Big Blasts

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Nonfiction authors have to make decisions when writing books about collected, collective phenomena.  Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders had to decide which volcanoes to include in Volcanoes in Human History.  The idea of the book is fairly straightforward—show how those sleeping monsters have sometimes long-term effects on human lives and culture.  Some of the choices were no-brainers: Mount Vesuvius, Santorini, and Tambora, obviously.  Toba, the largest known eruption, fell out of bounds because it went off long before Homo sapiens had learned to write.  Indeed, that eruption almost led to our species’ extinction.  Since I’ve been interested in volcanoes for about the last year or so, this book fit the bill.  It gives several snapshots of what happens when the earth’s mantle starts pushing up into the crust on which we live.  It also has lots of geology in it, some of which I struggled to understand.

The authors begin with the Hawaiian Islands, and the local mythology about Pele.  Then they move on to Thera, which created Santorini and ended the Minoan civilization.  Next, Vesuvius is not only the only active volcano on the European mainland, but its 79 CE eruption was the first written about by an eyewitness (Pliny the Younger).  The chapter on Iceland is more about the various notable volcanic activities but tends to focus a little on Laki.  Then comes Tambora, the most deadly volcano in human history.  Krakatau, also known as Krakatoa, was also deadly but is quite well known, in part because of a book by Simon Winchester.  It’s covered in the next chapter.  Mount Pelée—not to be confused with Pele—in the Caribbean is next.  In 1902 it wiped out an entire town of 30,000 people.  Tristan da Cunha I’ll come back to.  The last one covered is Mount St. Helens.

Tristan da Cunha is a place I’d never heard of.  Located about as far from any continent as you can be in the Atlantic Ocean, it’s occupied by about 200 people.  The founding humans were of European extraction, and the colony grew from 2 to about 300.  In 1961 the volcano that comprises the island erupted, which led to the inhabitants being exposed to modernity for the first time in about two centuries.  I found this utterly fascinating.  All of the chapters have interesting information, but some of it is pretty heavy going concerning geology and plate tectonics, but it does have quite a bit of human interest as well.  It made me glad that I live nowhere near a volcanic hot spot.

Whose Stars?

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Star Trek or Star Wars?  I used to hear this among sci-fi fans.  I grew up with Star Trek in the sixties and saw Star Wars in the theater.  Science fiction can shape our future.  Both for good and for bad.  I’m convinced, for example, that many Silicon Valley technocrats are Star Trek people who grew up emulating Mr. Spock.  No emotion, pure rationality.  That idea has come to stand for the faulty equation of brain = computer.  This is incorrect.  As AI began to be developed, the idea was that if we could rationally program computers with human rational thought, they could be taught to “think.”  They clearly forget pon farr from the episode Amok Time.  Even the full-blooded Vulcans know that logic will break down once in a while.  Even now Al is demonstrating that in real time.

Star Wars, on the other hand, depicted a paperless universe.  Nobody, not even old Obi Wan, or the even older Yoda, is shown with an ancient book.  Reading isn’t part of their life.  Tech is.  This idea, I suspect, helped spur on ebooks.  And audiobooks.  I’ve been a proponent of environmentalism since the seventies.  One of the few areas where I think the exploitation of trees is necessary, however, is in the making of books.  The other day I was in a very hopeful meeting where it was pointed out that there are moves afoot to start limiting screen time.  Get people reading books again.  I’m not really conflicted about this, despite my excessive work on this blog.  I spend very little time on social media.  Apart from this blog it’s maybe ten minutes a day.  I spend, if at all possible, at least an hour reading books each day.

Many analysts tend to think that the internet hasn’t really made human life better.  More convenient certainly.  But better?  There was a kind of exquisite longing to reading about a book in a catalogue, walking to a bookstore, ordering it and waiting a few weeks before receiving it.  Such things caused no harm.  Is it logical to speed things up if we can?  Sometimes clearly yes.  At other times, it’s fun to run amok.  To take a walk without your phone.  To pick up a book to spend an unrushed hour or two reading.  These were pleasures.  Now we turn on our devices and hear about the chaos Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu are causing.  All the deaths and suffering they wreak on the innocent.  Would Mr. Spock say this is logical?  Even Luke Skywalker would pull out a book to escape for a while.

Photo credit: NASA

Strange Academy

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Things have changed in academia.  Fifteen years ago, after my ouster from the classroom and research crowd, scholars studied such things as monsters, horror, and exorcism at their peril.  Not taken seriously by “rational” thinkers, such phenomena were largely considered a waste of time and effort.  Much of that is beginning to change.  And not just in religious studies.  Religion is an apt discipline to examine prodigies and unusual experiences, but I’m seeing more academic disciplines drawn into the discussion.  Philosophy, history, sociology, and even law, ponder how belief in supernatural beings fits in the bank of human knowledge.  This is something that AI has no hope of “comprehending” (as if it’s doing anything more than pretending).  These are very human concerns and, it turns out, they may be more rational than previously assumed.

Such things entered academia as pop culture was reevaluated as worthy of study.  Although ephemeral, what has the interest of the masses is important to understand.  Horror is increasing in visibility and more and more people are admitting their interest in it, at least occasionally.  A lifelong lover of the weird, had I known that this direction was available, in my former life, I would’ve been one of the first to sign up.  Horror, as we now call it, has been around since the Bible and before.  Ghost and monster stories were part of the earliest civilizations.  Often they’re simply there—assumed rather than postulated.  Many people today, some of them quite educated, also believe that there’s more to the world than what fits comfortably in the laboratory.  Although my last several books have been written for nonspecialist readerships, employed academics are writing for that more rarified readership.

Perhaps the thing that’s truly changed is that studies about such things are being published.  Various academic presses, it seems, have ventured into the “what if” territory.  We’re all asking if maybe the world is stranger than we were taught in school.  Our knowledge in technology has grown at what feels like an alarming rate, while our understanding of the shadowy side of our psyches, and the world itself, is only starting to get underway.  In my personal reading I keep trying to steer away from university presses to the world of trade publishing, but with the new interest in the strange, I find myself being drawn back.  You like your explorers to have a bit of skepticism, and an open mind.  Seems like the academy is starting to welcome such thinkers.  I’m glad to see this happening, because the world is a very strange place. If only it’d happened a little sooner.

Undersea Series

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As A Series of Unfortunate Events goes on the volumes become more adult in their complexity.  The writing is still recognizably Lemony Snicket, but the laughs are fewer and the plot is thicker.  Although The Grim Grotto is perhaps the one book (post book three) that I remembered the best so far, there was much I’d forgotten.  Rescued from the Stricken Stream by a submarine named Queequeq, the Baudelaires meet Fiona Widdershins, the step-daughter of the eccentric captain.  She becomes Klaus’ first love interest, just as Quigley Quagmire had for Violet in the last book.  Searching for the missing sugar bowl to help the V.F.D. against the schism, they encounter the eponymous grotto where Sunny is poisoned.  One of the things I remembered clearly from reading this some two decades ago was how worried I was for Sunny, although I knew she couldn’t be killed off.

Literary references abound in this volume.  The Herman Melville references are obvious enough, but I was impressed that Handler gives a brief lesson on Plato’s cave analogy and brought in several other literary figures as well.  Contrasting Melville with Edgar Guest (and I admit that I had to look up Guest) is brilliant.  Guest wrote optimistic poetry which earns him the scorn of Snicket.  Indeed, when Count Olaf shows up, late in the story, the crew of his submarine (in a riff on Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea) wears suits with Guest silhouettes on them, as opposed to the Queequeq Melville images.  The book also introduces children to the poetry of Lewis Carroll and T. S. Eliot, and I’m sure that there are others I’m forgetting at the moment.  It’s a service to young people to stimulate their interest in other writers.  I’d forgotten that “briny beach” comes from Carroll.  Even the tedious bits of this volume service a didactic purpose.  There may be spoilers below.

Not that The Grim Grotto is without humor.  Apart from the roasting of Guest, the reference to the Mediocre Barrier Reef was a laugh out loud moment.  And the tying together of loose threads.  The hook-handed man is Fiona’s brother.  Josephine’s family ran the destroyed aquarium, and Mr. Poe shows up near the end only to be eclipsed by Kit Snicket.  There is so much to like here.  Including the thin line between good and evil that the children keep coming back to.  Returning to the series after two decades with only the movie to partially remind me of the tale has been enjoyable so far.  Even though they weren’t part of my own childhood, I’m glad to make their reacquaintance now.

Fear Not

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It takes quite a lot to get me to buy a book from InterVarsity Press.  This is something I think Kutter Callaway would probably understand.  My childhood was haunted not only by my family circumstances, but also by fundamentalism.  When I learned I could run, I did.  When Be Afraid showed up on Theofantastique, however, I didn’t hesitate.  Some of us have found healing and a positive message in some horror.  I agree with Callaway that some series, or concepts, are too nihilistic to really get anything out of.  In this fascinating book, we are given a tour through some dark places by someone who’s still evangelical, but who admits to watching, and even enjoying horror.  And being in California, he can actually meet and interview some of the people who make the films that guys like me watch.

I understand this book began as a podcast.  Since my biggest fear these days is running out of time—I’ve got so much I want to get done!—I have trouble finding time for podcasts.  My stack of books to read miraculously never grows any smaller, no matter how many volumes I pull off the top of the stack.  I started this book a little skeptical, but I was soon won over.  Callaway advocates “fearing rightly,” and he knows something many won’t admit: we’re all afraid.  Some of us tamp it down pretty securely, but others of us stare it in the face until we have to flinch.  And a good number of us grew us in conservative Christian households.  One of the things I found interesting following the author through the contours of his fears is that a number of people who work in the horror film industry have, or still, identify as Christians.  I learned that Wes Craven was raised in a strict Baptist household and attended Wheaton College.

One of the recurring themes on this blog, as well as in my own books, is that religion and horror are closely related.  I explore this through my mini-reviews of horror movies and of various books.  I know some of the actually employed academics who work in the field.  And I’ll freely admit that the end of my teaching career at the hands of “Christians” has colored my own experience of horror.  This little book turned out to be a fascinating read.  And it led me to trust that the author wasn’t trying to covertly convert me.  If you have a religious background and are curious about horror, I’d recommend it.

Pick Up

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Although it came recommended by streaming services, I’d given The Black Phone a pass.  Seeing it mentioned a few times in a book I was reading, I decided I’d better give in.  Since it was an unexpected success, I suppose it got a lot of press.  In any case, it is scary but the violence is off-putting, at least to me.  The gritty story matter, however, doesn’t make it unexpected.  So, a serial killer is abducting boys in North Denver.  Finny’s best friend is taken.  His sister has dreams that reveal something of the truth, but their alcoholic father tries to beat the belief out of her.  (Not that it’s an excuse, but her mother also listened to her dreams and that lead to her suicide.)  Then Finny is abducted.  The killer keeps him in an escape-proof basement.  Then the kids who’ve died start calling him on the eponymous telephone.

The instructions the kids give him don’t always directly help with his escape, beyond giving him courage.  Meanwhile, his sister has dreams (except for one night when her profane prayer in the morning is sure to make some viewers blush).  The dreams are taken seriously by the police, but her father is less-than-pleased.  Although he’s repentant at the end, the punishment he gives his daughter is about as severe as the killer doles out to the boys before killing them.  And there’s kid-on-kid violence.  Finny and his sister both get kicked around, literally.  In other words, there’s a lot of threat of, and actual violence.  There’s also a fair amount of religion involved.

Finny’s sister has a ritual that she uses to invoke the significant dreams.  It involves, you guessed it, a Bible.  A Gideon New Testament.  Also a prayer card of the Virgin Mary and a cross.  This makes the movie worthy of Holy Sequel.  And, of course, appropriate for the scary movie season.  I think there may be a spiritual lesson here, but I prefer horror with supernatural monsters.  The supernatural characters in this film are all good guys.  After they’re dead, that is.  In life some of them were also violent individuals.  So, for people like me there were a few triggers with the alcoholic father and the way that children are beaten around.  As well as a psychopath.  The movie was well made, however, and the mask of the villain is decidedly creepy.  Horror that taps into religion often has a depth that makes people take notice.  And if done well, it shows at the box office.

Harvest Time

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Dark Harvest literally sat atop my literal “to read” pile for almost a year.  Norman Partridge’s book came into my possession sometime after Halloween last year but I wanted to wait until, well, harvest season to read it.  It’s a very good choice as autumn really begins to settle in.  It’s a story with its own world and its own rules.  In a small town in a farming community, a dark ritual is kept alive by a powerful group of local citizens.  On Halloween night, a specially grown pumpkin atop a crucified scarecrow, comes to life.  One of the people from town cuts the scarecrow down, carves it a face, animates it with candy, and hands it a butcher knife.  The October Boy, as he’s known, heads to town.  Meanwhile, the local boys between 16 and 18 are sent out with makeshift weapons to stop this monster.  If it makes it into the church before midnight, serious consequences will follow.  The boys, hungry from a week of fasting, prowl the night, looking to be the winner who takes October Boy down.  All of this is overseen by the town’s cop.  Things can get out of hand on Halloween night.

This is a horror story with heart.  I won’t put any spoilers here, but I will say, as in the best of horror, the monster isn’t who you think he is.  This elaborate game has taken its toll on the town for generations.  This Halloween, however, four people are out to stop it.  Supernatural horror that pays off the suspension of disbelief, Dark Harvest is also an emotional tale.  It’s a story of loss and one about the high cost of observing convention for convention’s sake.  Having the ending set in a church brings religion and horror together nicely.  And it also raises some deeper questions for those who care to steer that way.  Sacrifice is a major theme in the story.

I’m glad I waited until Halloween season to read this one.  A short book, it doesn’t take long to get through.  And it presses the right buttons for the season.  Partridge is an author who really gets what the autumnal setting can do for a horror story.  I enjoy good horror set in winter or summer as well.  (Okay, so spring too.)  There is, however, something special about novels that engage seriously with harvest time.  Harvest has always had a deep symbolic value that’s often overlooked in what is, inherently, a spooky period.  I really appreciated the author’s afterword as well.  I’m glad I waited for the right season.

Horrorigins

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Among those who write about horror, and those who talk about it, a common question is what drew you into it.  The origin story of your fascination.  I read a book where the author posed that question: when was the first time as a child you really felt fear?   I paused and thought.  Thinking back, the better question for me is when do I remember not feeling fear?  I spent a lot of time scared as a child.  I was born insecure, I guess.  Things frightened me.  I had more than my fair share of phobias and garden-variety fears.  Even as I grew up, it didn’t seem that my siblings were the same way.  I was the scaredy-cat.  We all liked watching monster movies on Saturday afternoon, however.  My gateway to manufactured fear was Dark Shadows.  The many posts on this blog about that series should indicate how formative it was for my young psyche.

If you get to know me well enough I’ll tell you some of the traumas I faced early on in this earthly existence.  Being the child of an alcoholic, I kept a close eye, and ear, on my environment.  I still want to know just where everybody is.  I don’t want someone startling or scaring me.  I don’t like surprises.  And I watch horror as therapy.  It’s cathartic.  And I write books about it.  One of those hopeful books is about the spirituality of living in the dark.  This isn’t something I willing chose.  No, it was what I was born into and had to learn to cope with.  I do like to “arm myself with knowledge.”  I read about the world and my small, scary corner of it.  Most everyone I read about had a well-adjusted childhood with one moment when fear coaxed them in.  That wasn’t my experience of it.

As we age our memories of childhood take on different shading.  Picture albums preserve the good times.  “Smile for the camera.”  My mother used to worry about me because I didn’t smile much as a child.  I was afraid.  I hadn’t yet learned how watching scary things might help me.  Besides, I had siblings close in age and there were always distractions around.  These days I’ve overcome most of my phobias.  Becoming a parent, although it introduced new ones, led me to try to overcome some of the older ones.  I sincerely hope trauma doesn’t get passed on genetically.  Maybe I’ve ended up where I have for a reason.  Watching horror gives me a chance to choose what form it will take.

Puzzle Conscious

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Those of us who write books are all working on putting together a puzzle.  Even though we often disagree, it is part of the same puzzle.  We’re trying to expand human knowledge.  Some make a living doing it, most do not.  As this thought initially occurred to me, I wondered if it applied only to nonfiction.  It doesn’t.  Even the novelist is participating in piecing together this immense, at least planet-sized, puzzle.  We don’t understand consciousness.  Some of us are convinced that it pervades other living beings as well.  Philosophers far more brilliant than yours truly have suggested that if consciousness is emergent then it can be traced back to matter itself.  Our human part of the picture is pieced together in libraries.  Those collections of human thought.

Being raised in a literalist environment, I thought books (nonfiction) were researched and written leaving the author mostly in the background.  I’ve come to realize that a nonfiction book is the author’s interpretation, having read the many interpretations of others.  And that each tome is part of the larger conundrum of mapping out human consciousness.  No matter how minor the publisher or how poor the sales, the book is, to some degree, a piece.  The puzzle we’re trying to construct is missing many, many pieces.  Long ago we surpassed the point at which one person could read every published piece of human knowledge.  Now, lifetimes would be required, and even then no one person could put it all together.  Consciousness is very slippery that way.  Not to mention the many, many unpublished books.  The task is immense and the end result is our contribution to the knowledge of how this universe works.

The humble contributions that I’ve attempted to add to the conversation may seem irrelevant.  They certainly haven’t brought in fame or money.  Those of us who write feel compelled to do so.  Others have no such compulsion and each of us has our role to play.  My thoughts go back to monks in the medieval period.  Many of them copying, a few of them composing, sacred objects.  Books were rare and all handwritten.  Today those that survive are priceless treasures.  They’re also pieces to a vast puzzle.  As we try to understand this very strange, very weird world in which we find ourselves, many of us still turn to books.  What we may not realize as we open the cover, is that we’re doing our part in a collaborative exercise in which we’re all involved.  Even if the puzzle is never fully completed.

A 48,000-piece puzzle

Falconry

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Some years back I read Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and the two follow-up volumes.  My interest in them was reignited when I started seeing them being branded as dark academia.  The home is really a kind of school and the images offer a feeling compatible with other dark academia works for children.  Then, reading about Tim Burton, I realized one of the few movies of his I hadn’t seen was the one based on this book.  Now, it has been long enough that the storyline has faded a bit, but I’m pretty sure the movie took some liberties with the original tale.  Even before seeing the movie, it seemed to me that Burton’s distinctive style would be a good match for what I remembered of the tale. I didn’t know it was a Burton movie when I first learned about it.

The best way to be introduced to the story is to read Riggs’ books, but the basic idea is that “peculiar” children—those with strange abilities—are kept in secret locations by Ymbryne, peculiar women that can turn into birds.  Miss Peregrine, for example.  They are kept safe from Hollowgasts, monsters that want to eat their eyes, and Wights, Hollowgasts that eat enough eyes to appear human.  The children are kept safe in time loops created by Ymbryne, where everyone stays the same age and they can hide from Wights and “Hollows.”  Jake’s grandfather was in Miss Peregrine’s home, but he decided to leave to hunt down the Wights and Hollows.  When he’s killed, Jake wants to find out if all the stories he told were true.  His father, thinking his son has mental issues, agrees to go on holiday with him and Jake finds and befriends the peculiars at the school.  They’re stuck in 1943.

When a Wight follows Jake to Miss Peregrine’s loop, the children have to fight the Hollows and Wights to rescue her.  And Jake has to make a decision whether to stay in 1943 or go back to 2016 where things haven’t been so great for him.  You get the picture.  The movie’s not bad.  It threw me a bit not to have the music by Danny Elfman.  Again, the subject matter would seem to have suited his particular style.  I remember hearing about the movie when it came out a decade ago.  It didn’t make a huge splash, and nobody else I know had read the books so I didn’t see the film back then.  Burton is a director that I’ve followed more or less steadily since his second film.  I have a little more catching up to do, however, peculiar as that may seem.

Building Horror

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Christina Henry grew a reputation rewriting fairy tales.  At least that’s how I found her.  I read The Girl in Red and then Horseman (which was after I’d begun work on Sleepy Hollow as American Myth).  I thought she’d found her niche as a writer.  Lately, when browsing bookstore shelves in the horror section, I’ve discovered she has a reputation there as well.  The House that Horror Built caught my eye, and I trust certain writers, based on past performance.  (Which is, I suspect, how most agents assess their clients.)   In any case, I wanted to give it a try.  Speaking of trying, I’ll attempt to avoid spoilers here because there’s a twist ending.  The story begins innocently enough.  Harry, a woman down on her luck, has a job cleaning the house of a famous horror director, Javier Castillo.  Barely making ends meet in Chicago, she cleans his horror props three days a week.

Castillo is in Chicago because of the disappearance of his wife and son after the latter was accused of a murder he probably committed.  His family gone, Castillo moves away from Hollywood while trying to work on his next project.  Meanwhile, Harry’s landlord is evicting her and her son Gabriel.  Upon learning that Harry likes horror movies, Castillo invites her and her son to dinner one night.  Things get a bit chummy for Harry’s tastes, but they return once more when a couple of actors are staying with the director.  One of the actors has a tragic accident, falling to her death.  Meanwhile the eviction date is moved up and Harry has no choice but to accept Castillo’s offer of hospitality.  She’s known for some time that his house is haunted.  I think I’ll leave things there.  Hopefully it’ll peak some interest.

I don’t know much about Henry, but she does seem to understand the plight of the poor.  It isn’t easy to survive when you can’t earn enough beyond what covers the necessary expenses.  And when you have a child, the anxiety increases exponentially.  For the most part, this is a slow burn horror tale.  The suspected ghost is introduced not too far into the proceedings, but the explanation is more than the reader expects—at least this reader.  The last couple of chapters are page-turners with some full-on horror.  I don’t mind waiting for some payoff.  To me, however, the darkness in the threat of homelessness is its own form of horror.  And it’s not too difficult to imagine for the majority of us.  I’d say Henry has bridged successfully into the genre.

Exorcising Emily

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Perhaps after The Exorcist, the demonic possession movie cited with the greatest respect is The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  This 2005 movie is based, in part, on the true case of Anneliese Michel, a young German woman who died after undergoing several exorcisms, beginning in 1975.  Sometimes it takes a while for the penny to drop, but after reading about The Exorcist the timing of all of this struck me.  Somehow reading about it in Joseph Laycock and Eric Harrelson’s “The Exorcist” Effect, hadn’t stuck with me.  William Peter Blatty published the eponymous novel in 1971.  This was based, in part, on a case from 1949, over twenty years earlier.  The novel was a bestseller and, of course, adapted into William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in 1973.  That movie was a blockbuster, and is probably the single biggest influence in the current perceptions of demonic possession.  What caught Blatty’s attention in the first place was how rare exorcism was.  And one was held in 1949?

Anneliese Michel had been undergoing psychiatric treatment since 1970.  It was only five years later, after the release of both the novel and movie, that exorcism was suggested as a possible cure.  It may be impossible to know if the priest whom the Michel family approached had read the novel or seen the film.  One thing is certain, however.  The Exorcist brought the topic back into popular consciousness in the western world by then.  Yes, in the United States it was pop culture, but the film was taken with such seriousness that it filtered into everyday consciousness as well.  Although banned in parts of Britain, that consciousness had entered Europe as well.  Was the idea to treat Michel by exorcism part of what Laycock and Harrelson termed “The Exorcist Effect”?

Media is incredibly influential.  Fiction can create reality.  It can cost someone their life.  And not just for being in an accident in the film industry (although such tragedies do occur).  Humans are intrigued by ideas.  We tell stories about them.  Sometimes our own life stories become fictionalized in our recollections.  My memories have been corrected more than once by my siblings.  Culturally, we were shown what demons were and what they could do in The Exorcist.  Even if Michel’s priest hadn’t seen the movie, he lived in a culture already altered by it.  I really need to go back and read Laycock and Harrelson’s book again.  Being invited to a podcast about demons back in August made me think about Emily Rose again, after years of pursing The Wicker Man and Sleepy Hollow.

Slip Sliding

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The world is quiet here.  The Baudelaire orphans have been reunited by the end of The Slippery Slope, but Quigley Quagmire gets separated from them at the denouement.  As a friend of mine once said regarding movies, it’s difficult to watch people who long to be—and belong—together being separated.  Indeed, it is one of the saddest of plot points.  Count Olaf and his band of villains kidnap Sunny while, they think, sending Violet and Klaus hurtling to their deaths.  The orphans were on their way to the V.F.D. headquarters in the Valley of Four Draughts. They eventually arrive to discover that the schismatic group of V.F.D. has already burned it down.  And we get a strong inkling that Volunteer Fire Department is what stands behind the mysterious initials.  Reading this again as an adult also reminds me that this is where we caught up with the series since we began buying the hardcovers for my daughter as they came out.

This segment of the Series of Unfortunate Events once again has the orphans wondering if they’re becoming as bad as the villains.  They decide that instead of fighting fire with fire they need to work to make the world a quieter, more peaceful place.  And two of Count Olaf’s associates, the women with white faces, leave his troupe.  A pair of criminals that have even Olaf nervous show up in this episode as well.  Lemony Snicket’s humor remains intact, despite the darkness of the tale.  There are laugh-out-loud parts in the last two chapters.  And some memorable quotes/ideas: “Count Olaf, like any good businessman, has committed a wide variety of crimes.”  The idea that somebody well-read is potentially trustworthy is repeated throughout the story. I mentioned a biblical connection (of course I did!) for The Carnivorous Carnival, but here there’s an explicit one as Snicket categorizes Adam and Eve’s decision to put on clothes “to leave the snake-infested garden” as an impulse passion.  After drying my tears, the cleverness of all this sank in.  Typically the impulse passion in Eden is precisely because the primordial couple is unclothed.  There’s much to chew over in these books ostensibly for children.  The message of what distinguishes good from evil wasn’t lost on me.

I recently discussed with my daughter how some authors are able to bridge from children’s, or young adult, novels into those for adults.  There’s kind of an invisible line there.  Adult life can be serious business, and it often is.  There are some great funny novels as well for the adult crowd.  And sometimes they can even be disguised as books for young readers.

Monster Mash

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You think you know a guy.  Actually, I never claim to be a Washington Irving expert.  Sure, a read three or four biographies, while researching Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, but the idea of that book was to trace the story he wrote forward, not to make stunning claims about Irving himself.  Still, doing this kind of research you tend to think you know a bit about the life of a person.  Irving was awkward around women but he seemed to fall in love from time to time.  He was engaged at least once (in his mind, at least twice).  His first love, like that of his younger contemporary Edgar Allan Poe, died young of tuberculosis.  Irving had considerable success with his first novel A History of New York, putatively written by Diedrich Knickerbocker.   He was sent off to England by his family and it was in Europe that he wrote the book that made him famous, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.  It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Irving stayed in Europe for 17 years and wrote other books that kept him going.  None would match the acclaim of The Sketch Book.  (It also included his tale, “Rip Van Winkle.”)  Since he remained in Europe, his fame was trans-Atlantic.  He was doing what few could—making a living by writing.  Most who did so, or tried to, struggled financially.  One of those people was Mary Shelley.  She’d begun writing Frankenstein when she was 18.  Twenty when it published, two years later she was widowed when her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned.  Shelley had a rocky relationship with his aristocratic family and Mary made a living by publishing lesser known pieces.

At some point—keep in mind Mary Shelley was a young widow and often lonely—Shelley tried to initiate a romance with Washington Irving.  He was older and, perhaps playing into her thoughts, an established writer.  That’s what she longed to be.  Irving was not interested in this particular relationship.  He’d fallen in love with an American girl traveling Europe with her family, and had been burned.  As Halloween approaches, this interesting confluence of the creators of Frankenstein’s monster and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow—two iconic seasonal monsters—has its own kind of wonder.  Neither Irving nor Shelley were “horror writers.”  That concept wouldn’t emerge until much later.  Nevertheless, they had brought to life two characters without which Halloween as we know it would be severely diminished.  You never know what might happen when you publish a monster story.

Otherwise

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I’ve read all of Diana Pasulka’s books.  A religion professor with a range, she’s worked in Catholic Studies (and served as a consultant on The Conjuring), UFOs, and, more recently, in entities and consciousness.  The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny is an unusual book.  As a Catholic herself, she doesn’t come out and say that the secret forces are God, traditionally defined.  The book doesn’t answer the question directly as to what these forces are, but makes a good case that they’re there.  For a lifelong liker of the weird and unusual, and also an erstwhile professor of religion, I found this book intriguing as well as a bit of a head-scratcher.  As regular readers know, I’m no fan of AI.  Pasulka gave me a bit of pause here, but not enough to change my mind. She also engages with Catholic thinkers and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

Consciousness is the elephant in the room.  We don’t know what it is, where it comes from, or how far down it reaches.  I’ve read serious philosophers who suggest the planet is conscious.  If so, it stands to reason that the rest of the physical universe is too.  What we do know is that the government has been taking UFOs seriously since at least the forties.  We also find out, from books like this, that tech moguls use what we might well call the paranormal to guide their decisions, including about AI.  Meanwhile, the average person on the street scoffs at anything they’ve been conditioned to think of as “crazy.”  Those in places of power aren’t laughing.  Reagan believed in astrology.  I understand it’s kind of “in” these days among the rich and powerful.

I come away from books like this realizing just how little the average person knows about what goes on behind the walls of power.  Those walls enclose the government (or at least some in the government), the ultra-wealthy, and some research facilities.  While Pasulka doesn’t discuss this, I’ve always been fascinated that the very wealthy businessman Robert Bigelow makes no bones about his belief in aliens and their presence on earth.  I suppose if you have lots of money it doesn’t matter if people laugh you out of a job.  Meanwhile, such things are still used as measures of “sanity” for ordinary folk.  Who are the others?  We don’t really know.  We do know that there are those among our own kind who take such things very seriously.  And they are, generally, the ones calling the shots.  I still don’t think Al’s a good companion to the human race.