The Shaft

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For those following my musings on Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, I’m up to book six of the Baudelaire orphans’ adventures, The Ersatz Elevator.  There’s much to appeal to adults in these stories, as ridiculous as some parts are.  In this installment the Baudelaires are adopted by Esmé and Jerome Squalor, wealthy benefactors who live on Dark Avenue.  Mrs. Squalor, who’s very wealthy, follows whatever’s in at the moment, setting the theme for this part of the saga.  Of course, many “in” things are quite silly and they keep the situation light.  Although they live on the 66th floor (at 667), the Squalors have the elevators decommissioned because elevators aren’t in.  Count Olaf uses an abandoned elevator shaft to help work out his scheme to control the orphans, all the while trapping the Quagmire triplets.  The V.F.D. theme is further emphasized, but not yet explained.

The world-building of this series is impressive.  I remember reading through the first time and being increasingly drawn into the question of what V.F.D. could mean.  Although the 2004 movie picks up on Olaf’s arson activities, it doesn’t include this particular aspect.  The rest of the world Handler devised is also intriguing.  The time-frame is unclear.  The place, although it goes to outer-lying areas, centers on a city unnamed but which clearly has relevance for the overall plot.  People of this world are singularly clueless, including the orphans at times.  The world with its desultory, or even sinister, place names reflects that constant theme of misfortune that somehow isn’t depressing.  And an educational element, particularly in introducing children to new terms, phrases, and concepts, is generally present.

I learned the word “Ersatz” in German class.  A noun denoting “substitute,” it became an English adjective only in the last century.  Once the concept is defined in the way the children devise to climb down the elevator shaft, it’s used in reinforcing ways throughout the rest of the story.  Often in humorous contexts.  Also, the character of Lemony Snicket starts to grow more prominent as Beatrice is brought more explicitly into the plot.  The first mentions here are subtle, but her role takes on some shading as the series moves on.  This use of narrator as character had some influence on me as a writer.  While I’d written a not very good novel before beginning my doctorate, I started on my fiction again, on and off, during the period when I was reading these books to my child.  Coming back to them continues to inspire an adult who loves their gothic flavor, even if as ersatz adult literature.

Not Full

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Disclosure Day may not be Steven Spielberg’s best movie, but it is a good one.  Part of his space trilogy after Close Encounters and E.T., it too comes back the the theme of aliens and posits what it might be like if those holding the secrets ever release them.  Although not a horror film, it makes use of the Bible—not surprisingly since real-life discussions about disclosure often ask about its effects on religion.  In the movie, the Wardex Corporation, part of the military-industrial complex, is the keeper of the secrets.  They reverse-engineer alien technology, and get to keep what’s found from recovered UAP wrecks.  More powerful than the police, they stop and kill without compunction.  They control the highest level of secrets that the government has—even those beyond the president.  (Spielberg clearly did his homework here, even working in the bit about Jackie Gleason making the claim to have seen alien bodies.)

A couple of Wardex employees, Hugo and Daniel, smuggle out the video proof of the nearly eight-decade cover-up and they plan to release everything to the media.  A weather reporter, Margaret, sudden becomes psychic and receives an alien message while on air.  Wardex has kidnapped and roughed up Daniel’s girlfriend, former novice nun Jane, to force him to return the stolen data.  (Religion plays a big role here.)  Noah, the head of Wardex, uses advanced technology to track Daniel, Jane, and Margaret, as they are trying to meet up.  When Margaret and Daniel finally do connect, Hugo reveals that they’re both “experiencers”—they’d been abducted as children and had been given extraordinary gifts.  Margaret’s abilities are such that she can break into and walk out of a secure military base with Daniel in tow.  As they prepare to show the evidence at Margaret’s Kansas City news station, Wardex shuts them down but Jane delivers a device that allows the broadcast to take place.  The world, which is on the brink of Armageddon—World War Three—stops to listen and begins to realize that we need to work together to save the human race.  

The plot is a bit complex to summarize fully, but this gives the general picture.  Disclosure Day is a hopeful movie.  The theme has been addressed by proponents of real life disclosure before: sharing this kind of information might well save us.  And the religious community, represented by Jane’s former monastery, is perfectly okay with this development.  There’s a lot to say about such a film, and I try to constrain my word counts here.  It’s the kind of movie that grows better with reflection—the writing is a bit trite in places—and the alien tech is a bit hard to believe.  Of course, we don’t know what off-world tech can really do.  But at the end of the day, religion plays a major role in the truth being revealed.  Worth thinking about.

Time and Space

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The more things change…  So, there was a major article in TIME titled “There Is a Persistent, Real Presence in Global Airspace beyond Current Human Control and Understanding,” by Jeffrey Kluger.  Now, I’m more of an old crow than a spring chicken, but reading this article reminded me of what I already knew in the seventies.  Even then any reasonably intelligent person could see that the government was covering up UFO sightings.  I mean, they headlined that they found one at Roswell only to retract the story to say that people in charge of nuclear bomb delivery had mistaken a weather balloon for a flying saucer.  Anybody paying attention would’ve noticed that J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer hired to advise the government UFO study program, went from hardened skeptic to true believer.  As I kid I was interested in these things but there was a government-encouraged ridicule response—laugh at the crazies that think there are “little green men.”  The official “scientific” Condon Report was done by scientists who’d decided in advance that it was all malarky.

Then the US Navy finally admitted it was dealing with UFOs—excuse me, UAPs—that it couldn’t explain in 2012.  The New York Times started taking the issue seriously.  Now TIME.  And reading this article, was like a walk down memory lane.  Newer sightings at military bases are now cause for serious study.  Sightings at military bases took place in the seventies, too.  Even as early as the fifties there was a well-known, documented incident where UFOs flew over Washington, DC.  Everyone seems to have forgotten that now.  We’ve had sightings since 2012 and these require explanation!  Those from the previous century—some of which remain unexplained even today—were all seen by nutty people who believe in things like alien abduction.  The current flavor is more for the adult palate.

I’m glad that the question is now out in the open.  I do kind of resent that if you had enough individuality to look at evidence—and yes, there was evidence—you were subject to humiliation.  There are still people laughing.  There are still many who simply don’t believe there’s anything to all this.  But the major media outlets are finally starting to report on it without sniggers behind superior hands.  Laughing at and shunning are two powerful tools of psychological control.  They’ve been in place for decades around Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.  The fact is, no matter what is being hidden the general public will never know the full extent of it.  The current spin of the issue still doesn’t address what many people saw decades ago; we’ve been too busy laughing.  It’s about time to be serious about this, according to TIME.

By the Gods

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For three semesters I taught Greek mythology at Montclair State University.  While I’m not a Classics specialist, I still felt the reticence of many Classicists about seeing The Odyssey.  My wife, patient with me as ever, waited until I came around.  I should not have doubted my Penelope, nor should I ever underestimate Christopher Nolan.  The movie surpassed my expectations.  By quite a bit.  Those who complain that it deviates from Homer might consider something I tell those trying to become vegan.  You don’t expect vegan cheese, say, to be exactly like real cheese.  If you accept it for what it is—something to use in place of cheese—you’ll soon acquire a taste for it.  This Odyssey is a movie, not an epic poem written in Greek.  It’s a twenty-first century movie when civilization under Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu seems to be collapsing before our very eyes.  It is a film that offers hope.

Some scenes could’ve fit a horror setting.  When Odysseus’ men were trapped in Polyphemus’ cave, fairly early on, is one of them.  I was vaguely thinking we might watch the movie on some streaming service, but that scene alone requires a theatrical viewing to allow for the full effect.  The scene where they blinded the cyclops was so loud that I couldn’t help but think those in neighboring screenings must’ve been complaining.  There was even another scene where I had a coughing spell but nobody in the theater heard me.  The action and the pacing are about right and even at nearly three hours long, it doesn’t feel overwrought.  I left the theater considering that I had much to think about, even having read the book and having taught the story to undergrads.  It occurred to me just how often we still make reference to the Classics and it is important, especially at times like this, to remember whence we came.

As the credits wound down, still in my seat, I was pleased to see that the movie was shot on film and processed as film.  I still prefer my books on paper, and my music in disc format.  We’ve lost so much to technocrats and their culture of convenience.  I haven’t been to see a movie in a theater for a few years now.  This one reminded me of what I’ve missed.  Even though I knew the story passably well, I found this interpretation of it compelling and new.  A hero who regrets what he did to his fellow people in the name of the gods.  It is appropriate for us to stop and ask ourselves what we have done, and who our gods truly are.

Ghost Belief

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I haven’t read Plato since I was a college student.  It’s not that I don’t want to read more, but as with most things it comes down to a matter of time.  If I’m honest I’ll confess Plato wasn’t the reason I read Cathy Gutierrez’s Plato’s Ghost.  It was the second word.  And the subtitle: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance.  I’ve always been interested in Spiritualism.  In fact, Lily Dale is on my bucket-list of places to visit.  The idea that ghosts can inform our spirituality is an intriguing concept.  While Gutierrez’s book is an academic one, it contains many stimulating ideas and shows that the Spiritualists were perhaps the truest progressives of their era.  And they had their heyday during the Victorian Period.  I enjoyed learning more about their theology and social views.  And, of course, ghosts.

When academics venture into esoterica, some amazing things can result.  I occasionally discuss Jeff Kripal’s books—he’s on the forefront of this movement—and now and again the books of other academics who engage the unusual.  Ghosts have, of course, been noted and believed in since the earliest humans who wrote.  Probably before.  They are still reported and chasing them has become a business model by which one might make a living.  A religion foregrounding the departed, however, is fascinating.  As Gutierrez demonstrates, Spiritualists were very forward-looking while keeping an eye firmly on the past.  While reading her book I kept stumbling upon astonishing observations that made me stop and wonder.  Spiritualists supported abolition, feminism, fair treatment for all, and, at least some of them, free love.  Numerous historical asides also brought me to a halt.  The idea, for example, that patients with multiple personality disorders might benefit from putting a non-dominant personality in charge.  There are Easter eggs like that throughout the book.

While Plato’s Ghost is academic, and there are parts that require some careful reading, it is the kind of book that laity interested in Spiritualism could benefit from picking up.  There are sections that enlightened me, and I’ve been studying religion for many decades now.  In general I’ve been steering away from reading academic tomes in my time off.  When I go to do my own writing it tends to veer back toward getting published only in academic presses, which I’m also trying to avoid.  I’ll make exceptions for books like this one, however.  I was drawn in by the promise of ghosts, and while they weren’t exactly what I was expecting, they were a rich feast nevertheless.

Weeding Lessons

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Weeding can be a spiritual exercise.  This summer has been particularly challenging for my communing with the earth because of heat spells, soupy, rainy days for a week at a time, and generally just being busy with other things.  Yesterday I went out to the front garden and received a shock.  A couple of caveats, in my defense: like many people we tend to use the back door instead of the front.  With our parking space behind the house, this is understandable.  Another excuse is that I’m too exhausted after work to do weeding.  At that time of day the unadulterated sun is having its way with the front garden, and, hey, three’s a crowd.  We planted our garden in the hopes of reducing the mowing by a little bit.  It did that, but we soon learned that the expensive plants you buy tend to be shy.

And “ground cover?”  There’s three year mantra: first it sleeps, then it creeps, then it leaps.  Ours slept a couple summers and seems to be in its second summer of creeping.  In the midst of all this: weeds.  Weeds may be the ultimate symbol of hope.  Life is extremely tenacious.  It doesn’t take “no” for an answer.  My amateur adventures in gardening have taught me that weeds grow next to those paving stones you put down.  Then they start growing over said stones.  If you let them go long enough (as I say, the weather has been awkward), they create their own soil over the stones.  Meanwhile, cars line up at the hardware store to buy bag after bag of soil.  Weeds can make their own.

I’m actually an admirer of weeds.  I enjoy the aroma of raw earth when they force me to my hands and knees in front of the house.  I do envy that their 9-2-5 is just being.  Growing.  Soaking up the sunshine, rain, and carbon dioxide.  If there’s a hint of soil, or something that can help them create their own soil, they’re not shy at all.  I don’t mind that they make me go outdoors on a pleasant weekend morning.  There’s peace in the air and I don’t mind the exercise.  I am surprised at just how many plants can grow in such a small amount of space.  I do wonder how our neighbors put up with us, but yesterday it was rejuvenating for my soul to be out there.  Everyone is sleeping in on a Saturday morning, and I’m learning some free life lessons from the amazing plants we call weeds.

Paperback Writer

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Change can occur quickly, like an avalanche, or slowly, like the build up to an avalanche.  Lasting change is of the slow variety.  In my mind I’m still a professor wannabe, although that ship has long since sailed.  The changes of an advanced degree are indelible, so I continue to write books and I still read a lot.  Here’s where the slow change comes in.  My reading lately has shifted towards fiction.  Not completely, of course, but I’m finding that my nonfiction reading pile erodes more slowly than its fictional sibling.  I hope that I’m not losing the capacity to handle the real world, but the realm of fiction feels so much more welcoming.  And I’ve been doing a bit of fiction writing myself lately, and to school myself I read fiction.  I’m not sure if the change is permanent or not since the end hasn’t yet been written.

My work on this blog bibliography continues slowly.  It will record most of my reading for the past decade and a half.  But not all.  I read books not quite born yet, for work.  And I read things other than books.  It will be an incomplete record.  Finding the time to work on it, however, is difficult.  Mainly because of all the reading I want to do.  And, since it’s that time of year, yard work.  I’m thrilled that my first novel will become a reality.  That’s especially good news to me since my energy has been focused on getting my most recent novel into what I hope is publishable form.  At times I wonder how many novels I’ve read.  I started reading scads of novels intentionally by the time I was in seventh grade.  I’m sure I’ve forgotten many of the fiction books I consumed.

As a professor I’d put novel reading on the back burner as nonfiction heated the research and writing projects I undertook.  I recall, however, guiltily sneaking in a novel now and again.  How many I don’t know.  I wouldn’t even know how to begin to count.  I suppose that’s one reason I’m trying to pull this bibliography together.  It won’t cover a couple decades of a literary life, but, as a friend used to tell me, “a little cotton is better than no mattress at all.”  There were some memorable big books: Jaws, The Godfather, War and Peace—and many more modestly-sized offerings.  Even more short ones.  The change in me has been slow, but steady.  Reading will do that to a person.

Stuffed

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Although a satire, The Stuff has a serious message.  This horror comedy from the eighties bears some similarities to The Substance, but in a more comic and environmentally conscious way.  The eponymous stuff is edible and discovered at a mining site in Georgia.  Its good taste soon challenges ice cream and millions become addicted to it.  The problem is, it takes over people’s minds.  Soon they will eat nothing else.  Some industrialists in the ice cream industry reluctantly hire a specialist in industrial espionage to learn what The Stuff is.  They engage Mo Rutherford, who, although crooked, is quite likable.  The film follows him as he investigates.  He eventually finds Jason, a young boy whose family has been taken over by The Stuff.  Jason saw it moving and knows it’s alive.  Mo rescues Jason and teams up with Nicole, an advertising executive who’s been marketing The Stuff.  Together, and with “Chocolate Chip Charlie” Hobbs, they decide to expose that The Stuff is animated by an alien life form and is dangerous.

There’s a lot of madcap stuff here.  The horror element comes from what happens to “Stuffies”—those addicted to The Stuff.  It hollows them out, eating them from the inside.  They’re left as hollow shells.  When shot they leak the white Stuff.  This leads an Army colonel who is also trying to stop it to his classic line, “I kinda like the sight of blood… but this is disgusting!”  There are so many corny lines that it’s no wonder that the movie has a cult following.  It’s also a parody of how industrialists will stop at nothing to get money, even when they know what they sell is dangerous.

Watching the movie, which wasn’t half bad, I wondered at how I’d never heard of it before.  There are so many movies out there and now with the internet so many websites.  Classic TMI.  I only found it by scrolling through a streaming service after a night of very little sleep when something kind of silly sounded appealing.  Comedy horror is a genre that can produce some good results.  This movie also made me think of The Blob, another shapeless monster that critics tend to dislike.  The film had a decent budget for the time and the production values are generally good.  The Stuff isn’t a great movie, but it’s a pretty good one.  The social commentary that it packs is just as relevant now as it was forty years ago.  It’s a satire worth seeing.

Paperback Dreams

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Although I’ve been focusing on my fiction writing lately, I still think about my poor, overlooked nonfiction books.  The other day I had an intriguing royalty statement from Bloomsbury.  (It’s not intriguing for the amount, which is negligible, but the implications.)    The name Bloomsbury is a story in itself.  Nightmares with the Bible was published by Fortress Academic and Lexington Books.  Lexington is (was?) an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield.  R&L was a fairly successful academic publishing brand, although not a university press.  A couple years back Bloomsbury, a British publisher, bought R&L.  Bloomsbury isn’t part of the “big five” publishers in English, but they did have the foresight, years ago, to sign up an unknown author by the name of J. K. Rowling.  Bloomsbury, cash in hand, began buying up smaller academic publishers.  That’s one way that publishers grow.

For me, that meant that Nightmares now had a new owner.  I have no idea which editor oversees it.  It’s a backlist title now, and I know from my own experience that when you inherit a backlist title, well, let’s just say there are more than enough frontlist and potential frontlist titles to keep you busy.  I was after my R&L editor for a paperback edition since Nightmares is my most expensive book, now that Gorgias Press has released a paperback of A Reassessment of Asherah.  This brings me back to my royalty statement.  On it there was a line for a paperback.  It even had an ISBN (9781978703209).  ISBNs cost money and many publisher don’t buy them unless they plan on using them.  Is there a paperback in the works?  I’m not getting my hopes up since ISBNs can be reassigned.

Earlier this summer I visited my local library to donate my books (if they would want them).  The head librarian kindly made time to discuss this and accepted Holy Horror and Sleepy Hollow As American Myth.  I left a little sad that I couldn’t offer Nightmares as well.  I only have two copies and I can’t afford to buy more, even with an author’s discount.  (Author discounts are usually between 40 and 60 percent; for a book that’s priced at over $100 that’s still not a bargain.)  I’m mature enough to know that a paperback wouldn’t fly off the shelves, but I consciously wrote Nightmares as a companion volume to Holy Horror—the two go together but were separated at birth.  You’ll pardon me for being excited at seeing a paperback ISBN, then.  I’ve been in publishing long enough now, however, not to read too much into it.

Pointedly

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Beaks, aka Birds of Prey, is either a knock-off of, or tribute to Hitchcock’s The Birds.  Some have suggested it should be considered a sequel.  For my part, I was looking for an animals gone wild movie to watch one weekend when I was alone.  It was free on one of my streaming services, so why not?  The acting isn’t great and the dialogue feels a bit forced, but this 1987 movie wasn’t completely bad.  The plot we’ve seen before.  There is a stronger environmental message here—the birds are attacking because of environmental pressures brought on by humans—than in Hitchcock.  I’m on board with that.  The story follows Vanessa, a news reporter, and Peter, her cameraman, as they cover, reluctantly, birds attacking humans.  The pacing is a bit off.  The opening paragliding sequence is really too long and confusing (where are these people?).  I did wonder, however, how the birds had been trained.

That question kept coming back throughout the movie.  The attacking birds are mostly pigeons or doves, and in the scenes where they really look like they’re attacking I wondered how they managed them.  Of course, actors can act like they’re in distress as birds go after food placed on their person, but the effects made it seem more sinister than that.  For this aspect alone the movie deserves some credit.  The opening sequence involves attacks by eagles, a bit harder to manage, it would seem.  The fatalities at the beaks of pigeons, however, are less believable.  Yes, they could attack eyes and ears and noses, but the injuries seem sustainable, and not life-threatening.  The attacks, for the most part, are realistic enough.  (When child actors are involved the attacks are far less convincing.)  The critics, it seems to me, are a bit too harsh.

A Mexican movie in English, it was filmed in Acapulco, but also Spain, Italy, Puerto Rico, and Peru.  The travel sequences, which are apparently meant to show that this is a worldwide phenomenon, sometimes feel tacked on.  More could’ve been made of the firebirds of the Inca returning.  It would’ve made for a more speculative film, of course, but it could’ve been good.  Beaks isn’t the kind of movie to which I’d give any kind of unqualified recommendation, but it isn’t without merit.  You do have to put up with quite a bit to get to the payoffs, though.  Still, when it was over I was left with the temporary paranoia about birds that Hitchcock’s film creates, so it wasn’t all bad.

Lovecraftian Layers

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Lovecraftian dreams dominate Hugo Yelagin’s Deadlights.  A few major themes are addressed in this debut novel.  One, which always stands out to me for some reason, is the search for the father.  Maxwell Corvid, a former medical student at Miskatonic University, is returning home to his father’s once grand estate.  Accompanied by a banker who delights in pointing out that his father’s debts, Maxwell learns he’ll inherit debt rather than anything substantial.  Accosted by a brigand, the two leap into a huge sinkhole that has taken the estate.  Maxwell finds himself among moldy people transforming into fish (Lovecraftian, as I say), but befriends a young girl who knows her way around.  They find the banker and brigand and begin trying to solve the strangeness they encounter in this world.  A couple other major characters enter the tale, but I don’t want to give any spoilers.

While novels that heavily feature dreams aren’t my personal favorites, this dark fantasy intrigues you into turning pages.  I really couldn’t guess the ending, and, like a dream, not everything wraps up neatly.  The amazing thing about H. P. Lovecraft is that his vision has inspired so many others to grapple with his worlds.  Many modern writers find the call of Cthulhu irresistible.  The sloshy, watery fear of being transformed into something you’re currently not.  This, I think, is a second theme.  Transformation.  Realizing maybe the way you see someone isn’t the whole of that person.  And, of course, the theme of light.  This sinkhole world is dark and occasional lights help the characters to see.  And they learn that those different from themselves aren’t necessarily evil.  (Although one or two might be.)

I’m not sure I’d consider this a horror novel, although there are monstrous sorts in it.  It doesn’t try to scare like many horror novels do.  It does have a gothic setting, but the timeframe isn’t specified.  Lovecraft tends to conjure the Victorian period in my imagination, but his stories probably reflect his own time, as opposed to an earlier one.  I acknowledge my own weaknesses as a reader, and as someone with historical training, knowing “when” gives me a useful framework within which to paint a story in my head.  But then again, in worlds dominated by dreams that may be a moot point.  It’s just that, in my own canvas of this story, I do wonder what was, in this Lovecraftian world, really real.

Humanity Wrought

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“What hath God wrought?”  So the first telegraph message read.  There was a wonderment and fear of technology in 1844.  Although at today’s rate of change, to us tech seemed to crawl back then, but it was changing rapidly.  What strikes me as I think about AI is that we’ve lost our humility.  “What hath humans wrought?” is the new motto, and one that presumes it can only be good.  How easily we forget Thoreau, even as we valorize him.  He feared that machines would end humanity, and in a way they have.  Fearing that trains would mean that schedules would be determined by clocks rather than human lives, he understood something that we’re still missing.  He feared trains would make humans in their own image.  And so they did.  We live by a 9-2-5 schedule, no matter how dehumanizing.

“What hath God wrought?”  With confident, angry atheists telling us there is no god, and that there is nothing more amazing than human intellect, we now see what we’ve wrought.  Many people object to AI.  They don’t want their power centers in their neighborhoods.  They don’t want the cost of electricity to rise just so Silicon Valley technocrats can get richer.  They know that as wildfires burn American cities, huge amounts of water are required for running data centers.  Even Three Mile Island is being restarted to help supply the electrical power they require.  Protest as loudly as you can, it will not stop them.  God is no longer in the equation.  God has left the building.  This is the age of humanity.  No, a very small segment of humanity.  A segment that thinks it’s god.

Technology is good if it serves to make our situation better.  AI is now starting, according to the New York Times, to both lie and cheat.  It is made in the image of humans, so of course it does.  Look at the White House and try to protest.  No longer does the imago dei hold any meaning.   We no longer aspire to that image of God in which we once could see reflected in our better natures.  No; we can so we do.  Even as Frankenstein keeps lumbering back to the screen, and new versions roll off the presses, we simply don’t get the message.  We have no time to stop and glance—no, stare—out over Walden Pond for hours at a time.  We must work so that our fellow humans can be put out of work.  What hath humanity wrought?

Dark Academy Series

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With Prufrock Preparatory Academy, A Series of Unfortunate Events enters directly into dark academia.  Not only that, but The Austere Academy also introduces the V.F.D. that kept me guessing for quite some time the first read through.  But let’s start with dark academia.  Any gathering of young people with the intent of equipping them to get along in the world is a school.  And schools all have their dark corners.  That’s because adults trade in secrets and other shadowy things.  Of course, Lemony Snicket makes Prufrock Prep into a pretty dismal academy with harsh rules, boring classes, and unsatisfactory accommodations.  The Baudelaire orphans are found by Count Olaf, of course.  They do, however, make friends with the Quagmire Triplets and the larger scheme of what happened to their parents begins to unfold.  It does seem that the tales grow darker and not quite as funny as they reach this point.

The school motto is Memento Mori, “remember you will die.”  Although this is a good life lesson, it might be a bit harsh for children.  Some of us grew up with a religion that made sure we understood this from an early stage in our lives.  I can’t say that was a fun way to grow up, but I can see the wisdom in it.  Our culture is about the denial of death and then when it does come it can be devastating.  Of course, these are children’s books and they don’t linger on such thoughts too much.  And although Count Olaf is dangerous, his disguises are always a bit silly.  In The Austere Academy, as in The Miserable Mill, he stays somewhat in the background, orchestrating schemes that make the orphans fail, and offering to take care of them.  In this case his disguise involves a turban that he cannot remove for “religious” reasons.  A fascinating misuse of pluralism, it made me think how some people hide behind it.

Not having written books in a series, and not having had a publisher’s input into what I’ve written, I don’t know how far ahead Daniel Handler planned the series.  I do recall that from this point on the mystery of what V.F.D. is becomes important.  I’d completely forgotten about the Quagmire Triplets.  Reading books for young readers as an adult can reveal quite a lot.  Sometimes it’s easy to forget that they’re written by adults and they may have had to go through the same rejection trials that other creative adults face daily.  Trying to break into publishing can indeed be a series of unfortunate events. Dark academia indeed.  I’m glad Lemony Snicket broke through.

Geeology

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Some of my fondest memories of the Midwest, apart from living my teaching dream, involve rockhounding.  The other day I was out in the garage trying to locate my rock tumbler when I came across many carefully labeled boxes from our rockhounding trips.  Not all of these trips were local, nor were all of them solely rock-based.  For example, my family took a driving trip around Lake Superior.  This was back before a passport was required to cross the border.  Part of the trip involved driving up to Copper Harbor in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to look for agates and, well, copper.  Then there was the time when we drove to Hannibal, Missouri to hunt for geodes.  The mine was closed because of excessive rain so a couple months later we drove down with some friends we knew from Michigan and tried again.  This time with success.

The great, unfortunately departed, bookstore manager at Nashotah House was a great conversation partner.  Once I was talking to her about rocks and I stopped and apologized, “I don’t know why I’m so interested in rocks.”  She said, “You’ve got curiosity.  If it wasn’t rocks it would be something else.”  I took that to be the compliment it was intended to be.  Not everyone at the seminary was curious and many were only interested in matters ecclesiastical.  One night a huge windstorm blew over a very large cedar tree that barely missed our house.  Before the week was out, I was outside standing in the hole left by its roots, poking around the glacial till for interesting rocks.  I continued doing this until the tree was removed and the hole filled in.  I’ve had other interests, bordering on obsessions, in my life, but the geological interest started early.

When I was a child my brothers and I would go down to French Creek in Franklin, under the 13th Street bridge and look for fossils.  I wondered how this could fit together with the story of the world being only 6,000 years old.  We knew from school that fossils were millions of years in the making.  One time my mother bought us, at a rummage sale, a small cardboard “rock collection.”  It had a few little pieces of non-gem quality gemstones glued to the bottom.  A couple of them had been previously pilfered.  I was fascinated that such colorful things just came out of the ground.  Planning on being a minister, I never studied geology in school.  To be fair, I don’t think Grove City even offered a geology major.  Years later, teaching in a seminary in the Midwest, my old fascination caught up with me again.  And it left many fond memories.

Evil Ghosts

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So, I did find the book.  Richard Matheson’s Hell House is somewhat of a classic, but, my usual complaint holds—it’s a bit too long.  It lingers too much over the various characters’ motivations and doubts.  It probably doesn’t help that I watched the movie first.  The screenplay was also written by Matheson, so it is fairly similar to the book.  Matheson had a history of writing for the screen.  He wrote several Twilight Zone episodes (indeed, Rod Serling blurbed the copy of the book I have).  The story is the same: a scientist and his wife, accompanied by two mediums (one mental and one physical), are sent to Hell House to demonstrate if there is an afterlife or not.  The scientist plans to prove that, although psychic power is real, it is merely electromagnetic radiation, not a survival of personality.  He has a machine that will demonstrate this.

Meanwhile the four spend the week at Hell House being tormented by ghosts.  Each member of the party winds up injured and two of them are killed.  In the end it turns out that ghosts do use (are made of) electromagnetic radiation and they are continuations of the spirits of the dead.  Only, at Hell House, there is one exceptionally powerful ghost.  One that makes others think there are many.  It’s a bit disappointing that the motivation for his evil behavior is that Belasco resented being short.  Those of us who are vertically challenged aren’t all sociopaths.  People can obsess over size, I know, but to what lengths would someone go?  Trying to haunt a house until eternity?  One thing the novel does explain better than the movie is Belasco’s overweening pride in being a giant of a man.  In reality, he’s maybe my stature.

Both the book and the movie use the Bible to help resolve the mystery, earning the latter a place in Holy Sequel.  Matheson was an influential writer in the horror genre.  I have to believe he was inspired by Shirley Jackson for this particular tale.  I found his I Am Legend a bit faster reading—another novel I read after seeing one or two of the film adaptations.  For some reason it felt shorter.  Having one person left in the world, an idea that was pondered by Mary Shelley in The Last Man, leaves plenty of room for pondering motives and psychology.  Maybe Hell House suffers for having four people to probe a little too deeply.  In any case, I’m glad to have read the book—it explained in a way the movie left a bit ambiguous, that both the scientist and the spiritualists were right in the end.