Empowerment

Leave a comment

Recommended as a worthwhile contemporary gothic novel, Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches is a feminist tour de force.  Set in a world similar, or perhaps parallel, to ours, it follows three witch sisters in 1893.  The sisters are estranged, having been raised by an abusive father, and each has found her own way to New Salem.  The old Salem had been destroyed after the witch trials.  The three find their lives drawn together, not even knowing the others are there.  But there are also still witch hunters.  None worse than Gideon Hill, the leading candidate for mayor.  I’ve long known that books written after Trump are often fairly obvious for the hatred that oozes from political leaders.  This is one such case.  The story is one of female empowerment in the face of constant male opposition.  It goes fairly quickly for a book its size.

It’s an enjoyable read but it grows, well, harrowing towards the end.  You come to like these three very different sisters and appreciate the gifts they offer to their world.  Men, however, make the rules and often they feel that women have no place in making decisions for the public good.  I’m amazed at the number of people who still believe this.  It makes novels such as this so important.  Women with power are crucial examples to present.  The three sisters may cause mayhem, but it is generally good for the city.  When men are in charge, things tend to get repressive.  Sound familiar?

Conveying the gist of a 500-page novel isn’t a simple task so I’ll simply say that this isn’t a conventional witch story.  There’s never a question that witches are good, but capable of doing bad things.  In other words, they are pretty much like all of us.  That’s not to deny that some people become evil and that such people will gain ardent, blind followers.  The characters are memorable and likable in their very humanness.  As far as genre goes, this is a magical realism novel.  As you get drawn into Harrow’s world it becomes believable.  It’s a book that should be widely read and its plea for tolerance must be heard.  I can think of other comparisons—others have also conveyed that an unquestioning religion may become evil unintentionally.  Such conversions aren’t the kind publicly discussed, but they do fit with human experience.  I’ve intentionally left out spoilers since I want to encourage readers.  It certainly has left me thoughtful.

Forgotten Books

2 Comments

Would you rather never write a book or write a book that’s easily forgotten?  This question springs from a recent exercise of trying (unsuccessfully) to count the books I’ve read.  I mean going through and putting a finger on each one and counting, if I’d read it.  I encountered a surprising number of ordinals that evoked a blank stare—I don’t remember the book at all.   Or I remember having read it, but don’t recall what it was about.  (In one instance, the book was one my wife read, and not me.  That explained a lot!)  This got me thinking about what it takes to write a memorable book.  I’ve always been one to prefer either speculative fiction or the classics.  (I’m aware that “classics” are now being dismantled because they don’t represent all groups.  I’d call them “white men’s classics,” but a surprising number of them were written by women.)  If a book has a speculative element strong enough I will recall having read it.  I like weird stuff.

I’ve read books where parts of them, at least, have stayed with me for half-a-century.  I remember specific things I read as a child (and no, I’m not talking about Barney Beagle—although I do remember that too).  I like to believe that even the bits that are hazy indicate that the book isn’t truly lost, but buried somewhere.  The human mind has an amazing capacity to absorb things.  I’ve read at least three thousand books in my life—I have no idea how many, actually, but Goodreads has me at 1,000 and I started using it in 2013.  I’d been intentionally reading for about forty years already, at that point.  Three of them while working on my doctorate.

I recently (within easy memory) read a Doc Savage novel.  I’d read the entire series, or pretty near, as a junior high schooler.   Anyway, there were well over a hundred of them.  I remembered nothing in my recent re-read beyond Doc’s band of five companions.  The story was completely unfamiliar to me.  One of the more recent books I know I read but couldn’t remember the story at all was a New York Times bestseller.  I guess if I’ve forgotten the author he’ll still be okay on Mars in the future since many others must remember something about it.  I’ll be long gone by then, both on Mars and down here, I’m sure.  I do hope even by then something will remain of all the books I’ve read.

Shadow Half

Leave a comment

Sometimes you just take a chance on a book you haven’t heard of.  You see, I keep a very active “to read” list.  The problem is that many books on it are a bit on the heavy side and it takes me a long time to get through lengthy books.  Every once in a while I go to a bookstore to browse for a book that’s short and speculative.  It seems that when I was growing up it wasn’t difficult to find fiction under 300 pages.  In any case, that’s how I found Sunny Moraine’s Your Shadow Half Remains.  It was in the “horror” section of a local bookstore.  (Even “horror” sections are now difficult to locate.)  It looked like it wouldn’t take me a month to read.  It was a good call.  It’s what I like in a scary story.

Not too gory and written with literary finesse, Your Shadow Half Remains is a pandemic story.  Well, not literally, but sort of literally.  It was published just this year and the story revolves around a pandemic in which people are infected by looking into each other’s eyes.  Nobody knows for sure how this happens, but people who are infected begin to act violently toward those around them before killing themselves.  Naturally, therefore, survivors begin to isolate themselves.  So Riley moves to a lake cabin where her grandparents got infected and died, but since there’s nobody else around the contagion can’t spread.  She lays in supplies and awaits, well, that’s just it—awaits what?  Her plan is interrupted, however, when she learns that she has a neighbor.  Maybe two.

One neighbor she starts to get to know, but they can’t look directly at one another and can’t really know each other’s motives.  Herein hangs the tale.  People are social creatures and the pandemic (in real life) caused much of its damage in the form of isolating ourselves from one another.  Other people, instead of being companions, were threats.  Especially in the early days when it wasn’t clear how the virus was spreading.  The safest thing was to stay home and avoid others.  It’s that aspect that Moraine really captures here.  A woman set to try to wait this thing out alone, but then, another person complicates things.  And how can you tell insanity from infection apart from insanity brought on by isolation?  Both seem to lead to the same results.  I took a chance on this unknown story, and it was a chance well taken.

Best King

2 Comments

I suspect most people have read one or two at least.  Most reading folk, that is.  I mean Stephen King novels.  He’s sure written plenty.  By my count I’ve read nine: The Shining, Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, It, The Stand, The Tommyknockers, Revival, and Cujo.  I probably have one or two more in me.  The dilemma is that I like King’s writing—I’m not one of those nay-sayers who call it clap-trap.  There’s real literary merit to much of it (sometimes just too much of it), and he integrates religion into horror really well.  The thing is, not all of his books are made equal.  I suspect that’s true of any writer.  I’ve consulted some lists to see which are the best and I’ve watched some movies before reading the books, but I’m starting a ranking of my own here—it will probably be revisited from time to time, as events warrant.

What’s his best?  Well, such lists are supposed to start with the worst and work their way forward.  I’ll cave to convention this time.  So, The Tommyknockers and Cujo are tied for least favorite.  Each has a reason: The Tommyknockers is too long and lacks sympathetic characters and Cujo is just too nihilistic.  The premise is good but the bleakness got to me.  The Stand comes next primarily because of the length.  I like the way that one ended up, though.  Revival, my most recent read, comes here, about in the middle.  It was enjoyable to read, even with its length.  I think King has a little trouble writing convincing kids, but the story was good.  Next I would put ‘Salem’s Lot.  Who doesn’t like a good vampire story?

Not that kind of book.

My top three are, perhaps predictably, generally among the top ranked.  My order is perhaps a bit different than most, however.  I really, really enjoyed The Shining.  The movie, I believe, is better.  That may be heresy, I know.  Carrie has all the freshness of a novelist breaking through, and it’s effective.  Better than the movie.  That leaves Pet Sematary as my current favorite.  The story there caught me up and it’s the only one of my top three that I read before seeing the movie (both of them).  The book is way, way better than the movies.  Compared with Revival, which also deals with what happens after death, Pet Sematary offers a commentary on grief that doesn’t involve everyone dying by suicide.  It’s on a much more human level.  As I read more, I’m sure I’ll form other opinions, but for the time being, these three of the King’s early novels, are, in my standing, the most deserving of the crown.

Hopeful History

Leave a comment

We could all use a little hope.  Given the rate of change in the world it often feels impossible to catch your breath.  And not only that, but the change often feels decidedly negative.  Few would opine, for instance, that we live in the golden age of politics.  And while it has its supporters, AI seems bent on our destruction.  So why not eat, drink, and be merry?  Scott Edwin Williams, whose last book Lightbulb Moments in Human History I reviewed here, has been at it again.  His basic idea is that our “lightbulb moments” give us hope for a better future.  Lightbulb Moments in Human History II: from Peasants to Periwigs, keeps the same general idea afloat, but barely.  As history progresses it’s harder and harder to say that the lot of humanity, tout court, has improved.  True, we live in relative comfort in “the developed world,” but we still have looming Trumps and other nightmares in the wings.

This book tries to cover large swaths of history, and that’s a difficult task.  Williams tries to keep it lighthearted but even he struggles to do so when discussing the rise of big business.  The chapter “Takin’ Care of Business” really showcases the negative traits that humans are too often willing to display when they form companies.  Capitalism may have been a lightbulb moment, but the untold misery it has introduced into the world gives the reader pause.  For example, the East India Company’s business decision to addict as many Chinese to opium as possible, seems quite strange in the context of a “war on drugs” being used as a means of incarcerating “undesirables” because, well, drugs are bad.

There are some signs of hope, and some lighthearted moments in the book.  It does, at times, seem to work against its own thesis.  It makes me glad for living in an age of anesthesia, and of general agreement that people should respect each other’s boundaries (unless you live next to Russia).  Even the lightbulb moments of Mesoamerican/South American history demonstrate the kind of cruelty humans often perpetrate against “outsiders.”  Williams notes here that two more books are in the works (authors know that a series isn’t a bad thing) but it does make me wonder if light and dark don’t balance each other out.  I know from my own family history that some of my ancestors died of things quite curable today, and they lived not all that long ago.  And that I can write these words and publish them instantaneously (whether or not anyone reads them).  And I can buy most necessities of life (apart from toilet paper during a pandemic) fairly easily.  And I do appreciate books that give me hope.  But balance isn’t such a bad thing either.

Mirror Gothic

Leave a comment

I have a soft spot for gothic novels.  I get the sense that Rebecca James set out to write the most gothic novel ever in The Woman in the Mirror.  Although the supernatural persists in the background throughout the novel, it’s mainly the reflection of two women who encounter the mysterious Winterbourne Hall, high on a cliff over the Atlantic in Cornwall.  Rachel Wright, in the present day, is a self-made woman.  Overcoming the life of being raised an orphan, she has opened a successful art gallery in New York City when she receives an unexpected letter informing her that she’s inherited an expansive property in England.  Not knowing who her parents were, this is a world-changing surprise, so she heads to Cornwall to find her past and to figure out what to do with her inherited property.

Her story is intertwined with that of Alice Miller.  An English woman from two generations past (I’ll come back to that), Miller grew up with a bully for a father and a desire to make it on her own.  She’s hampered, however, by a past secret.  She takes up employment as a governess at Winterbourne where a Rochesterian Jonathan de Grey is lord of the manor.  His two children, fraternal twins, require keeping and the last governess threw herself off the cliffs—you see what I mean by most gothic—so Miller takes the post.  The massive house, however, has a strange effect on her.  Not only on her, we learn, but on most of the women who live there.  The final housekeeper, however, does seem to be immune, perhaps because she’s older.

The story is slow paced, with a fair amount of romance thrown in.  Both Rachel and Alice have lost lovers and are coping with their pasts.  They never meet, of course, being from separate generations.  Perhaps this is just the perspective of an old geezer, but putting Alice Miller in, presumably, her twenties in 1947 doesn’t really seem long enough in the past for the story to unfold as it does.  I couldn’t help but think that this makes her about my mother’s age and I would have to admit that my own daughter is old enough to inherit an estate while having already become a successful artist in Manhattan.  The timing just seemed a little off to me.  The perfect gothic novel seems to require some Victorian aspects, in my opinion.  Nevertheless, this story becomes quite gripping toward the end.  If you want a modern-day gothic romance, you’ll likely enjoy The Woman in the Mirror.

Iron Age Angst

Leave a comment

Browsing can lead to unexpected finds.  Such is the magic of bookstores.  Most of the books I read are recommended to me either through online sources or from people who have an inkling of my tastes.  Often such books are on the long side.  While I don’t object to really getting into a book, like most people I wonder where the time goes and a short read gives you a sense of accomplishment.  So it was that I was browsing a local bookstore for something brief.  I came across Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss.  The back cover bore no BISAC info telling the genre, but in this case the blurbs convinced me that I’d find this a rewarding read.  It’s not horror, but it has a sense of doom about it.  There may be some spoilers below but I won’t give away the ending.

Told from the point of view of Silvie, a teenage minor, it recounts a college anthropology experiment on the moors of northern England.  Silvie isn’t one of the students, but rather a high-school-aged daughter of a bus driver enamored of Iron Age Britain.  A professor has three students set to live part of the summer like Iron Agers, and Silvie’s father has brought her and her mother along to do “the women’s work.”  Yes, he’s a chauvinist and he has violent tendencies.  He clearly wishes he’d lived in “simpler” times.  I suspect what makes a novel like this work is that many of us know people like the father.  Hard, angry men.  As the story unfolds we witness his abuses and the clueless professor simply continues play-acting Iron Age.  Until they get the idea of sacrificing a victim like the bog people of northern Europe.

The style is spare, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  As one of the blurbs says, there are echoes of Lord of the Flies as well.  What do groups of men get up to when unleashed from civilization?  It took me some time to figure out, since this is entirely first-person narrative, that there are only three students—one woman and two men.  With the chaperones it’s two men and a woman.  This uneven power structure raises its own questions.  Meanwhile Silvie is coming of age, beginning to realize her own sexual awakening.  Her best role model is the co-ed among the group since her working-class mother lives in fear of her husband.  The story is compelling and a bit scary.  It’s also a rewarding read that won’t take a month or more to finish.

A Bookseller’s Son

Leave a comment

Be kind.  One of the best reasons, apart from innate rightness, is that we don’t know the burdens other people carry.  Yes, some will tell us and others will not, but one thing is certain: we all bear scars.  I met Andrew Laties because of the Easton Book Festival that he organized.  Andy is half-owner of Book and Puppet Company, an independent bookstore in that town.  A colleague of mine from Lafayette College introduced us back in 2019.  Whenever I go to Easton I stop in the store and pick something up.  Andy has kindly slotted me into each annual Book Festival, except last year, because of a burden I happened to be carrying.  I recently finished his book, co-authored with his son Samuel, Son of Rebel Bookseller: A Very Large Homework Assignment.  Andy had revealed one of his burdens before I read it, and I appreciated the slight cushioning of the shock.

Samuel is a posthumous co-author.  I have had friends—too many—who have lost children.  It is a devastating blow.  I’d casually chatted with Andy for five years without realizing he had this to bear.  This book is an unflinching stare at the unfairness of life.  You get a good idea of what Sam must’ve been like, through his writing and his father’s description.  His brilliance is evident, even as we learn of his mental illness.  The two often go together, and even contemporary successful authors, such as John Green, have  revealed their mental struggles to the world.  There are many great writers, like Edgar Allan Poe, who clearly had some issues.  The stigma must disappear.  Our culture would be so very poverty-bound without it.

Son of Rebel Bookseller is available on Bookshop.org.  Or, if you’re in Easton you can stop into the shop.  The title makes reference to Andy’s previous book, Rebel Bookseller, which I mentioned here a couple years back.  This, however, is a much more personal story.  An anguish screaming to be released.  Something that I’ve picked up on during editorial board meetings at work is that books by authors with a compelling personal story have something special about them.  They may not end up published by the Big Five, and they may really find only a local readership.  That doesn’t mean, however, that they can’t have an impact.  The vast majority of books have limited readerships, and some of them are far more important than those that line bestseller lists.  And this one reminds me once again the importance of kindness, and striving to be as humane as a human can be.

Drac Ops

Leave a comment

Just don’t ask, okay?  Like most things in my life, I discovered Dr. McNinja way past when it was popular.  Who knows?  Maybe it’s still popular.  I’m not the best judge of that kind of thing.  I’ve read a few graphic novels in recent years, generally when someone lends them to me, or when a movie I like is based on them.  Now, the thing about Dr. McNinja is that it started out as a webcomic.  People younger and more with it than me have shown me other people younger and more with it than me making a good living web cartooning.  They don’t have 9-2-5s and they live, going by their videos, in nicer houses than I do.  So when someone suggested I look up Dr. McNinja I found an old-looking website saying it was no longer online.  The author had published it in book form.

Even though I work in publishing, I find it difficult to tell if a book is out of print.  We live in that strange purgatory where IP (intellectual property) can be kept on life support until copyright expires without ever really having to print more books when they run out of stock.  They’re never truly out of print.  I’m guessing that’s what happened when on Amazon you see that only used copies are available.  So which McNinja to select?  The one with a cover that riffs off Plan 9 from Outer Space, of course.  That movie keeps coming back into my life.  It’s one of Fox Mulder’s favorites on the X-Files.  In any case, I was hardly prepared for the amazingly creative imagination that Christopher Hastings has.  If you start with Operation Dracula! From Outer Space you’re entering the story in media res, as the academics say.

I confess to liking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when it first came out.  These days the exoticism of eastern Asia is frowned upon by academics, but it’s still there in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, so why not?  In case you’re wondering, there is a reason behind all this.  I can’t tell you at the moment, however.  I can say that if you’re looking for a wild, wild story with lots of unexpected twists and turns, Dr. McNinja will not fail to win approbation.  I’m dithering on whether to go back and start from the beginning—these print volumes are becoming collectors’ items, it seems.  And no matter how much fun it is, reading graphic novels always feels like cheating to me.

One Another

Leave a comment

Like much of the other information that I’ve managed to pick up in these six decades of wandering the planet, my knowledge of horror is self-taught.  In truth, I’m an eclectic reader—my various, periodic obsessions generally stem from books I’m writing.  For my unwinding time, however, horror stories seem to do the trick.  Nobody I know in person reads horror, so my recommendations are generally the results of other books I read.  That’s how I found Thomas Tryon’s The Other.  Although I’d only learned of it recently, it has been a classic in the field for many decades.  After having read it, I can see why.  And unlike many fiction works with an afterword, this edition has one worth reading.  Maybe you’re unfamiliar with the novel?  If so, in brief, it’s about twins.  It’s about twins.

Identical twins.  Holland and Niles Perry were born over the cusp of midnight, giving them different birthdays while still being the same age.  Unlike stereotypical identical twins, however, Holland is evil and Niles is good.  As the novel unfolds it contains some twists that, if like me you haven’t heard the story, really do work.  They live in a small town in Connecticut with their widowed mother, older sister and brother-in-law, maternal grandmother, and a couple of domestics.  An aunt and uncle, along with a cousin, settle in.  (It’s a large house.)  Family dynamics are strange and the locals grow increasingly impatient with Holland’s antics.  The Perry family is, however, long established and well respected.

Doesn’t sound very scary, does it?  That’s the genius of the work.  It’s a slow burn but when the fuse reaches the powder it leaves you trembling.  Nobody taught me how to find and read horror.  I’m still pretty much a novice and it seems that novels these days tend to have weight problems.  I was glad to find The Other wasn’t excessively long.  It shows that literary horror is possible as well.  Like Shirley Jackson, Tryon received acclaim for his work.  (And like Jackson, his novel doesn’t balloon out to over four hundred pages—something of a rarity these days.)  I guess I’m just a bit surprised it took so long for me to find out about this one.  I don’t want to give any spoilers because this is a beautifully constructed novel and knowing what happens might deter other readers.  I wouldn’t want to do such a disservice to a book I wish I’d known about when I was younger.

Unusual Places

Leave a comment

I don’t recall how I first learned about Mitch Horowitz’s work.  I read Occult America as soon as I found out about it—it helped as I was transitioning to writing about religious culture (largely through horror films) since there’s a healthy dose of occult in horror.  While still in publishing Mitch agreed to look at Holy Horror before it landed with McFarland.  The thing about my life is that it’s too busy (9-2-5 isn’t a size that fits all) to keep up with writers I find fascinating.  I hadn’t been aware of Horowitz’s continued, and continuing, book writing.  As soon as I saw Uncertain Places: Essays on Occult and Outsider Experiences I ordered a copy.  It brought back to mind the semester break at Nashotah House when I realized that to get anywhere near the truth you need to question and question boldly.  I told my students that if they didn’t challenge their perceptions with reading during semester breaks they were wasting them.

I met Mitch (although we’ve never seen each other in person) through our mutual friend Jeff Kripal.  They both have the courage to question apparent reality and to not stop at the line that the wall of materialism throws up around the pursuit of knowledge.  Uncertain Places is well titled.  Like almost all collections of essays some speak to the reader more than others, but I found myself pausing frequently to consider what I’d just read here.  One thought that keeps recurring is how even someone with a terminal degree can constantly feel like there’s so much more to explore.    Horowitz is a seeker unashamed.  And that also took me back to my past.

Growing up poor, I didn’t have many resources other than my mind to help draw some preliminary conclusions about reality.  Like many red-neck families of the time we had a CB radio and we were each instructed to come up with a “handle.”  I believe it was my mother who suggested “Searcher” to me.  She knew that I would never stop looking.  Uncertain Places is the work of another searcher—one who’s less fearful than I tend to be.  (I’m working on it.)  Reality, it seems clear to me, is far more subtle than most of higher education has taught me that it should be.  We try to make occult scary and demonic but Horowitz is, like yours truly, an historian.  Those of us who explore the history of religion can find ourselves in some pretty unusual, one might say uncertain, places.  And rather than dismiss what we see there, we take a closer look.

Reading 2023

Leave a comment

As has become my tradition, I’ll end the year reflecting on the books I’ve read.  For a variety of reasons this is the first time in nine years that I haven’t cleared seventy books.  (I ended up one shy.)  But looking back over what I read, I may see some logic behind this.  Many of the books were academic, and specifically, academic in fields outside my formal training.  That also means they generally didn’t make it to my list of favorites.  2023 was also unusual in that it wasn’t until about late spring that I started to read books I really enjoyed.  The first on my list of memorable titles is Andi Marquette’s The Secret of Sleepy Hollow.  This was followed by a couple other fiction titles, Grady Hendrix’s Final Girl Support Group and Gina Chung’s Sea Change.  Those ended up being my favorite three fiction titles of the year.

For nonfiction, I finally read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, memorable, if terrifying.  Also along the lines of history, I found Lesley Pratt Bannatyne’s two books Halloween and Halloween Nation, to be particularly good.  Mark Dawidziak’s Mystery of Mysteries may well have been my favorite historically-oriented book of the year.  Donna Kornhaber’s Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction was also quite well done.  I always enjoy books on horror films, and two on The Exorcist were noteworthy: Nat Segaloff’s The Exorcist Legacy and The Exorcist Effect by Joseph P. Laycock and Eric Harrelson.  Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies by Matthew Strohl, which I read a bit earlier in the year was also quite good.  By far the most helpful book in a personally troubling year was The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy.

In years past I’ve generally had more commendable books on my list.  I did, however, finish the last three Dark Shadow’s novels by Marylin Ross, reaching the bucket-list item of having read the entire series.  I also found Jessica Verday’s three-volume series strangely memorable, although written for young adults (found here, here, and here).  While the number of books I really enjoyed wasn’t as high as in some other years, these highlights make me optimistic regarding 2024.  I used to follow the Modern Mrs. Darcy’s reading challenge guidelines, until they stopped being published, and now I find myself left to my own devices, for the most part.  Much of my reading is driven by research, and I suppose I should also mention that my own fifth book was published in 2023 as well.  I don’t expect it’ll be anybody’s favorite, but it is nevertheless an honor to be part of the conversation.