2020 in Books

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As has become traditional on this blog, I like to revisit my reading for the year before the next one begins.  No matter what else goes wrong, we have books.  As I noted yesterday, I’ll be devising my own reading challenge for the coming year and if nothing else, it’ll be diverse.  For 2020, according to Goodreads, I finished 78 books.  Since I was in the final stages of getting Nightmares with the Bible to the publisher, several books early on were about demons, and many of them were quite good.  The nonfiction that really stick out in my mind, however, includes D. W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic, Richard King’s Ahab’s Rolling Sea, Gary D. Rhodes’ The Birth of the American Horror Film, Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Secret Body, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living with a Wild God, and Ernestine Hayes’ The Tao of Raven.  If anything ties these books together it is likely their honesty when it comes to the spiritual quest.  It can legitimately take many directions.

Fiction has, at least for much of the year, been driven by a few factors: books I have on hand during a pandemic, The Modern Mrs. Darcy’s reading challenge, and books on my reading wishlist.  That list is constantly growing and the books that stand out particularly are again diverse.  Especially memorable were Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Scott Shibuya Brown’s The Traders, Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic.  Apart from their diversity these books have little in common.  I suppose that’s a testament to the importance of reading widely.  On that list there are only two “white” men but a lot of great books.

Another couple of categories might apply: big books and short story collections.  Big books intimidate me, but I read five of over 500 pages: Ellison’s Invisible Man again, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (my longest book for the year), and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.  These books are all in the “classics” category, I see.  Short story collections are more edible, and I read nine of them, including four “by” Rod Serling.  The first was an edited collection of his works, and the other three were his own Twilight Zone adaptations.  I read a few plague books because of the pandemic, but they weren’t really among my favorites.  Perhaps they were a little too close to reality.  Nevertheless 2020 was a good year of reading, overall.  I’m looking ahead to what gems 2021 might hold.

Udolpho’s Mysteries

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The carousels on Google can provide a great deal of information.  Looking at them, along with trusted lists of gothic novels, it became clear that one of the few classics I’d not read was Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.  It’s been on my shelf for many years, it’s shear bulk staring me down each time I turned in its direction.  Long books are, of course, fine if they keep you going.  Knowing this was published in 1794 (in four volumes) cast some doubt on the narrative earning the sobriquet of “page turner,” and thus it proved not to be.  I’m afraid my disposition meant that the gothicness of the novel (and it’s certainly there) didn’t speak to me as I hoped it might.  There are creepy castles and rumors of hauntings.  Lots of stormy nights and damsels in distress.  Still, it comes across as the problems of the wealthy and that has to be handled well in order to not turn off this poor reader.

Still, a novel of such fame being written by a woman in the eighteenth century is worthy of note.  More than that, Radcliffe was the most successful (in financial terms) professional writer in the decade that produced The Mysteries of Udolpho.  Her literary influence is undisputed.  The novel is, however, excessively long.  Descriptive prose style was common at the time and may seem excessive to modern readers.  This is, however, impressive for an author who never traveled to the regions about which she wrote.

About 600 pages in, in the edition I read, something caught my eye.  Much of the novel consists of descriptions of mountain ranges in France and Italy.  As one party is on its way up one of the inclines, one of the gentlemen mansplains some of the geological features.  Noting that sea shells are found at such elevations, and so far from any body of water, it is noted that this is evidence of the deluge.  What’s so astonishing about this is that even in the twenty-first century that explanation still has currency among biblical literalists.  The novel appeared before Charles Lyell, who would explain the ancient ages of rocks, was even born.  We have centuries of knowledge at our disposal that we still have a tendency to dismiss.  Interestingly, Radcliffe was famous for reviving gothic literature partially by explaining away any supernatural elements.  Of course, accepting standard religious teaching of the day would pretty much have been expected.  And yet the mysteries continue even over two centuries later.

The Abbey

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In my efforts to satisfy the Gothic longing of October—such a melancholy month—I’ve been reading Jane Austen’s classic, Northanger Abbey.  I avoided this particular title for many years because I knew that the Gothic frights were all rationally explained.  Austen was such an accomplished writer that she was able to poke fun at the Gothic genre while participating in it, at least somewhat.  I actually read this novel with no idea concerning the plot or characters.  Sometimes for works of the western canon these elements are so well known that you kind of know what to expect.  Northanger Abbey, although appreciated, isn’t often considered Austen’s finest work.  In fact, it was her first novel finished, but was only published posthumously.  As I writer I can understand that.

The story follows Catherine Morland in a satire of Gothic novels.  In fact, Catherine’s favorite book is Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, one of the Gothic standard-bearers.  The first half of the novel (pre-Gothic) sets the story up with two love triangles formed in the city of Bath.  Austen excels at making the reader uncomfortable with characters.  So much so that the second (Gothic) part of the novel ends up making one of the formerly noble Tilneys,  father of Catherine’s love interest Henry, look downright snobbish and petty.  O, the egos of the privileged!  The fact that she threw this in just about ten pages before the close (in my edition) made the ending all the more anxious.

There are no ghosts in Northanger Abbey.  No murders or poisonings took place there.  No secret manuscripts contained cryptic truths.  No secret passages led to hidden chambers.  Austen sets readers up for all of these, only to bring the conceit down in a showcase of her satirical ability.  The novel still frequently ends up on lists of Gothic classics.  I wonder if readers don’t get the satire.  I had put off reading it for many years because I knew it to be good-natured fun-poking at a genre I unaccountably enjoy.  At least I know I’m not alone in this.  I’m glad, in any case, to have finally read it.  Jane Austen was a most capable writer, a master of portraying human foibles particularly well.  The problems of the landed gentry, however, as I’ve noted before, aren’t really of interest unless there’s actually a ghost or monster lurking in the shadows somewhere.  Without monsters even an imposing abbey owned by a spoiled petty nobility is just an abbey devoid of purpose.

Sister Monsters

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Every once in a while you read an inspirational book.  I’m hoping readers will keep in mind that inspiration comes from different locations for some of us.  Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction, by Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson, is a source of inspiration.  With the usual Quirk Books touches, this isn’t a tome heavy on literary criticism, but it is a wonderful compendium of brief bios on women who walk(ed) on the dark side.  I find books like this encouraging in a number of respects.  First of all, these are women who did what they loved and were recognized for it.  Secondly, it gives the rest of us some hope that getting through the establishment to actual publication isn’t as impossible as presses would have us believe.  And third, it’s also a lot of fun.

It isn’t often pointed out that women played a major role in the development of the horror genre.  Some of the earliest Gothic novels were by Ann Radcliffe and Margaret Cavendish.  Probably the first fully fledged horror novel was Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.  The real learning kicks in when the other names come out—many women found, and continue to find, the genre compelling.  Most of them, like most of us, are lost to history, but many of them have been rediscovered.  Here again is cause for hope; those of us who write, I think, have our eyes set on the far distant future.  We’re inscribing our “Kilroy was here” on paper—I still can’t think of ebooks as actually existing—in hopes that those down the road might know us a little better.  The fact that some of our sisters have been found suggests that we too may be resurrected some day.

There’s no plot here, and the point isn’t to present some great discovery.  This is a book that encourages women to be who they are through example.  The fact that it involves monsters and horror is simply a bonus.  As a non-female reading this it struck me time and again that women have long been informed of what they should or could do by men.  Men don’t like to see women knowing as much as they do about the shadow side of human existence, even as they relegated them to the shadows.  It’s my hope that this book will inspire women to be themselves.  And if they want to invite monsters along, so much the better.