Echoes

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Among the first books I read that might be considered Dark Academia was P. D. James’ Death in Holy Orders.  That was so long ago that I don’t remember when, although the inscription tells me it was purchased in 2002.  There’s no mystery as to why.  There was buzz at Nashotah House when the novel came out.  It was about a murder at a conservative Anglican seminary with few students.  It seemed very much like Nashotah House to some there, so I read it.  Now, I’m not a fan of murder-mysteries.  I’ve read nothing else P. D. James wrote.  I had no idea who Adam Dalgliesh was.  The book was a New York Times bestseller.  Reviews were mixed, and among fans of Dark Academia it is scarcely noticed.  Still, Dark Academia is still in its toddlerhood.  Its boundaries aren’t clear and it overlaps with other genres, as most modern genres do.  There may be spoilers below.

In a very complex plot (mystery writers like to show off in that way) a rich seminarian at St. Anselm’s, dies by suicide that was strange but not really suspicious.  His wealthy stepfather receives an anonymous letter suggesting foul play and super-sleuth Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard is brought in. After the suicide, an old housekeeper dies of an apparent heart attack.  But then an Archdeacon is murdered in the chapel (here was the frisson at Nashotah House).  Since there were visitors on the isolated campus at the time, and the Archdeacon was not liked by most people there, it becomes a whodunit with conflicting motives, one of which is to see the seminary closed.  It owns artifacts worth millions, and, it seems, someone stands to inherit.  Dalgliesh and his team pick through all the clues and, of course, figure out the guilty party.

Even at the end the motivation seems odd.  There is a kind of Dead Poets Society letter of confession about preserving the arts.  The murderer is a professor of Greek.  These elements definitely cast the book into the realm of Dark Academia.  Still, it’s primarily a detective novel, and I suspect that’s why many fans of Dark Academia haven’t yet come upon it.  I do recall, upon first reading it, that it felt real enough.  I was living in a setting not unlike that of the novel and small seminaries do have big secrets.  This time through I was less impressed.  Super-sleuths are just too smart, which means their writers have to be exceptionally clever.  The setting suggests something wrong in the educational world, however, and that is true enough.

Questioning Paradise

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The term “dark academia” is somewhat difficult to define.  It is a rather new aesthetic, but it has been the topic of books and movies for some decades.  Among the books often considered dark academia is Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.  Since it’s one of the shorter exemplars of the genre, I recently picked it up.  A bit disorienting at first, it is the story of a fantasy world where oceans flood the lower floors of an elaborate labyrinth in which two people live.  The narrator (or more properly epistolist) is one of the two.  We come to learn that he is actually the only full-time resident of this world.  And that this world was conjured from the world in which the rest of us live.  It takes Piranesi, the narrator, about 70 pages to realize that something isn’t quite what he’s been led to believe.

The writing is beautiful and the world-building is fine.  It would be possible to set an entire novel in this world, but, like most paradises, it wouldn’t satisfy.  Indeed, there’s almost a biblical recognition of sin and human character.  The voyage of discovery that Piranesi undergoes is both encouraging and dispiriting.  Having a world in which one’s needs are met, and where most danger can be avoided by careful observation, seems desirable.  There’s a sense of inevitability in Eden as well.  The human psyche requires challenges and exercise.  To remain in paradise would have been stultifying, if without danger.  I’m not sure if Clarke intended that in her novel, but I definitely encountered it there.

But what does this have to do with dark academia?  I asked myself that question along the way.  The creator of this world was, at one point, an academician.  Such are the kinds of people who attempt to build perfect worlds.  The darkness comes from the fact that this world is not what it seems to be.  It comes with a very high price.  Even so, it is compelling to those who find it.  Its creator is a cold and scheming individual.  Unlike some such stories, we don’t hear much of the university life that gives the genre its name, but the classical setting is much like what universities once taught.  And when they go wrong, this genre suggests itself.  I don’t want to reveal how the story ends.  It gets pretty exciting about halfway through and I had misguessed a few things along the way.  In many ways it feels like fantasy, but it also dips into the academic world gone wrong.

Another Level

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Jack Finney is probably best remembered as the person who came up with the idea for The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  His book, The Body Snatchers, was the inspiration behind the two movies based on it, as well as various knockoffs.  The Third Level is a collection of short stories he wrote.  I’ve been trying to introduce more short stories into my literary diet, and this one was recommended by Stephen King in Danse Macabre.  Specifically, he mentioned it as being more like what The Twilight Zone should’ve been than much of what Rod Serling wrote.  Now, I’m an unapologetic Rod Serling fan.  This is based on memories from childhood when I watched the show and, let’s be honest here, wished he could be my father.  I already had a taste for the unusual and sometimes macabre, and so I was curious what King thought might do Serling better.

The Third Level was labeled as science fiction, but sci-fi and horror share more than a boundary or two and at least four of the stories have nothing sciency about them.  As a collection it’s good in the same sense as a mature reading of Ray Bradbury is good.  I would’ve liked this—probably loved it—as a kid.  I was reading, however, for The Twilight Zone.  There are some good twist endings here, but not all the stories have them.  A couple of them are pretty straightforward whimsical romances.  Many of them feel very much like they were written in the forties and fifties.  A couple of the stories, late in the collection, I really liked.  They were a bit more Zonish than some of the others.

One of the problems in writing a brief post on a collection—and no collection is uniformly great—is that it’s difficult to give a sense of the whole.  So instead I’ll just focus for a minute on the last story, “Contents of the Dead Man’s Pockets.”  This one shows the power of Finney’s descriptive writing and it caused physical reactions I seldom get when reading.  It involves a man climbing out on an eleventh-story ledge to reclaim an important bit of paper that blew out the window.  More than once I almost had to put the book down.  Fear of falling is deeply embedded in the human psyche and Finney is able to probe it for more pages than I was comfortable reading.  Well done, sir.  Overall, the collection is good to have read.  It won’t change my mind about the Zone, however.  It reached me a little too late to do that.

Gray Matter

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It seems to me that I was living in Boston the last time I read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.  That was long enough ago to have forgotten almost everything except the central premise that everyone knows.  Recently, I had been reading some analysts who consider it a kind of horror story.  Wilde was a great and notable wit, not typically cited as a horror writer.  More recently I’d seen the novel classified as dark academia.  Since there are no students, and there’s no school in the novel, that genre seems forced.  In any case, it is a classic and I was curious about what I had forgotten.  The dialogue regarding morals stands out rather boldly, with traditional Christian values being the gold standard.  In his own life Wilde was known to flaunt these things, but in his story they stand mostly unchallenged.

At the same time, it is a book about seeking redemption.  Toward the end, Dorian regrets the lifetime of evil he’s led.  He wants to turn over a new leaf.  Corrupted from an early age by Lord Henry Wotton, he learned to live a cynical and self-centered life.  He shut out the feelings and needs of others for his own pursuit of pleasure.  As an old man still appearing young, he comes to have his regrets.  Although Wilde didn’t really live long enough to reach this stage in his own, he seems to have understood psychology well enough.  He even tried to have a half-year Catholic retreat.  Length of life often trails regrets in its train.  Of course, for Gray it is too little, too late.  He has made his mark on the world, but it hasn’t been for good.  His final act is a stab at redemption, but the novel gives no hint whether he achieved it or not.

Whether intentional or no, the novel considers the fact that we all wear masks.  And we do so for much of the time.  And there is a bit of horror involved in discovering that we aren’t who we pretend to be.  The real Dorian Gray was locked away in an attic room while his life of dissipation  led to the ruin of many.  The witty dialogue maybe makes this a comedy horror.  At times it seems to get in the way of the mood of the story, but it never stopped the novel from making a similar impression to the nearly contemporary Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  Late Victorians knew something that we, as a society, seem to have forgotten.  The attics of some prominent individuals surely have portraits that belie their appearance on the ubiquitous screen.

Dark Academia

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Dark academia is the new gothic.  It’s all the rage on the internet, as I found out by releasing a YouTube video on the topic that quickly became my most popular.  Still, I was surprised and flattered when Rent. asked me my opinion on the dark academia aesthetic.  You should check out their article here.  What drew me to dark academia is having lived it.  Although the conservatism often rubbed me the wrong way, Nashotah House was a gothic institution with skeletons in closets and ghosts in the corridors.  Tales of hauntings were rife and something about living on a campus isolated from civilization lends itself to abuses.  An on-campus cemetery.  Even the focus on chapel and confession of sins implied much had to be forgiven.  The things we do to each other in the name of a “pure” theology.  Lives wrecked.  And then hidden.

I entered all of this naive and with the eagerness of a puppy.  I was Episcopalian and I had attended the pensive and powerful masses at the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill in Boston.  I was open to the mystery and possibilities even as I could see the danger in the dogmatic stares of the trustees.  It was a wooded campus on the shores of a small lake.  A lake upon which, after I left, one of the professors drowned in a sudden windstorm.  I awoke during thunderstorms so fierce that I was certain the stone walls of the Fort would not hold up.  Disused chapels full of dead black flies.  Secret meetings to remove those who wouldn’t lock step.  This was the stuff of a P. D. James novel.  Students at the time even called it Hogwarts.  They decided I was the master of Ravenclaw.

Fourteen years of my life were spent there.  I worked away at research and writing in my book-lined study painted burgundy.  Is it any wonder that I find dark academia compelling?  I’ve often written, when discussing horror films on this blog, that gothic stories are my favorites.  Even the modern research university can participate.  Professors, isolated and often unaware of what’s happening outside their specializations, still prefer print books and a nice chair in which to read them.  And, of course, I’d read for my doctorate in Edinburgh, one of the gothic capitals of Europe.   Even Grove City College had its share of dark corners and well-kept secrets.  What goes on in that rarified atmosphere known as a college campus?  The possibilities are endless.  On a stormy night you can feel it in your very soul.

That article again: Dark Academia Room Decor: Aesthetic Secrets Revealed

Thinking about Vampires

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Any book on vampires has to be limited.  I first read Matthew Beresford’s From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth back in 2009.  It has lots of information, but it was long enough ago that much of what I’d learned had grown fusty with age.  I began re-reading it as Halloween approached, and am glad I did.  The thing about vampires, however, is that you do have to compare sources.  Like many explorations of the vampire, Beresford’s notes that there are ancient analogues, but nothing precisely like we think of vampires today.  From my own perspective, I tend to think that our modern vampires, like our demons, come from movies.  Starting with F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, but more clearly from Tod Browning’s Dracula, our idea of what vampires are have been mediated by the silver screen.

This book ranges widely across time, region, and genre.  It discusses early reports that clearly considered vampires an actual threat, as well as movies made purely for entertainment.  One thing that I noticed this time around is that the author, being British, seems not to have noticed the tremendous influence Dark Shadows had on the popularity of vampires prior to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.  I suspect that soap operas were not widely known internationally, and even if they were, they were likely not taken too seriously.  Dark Shadows was different, however, and it made vampires chic in a way they simply weren’t before the early seventies.  At least in the United States, Barnabas Collins helped define the vampire.

Beresford makes the point that there is no single defining characteristic that applies to all vampires.  Early European vampires didn’t necessarily drink blood—they were revenants (they’d returned from the dead) but they weren’t always after blood.  In the nineteenth century bloodlust became the defining feature of vampires.  There are historical points on which to quibble with the argument here, but overall this book is a good overview of how ideas like vampires have been around for quite some time.  As someone who specialized in ancient literature for a good part of my life, I would not have called the various ancient analogues pointed out “vampires.”  Beresford is making the case that they lay the groundwork for what later became vampires.  And Vlad Tepes of Wallachia played his part as well.  As did the ancient Greeks.  It seems to me there’s more rich ground to explore here and this book provides a very good starting place.

Won’t Tell

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This one is pretty darn close to too tense to read before bed.  I don’t remember how I found out about Ivar Leon Menger’s What Mother Won’t Tell Me.  That’s usually a pretty good sign that I found it in a bookstore.  Those are still places to linger while trying to find something a bit different.  This one is a page turner, but also one that I’m not quite sure how to classify.  It may be horror but the “monsters” are all humans.  I almost don’t want to describe the plot because it is so exquisitely suspenseful.  When I’m reading to get sleepy, I often find myself trying to grasp pieces of a story that are floating away like dandelion fluff, unable to put them back together.  Then I know it’s time to close my eyes and re-read a paragraph or two tomorrow.  That never happened with this one.

I think I can say this much without giving it away: Juno lives on an isolated island in a lake with her parents and younger brother.  The parents warn them of the murderous strangers who are seeking them—the father was a states’ witness against a powerful criminal family—so the children must never be seen on the island.  If anyone happens to come, they must hide and remain quiet until they leave.  They have to practice drills in case this ever happens.  It gets pretty creepy, from nearly the first page.  I would also advise against reading the back cover copy, since it will give some of it away.  I tend not to read the copy until after I read a book—you just never know what they might let slip.

This is a story about perseverance and discovery.  Discovery that is full of tension.  It’s a reminder of how precarious childhood is.  There are plenty of twists in the story and chapters generally end with information that creates a tension that the next chapter will only partially resolve.  The end result is a story that pulls you along and is pretty chilling.  I’m not sure if I’d call this horror or not.  If there’s a good case for a thriller being a separate genre, this could be useful as evidence.  Even if it’s not horror, it is likely to appeal to many who read in that genre.  There’s nothing speculative about it.  Perhaps that’s why the story scares in the way that it does—this could happen.  What happens?  Like mother, I won’t tell you either.

Nightly Entertainment

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A list of most gothic recent books, I believe it was, that suggested The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.  It’s a big book—over 500 pages—so I decided I’d wait until autumn to get underway.  It ended up taking most of September and half of October to finish it.  Since I prefer to start fresh, I had no idea what it was about.  A night circus, of course, as the title indicates.  It is set in the late Victorian period, although I’m not sure all the turns of phrase in the book were current at that time.  There may be a few spoilers in the description, should you want to go out and read this yourself first.  I mention that because something that only becomes clear near the end is a pretty good starting place for giving an idea of what the story’s about.

A very old man (who doesn’t look or act old) is a very accomplished magician (not the stage variety).  One of his students becomes very proficient and the two begin a rivalry that involves each setting a protege against that of the other.  It is a contest, we eventually learn, to the death.  The younger magician selects a daughter he didn’t even know he had, while the original teacher selects a young man without prospects.  The battleground on which these two duel is the eponymous night circus.  Each tries to outdo the other in creativity and wonder.  The circus is open only at night (hence the name) and is fueled by actual magic.  A cast of characters gets introduced, and they’re very well drawn.  In my experience of reading the book, they drew me back in because you pretty much liked most of them and with magic involved, well, you never know.

The novel was gothic in the Victorian setting and in the sense that there is an ancient contest underway here that interrupts into the then present.  There aren’t spooky castles, however, or really even damsels in distress.  The women characters are all strong and resilient.  The writing is lively and the resolution is satisfying.  The real draw for this book is the writing and the complex story that doesn’t overwhelm or leave you feeling too lost.  It’s a magical realism with boundaries and offers a good message that magic is all around, if we only open our eyes to it.  It’s a good book to get lost in for a few weeks.  I appreciated the fact that the villains weren’t the focus and the violence was mostly implied.  It kept me turning pages, gothic or not.

Dancing with King

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There are books you wait too late to read, but which you read at just the right time for you.  That’s how I feel about Stephen King’s Danse Macabre.  This book is endlessly cited in more academic treatments of horror and I knew I should read it.  And one thing I immediately appreciated is that even early in the eighties King expressed my long-term concern: many genres fall into horror.  He, perhaps rightly, considers horror a subspecies of fantasy.  Or course, fantasy has come to mean something quite different in the intervening half-century.  Still, the reader is treated to thrillers, sci-fi, and weird fiction.  There’s also a dose of the gothic and speculative as well.  King sets his four classes of monsters early: the vampire, the werewolf, the thing without a name (Frankenstein’s creature), and ghosts.  These are all very broadly conceived.

It will become clear in coming weeks, for anyone who’s interested, that the movies I “review” here have been influenced by King’s list.  And in the longer term, the books as well.  And I tend to agree with King’s antipathy toward television, although I disagree with his assessment of The Twilight Zone.  Danse Macabre is a book of its time, of course.  I would be curious as to the master’s reaction to such more recent classics as The X-Files.  I loved that he treated Ray Bradbury as a sometime horror author and it becomes clear that each of us finds different things scary.  The thing was, I found myself anticipating my too scarce reading time each day for the month it took me to read the book.  I often start books that I soon find myself approaching with a kind of duty to finish.  Love him or not, King is a talented writer and will keep you coming back, just like birds to a feeder.

I learned that King, too, appreciates bad movies.  He grew up about a decade and a half before I did, but the small-town culture I experienced as a child was not so different, although Sputnik was already up and the Cold War already on.  I guess what I find so engaging here is that this is a guy who speaks my language.  My tastes differ, of course, but there’s something comforting about whiling away the pre-dawn hours with a guy who can say “The Thing” and you know immediately what that vague phrase means.  And it was strangely reassuring to be reminded that the world of the seventies, which I experienced as a teenager, was just as scary as the world is right now.  And if King ever looked me in the eyes, I think he’d recognize something about me, although a sometimes critical fan.

Dictionary Dreams

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“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.”  Thus begins the venerated Nunc dimittis, familiar from so many years of chanting evensong at Nashotah House.  It comes to mind when I’ve reached a milestone I never dreamed of attaining.  One that makes me feel as if I’ve accomplished my life’s work.  Strangely, it didn’t occur when my name ended up in a study Bible’s front matter.  But a friend recently sent me a note that immediately brought old Simeon’s words to mind.  I have been cited in the Oxford English Dictionary.  My book Weathering the Psalms is quoted (in the web version) under “simile.”  I have no idea how examples are selected for the OED.  It used to be scraps of paper sent in by astute readers, but I suspect things have changed.  How my obscure book ended up there, I haven’t a clue.

There’s an irony here as well.  Like most academics clueless about publication, I initially proposed Weathering the Psalms to Oxford University Press, assuming they published such things.  It was turned down on the basis of a reviewer—one or two I know not—that I later met at a social function, where he was clearly embarrassed.  I really just wonder how the OED found the book to cite in the first place.  In terms of copies sold, it has been my most successful book, but that’s not saying much.  As far as I can tell, it’s only sold less than 400 copies (the royalty statements don’t have the total and I haven’t received a check in years).  I guess all things in the world are connected, whether we notice it or not.

Those who know me personally are aware that validation is a huge thing for me.  I suspect that is true of most people who grew up in difficult circumstances and who managed—and this is never a certain thing—to pull themselves out.  Having been fired from my long-term teaching post (where I was working on this book) only made me want to prove myself more, I guess.  Insignificant things like getting a Choice review for one of my books (which continues to sell poorly) and having that behemoth of a dictionary notice that I used a fairly common word in a fairly common way do tend to release the endorphins.  It’s like maybe someone noticed that I’ve passed this way.  Maybe there was a reason for trying to capture the Wisconsin thunderstorms in a book about the Psalms.  Maybe there’s a reason each working day there concluded with the Nunc dimittis.

Empowerment

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.