No Ordinary Picnic

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I will be including spoilers in this review, so please be advised!  Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel that began as speculative but then turned naturalistic.  Mostly, anyway.  Born in 1896, Lindsay published the novel just after she turned 70.  Since she was Australian, it stands to reason that the story is set there.  Hanging Rock is an actual place and, according to multiple sources, Lindsay ended the book with a speculative chapter that explained the mystery.  What is the mystery?  On Valentines Day 1900, the girls at Appleyard College set out for a picnic at, well, Hanging Rock.  While there, three of the girls and one of their chaperones disappear.  Since everyone travels by literal horse power, getting back and forth from the scene of the mystery takes hours.  The head mistress of the college is frantic, mostly because she’ll be losing tuition because of this.

Eventually one of the girls is found, somewhat mystically, by a young Englishman with whom a romance starts and seems to end abruptly.  The found girl remembers nothing of what happened that day.  Further investigations are held, but the mystery is never solved.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Appleyard, the mistress of the college, takes a strong dislike to one of the girls who was devoted to one of the missing.  After one of the girls’ governesses, recently dismissed, burns to death, the headmistress appears to have murdered the girl she disliked (or she fell/jumped from a window; the novel isn’t explicit on the point).  Mrs. Appleyard, realizing she is ruined, goes to Hanging Rock where she dies by suicide, throwing herself down the rocky side of the outcropping.  The speculative ending—no longer part of the novel—had the missing girls disappear into a kind of time warp.  Lindsay’s editor had her remove that chapter.

The novel became quite well known in Australia, and to the wider world when a movie was made from it.  The interesting thing is that the novel presents itself as describing factual events, like the Blair Witch Project.  This is so much the case that the rumor grew that the events really did happen.  A book was even written, suggesting a solution regarding what happened to the missing girls.  Had the excised chapter been published with the book, it would’ve been clear that this was a fictional tale.  Lindsay had a savvy editor, however.  Nothing sells like a dramatic story that readers believe to be true.  Witness The Amityville Horror.  Even though naturalistic, a bit of the speculative still hangs about the story, making for a good gothic novel without a firm resolution.

Hop In

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Especially the first part, of Mona Awad’s Bunny, is so well written I almost laid down my pen for good.  I really enjoyed this one.  Once the story gets deeper, into the second and third parts, questions begin to arise as to what’s going on.  One reason for this is the story becomes speculative in nature and Awad’s not about to give away what’s “really happening.”  Set among a set of five graduate students at the prestigious Warren University (the name is a hat-tip), the novel is often considered dark academia.  It starts out pretty light, and although Awad maintains her deft hand, it grows progressively darker as the tale goes on.  Samantha Heather Mackey is enrolled in the writing program with a cohort of four “perfect” women—the kind many guys go for.  Sam’s an outsider, though, writing dark and troubled stories while her classmates garner the professor’s praise.

The “perfect” women call each other “Bunny” and they eventually invite Sam into their clique.  This annoys Sam’s best friend and sometimes roommate, a local artist who isn’t a student.  But Sam is caught.  She learns that the Bunnies actually transform rabbits into their ideal boyfriends.  They haven’t got the process down pat, though, and the resultant hybrids often have various deformities.  Sam is the only one who can’t do this transformation.  Until she does.  But it doesn’t turn out like anyone expects.  I’d better draw my plot summation to a close there, otherwise I might hop into spoiler territory.  I wouldn’t want to do that because I recommend reading this one for yourself.  Awad’s writing is beautiful and compelling.  I did wonder if I’d interpreted everything correctly when I finally put the book down.

Dark academia comes in a rainbow of colors.  Here, although comi-tragic, there’s something seriously wrong at Warren University.  There are plenty of books and classes, as well as intrigues among ingenues.  And also some serious reflection on expectations and how they affect relationships.  Friendship and what it really means.  Loneliness, and how it creeps into the lives of creative people.  It’s also a story about writing and learning to write.  As noted above, it succeeds wildly in this.  There are definitely horror vibes about the tale, but it’s so well told that you might lose track of the fact that they’re there.  When Margaret Atwood praises a book, it’s worth paying attention.  While not dark and dreary, Bunny shows the sub-genre off as one of great potential.  It’s worth twitching your nose over.

Bad Intensions

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What, exactly, defines dark academia?  I ask myself that question a lot.  Looking for movies that might help answer that question sometimes brings about unexpected results.  A film that appears on several dark academia lists is Cruel Intentions.  I’d never seen it before and since it’s generally classified as a teen romantic drama, it isn’t exactly what I tend to go seeking.  Still, that definition is important to pin down, dark academia.  So I tried.  It presents itself, at least up front, as a teen sex comedy.  A rich playboy at a private school, and his scheming step-sister, enjoy destroying the innocence of new coeds.  She uses coke and he appears to be addicted to sex.  There’s not much to really like about either one.  Then the unexpected happens—he falls in love with one of his intended victims.

If the plot sounds a little familiar, it may be because it is a retelling of Dangerous Liaisons, a movie I’ve never seen based on a novel I’ve never read.  What makes it dark academia is that it takes place in a private school.  An exclusive private school (but aren’t they all?).  And it does take a dark turn toward the end.  The cad (Sebastian by name) is eventually caught in his relentless womanizing and although the woman he truly loves is a forgiving sort, it can’t save him in the end.  The movie has the fun of double-double crossing and certainly doesn’t paint a very flattering portrait of the rich.  Indeed, Dorian Gray comes to mind as well.

The movie, qua movie, is enjoyable enough.  The acting is pretty good.  I’d seen it described as a thriller as well, and there may be some junior-level thriller moments.  Dark academia, at its best, has some crossover with thrillers, or even horror.  Since the aesthetic appeals primarily to the young, it is perhaps inevitable that it goes gently into that dark night.  I’m trying to get a handle on it because it has captured my imagination.  In many ways dark academia has helped make sense of what has happened in my life.  I love the gothic aspect of the genre.  The few shots of the gothic architecture of Manchester Prep were appreciated, but the movie as a whole doesn’t have much of a gothic feel, beyond the monied privilege of kids who’ll probably never have to do a day’s work in their lives.  Dark indeed.

Scholars and Villains

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Having read M. L. Rio’s novella Graveyard Shift, I turned to her debut novel, If We Were Villains.  It must be a heady feeling having your first novel become a bestseller, but reading it confirms why.  Rio came to my attention because of dark academia.  This novel is written as realism, so there’s really no speculative material.  At least not directly.  It’s the story of seven friends at the Dellecher Classical Conservatory.  They are the fourth-year students majoring in acting and they are essentially a Shakespearean troupe.  Dellecher only puts on Shakespeare plays, so much of the story is built on the Bard.  There may be some plot give-aways below, and I think this is a book you might want to read—so be advised.  I’ve continued to read Shakespeare beyond high school, mostly sticking to his better-known plays, so this was enjoyable to me.

The crisis begins when the largest and strongest member of the troupe—the leading man—becomes offended by not getting assigned the role he feels entitled to.  He begins acting out against his classmates, bullying them onstage so they can’t call out his bad behavior.  To make things more interesting, one of the troupe is his girlfriend and another of the women is his cousin.  Since they all value what they do so much, and it’s their last year, nobody wants to challenge him.  Until it gets out of hand.  Although Dellecher is exclusive, there’s quite a lot of partying that takes place.  Drinking and drugs seem freely available.  One night when the leading man is drunk, he takes out his hostility on his troupe-mates but is found nearly dead in the lake by dawn’s first light.  And then things start to spiral.

Dark academia is a genre that explores the dark part of higher education (and sometimes secondary education).  I think that most people, even if they enjoyed college (as I did) saw there were tenebrous aspects to it.  This particular genre focuses on those negatives, but not to the exclusion of the very real draw of continued learning.  Since college is when many people receive their first taste of independence, and what passes for adulthood, many emotions come to the fore.  Love, jealousy, fear, and passion among them.  These are powerful motivators and much of our lives are spent learning to control them so that we can live together as a productive society.  This novel, like much dark academia, lingers in those places where unresolved emotions and unchecked bullying collide.  All with a Shakespearean touch.  Classic.

Playing Sleepy Hollow

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In my teenage years I wrote a short play or two.  I haven’t done it since.  I’ve read plenty over the years but my fiction takes the form of short stories and novels—narrative fiction.  Playwriting, and scriptwriting, take a special talent.  One time-honored way to doing this is to utilize source material.  One of the points that I make in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth is that movies, in particular Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, inspired a number of other movies and even novels, both narrative and graphic.  Others saw the potential this short story could have.  I spend some time in the book going over the various adaptations and the innovations they make.  The point is that “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” has become an American myth.  Anyone who examines its long history can see the impact that it has had on the American imagination.  And on Halloween. 

Christofer Cook’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a two-act play, adapted from Washington Irving’s story.  Some of it is taken directly from the story, but as most of those who have adapted the story know, it requires some help to become a performance.  Cook’s play is an interesting take on the story.  I’m not sure what other sources Cook may have seen and/or read, but there are some elements here found elsewhere that have become part of the tale.  For example, a duel between Brom Bones and Ichabod Crane.  I’ve seen that in other treatments, and it seems logical enough, given the circumstances.  Irving, however, it is not.  Perhaps the most surprising shift Cook makes is that the famous horse chase takes place with both Ichabod and the horseman (named Hermann Von Starkenfaust) on foot.

Had I known of Cook’s adaptation before submitting my manuscript, I would’ve been glad to have included it in my book.  Many movies have their own scripts that they use to bring the tale to life on stage and screen.  This only underscores my point—myths are endlessly adaptable and capable of serious transformation.  Some elements of the story we now assume to be part of the original were added many years after the story was written and its author had died.  Yet we all tend to expect these things.  Nobody has the final word when it comes to what happens to Ichabod Crane.  Washington Irving assured that in his story.  Those who come after bend, twist, and stretch the tale in new and fascinating directions.  This little play is one such and would be, I suspect, great fun to see.

Shadow off Campus

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I’ve been to quite a few academic conferences in my life.  Some have been held in neighborhoods declared “unsafe.”  I even had a job interview in a hotel room (such can’t happen now) with a college that didn’t want to pay the fee for using the society’s services.  (A friend who’d also interviewed with the same school said to me afterwards, “I thought they were going to jump me!”)  (Neither one of us got the job.)  I even went to a conference where I had to drive through a crime-ridden neighborhood to get to an off-site hotel.  But I’ve never been to a conference where someone was murdered.  That’s the premise behind Kathleen Kelley Reardon’s Damned If She Does.  Reardon’s keenly aware of the kinds of issues women face in the professorate.  There are some unsavory guys in the profession and power is very difficult to wrest from those who hold it (generally white men).  In this follow-up to Shadow Campus, she tells Meg and Shamus Doherty’s experience with murder, and more, at an academic conference.

Academics are so necessary for studying things closely, opening up true understanding.  They are, however, people too.  And people can be petty, vindictive, and selfish.  They’re usually not inclined to murder, however.  I’ve been meaning to read that book about the murder of a religion professor at the University of Chicago several years ago precisely because such things are so unusual.  In dark academia, however, events like that are fairly common.  The thing is, many academics are also quite smart.  If someone were to put their mind to an undetectable murder, hmm.  The old gray matter starts churning.

In Damned If She Does, the apparent motive is publication in prestige journals.  In the end, it turns out that there’s more to it than that, but it’s somehow believable that a matter like publication could lead to homicide in academia.  As an editor, and writer, myself, I know how important publication with specific presses can be.  Even after doing this for over thirty years, an acceptance notice creates a sense of validation like no other.  Dark academia explores such territory.  I suspect that I’ve always been a bit naive when I’ve attended conferences.  I go, present papers, and keep interactions, well, academic.  I’ve heard whispers of them being places of temporary flings and I’ve seen colleagues use them as places to party.  On occasion I’ve seen established scholars very inebriated.  They’re people too, of course.  And as long as nobody is murdered, the code seems to be that what happens at a conference stays at the conference.

Around Us

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Our Wives Under the Sea is a gentle, but chilling horror story by Julia Armfield.  Two women are married and one of them is a marine biologist being sent on a submarine to explore deep ocean life.  A planned three-week voyage becomes six months and when the sub finally surfaces again, Leah, the biologist, has “come back wrong.”  She’s transforming.  Something happened to her under all that water.  Told alternately by Leah and Miri, the story is one of loss and mourning and lack of any reasonable explanation.  Haunting, in a word.  The writing is exceptional.  And probing.  I quite enjoyed this book.  I can’t recall how I first heard about it—it was published in 2022—but I knew I wanted to read it even then.  The sea is that way.  Moby-Dick, cited in an epigraph, has always been my favorite novel.  One of my early reading memories is Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (also cited here).  The story is a winner.

There’s something about the ocean.  We, in reality, know little about it.  Penetrating the crushing depths requires a well-funded science, something we’ve moved away from in favor of personal greed.  Life takes unexpected forms deep under the surface, even as we deplete the resources we can reach—over-fishing and consuming.  We’re never told what it is Leah and her crew-mate see so far down.  We all know of lantern-fish (lately in the news) and other sub-surface terrors.  We don’t know the potential life we might discover if we only cared to look.  The company that sent Leah down, however, is as shadowy as the government.  Promising help but not answering the phone when you call.  Yes, this is a haunting book.

Mostly, however, at least in my reading, it is about coping.  We attach our lives to others and when something changes them we have to try to adjust, because love is that way.  Caregivers understand.  The novel evokes both the endless draw of the ocean and its mystery.  Even as a child I wanted to live on the stormy east coast, preferably in Maine.  I wanted to be near the water.  As my mother was in her final decline, one of her dearest wishes was to return to the ocean.  She’d spent a fair bit of her childhood in New Jersey and always felt the draw of the sea.  She was no swimmer, but just being near the ocean was something she loved.  And that has passed down, it seems, to my generation.  Fearful yet drawn.  It is the dilemma that can lead to effective horror stories that make you both think and feel.

Seeing the Forster

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The thing about exploring dark academia is that its recognition is fairly new.  It seems that the “concept” emerged only ten years ago and the longer that it’s around the more sources it gathers, like a dust bunny growing under the bed.  I’ve never read E. M. Forster before, although I’ve seen movies based on his novels.  He was an interesting chap, trying out sci-fi (or at least dystopian fiction) as well as his literary novels.  Maurice was not published during his life because it explored homosexuality.  Forster was gay when it was technically illegal, and this novel reveals much of the struggle faced by homosexuals during the early decades of the twentieth century.  The novel has been cited as an example of dark academia, I suspect because much of the early part takes place in Cambridge.  Although it has a happy ending it’s not an easy novel to read.

Quite apart from the hideous paranoia of society at the time towards any kind of homosexuality, Forster’s style was, for me, difficult to decipher.  I know this is my issue, and not his.  His use of British expressions underscored for me how difficult it is to understand idiom in another culture.  At more than one place I was unsure what the speaker meant because the British slang used was so different from what I encountered living in the UK in the early nineties.  Not that the story is difficult to follow.  It is movingly written, demonstrating the torment of those who realized their orientation as they faced in an intolerant society.  Maurice even tries to “cure” his homosexuality, but efforts fail.  There is a darkness here, appropriate for dark academia.

Forster died in 1970, just when homosexuality was beginning to be understood not as a sickness, but a disposition.  It’s not a choice, and as the animal kingdom tells us, it’s certainly not limited to human beings.  The novel makes note of the fact that Greece, the origin of much of western culture, approved and promoted homosexual relationships.  Maurice is told that he could move to France of Italy where such relationships were not illegal.  There’s no question that the societal stance toward homosexuality was based on particular understandings of biblical texts, some now thoroughly discredited by biblical scholars (Sodom was not destroyed for homosexuality as biblical intertexts clearly show).  Generations of people, including Forster, were put through lives of torment in order to keep a prejudice alive.  Academia may be dark indeed.

Late Shift

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M. L. Rio is best known for If We Were Villains, a book I have on my shelf but haven’t read yet.  She’s one of those rare PhDs who can write, and her punchy, irreverent style has a way of drawing you in.  Graveyard Shift is actually a novella (a cynic would say a way to get you to pay a full novel price on a piece a bit too short to qualify), so it’s a quick read.  It’s a little difficult to classify, genre-wise.  The copyright page suggests thriller, which means not-quite-horror, but with elements of it.  Taking place over one night (and just over 100 pages), its the story of how a college student journalist and her friends crack the case of a mysterious shallow grave they discover one night at their usual hangout, behind an abandoned church, Saint Anthony the Anchorite.  Edie, the journalist, has to find a story to headline the next day’s edition, and the grave provides it.

The story involves mushrooms and rats, sleep deprivation, and lots of smoking.  Still, it’s a well-crafted tale that holds your interest.  Of course, I noticed the centrality of the church to the story.  It’s so much a part of things that the disparate group of friends identify themselves as Anchorites.  An anchorite is essentially a hermit—a monk who prefers not to live communally (cenobites, a name taken up by the Hellraiser franchise, are monks in community).  Of course, the friends aren’t monks, just young people in a college town who like to be out at night, and maybe solve mysteries.  The church is both a focal point and a kind of vector in this world where unusual activities take place after dark.  It shouldn’t be a spoiler to say the friends solve the mystery and begin to help address one another’s problems.

I like brief books.  I don’t mind moderately long novels—when they start getting over 400 pages I get a bit anxious.  I have to admit that Goodreads has made me conscious of how many books I read in a year.  And since I like to blog about books, it also helps to finish them in a timely way.  Besides, escapism is especially important at the moment.  If you like stories about college kids, under-employed professors, bartenders and others who manage to eke out a living before family and mortgage change everything in your life, you’ll probably like this one.  It’s not really a horror story, but it’ll keep you turning pages, which is what books of any size are meant to do.

Cloistered

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Free will.  I’ll go on the record as a proponent.  Any kind of determinism gives me the willies.  At times, however, it does feel as if we’re merely pawns.  Katy Hays deals with the concept of fate, and the occult world of tarot, in The Cloisters.  The writing is quite compelling and the story moves along at a good pace.  It follows Ann, a graduate from eastern Washington who wants to get away from the town where her father was killed.  She accepts the offer of a summer program at the Met in New York City, but because of a mix-up ends up at the Cloisters instead.  I’ve never actually been to the Cloisters, but this novel makes me want to go.  At this museum of Medieval and Renaissance art, Ann works with Rachel, another assistant, Leo, a gardener, and the curator, Patrick.

Rachel has been at the Cloisters for some time and Patrick, her boss, has become enamored of tarot decks and their history.  He’s been seeking perhaps the oldest complete deck known and has come to believe that perhaps the cards do have the ability to tell the future.  Ann befriends Rachel.  The two begin to make discoveries, particularly Ann, but Rachel, who is independently wealthy, manipulates her, taking advantage of the fact that Ann never wants to return home.  Then Patrick is poisoned.  I won’t reveal whodunnit here, but the last half of the book has several twists that make you reassess whatever conclusions you may have drawn.  It’s a fascinating story, well told.

This novel is another example of dark academia.  Much of it takes place in the library of the Cloisters and Patrick holds a Ph.D. while Rachel is a graduate student.  Ann is about to enter a doctoral program.  All of them have some fairly dark secrets in their lives.  And all of them are driven.  The story has elements of social commentary as well, particularly concerning how life in New York City will drive people to extremes when the competition makes this necessary to survive.  Although three of the four commit crimes, they are all likable people.  Three of them are academics as well.  All four are quite intelligent.  I was drawn into this tale from the start and even as the darkness was revealed couldn’t bring myself to dislike any of the characters.  Some novels have antiheroes that you just can’t feel for.  The Cloisters moves in the other direction, and it does make you wonder just how much choice you actually have and how much is left to fate.

Contours of Dark Academia

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As I attempt to trace the contours of dark academia, I’m learning that much of my reading has been classified that way by others.  My main engine for discovering this is Goodreads, making me think I should shelve my own books more.  Also, I recently visited a local Barnes and Noble where one of the front tables was dedicated to dark academia.  Looking over the titles gave me fiction reading ideas for months.  In any case, apart from classical dark academia, where the setting is an institution of higher, or specialized learning, the category for many includes books about books.  This would pull in titles such as Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, which I read before my current conscious interest in the genre.  I think I was looking for gothic books back then.  I include, on my personal list, books about students with dark experiences, such as Familiar Spirit by Lisa Tuttle.

The books about books category does shed some insight.  I love Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, but it’s not really dark enough to be, well, dark academia.  I understand the critique that dark academia tells stories of privilege, but that dissipates somewhat when including books about books.  Higher education is, and remains, a domain of privilege, but it is possible for those raised poor (such as yours truly) to break in.  I enjoyed higher education throughout the eighties and into the aughties.  After that it began to get far too political and business-oriented.  (Not that I wouldn’t go back if I had half a chance.  Or even a quarter.)  My point is, dark academia can deal with those who lack privilege, but I also believe there’s no point in denying privilege does exist.  And opens doors.

Dark academia is new enough that its parameters are permeable.  To me the real draw is that a fair bit of sculduggery really does exist in higher education.  The reading public seems eager for it.  Thinking of all the odd, somewhat tenebrous things that occurred in the course of my couple of decades in academia, the genre rings true to me as well.  As I think back over the books I’ve read, I think maybe I should build a shelf especially for dark academia.  I’m trying to read in it more intentionally now, but I’ve been unintentionally exploring it for decades.  When you add books about books, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose joins the crowd, and I read that one all the way back in seminary.  I tried to be part of academia, but there’s a darkness about an unrequited love, and so it just makes sense to me.

and Seek

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I’m afraid there may be spoilers—but not for the ending—below.  Discussing this story will be difficult without giving some things away.  Kiersten White’s Hide has given us an imaginative world with masterful misdirection.  Fourteen people a bit down on their luck, and strangers to each other, are offered an opportunity to win $50,000.  They have to hide in an abandoned amusement park for a week where two of them will be caught each day and the last person remaining wins.  The novel mostly follows Mack, a woman whose father killed her family while she survived by hiding.  Not only does she have survivor’s guilt, but she’s been homeless and the shelter director thinks she’ll have a chance at winning the prize.  There is a lot of social commentary here, as well as a monster.  Okay, spoilers below.

The minotaur is a most useful monster.  The backstory here isn’t in Greece (well, the deep backstory is, but that is only played out partially here) but in Asterion.  No state is given for the town, and the contestants can’t be given that information.  They’re locked in the park, with supplies, but very little information.  Then the contest starts.  After a couple of days Mack and a couple others begin to suspect that something’s wrong.  Those who get caught while they’re hiding leave personal effects behind, and since they all need the money that seems unlikely.  Then their host stops coming, leaving the bewildered contestants on their own.  Mack and those she’s befriended come to understand that being “out” is really being eaten by the minotaur.  Well, they don’t realize it’s the minotaur.  The one who does gets eaten before he can tell.

In any case, this is a tense horror story based on a classic tale.  There is, of course, a rationale for the murderous behavior in a modern setting.  White keeps you waiting quite a while to learn what it is, and there are plenty of places where I thought I’d figured out how it’d end only to be proven wrong.  And she gives believable character sketches and explores the kinds of motivations that drive different people who find themselves needing an income.  (One of the characters was raised in a religious cult—bonus!)  Those who are poor aren’t always at fault, but those who are wealthy will do anything to preserve their excess.  We see that playing out in daily life, even as it’s being explored in fiction.  The minotaur isn’t always what we think it is.  And the more you think about its insidious origin story provided here, the scarier it becomes.

Deep Backlist

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It’s kind of a personal archaeology.  Exploring the terrain of one’s own mind, that is.  Back in January, I mentioned my “deep backlist,” which is actually my “to read” list stored on an online book vendor site.  When it comes time to buy (or provide a gift request for) a new book, this list is my first stop.  I started the list in 2010.  Since I’m cautious about book buying (believe it or not), there are many items on that list that never got purchased.  And if I go back far enough, I have to confess to myself, there are books I really don’t want to read anymore.  At least not at this time.  That list, however, is a snapshot of my interests at the time an item was entered.  I don’t delete things from it unless I actually get them.  Life has taught me that when interests fade it’s usually not permanent.

Sometimes I think I should be more intentional about my reading.  When I was writing Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, I was adding lots of books related to the subject.  Many of them came off the list as I purchased and read them, but not all.  Although I’m currently involved in my next writing project or two, I don’t remove the remaining Sleepy Hollow-inspired books because I may well, depending on length of life, come back to them.  The same is true of all my books from Holy Horror on.  Depending on where I am on that list, I can tell what book I was working on, and not a few that never got finished.  An accountant once told me that if you are writing books to earn money (as paltry as those earnings may be), the books you buy may be tax write-offs as business expenses.  Such is the mind of capitalism.

My wishlist is a personal archaeology of some poignancy.  It took me many years after being shunted out of academia (no matter how dark) before I found employment stable enough to allow for me to start writing books again.  Weathering the Psalms was started around 1997 or 1998.  It was published in 2014.  Even after that it took a couple years to realize that I could write Holy Horror.  And there are other books that, if I’m honest with myself, I know I won’t have time to write or finish.  I find scrolling through my “deep backlist” an inspiring but melancholy exercise.  We all have layers, and strangely enough, even the books that we wanted to read, or just remember, can speak volumes about who we are.

First Tower

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In these days when daring to think feels dangerous, R. F. Kuang’s Babel: An Arcane History feels dangerous to read.  Good literature is like that, even if it’s uncomfortable to read as a “white” man.  A fantasy largely set in Oxford, it’s based on the premise that languages, when placed next to one another, engraved in silver, have enormous power.  The power to run an empire.  This is a post-colonial story, and I took comfort in the working class support, for their own reasons, of exposing the very dangerous world of capitalism.  With its “human capital” as we’re now being called by businessmen.  But I digress.  Four students, three from abroad, are brought to Babel, a tower in Oxford that houses the Royal Institute of Translation.  Their use of their native tongues helps build immense power in this Oxford tower.  Power that fuels Britain’s imperial goals.  But all is not well in academic paradise.

Slowly three of the four scholars come to realize that their home countries are being exploited for purposes of yet further exploitation.  The wealth always flows back to England, and even the small emoluments it offers to those other nations cannot negate the fact that the end goal is British superiority.  The protagonist is Chinese, taken from poverty to live in academic luxury, in exchange for what was his birthright—his linguistic ability.  It doesn’t end well.  This is not a happy novel.  But it does highlight something we seldom consider; our language ability is truly an amazing thing.  We try to convey a fraction of what’s going on in our heads to another person, and that person has some ability to understand it.  And languages are ways of thinking.  I used to tell my students that all the time.  It’s more than just words.

This is also a fairly long book.  As with most fairly long books, you’re left feeling it once the story concludes.  Even though language allows us to communicate, it’s sometimes uncomfortable to hear what someone else is thinking.  We don’t have to be woke to realize that Black, or Asian, or indigenous experience is quite different from what we call “white.”  And such voices deserve to be heard.  We live in a time when white men don’t like to be told that they’ve participated in oppressive behaviors.  Probably most of them (for I believe people are generally good) are not intentionally evil, but they participate in a system which can be.  And often unthinkingly so.  Thus these days thinking feels dangerous.  And this book will make you do so, nevertheless.

Not Afraid

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It’s something many of us do.  Trying to explain why, while religious, spiritual, and moral, we find horror fascinating.  I read Brandon Grafius’ Lurking under the Surface, and when I learned about Joseph Haward’s Be Afraid: How Horror and Faith Can Change the World, I figured I’d better read it too.  Haward is a British Baptist minister who seems to support progressive causes.  He also enjoys horror.  He even finds it prophetic.  I have to admit that when I read the foreword by John E. Colwell I was afraid that this would be one of those books.  You know, the kind that only half-likes horror because their religion tells them so.  Colwell is no horror fan, and his foreword doesn’t set the tone for what follows.  Haward finds horror homiletical.

When I was young I used to see movies and analyze them theologically with my friends.  This was in college and seminary, mostly.  We’d discuss the implications of movies—sometimes horror—and how they fit into our Christian worldview.  This book is like that.  It’s Haward’s reading of various horror films, some television, and some novels, integrating them into his theological outlook.  The book is more about theology than it is about specific horror films, although it does mention quite a few.  The discussion is sometimes hard to follow because the paragraphs are so incredibly long and the style is very theological.  I got the feeling that Haward would be an interesting person to have a conversation with.  His book didn’t really do it for me, however. Some things are simply better in person. (I do know Brandon Grafius, and enjoy our talks.)

I’m not into horror for the violence.  Haward tends to point to that element, but I’m generally looking for the mood.  And avoidance.  Also when I was young I learned the truism, “He who lives to run away, lives to run another day.”  I like to think that I’m brave, but violence really bothers me.  My family finds me a contradiction; I won’t watch movies that are based on “true events” unless they’re speculative.  I don’t need reminding that people can be horrible to each other.  I know that from scanning the headlines and from watching the election results.  No, I use horror to help me cope.  And it works best when I know there’s something supernatural going on.  I’ve grown out of theologizing about movies.  I took plenty of theology courses in college and seminary, but they seemed a bit too abstract to be helpful.  Then I’d go out with my friends and watch a horror movie on the weekend so we could talk about it.  There’s a bit of that nostalgia here.