Nightmare Talk

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For those inclined to podcasts, and who plan in advance, I wanted to pass along the information on this poster.  James Annitto and Victoria Jaye have kindly invited me to be a guest on their Nine Gates Podcast.  The topic will be Demons in Media.  This is a subject that has interested me for some time since it seems that our current ideas of what demons are owe a huge debt of gratitude to The Exorcist.  Yes, exorcism did exist long before the novel and blockbuster film.  And yes, many of the reported behaviors portrayed therein had been proclaimed by witnesses to said exorcisms—this is what gave William Peter Blatty the idea in the first place.  What had also happened, however, is that public interest in the topic had waned to the point that the novel and movie were so shocking as to jolt the interest back to life.

After The Exorcist, we had a new old monster to add to the horror lexicon.  The Exorcist-styled demon.  It has only grown from there.  A ritual that the Roman Catholic Church had mostly buried became frequently requested.  Protestants, never willing to let Catholics get the upper hand for long, joined in with their own methods of expelling demons.  Popularizers such as Malachi Martin and Ed and Lorraine Warren joined in, asserting demons were not all that uncommon after all.  Those who distrust science now had a new potential source to cure ailments that may have, ironically, been spawned by movies that convinced people that demons did exist.  I dealt with this in my book Nightmares with the Bible.  

I’ve occasionally been invited to various podcasts (a list is here) and I always enjoy it.  It reminds me of being back in the classroom, where I belong.  I realize blogs are outdated, but writing is what I do.  Also, putting together a single podcast can eat up a weekend while a blog post claims much less time.  I like to think I pay back the publicity of my kind hosts by advertising books here.  I have no idea if such notice ever leads anyone to add to any author’s coffers, but I can hope.  Living by the word has never been an easy prospect.  Certainly book royalties (in my experience) don’t come near reimbursing the expenses.  I suppose they’re more legacy building than anything else.  My “Kilroy was here” spray painted on the internet.  In any case, if you’re interested, on a forthcoming Tuesday night, look for me on the Nine Gates Podcast.

Lemony Reptiles

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Having embarked on A Series of Unfortunate Events again, and having just finished The Reptile Room again, I might reflect on Lemony Snicket’s contribution to dark academia.  I mentioned to a friend recently that some dark academia aficionados consider the series to fall into that genre.  Having had the books read to her at a young age, she asked “Why?”  That got me thinking again about this wide, wonderful, amorphous category of books.  In my personal calculus, dark academia involves education—and this may be book learning undertaken independently—something going seriously wrong, and, in the best of it, a gothic atmosphere.  While A Series of Unfortunate Events is generally quite funny and fun to read, it clearly has the main elements I seek in classifying dark academia.  The Baudelaire orphans are pursued relentlessly by Count Olaf in a setting which, although difficult to place time wise, has Victorian aesthetics.

Of course, The Reptile Room is the second book utilized by the movie A Series of Unfortunate Events to get it up to feature length.  Reading it again revealed just how distorted my memory of the story had become by the movie.  The resolution of the scam by Stephano in the film is merely a distraction by the children to come to the real reveal in the book.  I’m not one to diss the movie.  It is quite gothic and it has many quotable moments, but it isn’t the same as the books.  I still remember when we first learned about these books from a niece, very young at the time, who enthused about them.  We were just a little cautious about reading scary stories to our daughter because one Roald Dahl book we read really was too gruesome for a child of tender years.  We immediately loved this series, however.

A quarter century or so is plenty of time to forget details.  Rereading these books also reminds me how influential they were on some of my own writing, although I read them as what passes for an adult at the time.  (I was old enough to be, and indeed was, a father.)  It occurs to me, as it likely did back then, just how clueless adults are.  Some of the descriptions of Count Olaf in this book could easily be substituted for a particular denizen of the Oval Office these days.  And, I suspect, children are able to see through those who constantly make up excuses to cover their own incompetence.  I’m looking forward to The Wide Window.

Life Underground

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Having really enjoyed Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, I was looking forward to The Starless Sea, despite its nearly 600 pages.  I don’t mind getting lost in a book; in fact it’s one of life’s true and simple joys.  The Starless Sea came to my attention as a dark academia book.  The story is a good one, but in my uninformed opinion, a bit too long.  The fault is my own, I’m sure.  My sensitivity to high fantasy has reached a point where swords tend to put me off.  And some bits, particularly in book V were a bit confusing.  Still, Morgenstern’s writing is beautiful, and at some points sublime.  If it’d been a bit shorter I’d probably be gushing.  Instead I’m reflectively admiring.  As a sometime writer myself, I know that you write what you write and others may not get it.  That’s life.

The story generally follows grad student Zachary Ezra Rawlins as he finds a book from a library of a world that’s beneath the ground.  A world that includes a harbor on the Starless Sea.  That world is inhabited by the surviving members of a decaying society made up of stories.  Most members of this world (and it’s difficult not to see this as an allegory) have left for the world above (this world).  Access between the two worlds is through doors.  Sometimes real doors, other times doors painted on a wall.  Zachary finally goes through one, having not tried one outside his house when he was just a boy.  He’s not sure if he wants to stay in the Starless Sea world or not, but he gets roped into the story.

Many other characters, at varying levels of the story within a story get involved, of course.  He meets his true love, and one of the undergrads he taught gets interested in his fate, and the denizens of the world below are intriguing characters in their own right.  Despite the length of the book, there are still plenty of gaps left for the readers to fill in for themselves.  Again, my own limitations prefer to have not too many gaps because I get confused.  The story tips a hat to several of its influences explicitly, and in many ways reminded me of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.  With its grad school protagonist, lots of libraries, and even a secret society, this fantasy is a card-carrying dark academia novel.  The genre encompasses may differing books and styles.  And I’m glad to have read this one as part of my own quest in that genre.  It was a sustained escape from life in the upper world.

Bad Start

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I’m not too proud to admit to reading books for young readers.  On a recent family night we watched the 2004 film, A Series of Unfortunate Events (not for the first time), and I realized that my memory of the books by Lemony Snicket was hazy.  Since we bought and read all the books for my daughter, I pulled The Bad Beginning from the shelf and read it in a couple of hours.  Although it was published over a quarter century ago, it is still fresh and it stands as one of those books (and series) that defied convention and presented stories that were potentially disturbing for children.  I have to admit that another of my motivations in re-reading this was the suggestion that perhaps on another family night we might start watching the Netflix adaptation, which, as I understand it, is better than the theatrical movie.

The movie, of course faced a dilemma.  There are thirteen books in the series—too many to comfortably fit into one film.  Each individual book, however, is too slim to fill out a feature-length presentation.  The decision was made to blend the first three books together, beginning and ending the show with the events from The Bad Beginning.  If you’re not familiar with the series, even if you don’t have children, the books are an entertaining read.  Snicket, who was later revealed to be Daniel Handler, is quite a clever author and there were a couple of points that had me, well, snickering out loud.  In any case, I’m given to understand that the Netflix series tackles this conundrum of too much/little material by being, ahem, a series.

A brief summary of The Bad Beginning may help if you’re still undecided about reading it as an adult.  The three Baudelaire children, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, are orphaned in a fire.  Adopted by their scheming uncle, Count Olaf, they are immediately put in peril as he tries various ways to get at their parents’ fortune.  Since Olaf is a thespian, he devises a plot to hold a wedding between himself and fourteen-year-old Violet in disguise as a play.  The plot is foiled, of course, by the children.  The book ends by letting the reader know that the orphans are still in danger because Olaf has escaped and remains at large.  That would take quite a lot of padding to get a feature-length film out of it.  It works quite well as a brief book for young readers.  I was impressed at both the set-up and execution when I first read this many years ago.  And I liked it again the second time through.

Scary Scripture

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The question’s not as simple as whether chocolate and peanut butter go together.  What is it with horror and the Bible?  A number of us have explored that question in book form, but probably the most prolific is Brandon R. Grafius.  His Scared by the Bible is a mapping through terrain that will feel foreign to some: if you live for the beach in summer, why would you fly to Antarctica to visit the South Pole instead?  Part of the reason is clearly that the Bible isn’t the rainbow-and-unicorn book that it’s often made out to be.  Some parts—not a few—are pretty scary.  That’s Grafius’ entry point into how horror and the Bible are surprisingly compatible.  Interestingly, we had similar starts down this path.  A Bible given to us by a grandmother when we were a child, and the determination to read it.  My world was a bit more hellfire and brimstone than Grafius’ but we’ve ended up near the same place.

Often I thought, as I was reading it, “Are people going to get both these references?” (i.e., both the biblical story and the horror movie being cited).  After all, many Christian denominations still teach that horror is not helpful at best, and satanic at worst.  I just wonder how many of us there are who never found watching horror a spiritual problem.  I grew up thinking about death a lot.  Part of this was because Evangelical children’s literature raised the question of where would you spend eternity if you died today.  Seriously, some of the stories I read, along with Dick and Jane, still scare me today.  Religion often uses fear for its own purposes.  So does the Bible.  Grafius comes down to this at the end, asking if it’s intentional on the Bible’s part.

It seems to me that this is an important question to explore.  Religion has been weaponized through fear since at least the Reagan years.  More recently it has been aimed specifically at us “evil” liberals and our “culture of death” even as conservatives rain bombs on Iran.  We desperately need to understand religion’s now very intentional use of fear to retain power.  People are afraid.  They have reason to be.  Generally it’s not the emotional issues politicians hand-pick to garner votes.  Yes, the Bible is a source of fear.  Horror films are often also a source of scary thoughts.  They do have a lot in common.  We just need someone to come along with an open jar of peanut butter to run into someone eating a chocolate bar.

Re-Telling Poe

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Retelling stories is a very old tradition.  Fiction writers often do it.  Some even argue there are no new stories (I tend to disagree with that).  In any case, T. Kingfisher decided to try retelling my favorite short story, Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”  What Moves the Dead has Roderick and Madeline Usher and their creepy house but the story revolves around the narrator, Easton.  (There’s a helpful author’s note at the end that discusses this.)  As Kingfisher notes, the narrative warps around fully-formed new characters and the question is whether that works or not.  Anyone who’s spent much time on this blog will know that I’m a diehard Poe fan.  It takes a lot to convince me that anyone has done him justice.  What Moves the Dead is a quick read, but perhaps unsurprisingly I had trouble accepting Easton as the interloper to the story.  

One of the most compelling aspects of Poe’s tale is the point of view of his unnamed narrator.  He expresses his horror at what happens but manages to keep himself out of the spotlight.  Easton intrudes a bit too much in the narrative.  And other characters also tend to overshadow the Ushers.  The main thing that is missing, however, is Poe’s unity of effect.  There is a dread running throughout Poe’s “Usher,” and analysts have suggested that every detail of the story is relevant.  There’s a reason it’s my favorite short story—it is just so good!  So good that the few times I’ve ridden on a horse in my life, the first thought that always comes to mind is the opening of Poe’s story.

If you’re looking for a quick horror book to read, which has a bit of humor to it, What Moves the Dead isn’t bad.  Kingfisher is a talented writer and her characters are creative.  It’s just that they muddy the waters, as it were, of Poe’s masterpiece.  Ironically, I think the story would’ve been much more compelling without the Poe tie-in.  The idea of infecting mushrooms (she also discusses this in the author’s note) can be a really compelling tactic.  In fact, it is used quite a lot in horror these days (and I completely understand Kingfisher picking up another book that does what you’re trying to do when you’re in the middle of a project—that has happened to me more than once).  For me, Poe’s story is pretty much perfect and it’s difficult to improve on perfection.

Long Winter

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I have to confess that I often feel uncharitable towards very long books.  Mainly, I think, that is because one of my main blogging topics is books and when it takes a long time to read one I have to come up with other things to write about.  Still Dan Simmons’ The Terror had been strongly recommended.  I found it in an indy bookshop on independent bookstore day and began reading it sometime back in May.  It started out strong, but about three-hundred pages in began to feel a bit tedious and self-indulgent.  (I’ve done that myself with my fiction, so this criticism is also aimed at the one writing this reflection.)  In case you haven’t read it, the Terror of the title is HMS Terror, the ship captained by Francis Crozier under the command of Sir John Franklin, captain of HMS Erebus.  Both ships, seeking the northwest passage, froze in the Arctic ice in 1846 and their combined crews of 129 died without ever being found.

That’s a strong basis for a horror novel.  Your mind can’t help but wonder what it’d be like to be stuck in the dark, sunless winter, temperatures well below what most of us could survive, and realizing that you were never going to get out.  Simmons traces the story arcs of several of the crew that historically populated the ships.  Since there were no survivors, just about anything is fair game.  Including creating a monster to attack them.  Even as I began to warm to the book in the last hundred or so pages, it seems that some of this could’ve been trimmed and the same sprawling majesty been preserved.  Maybe I’m just jealous because none of my novels have been published and I keep being told you have to keep things short to get any traction.

In any case, by the end of the book I was really drawn in.  This was after the villain got his own, and Crozier starts to recognize the indigenous Arctic people for their truly remarkable survival skills.  (Not vegan friendly, of course, since vegetation doesn’t thrive in ice-bound conditions.)  It comes to a remarkable conclusion and I gradually found myself letting go of my petulance for having to invest so much time in one book.  I’m a slow reader with a very large pile of books yet to read.  In any case, Simmons won me back.  I quite enjoyed his Night of Summer and A Winter Haunting many years ago.  If you’re not afraid of big books, and you’d like to read about what can go wrong with a group of men trapped in the Arctic, then The Terror may be for you.

Novelization

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I watched the sci-fi horror film Splice a few years ago.  Long enough that I don’t recall many details.  When Claire Donner, a friend of mine from Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, told me she’d written a novelization of Splice, I knew I had to read it.  If you’ve seen the movie then you know the story.  If you haven’t, you can read it in her book.  I don’t often read novelizations—I read the one for Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, and as a young person read the original three Star Wars novelizations.  Such books really only apply to movies not already based on a novel, of course.  They give the reader a path into the inner lives of the characters.  Naturally, now I have to watch Splice again to see it through Donner’s lens.  The basic idea, if you want some encouragement, is that a couple of scientists add some human DNA into a gene-spliced animal being lab grown for enzymes to fight disease.

In the rawest sense, this is the story of Frankenstein for a more technological crowd.  Like Frankenstein, it is a sad story.  And like said sad story, it involves reproduction without two human parents.  The real builder this time, however, is Elsa and Donner gives considerable development to her motivations and thought process.  (I’m very curious to know if I can see that in the movie or not.)  Clive, her partner, isn’t aware of the source of the human DNA.  The spliced creature grows into the passably human Dren, who finds herself asking the questions Frankenstein’s creature asked about his own existence.  Like said creature, Dren has to be hidden away, and controlled.  At the same time, she is evolutionarily superior to her maker.  There’s a lot to see here, folks!

Having written a fair bit of fiction in my time, I do wonder what it might be like to do a novelization.  I suspect most of us, if a movie is well made, decide on the motivations of characters but how often do we delve into their inner lives?  I’m not sure that I do that most of the time.  When I write fiction I do it all the time.  I want to know my characters and why they are the way they are.  Sometimes they remain mysteries to me, but that doesn’t prevent me from trying.  This novelization is deftly done, and approved by the screenwriter/director.  And the deep motivations make the scenario plausible.  If you haven’t seen Splice you might enjoy doing so.  And then read the novel.  Or the other way around.

Folk Exorcism

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The consensus seems to be that The Old Ways is pretty good.  This folk horror, demonic possession film didn’t impress me too much, however.  The premise is good: there is a ruin in Mexico that explorers leave having been possessed.  They don’t know it.  At the same time, it seems that the possession of Cristina, the protagonist, came from her mother.   And she also visited the ruin.  Most of the movie takes place in a room where a bruja and her adult son attempt to exorcise Cristina while her cousin Miranda watches.  Things are a bit more complicated than that, however.  Cristina has returned to her hometown with the intention of dying via a heroin overdose.  Apparently the demon was luring her there to finish her soul.  In any case, it felt quite confusing to me.  

The story actually begins with Cristina finding herself held captive by a bruja named Luz.  She insists that Cristina can’t go until the demon has been destroyed.  Cristina feels fine, though, and doesn’t believe there is a demon.  Meanwhile she’s able to smuggle in her heroin and uses it at night.  But she also starts seeing what seem to be demonic entities.  She escapes but finds that she can’t cross a line of salt.  She’s forced to admit that she does have a demon and submits to a painful “old way” extraction.  Luz performs the ritual—nothing like Exorcist style—and even performs surgery on Cristina with her bare hands.  In the end, the exorcism leads to Luz’s death.  Cristina prepares to go back to Los Angeles, but then discovers the demon has taken possession of her cousin Miranda.

Becoming a bruja herself Cristina performs the ritual on her cousin.  The results are less dramatic but lead to a confrontation with a particularly nasty demon.  The cousins together are able to destroy it.  Meanwhile, Cristina’s boss has come looking for her and he too went to the ruin and has been possessed.  Cristina prepares to do another ritual, the old way.  There seems to be too much going on here and much of it is unfamiliar and therefore difficult to understand.  It is a good example of religion and horror cooperating and the use of folk methods for handling a demon felt fresh.  The eeriness of the situation is perhaps more uncanny than scary, but the biggest problem for me was that the origin of the possession kept shifting.  There is a character (a little boy) who’s not really explained, but who isn’t a good sign.  This isn’t a bad movie, but it made The Exorcist feel like old school.

Bad Boy

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I’m still trying to figure out what I think about it.  The introduction by Grady Hendrix got me interested in the novels of Ken Greenhall.  The introduction was in Hell Hound and it described how Greenhall’s books whispered horror rather than shouted it.  That’s also true of the horror stories I write, and it’s clear I still have plenty to learn.  Baxter is a bull terrier whose thoughts are recorded for part of each chapter in this short book.  What we read isn’t terribly welcome.  Baxter is aware and intolerant of human weakness and he has a strong will.  So strong that he uses it to get people he doesn’t care for out of his way.  At the same time, as the story unfolds, you can’t see Baxter as evil.  He obeys his nature but he has morals.  Spoilers follow.

His first owner, an old woman with little joy in life, is his first victim.  He’s adopted by a young couple but they’re about to become parents and when they do his jealousy appears in the worst way.  They couple give him away to a young boy who aspires to be a Nazi.  A fan of Hitler, he appreciates Baxter for his power and his, as he thinks, killer instinct.  But Baxter doesn’t kill for the sake of it.  Misguided as he might be, his kills all have a purpose.  The boy is a bit different.  He demonstrates his callousness by trying to have Baxter kill another boy.  Then the Nazi kills the pups Baxter has sired.  The two face off and the story is written well enough that you find yourself hoping that Baxter will prevail.  But alas, opposable thumbs do give a fatal advantage.

It’s unclear by the final chapter how much, if at all, the boy has changed.  He knows how to manipulate others and his own interest is what guides his actions.  It’s kind of a bleak story in the end.  It is, however, well told and compelling.  Greenhall wasn’t known much during his life, but he did manage what’s rather difficult today—he had a series of novels published.  He died over a decade ago and is now starting to be recovered.  That’s often the sign of quality writing.  Those who make an impact are often overlooked in their own time.  Hell Hound isn’t my favorite horror novel, but it is a strangely affective and effective one.  And it shows that dread need not take place over many hundreds of pages to work.  I’ll likely be coming back to Ken Greenhall for more.

Note to Myself

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A note to myself (perhaps the best title for this blog) in a forgotten book.  Well, not exactly forgotten, else the post unwritten would remain.  In a book I’d been gifted at twenty-one.  I was working that summer as an intern in a church in Pittsburgh where my duties included visiting parishioners.  One of them was an elderly scientist that everyone mentioned with awe because he’d written a book.  In the eighties, writing a book still meant something.  He gave me a copy.  I could tell, even at that tender age, that the publisher was a vanity press.  Part of the satisfaction of “traditional” publishing is knowing that you’ve convinced at least a handful of people that your writing is worth publishing.  Vanity presses take your money and produce your words with wanton abandon.  Still, I read the book.

This was during those heady college years when I annotated everything.  So many books later, annotation is rare for me now.  Other people will want these books when I’m gone.  Then, I critiqued as well.  You see, the scientist (with a master’s degree) had undertaken a theological topic, trying to explain God with science.  I’m sure he died long ago and now knows more than I.  Still I had to express myself.  That’s what those of us who write do.  Here’s an image of my summary.  It took me a while to figure out the symbols the younger me made up.  One looks like a capital K with the lower diagonal ending in an arrow.  What did that mean four decades ago?  Context gave me the answer: “off the wall.”  Why not write it out?  Perhaps I was afraid someone would find the note to myself.  This is the danger of writing things down.

Another symbol gave me pause.  A circle with a stretched capital H in it within a cube.  Ah, a capital theta, my usual shorthand for God.  In a box.  I flipped through the pages.  Yes, some of his suggestions definitely put God in a box.  Did I ever discuss this book with anyone?  It occurs to me that since my teaching career tanked, I’ve discussed very few of the books I’ve read with anyone, except readers of this blog.  We who write know there’s always the danger that someone else will read our thoughts.  In my experience, putting them in book form is about the best way to ensure that nobody will.  Still, for anybody who’s written a book, if you google them, their tome will be the first thing that shows up.  That’s true of the scientist who died, I’m pretty sure, before the new millennium.  When, as it turned out, that writing a book would become as common as starting a website with a catchy title.

Books Left out

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I’m still working on my bibliography of this blog.  It’s going to take some time yet to finish it.  One of the things that has surprised me already, though, is the number of books I read but didn’t discuss here.  In the first five-plus years of this blog I tried to tie every post in to religion.  A friend had told me that staying on topic would get me more readers and I think he was right.  I now discuss many subjects and my readership has fallen off.  But my writing in general has moved away from all religion all the time.  The real loss, however, is that many very interesting books didn’t get discussed here.  Were I to want to do so I’d have to go back and re-read them.  And I don’t have time for the reading of the books required for my current book project.

Books have defined my life since I got past that stage of eating candy and running around to burn off the energy.  I began early with the Bible but started reading seriously when I was a tween.  And I haven’t stopped.  My bibliography, and this is just a guess, has about 600 books on it so far.  These are books that I’ve discussed on this blog.  Goodreads shows me I read far more than that since 2013 (this blog began four years earlier than that).  I don’t regret being a bookworm.  The neighbors might be out mowing the grass, but I’m behind a book living in a different world.  Maybe for a future project I’ll take the books from Goodreads that didn’t make it to the blog and give them their own post.  It might cause red cheeks because I remember that some of them I didn’t post on because I was embarrassed for having read them.

You see, to publish fiction you’re often told to read books from the independent publishing houses to which you’re pitching.  That accounts for several of the no shows.  Early in my blogging life I avoided posting on the paranormal (I like weird things—they help with writing), those books didn’t show up here either.  Others simply weren’t religiony enough.  Or I couldn’t think of anything to say about them.  Still, it might be interesting sometime.  Goodreads has my list at over 1,100 books at the moment.  I’ll be curious to see how many have shown up here.  I was in my late forties in 2009, when this blog began.  I’d been reading for some three decades before that.  How many books?  Well, the bibliography won’t be half the story.

Cool Summer

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Daily readers may recognize the cover of this book.  Some time back I posted on a misprinted book I’d received from Amazon.  It was the first time I had to return something to the retail giant in exchange for the book I’d actually ordered.  Although the volume itself  doesn’t say, I suspect William K. and Nicholas P. Klingaman, the authors, are kin.  (Some publishers make a big deal of such things.)  Regardless, I was reading for content.  It was strange reading this during a May when temperatures have generally been running about 1816-average levels below normal (mean temperatures can be deceiving).  It was also a good reminder how erratic weather can be and how dependent we are upon it.  So, basically, the volcano known as Tambora had a massive eruption—the largest during human recorded history—in 1815.  The ash in the atmosphere contributed to a year (1816) with cold temperatures that in many places devastated agriculture and led to widespread starvation.

The Year Without Summer is an interesting book, even if overwritten (which could be a function of having two authors, each with a lot to say.  One is a meteorologist and the other an historian.  And historians, especially, tend to write long.  That’s partially because so many interesting connections can be made.  Certain things happened because precipitating events owed their existence to a volcano.  There were several points, however, where I said to myself, wait, now, what does this have to do with the weather?  All authors (including yours truly) are selective and tend to focus on what they find interesting.  Detours are permitted.

The combination of meteorology and history was very interesting in its own right.  The weather is something we talk and perhaps think a lot about, but to which we tend not to ascribe too much ultimate importance.  The many, many pages of loss, despair, and death that make up this book should belie that understanding.  The weather is vitally important for our entire way of life.  We often take food for granted, but it’s anything but.  Many of those who starved to death in 1816 did so because they couldn’t afford food.  It was sometimes available, but at princely prices.  Many otherwise law-abiding citizens opted for riots and many governments didn’t see it as their responsibility to care for the people they governed (that still happens in capitalism).  This book, a bit overwritten, is nevertheless full of interesting information and creates some weighty thoughts.  If a Tambora-level eruption were to take place today, we’d see capitalism on display with all of its very ugly teeth.

Walking Sleep

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It has been suggested to me that I might try screenwriting.  I’ve always resisted this, even though some of my fiction may be movie-worthy (one editor told me it was, but then I have a huge stack of rejections from others).  In any case, I had high hopes for Sleepwalkers.  I’d never heard of it before, but I saw that it was Stephen King’s screenwriting debut.  Not all novelists can, or should be screenwriters.  I like King’s novels.  The only one that really didn’t wow me was The Tommyknockers, and even it was well written.  This movie struggles.  Part of the reason is, undoubtedly, that directors depart from the script sometimes.  And the budget doesn’t seem to pay off its estimated 15 million.  For one thing, it’s set in Indiana but the scenery is clearly, clearly California.  They didn’t even try to make this look like the Midwest.  And the acting isn’t great.  The little jokes fall flat.  Something’s wrong in Kansas.

The story seems promising enough.  Sleepwalkers are shapeshifting cat people.  They’re also psychic vampires, drawing their energy from virginal girls.  So far so good.  Then it gets weird.  They transfer energy to each other through incest.  And they can turn invisible.  And turn cars invisible, even at a distance.  They’re super strong and can survive gunshots.  You can kill one by poking its eyes out, however.  And cats are their natural enemies, setting them on fire if they scratch them.  Slow down—there’s too much going on!  And there’s a quasi-comedic tone that prevents this movie from ever really feeling like a Stephen King novel.

A couple of things: those of us who write horror often find humor in our stories.  Sometimes we just can’t avoid it.  And the other thing is writers are often typecast.  For example, we think of Edgar Allan Poe as a horror writer because his best known stories are the scary ones.  Poe wrote funny, however.  And what we’d call, for lack of a better word, literary fiction.  Writers write.  Other people categorize.  In the case of Sleepwalkers, however, it does seem that it was intended as (it was certainly advertised as) horror.  And it has horror moments.  It also has quite a bit of sympathy for the monsters, which isn’t a bad thing.  Predators have to feed—that’s the way of nature.  The sleepwalkers are, to all outward appearances, human.  And they have human emotions.  Stephen King’s first screenplay wasn’t his best work, but we all have to start somewhere.

Dr. 2 P 2

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Before reading Lord Byron’s Doctor by Paul West, I started reading John William Polidori’s diary.   This is freely available online, but I need a book in my hands to truly read.  A little backstory: before his trip to Switzerland in 1816 with Lord Byron, the poet’s publisher paid Polidori to write this diary.  After Polidori died by suicide, his sister edited out what she thought reflected badly on the family, and destroyed the original.  The diary was published in 1911, edited by Polidori’s nephew William Michael Rossetti.  The edition I read was a reprint by Forgotten Books, containing the University of Toronto’s Library’s edition for scanning.  While not the most exciting reading, it is revealing.  Polidori appreciated the finer things in life (he qualified as a medical doctor), but he sometimes missed the point.  For example, being paid to write about Byron’s travels, his mentions of Bryon are relatively few.

You get the real sense that Polidori was jealous of the Lord with whom he traveled.  Then, when Percy Bysshe Shelley and his party arrived in the neighborhood, it becomes clear that Polidori was jealous of Byron’s attention to Shelley.  I sympathize with the author; both Byron and Shelley were already famous and infamous for their writing and lifestyles.  Both were from aristocratic families and had no profession other than writing and traveling.  For Polidori this was a working trip.  His mood seems to be reflected in that, just after the famous ghost story contest, entries begin to focus mostly outside the gathered writers until they stop altogether.  Much of the summer is left blank.  In September Byron sent Polidori packing, and the remainder of the diary is about his, often penurious, travels through his ancestral Italy.

Polidori is now known as the author of “The Vampyre,” which he wrote during the period covered in the diary.  He doesn’t talk about it much.  For me, Polidori is a sympathetic figure.  A lonely man, he was intimate with the most famous English poet of his day.  He often, however, in his own accounts, wasn’t in control of his emotions, particularly when he felt he’d been slighted.  Jealousy can be a very difficult monster with which to wrestle.  But reading this diary does lead to the uncanny sense that the most interesting parts were the things he didn’t discuss.  The diary has been used as the basis of more than one fictional treatment of the events of the summer of 1816.  And since some of the juicy bits are left out, free rein is given to the imagination.