Learning to Like

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The shout-out is an always appreciated gesture.  Among the guests on The Incarcerated Christian podcast, I’m pretty clearly the one with the smallest following.  That makes me doubly grateful to Robin and Debra for the work they’re doing.  If you want to get a sense of what their initial year involved, please take an unrushed moment or two and listen to their year-end reflection.  Better yet, follow them wherever you follow podcasts.  I’ve been watching some YouTube lately (I know, I know, the world has gone after TikTok instead) and I’ve come to realize that even those channels with millions of views have to remind people every single episode to click like, share, and/or notification.  Nobody knows it’s worth their time if readers/watchers don’t share!

One of the things about writing is that is craves readers.  There’s an almost Hebraic sense in which my writing is intended as a statement, whether or not it’s even read.  Ideas build up until they must be expressed.  You start to get to know other people by their words, written or spoken.  I sincerely wish I had more time to listen to podcasts.  I’m one of those people who can’t write with music or talking going on.  Nor can I work that way.  Those two activities make up the majority of my waking hours (perhaps I’m trying too hard, if there is such a thing).  Even the smallest Who, however, has his “Yop” to express.  In that case, however, he ended up saving the world.  I suspect many people have no idea what this blog’s about.  If you know, please tell me.  (There’s a comment section below.  Don’t forget to click like and share when you’re down there!)

The Incarcerated Christian has had everyone from evangelical pastors to obscure religionists such as yours truly on their podcasts.  People who aren’t afraid of the dark.  There’s an episode about the divine feminine.  There’s another by a blogger who used to follow my blog and comment on it in the early days until his own efforts took off.  And there are the hosts, Debra and Robin, whose stories are intriguing in their own right.  They approached me not knowing my own history with abusive religions—perhaps it comes through in my writing, or at least my choice of subjects?  There’s a strange comfort in knowing that others have had similar experiences.  Religion can be a monster, devouring people and spitting them out, all in the name of sanctity.  Listen to the Incarcerated Christian podcast, and don’t forget to like and share alike.

Erase This

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Over the years I’ve read a fair bit about Eraserhead without having ever seen it.  Approaching it I had little idea what to expect—normally classified as body horror, there’s a fair amount of debate as to whether it should be considered horror or not.  Now that I’ve finally seen it, I’d probably call it existential horror.  There are no jump startles, and the quirkiness makes it almost funny at times.  To me it suggests the horror of finding oneself in a world where the most desirous things are also those that scare us the most.  If you’ve not seen the movie this may not make sense to you.  David Lynch, the writer and director (and producer), went on to find fame in more mainstream media, but Eraserhead made the National Film Registry’s preservation list, which says something about it.

Comparison is sometimes fittingly made to Kafka.  Life itself can be traumatic.  Body horror tends to focus on the abject aspects of being incarnated.  We associate intimately with our bodies, but they do things we don’t understand and which sometimes alarm us.  The absurdity of this situation wasn’t lost on the great existentialist writers of the last century.  Faced with these circumstances we carry on because it’s not clear what else to do.  So Henry Spenser doesn’t emote very much.  Life does weird things to you and sometimes just watching the strangeness unfold is the best option.  This level of vanity brings old Qohelet to mind, for even the Bible realizes that some things just can’t be explained.

In an interview on the film Lynch cites the “little torments” of those in the workaday life.  It’s difficult not to feel like a mere cog when your wage is premised upon the amount of time you spend on the clock.  Even for professionals.  The stark divide is like the industrial wasteland the film so ably portrays.  This isn’t where anybody wants to be—no, it’s where one finds oneself.  Comforts are few and the background noise is constant.  Although Eraserhead isn’t widely known among the general public, its influence on other filmmakers is clear.  I could help thinking “oh, this is where that idea comes from.”  Probably most strongly that related to Brazil, a film I saw twice in one week in the theater (something I’ve not done with any other movie).  Having worked within the system, following all the rules only to find they don’t really mean you’ll end up where you hope, the theater of the absurd has always felt natural to me.  I should’ve watched this sooner.

Rel Stud 101

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There’s no such thing.  Religious studies, that is.  I first heard this a decade ago while working as religious studies editor for Routledge.  My supervisor stared at me with such knowing eyes that all I could do was nod.  I figured that since I’d spent my entire career in religious studies I’d probably know if it existed or not.  I’ve heard the statement a number of times since then and have come to realize that what it means is this: unlike other academic disciplines, religious studies has no single, central topic of study and no agreed upon methodology.  It consists of scholars trained in a variety of fields looking at different aspects of religion from different perspectives.  There’s even little agreement as to what religion is.

Religious studies is an outgrowth of biblical studies.  Studying the Bible was a long preoccupation with Jews and Christians.  Long before there were universities there were places you could study the Good Book in depth.  When enough time had passed history of Christianity and theology were added to the mix.  It was only fairly recently, about the late nineteenth century, that scholars of Christianity began to wonder about other religions.  The earliest religious studies were Christians studying other faiths.  Now, of course, religious studies exists in a number of universities and colleges (but by no means all of them) and nobody really stops to think how this came to be.  Students are very interested in religions, but as a major it offers few career options (yours truly is a case in point).  It’s a discipline under duress.  Pretty stressful for something that just doesn’t exist, isn’t it?

My suspicion is that many who entered this limbo started out as I did—a curious Christian wanting to know as much as possible about what I’d been taught.  You learn to think along the way, with somewhat predictable results.  Sometimes it takes years to dawn on you.  In other words, I doubt that many entered this field consciously thinking “I want to learn religious studies as a discipline.”  Like a pitcher plant, however, once you fly in there’s no way out.  Instead we have to find tools to study this strange and slippery environment into which we’ve fallen.  Otherwise we’ll simply be digested.  I made it through three degree programs in this field without ever encountering this idea that apparently has been long known.  Numbers are declining, which makes those of us in here how long our odyssey might continue.  If it even exists.

Mag Dash

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I don’t do much magazine reading.  Back when I had more time (mainly before buying a house), there were a few with which I attempted to keep up.  Mainly, however, I’d buy a particular issue that I wanted to keep.  I suspect that’s because I’m a book reader and my time for pure reading is limited.  Strange thing for a professor/editor hybrid to write, but there you have it.  Each year I “pledge” a number of books to Goodreads to keep me honest, and achieving that goal adds a kind of friendly pressure on my reading time.  Magazines don’t count, and mostly I never read the whole thing.  My current book project is an analysis of the movie The Wicker Man.  This led to some magazine reading.

Horror movies, especially, have been traditionally treated as ephemera with little lasting cultural value.  Fan magazines, therefore, often provide most of the periodical treatment for some of these “B movies.”  The Wicker Man suffered legendary distribution problems and that may have been what prompted Cinefantastique to devote all its feature space to this particular movie back in 1977 (the movie came out four years earlier and was still struggling).  The article is a lengthy one, not quite to the extent of The Atlantic, but still several pages.  It was the origin of the much repeated epithet “the Citizen Kane of horror films.”  To read this I had to locate a copy of the magazine.  There was, fortunately, a seller in Beloit, Wisconsin who wasn’t extortionate (thank you!).  My experience in buying print materials from the seventies has often proven the opposite.

Occasionally someone glimpsing my books will cattily ask, “Have you read them all?”  No.  But then not all print matter is for reading all the way through.  Reference materials, for example, are consulted.  The way my mind works, I need to keep things around so I can find them again.  Studies have shown that retention for electronic media isn’t as reliable as it is for print.  That may change some day as we evolve more and more into extensions of our machines, but for now I use it to justify keeping books.  Since I can’t predict the future, I never know when some forgotten tome might come up again in a new project.  That has happened a few times already while working on my small book on The Wicker Man.  And that includes magazines with good articles.  This one is a keeper.

Global Swarming

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It’s a veritable horror trope.  The swarm, that is.  We fear being overwhelmed by vast numbers of apparently innocuous insects or arachnids, although they are much smaller than us.  It’s their logistical superiority, and perhaps their utter disregard of personal space.  Summer at Nashotah House was the time of the earwigs.  They came out in such numbers that no room in the house was safe from them.  There was a horror element to pulling your toothbrush out of the holder only to find one hanging onto the place you were about to put your fingers.  Or opening the refrigerator to find that one had crawled into the butter.  Any time you picked something up you might find an earwig under it.  They would crawl up the walls and across the ceiling.  Other places on campus would be overrun with ladybugs or black flies.  It was in the woods, after all.

Most places we’ve lived since then have had their native bug that gets in, often in numbers.  Our current nemesis is the box elder bug.  Although harmless, it is a true bug in every sense of the word.  I’m Buddhist in my desire not to kill and there are too many to catch and take them back outside.  Fortunately they’re pretty localized—they like my study, probably because its southern exposure means it gets sunshine even into December.  We’ve had some cold days but November has been experiencing global warming and the box elder bugs, clueless, wander all over the place.  Most of them are near the end of their life and die after poking around for a few days.  Others are quite frisky.  Some remind me of horror movies from the fifties.

I have one of those desk set Stonehenge models.  I don’t have the space to set it up fully, and the die for the model was obviously done with poorly sculpted clay, so it takes some imagination to think the trilithons resemble those of the actual site.  When I noticed a box elder bug crawling over one, however, it took me back to Tarantula and other such films where the menace wasn’t just a little old bug, but a huge one.  Our monsters these days have shrunk, however, and fear comes in small packages.  Box elder bugs are harmless but annoying.  Of course, they’re still out this year because we’ve warmed the place up for them and even in November they, well, swarm.

Numbers Game

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I once asked a movie expert—this must’ve been when I was regularly on a campus somewhere, but not Nashotah House—how many movies had been made.  He sighed and said “There’s no way to know that.”  What I was thinking at the time was the Motion Picture Association of America (now the Motion Picture Association) number that comes near the end of the credits.  I wondered how many of those there were.  Of course, the number keeps changing.  It doesn’t account for television movies or straight to video, although, I see it does now include Netflix.  In any case, I was really interested in the statistics.  I still am.  I may not be a math person, but big numbers are intriguing.

The more I read about movies, and I seem to be moving in that direction, the more I realize how nobody can be an expert on all of them.  Even those of us with decades of experience watching horror can’t keep up with that genre.  Many of the books I’ve read are by authors whose families don’t like horror, so they have to carve out time alone to see the films.  This is on top of their jobs, which for some, admittedly, is film analysis—perhaps they’re the lucky ones.  I selected many films to discuss in Holy Horror.  There’s no index of the Bible in films, as useful as such an index would be.  As I continue to watch, and sometimes rewatch, I keep finding more and more material.  At some point, however, you just have to say “what I have written, I have written.”  But how many movies actually engage the Good Book?  There may be a way to know that, but it will take a lifetime of research.

Speaking of large numbers, the stats for how many Bibles are sold each year is a phenomenon unto itself.  It seems inevitable that it would find several of the cracks in American culture and leak in like rain water.  At times it’s the antidote to horror, while at others it’s the dote itself.  Holy Horror was never intended to be comprehensive.  It limited itself in intentional ways.  As I was writing it my naive question kept coming back to me.  When I research a topic I like to read as much written on the topic that I possibly can.  Of course, I spend over eight hours a day for most of the year doing something else.  The number of days like that, I suspect, is frightfully large.

Next Books

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The other day an older friend asked about my writing.  My answer was brief because it’s complicated.  Not because I do it from three to four a.m.  Not because many of my older friends don’t know what a blog is.  No, it was complicated because my next book is about a movie few Americans know, especially many of my friends.  I really don’t know many horror fans.  Academics, yes, but normal folk, no.  This is a little odd because statistically most adults like horror.  I feel I always need to explain why I bother writing such books.  (There is a reason and there’s even a book I’m working on to try to explain it.)  It’s easiest, in such circumstances, just to say “I’m keeping busy with it.”

The fact is the draft of my book on The Wicker Man is done.  It has been for a few weeks.  None of my published books are the same as their drafts initially were.  (This is the difference, say, between a dissertation and a first monograph.  Let those seeking advice take note.)  The draft follows the approved proposal pretty closely, but I now kind of do research backwards.  Or at least while the book is in process.  Unlike a professor with a library and sabbatical and summers off, I find my sources as I write.  My books, despite what might seem a narrow focus, range pretty widely.  My reading goes in directions not even I anticipated when I began.  Ideas lead to other ideas.  Soon there’s enough of them for an entirely new book.  So I’m reading my draft and reading other books and creating the Frankenstein monster that will be a codex.

Every time I reach that point where I say, “this will be the last book I need to read for this project,” only a matter of days later I find another.  And another.  Book writing involves both creativity and distillation.  It takes a lot of books read to make one book written.  All writers know that.  Some have trouble knowing when to cut off the research because, and this is a truth for all of life, there’s always one more.  The very month of my doctoral defense a new book on Asherah was published.  The external examiner brought it to my viva.  Obviously he knew that I couldn’t have read it by then (it had to be in German, of course).  It ended up on my bibliography.  So I plod along with my book already written, but not yet begun.  I said it was complicated.

Ghost Publishers

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Ancient Near Eastern studies, where my academic work has the widest recognition, is still an area of fascination.  I have to hold myself back when I see a new book published in the area.  You see, I learned when I researched in this field that there is little academic opportunity in it.  As per usual, the public seems quite interested so academia is not.  A few practitioners, however, have been able to break through.  One of them is Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum.  He’s been writing popular books about ancient ideas and getting respectable press for doing so.  His most recent book (The First Ghosts), as described in an article in the Smithsonian, deals with the earliest depiction of a ghost.

Perhaps because of copyright complications, his book on the subject doesn’t seem to be widely available in the United States, despite having been published by a trade house.  It could be that the publishers don’t think anyone will be interested.  Hello?  Ghosts and Mesopotamia?  Haven’t you been paying attention?  This is part and parcel of the academic publishing world.  The editorial board has to decide which books see the light of day and which won’t.  And how to price them.  Is this primarily a library book or can it somehow claw over into the crossover market?  Academic publishers will casually add five or ten dollars to the price, assuming it won’t hurt sales.  Guess what?  It does.  As much as I’d like to read Finkel’s book, my interest doesn’t hover around the 60 dollar range.

When I first studied Hebrew I wanted to buy a textbook my professor mentioned, but it cost nearly $100 in the US.  This was back in the 1980s, so that really was steep.  When we moved to Scotland I discovered the same book was available there is paperback for a reasonable price, so I bought it.  That’s when I began to realize copyright laws direct the shape of scholarship.  Publishers decide what makes it into reputable book form and who will be able to afford it.  That’s power.  You see, people have believed in ghosts from as long as we could convey the idea.  The dead never really leave us.  Finkel’s book examines a clay tablet used to exorcise ghosts and may contain a line drawing of a spirit.  Who wouldn’t want to read such a book?  It’s getting press coverage but those who make such decisions have decided, apparently, there’s no market for it.  When that happens a book hasn’t a ghost of a chance.

Postscript: Checking Amazon one last time before clicking “publish,” I see the book has now come down to the $30 range. I can’t take credit for that, but my point still stands.

Thought Experiment

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One benefit of aging is that hiccups become less common.  They were always a conversation starter when I was younger—someone you were on a date with, or a college buddy, would get the hiccups and you’d end up talking about how they got rid of them.  Generally it was some variation of taking a long drink of water, often with a twist (not a lemon twist, but some kind of alteration from normal drinking).  I did that myself.  My technique was simply a very long draught of water.  I eventually figured out that it was holding my breath as I drank that did the trick, so I started using the dry method, which was helpful when you didn’t have a glass of water handy.

People sometimes tell me I overthink things.  So with the hiccups.  Somewhere in Wisconsin—I don’t remember where, but we weren’t at home and I didn’t have any water in the car—I thought, if holding your breath gets rid of hiccups, you don’t need an external agent at all.  The point is rather to get your mind off the physical discomfort and it goes away.  If that’s true, you ought to be able to think the hiccups away.  I tried it and it worked.  I’m no physician, and I’m rather squeamish about many body things, but you can kind of feel what’s going on in your throat when you get the hiccups.  What I do now is concentrate on that and will it to stop.  It works unless I’m really distracted by something else I have to do.

Our minds can control quite a few of our bodily functions by concentration.  It’s sort of like mind over matter, I suppose, but I’ve noticed that when I can take the time to analyze something I can often think a physical annoyance away.  It’s difficult to ignore an itch, but if you can do it it often goes away.  Like everybody else I find my hand subconsciously scratching itches.  To invoke the power of concentration entails having to be able to think about it.  Our working lives are filled with the distraction that we call vocations.  Time to concentrate on how the world works quickly evaporates once they hand you that diploma.  We have things to do so that we can get paid, and some of us really can’t afford to retire.  Just think of the things we’d learn if we had the time to think away physical annoyances.

Haunted Landscapes

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The Devil’s Advocates series consists of short books focused on a single horror film.  For horror fans they’re a great resource, as they will hopefully also be in teaching settings.  David Evans-Powell’s recent volume on The Blood on Satan’s Claw is a fine example of just how intelligent horror can be, and how it can be interpreted so.  This particular movie from the early seventies was never a major revenue earner, but that in itself is a lesson.  Influence, measured in smaller scales, can still create an impact on people’s lives.  Evans-Powell’s treatment takes several angles, each of which casts light on this unusual movie.  Reading this little book brought quite a few ideas to mind, both about social structures and religion.  The film is set in the early 18th century, with a city judge who is problematic actually saving the day.

Since The Blood on Satan’s Claw is folk horror, quite a bit of the discussion focuses on landscape.  Paying close attention to landscape reveals hidden information.  It becomes almost a character.  At the risk of too many spoilers, the film is about uncovering Satan—or a demon, it’s not terribly clear on the point—from a farm field.  As this evil character gains power the local children are drawn to him and the village authorities are unaware of what’s going on in the nearby woods.  Landscapes reveal and conceal as the creature gains power and the children engage in acts of violence.  The response of the judge is a violence of its own.  The movie doesn’t really deliver all that it promises in that regard, but Evans-Powell explains how the film was made and that, in turn, explains some of the rough edges.

Religion and horror go naturally together.  I suppose any film with “Satan” in the title will address religion somehow.  Not all horror is religious, of course, but many of our fears derive from religious subjects.  It’s almost as if as we ceased to fear the landscape—nature having been tamed to some degree—we began to find fear in religious thinking.  Put another way, religion has kept fear alive.  The Blood on Satan’s Claw was never a major, big-budget release.  Except for fans of British horror it has largely escaped notice.  Folk horror, because of its recent revival, brought interest back to some of these older efforts to explore such themes, many of them implying a religion hidden in the landscape.  This book provide a useful map in exploring that territory.

Religious Dinosaurs

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Dippy is, apparently, a common name for pet diplodocuses.  The statue of a diplodocus outside the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh is fondly known as “Dippy,” as is the fossilized remains of one such dinosaur from London’s Natural History Museum.  The London Dippy is on tour, or at least has been.  I learned about the fact that Dippy was in Norwich Cathedral just a day or so after the exhibit closed (I wouldn’t have been able to make it in any case; I mean I haven’t been able to get to the Pittsburgh Dippy and I live in the same state).  There are still plenty of photos on the cathedral’s website.  It’s a striking juxtaposition.  A massive stone building constructed to a medieval conception of God and one of the best examples of evolution, far older than the church on several orders of magnitude, peacefully coexisting.

John Bell Hatcher, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

American evangelicalism has a much harder time accepting science.  I’ve been writing about change recently.  One of the changes in western thinking has been to move from the “I told you so” of clerics to the “I can show you evidence” of scientists.  Those who like others to tell them what to think have a difficult time letting go of medieval notions of the world—that it’s flat, and young, and about to end, as if God has a very limited imagination.  We now know that the world has been here far longer than one interpretation of the Bible posits, but that doesn’t make it any easier to have a conversation about it.  Many religions want to claim knowledge that can’t be questioned.  And yet, dinosaurs and cathedrals seem to mix well.

The assumption that those who think differently are evil, or are inspired by evil, is one of the most insidious children of monotheism.  With one God comes the idea of only one way to understand that deity and all other interpretations come from that divinity’s arch-enemy.  It’s a view of the world that struggles with change.  Historians, even those of us who focus on the history of religions, tend to take a long view. It’s possible to trace the development of ideas that have lead to the strange juxtapositions of our modern world.  Apologists so convinced of their interpretation of Genesis that they think the Bible wouldn’t have found dinosaurs worth remarking about, for example, and then cramming them on the ark.  Others, it seems, welcome dinosaurs into cathedrals.  Which is a better way to be humble before God?

Pop Culture

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Something I was reading recently made me ponder how we become acquainted with culture, particularly pop culture.  I can really only speak for myself, but I know television had a lot to do with it.  We were a family of humble means and with three young boys to entertain, television often came to the rescue.  There were the usual Friday night Brady Bunch and Partridge Family lineup and Sunday’s Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and perhaps Wonderful World of Disney duo.  Lots of other stuff got mixed in there, too, I’m sure.  I watched Dark Shadows after school and the original series of Star Trek. Gilligan’s Island was a big influence, as was Get Smart.  All of these have come back to me as an adult, and in some ways define my outlook.  It’s kind of scary, actually, the power television has.

Specifically, however, I had recently read something mentioning James Bond.  How did I find James Bond?  It must’ve been on commercial television broadcasts of the Sean Connery movies, but I knew enough to pick up these titles at Goodwill when we went there on a Saturday, clothes shopping.  Always more interested in books than other things, I remember running my eyes over the spines in the book bins.  I quickly learned to recognize, and snap up, the Dark Shadows books.  I also somehow learned the canon of Ian Fleming James Bond novels.  Perhaps there were lists inside the cover of the paperbacks I bought.  Little boys and spies require no explanation, but how did I learn there were twelve Fleming novels?

From Dr. No trailer, Wikimedia Commons

Since the first film, Doctor No, came out the year I was born, I was a bit late to the party.  Still, as a child I recall being scandalized, and confused, by the sex scenes in the books.  I was after the spy action, not the “mushy stuff.”  Reading TV Guide like Holy Writ, I tried to make sure I could see the movies when they happened along.  In my mind there was one corresponding movie to a book.  Whoever got there first cast it in bronze.  I was offended on seeing Casino Royale for the first time.  It was a comedy.  And what was David Niven doing as 007?  And was that Peter Sellers in there too?  The Fundamentalist brain, it seems, understands only one way of doing things.  Growing up I spent entirely too much time watching television.  I shouldn’t be too harsh about it, however.  It’s likely how I came to know anything about popular culture, even if it was seen through the humble lens of the working poor.

Degrees of Separation

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For some reason lost in the fog of weblandia, I get The New York Times, “The Morning” delivered to my email.  By carefully not clicking the links I can get my day’s worth of fear and paranoia for free.  Not all the news is bad, of course, and I’d be glad to pay if circumstances had been different.  After giving all the sorrow that’s fit to print, “The Morning” ends with an Arts and Ideas section.  By then I’m usually cradling my head in my hands but I look up to see the positive side of humanity.  The other day the article on the Metaverse included this line: “In its simplest form, the term — coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel ‘Snow Crash’ — describes an online universe that people can share together…” and I realized probably the closest I’ll ever get to the Gray Lady.

I am, as many of my regular readers know, Neal’s brother-in-law.  He mentions me in the acknowledgements to Snow Crash, something that was discovered by someone at work fairly recently, and which probably did more for my stature than my many long hours daily.  When it comes to degrees of separation, fate, I suppose, plays a role worthy of the Joker.  Neal hadn’t written Snow Crash yet when I met his sister.  Her somewhat unlikely friendship with me eventually led to our marriage and it was in the context of a family gathering that the conversation Neal mentions in Snow Crash took place.  Outside publishing, and in particular academic publishing, acknowledgements are seldom read.  I always read them, though, looking for unusual connections.  I’m often rewarded for doing so.

Asherah was, unbeknownst to me at the time, undergoing a resurgence of interest.  My Edinburgh dissertation was published the same year as a more prominent one by Cambridge University Press.  Just a year later, another came out.  Then another.  The internet was really an infant in those days and we learned of such things through printed resources and printed resources are always in arrears by months, if not years.  Of the many Asherah books mine had the distinction of being the most expensive.  Some things never change, I guess.  Suffice it to say, Asherah was on my mind as Neal and I drove to the store to pick up some baby supplies.  I had nothing to do with his coining the word or idea “Metaverse”—he’d already worked that out.  It was Asherah that ended up in the novel.  I was on my way to a short-lived romance with academia at the time.  Family, however, is so much more than degrees of separation.

Walking Bear

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Indigenous peoples have been on my mind over the past several months.  Indeed, I read books by American Indian authors with awe.  In this darkening time of the year the Indian monsters join those of European descent in my imagination.  The wendigo has become somewhat popular in recent years but the bearwalk, or bearwalker, remains obscure.  Although a novel for young readers, Joseph Bruchac’s Bearwalker is a genuine horror story and the author is of American Indian descent.  It took someone giving it to me as a present (mainly because it was for young readers) to get me to pick it up.  I’m glad I did.

As might be expected for young readers there’s some blood but not gratuitous violence.  There are skillful twists in the novel and Bruchac knows how to put his protagonist on a cliff, as the old adage goes, then throw stones at him.  In this case, Baron, a thirteen-year-old Mohawk boy, is tormented by the bullies at his school.  Befriended by a respected teacher, he attends a three-day camping trip to the Adirondacks where a family dispute has led to a plan to terrorize the camp and force its sale.  The plan is to make it the scene of a mass murder with the school children present.  It’s here that Baron is able to demonstrate his worth to his classmates by escaping from the would-be killers and bringing help.

Throughout the story bears feature.  There’s some question as to whether there is a real bearwalker present, but the idea is there.  As with literature for young readers there’s some protective layering—no sex or strong language, for instance—but violence, at least in intent, is clearly there.  It is a very good story with suspense and excitement enough to keep even an adult horror fan going.  The main reason I’d had my eye on the book was to learn how the bearwalker might appear in it.  And also to see the story told from a First Nations’ point of view.  Like Baron in the story, American Indians I read aren’t aggressively angry about the way their people have been treated (which they certainly have a right to be).  There’s nevertheless a sadness and inevitability there.  Still, there’s also a pride in being part of an ancient and surviving culture.  There’s also quite a bit of symbolism in the story; Baron’s parents both proudly serve in the military, despite what the nation has done to their people.  And more subtle indications occur here and there that mainly adults would notice.  Although for young readers this is a real horror story, but one with a conscience.

Sky Dwellers

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If the atmosphere’s an ocean, we’re all bottom-dwellers.  Ancient peoples populated the sky above with incorporeal beings, starting with a god, or gods, at the top.  Beneath that great being were other, for lack of a better term, spiritual beings.  Angels, etc.  Eventually, the lower you got in the sky, the heavier bodies became until those of us bound to our planet by gravity (for which they had no concept) were pretty much stuck on earth.  Although this may not seem like it, it was an early form of scientific thinking.  Birds fly.  The first thing you notice upon lifting a bird, is how light it is.  (Bird lifting may be rare to those of us in modern times, keeping the wonder intact when we actually encounter it.  I was once handed an owl-hawk or some such raptor, at a street vendor stand at Stratford-upon-Avon.  As the handler slipped the glove on and asked me to hold my hand out, I prepared for like a five-pound bag of flour.  Instead I could barely tell that the bird, larger than a bag of flour, was even there.  “Light, isn’t he?” the vendor asked.)

Back to science.  If birds, which are light, can fly in the air—some at great heights—it must be that sky-dwelling beings are lighter.  Lighter than birds.  In the Middle Ages, in Europe, this proto-scientific thinking was applied to theology.   Monastics and scholastics tried to determine what exactly spiritual bodies were made of.  Keep in mind that their world consisted of a basically flat earth with a very large dome over it.  That dome had layers—the sun and moon lived in one, the stars lived in one, and then spiritual beings all the way up to God (since monotheism reigned by then).  Stories of angels and demons mating with humans circulated.  How was that possible if they were pure spirit?

It stands to reason that clouds also inhabit the skies.  It doesn’t take much of a scientist to associate heavy clouds with rain.  Logic suggests clouds are made of water.  Perhaps then spiritual bodies were some kind of vapor.  Lighter than air they inhabited realms far above the clouds.  They descend by gaining weight, perhaps like clouds.  These otherwise ethereal beings would be unknown to us, they dwell so high.  They have to come down to deal with us.  There may be realms even lower, but if the atmosphere’s an ocean, early science suggests, we are indeed bottom dwellers.