Dr. 2 P 2

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

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

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

Rabbit Holes

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Rabbit holes are my favorite part of the internet.  They can be used for heavy-duty research, but in my case they’re mostly just fun.  I’ve written about Dark Shadows many, many times on this blog.  Although I did watch many episodes of the original run with my brothers, my memories of the story line tend to come from the concurrent series of pulp fiction books by Marilyn Ross.  These books, which I have only ever seen used, were distinguished by their olive green covers and an oval cutout on the front where an image from the television series, sometimes apparently selected at random, was shown.  There were a total of 32 of them and, as an adult I collected them all.  Some months ago I wrote about my delight at finding several of them, in very good condition, at an antique and curio shop not far from us.  Recently in that shop again, I looked over the titles and discovered one that wasn’t in the series but was in the larger series, Paperback Library Gothic.

I’d never really given much thought to it, but the book was in great shape and was riffing off the Dark Shadows series.  It was reasonably priced, so how could I not?  Excited as a schoolboy coming home in time to catch the series on TV, I looked up the series online and fell down a rabbit hole.  There was an entire series in the mass market paperback format that I adore, from the sixties and seventies.  Shy of writing a bestseller myself, I’d never be able to afford them all.  The series included some classic titles out of copyright by such authors as Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austin, Bram Stoker, and Wilkie Collins (no relationship to Barnabas).  To these they added contemporary gothic titles including several by W. E. D. Ross, writing under the pseudonym Marilyn.  These were pre-Dark Shadows books.  There were well over a hundred of them.

Paperback Library was an independent New York City publisher founded either in 1960 or 1961, capitalizing on the pulp fiction and mass market paperback models.  They were bought out by Warner in 1970.  Warner eventually became Grand Central Publishing—still in New York.  In the large conglomerations that brought us down to only five major publishing houses in English, Grand Central was acquired by Hachette, one of said big five.  Recently the main distributor of mass market paperbacks decided it would no longer handle that format, essentially dooming it.  And with it a piece of my childhood.  Thankfully there are still some rabbit holes to fall down.

Dr. P.

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My recent fascination with the meeting of Lord Byron with Percy Shelley’s party in 1816 led me to read Paul West’s novel Lord Byron’s Doctor.  In case this meeting isn’t familiar to you, it involved five English travelers gathering for a few months outside Geneva.  Those present, beyond the two already named, were Mary Godwin, soon to be Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont (her step-sister), and John William Polidori, who was, well, Lord Byron’s doctor.  Polidori, when not being completely overlooked, is a bit of an enigma.  He aspired to literary renown and produced a few works.  His most notable piece, “The Vampyre,” was initially attributed to Byron.  He wrote at least two plays and a novella, as well as some nonfiction.  He had been hired by Byron’s publisher to keep a diary of their travels, which, it turns out, leaves Byron out most of the time.

It’s clear from the historical sources that Polidori was quite jealous, both of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley.  They were both aristocratic and had achieved fame through their writing, but Polidori not so much.  He also seems to have been jealous that Shelley received Byron’s attention unstintingly.  Byron was a lord and Shelley the scion of an aristocratic family.  Polidori, while not exactly what we’d call “middle class” today, did not have nobility in his family and, perhaps worse  among the English in the period, he was half Italian.  Paul West takes the story of Polidori and tries to flesh it out.  I haven’t read any other of West’s works, but given this novel I’m unlikely to.  He does do a good job of probing the inner feelings of being left out and excluded from what one really wants to do with one’s life.  (Some of us know this firsthand.)  He overdraws, however, just about everything.

For anyone with an idea of what happened among the English party that summer, and the fact that Byron dismissed Polidori when the summer was over, the basic shape of this narrative will be familiar.  As an extended character study it seems to do passably well.  Some of us, however, find trying to think like someone else might have a bit of a fatuous fictional folly.  My mental image of Polidori, apart from the feeling left out part, is quite different.  In other words, attempting this kind of novel is sure to put some readers off from the start.  I gave it a good faith effort.  Some parts of it I enjoyed.  The whole, however, felt tedious and too long.  It may, however, give some readers a sense of who Polidori might have been.

May’s Cool Start

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Beltane always makes me think of The Wicker Man, for some reason.  I recently got a royalty notice telling me sixteen copies had sold since the last statement.  (I never received that actual statement, but Worldcat shows that 419 libraries have a copy, making it my second best-selling book (maybe the best-selling; most royalty statements don’t include the total number sold, as much as authors would like to know that).  In any case, today is Beltane so I tip my hat to Sergeant Howie of the West Highland Constabulary and confess that I have two more books on the movie that have come out since I wrote mine that I haven’t read yet.  The reason is that I’m currently researching for a new book and Sleepy Hollow intervened.  But back to Summerisle.

The Wicker Man was a movie before its time.  The last of the three famous British films that spawned the sub-genre “folk horror,” it helped launch a new interest in ancient religions.  A friend pointed me to Children of the Stones (there will be a post on it in coming days), which was a British children’s television series with distinct folk horror undertones.  Maybe overtones.  It made me think of Wicker Man again.  And the way that folk horror has taken off in the past decade or two.  I’ve lost track of how many folk horror movies I’ve watched.  While discussing Christopher Lee with a friend lately, I was reminded how he once said that of the many movies he was in, The Wicker Man was the best.  It’s certainly a literate film.  Folk horror often tends to be.  Delving deep into what people (the folk) really believe can dredge up some very interesting possibilities.  I try to use them in my own horror writing.

Just because my book doesn’t explore the folk horror angle doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s not there.  (Sorry for the four-negative disclaimer.)  Devils Advocates at the time was looking for an approach that didn’t foreground folk horror.  Scholars tend to typecast Wicker Man.  I was working on a larger holiday horror project at the time—I may come back to it some day—and was surprised that nobody had approached the film from that angle.  The genre “horror” itself is a bit of a misnomer, and many of the sub-genres aren’t clearly defined.  For many people “horror” equates to “slasher,” but there’s a great deal more out there than that.  The Wicker Man stands witness to that on this somewhat cool May Day decades later.

Hopeful Reading

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Although I prefer independent bookstores, I happened to find myself in a Barnes & Noble between other activities on a recent weekend.  This ended up being good for my spirits, although I didn’t buy anything.  The reason was, perhaps, ageist of me, that I was buoyed up by seeing so many young adults there buying books.  Granted, it was a cold, gray Sunday afternoon, but I read so much about the death of reading that this particular trip gave a bit of balance to all the doomsayers.  There is still a reading public.  And many of them are a good bit younger than yours truly.  I do wish more people my age would spend time in bookstores as well, but the future is with those who know to put down their devices and pick up actual books.

I’ve had more than one academic tell me that they do not assign e-reading for their classes.  One of them was a decade or two younger than me.  The reason?  Students don’t retain well what they read on a screen.  I tend to agree with this.  The context of setting aside time to open a book with no interruptions from texts, emails, or social media, is sacred.  You shut out the world and concentrate.  I try to do this for an hour each day (most days more than an hour) and it has to be done with print books.  I have no great love of electronic “books.”  The experience is sterile.  Devoid of true engagement.  And I’ve even been forced to read ebooks with other people’s highlights left behind.  When I buy a used book I try to make certain it’s an unmarked copy (although some sellers don’t look very carefully).  Why would I want an ebook with somebody else’s notes?

The visit to a bookstore is a restorative one.  In the rare instance where I know the proprietor, it becomes a social visit as well as a financial transaction.  Books are a kind of currency among some of us.  Although I know none of the names of the young people that I saw at Barnes & Noble, I do know something about them.  They enjoy books.  That is one of the most hopeful thoughts I can have.  As long as we manage to survive as a species, there is hope for the future if young people are interested in books.  Reading is a mind-expanding exercise.  Our life together is so much more enriching when we invite others in.  And some of them we meet between the covers of books.

A Sense of Scale

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Most people have trouble imagining very large numbers.  The things we count, in daily life, seldom top the thousands.  To the human mind, a million is an almost impossibly large number to visualize.  This came to mind the other day when looking over a list of bestselling books of all time.  I glanced through one of Guinness’ lists, remarking some titles that I was surprised to find on the high millions list.  What really strikes me, however, is those on the other end of the scale.  Publishers Weekly estimates that four million new books were published in 2025.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth was one of those.  Sales figures I’ve seen suggest it has sold less than a hundred copies.  I’d feel bad, but I’m in very good company.  Many books sell very few copies.  Unlike many that are simply churned out, mine take a lot of time and research to write, and, interestingly, those kinds of books just don’t sell.

I lack a sense of scale.  For example, Frankenstein (which was what I was curious about), sells about 40,000 copies a year.  That doesn’t make it one of the best selling books of all time.  Most authors today dream of selling 40,000 copies.  Successful books often sell about a quarter of that.  Authors need a sense of scale.  The few people who’ve read my Sleepy Hollow book have said good things about it.  It really seems to have caught the attention of AI only.  I advertised it with the Horror Writers’ Association, taught a class on it at the Miskatonic Institute, and contacted bookstores and libraries in Sleepy Hollow itself about the book.  Scale.  

Perhaps I’m odd in that I find books a treasure.  They really don’t appreciate in value until after some kind of apocalypse, or if centuries pass and only one or two survive.  Or, rarely, a first edition of a book that later becomes famous.  Such as Frankenstein, which had an initial printing of only 500 copies.  If you own one of those copies today (I don’t, just for the record), you must be quite well off.  Some of us write because we have ideas that boil over out of our heads and spill onto paper.  We do it although it doesn’t mean more money for us.  But we also do it because we want to share those ideas.  My timing was apparently off with Sleepy Hollow.  I wanted it to be out in time for a movie that was announced some three years or more ago.  I need a sense of the time scale for movies too.

Academic Reading

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There is an art to writing biographies.  In the course of my training myself to write on literary horror, I’ve read a number of them.  Those written by literary scholars tend to veer into literary analysis, derailing the narrative.  Academic writing encourages such things, whereas the reader simply itches with boredom until the author gets back to more interesting things, like who the subject met, or what s/he did.  This is a shame, really, since I’ve read many books that could’ve been made much better by leaving the academese out of it.  Scholars far more brilliant than me have argued this for years.  I find it particularly ironic among English professors.  When they write biographies of literary figures, look out.  Obfuscation being mistaken for erudition is the order of the day.  Why do we teach those who study literary expression to make their own writing so turgid?

I know!  I know!  “If you can do better, you’re welcome to try.”  But I’m only after information.  If I’m reading a biography of a writer I don’t want her or his literary output analyzed.  I want to know about their life.  What made them tick.  Chances are, I can read what they wrote for myself and I don’t need anyone to tell me how to do that.  As an editor, I see a lot of academese.  My face falls when I do.  This stuff is so dull that only a true specialist would appreciate it.  Of course, I grew up in an uneducated family and I valued teachers who were good at explaining things.  There’s plenty I don’t understand (i.e., I can’t do it better myself), and I read to try to comprehend.  It reminds me of that witty academic bumper sticker I see from time to time in university towns: eschew obfuscation.

Is it really so difficult to write well?  I suspect some of the less accomplished biographies I read are in reality revised dissertations.  Dissertations are written for a committee, and rare are those that can be read by general readers with any appreciation.  But then, there are so many interesting people in the world who deserve biographies who’ve never been discovered.  The one who realizes this is often the doctoral student and when they begin to write up their findings, they bury this interesting person again under so much unnecessary verbiage that they continue to remain obscure.  Perhaps there’s a reason I was never really welcomed into the academy.  I am, perhaps, too easy to understand.

Horror History

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The problem with writing about the history of anything is that time keeps unspooling.  Published in 1967, Carlos Clarens’ An Illustrated History of the Horror Film has a certain innocence about it.  As a genre, horror had not been discussed much in book form yet at the time, thus part of the innocence.  Another part, however, derives from the fact that the very next year, 1968, is often considered the year horror “grew up.”  The reason for that is that both Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby were released that year, forever changing the direction horror might go.  This book is a rare glimpse into what film critics thought of horror before it really came into its own.  There are many gems of horror history here and quite a lot of insight comes through.  On the very first page Clarens notes that horror meets some of the same needs as religion does.  At one point he states that horror avoids religious themes.  Then Rosemary’s Baby happened.

Another early insight in this book is that “horror” is a faulty title for the genre.  I’ve been suggesting this, quite independently, for years.  One of the alternatives Clarens mentions is “chiller,” which was common before “horror” took over in the 1930s.  Even today “thriller” and “horror” aren’t easily parsed.  Clarens tends to consider horror as involving the supernatural in some way.  He does discuss Peeping Tom, however, but not Psycho.  Hitchcock makes an entrance in the very last chapter where The Birds is discussed.  Turning back to the supernatural, this has largely been the draw to horror for me.  Something beyond the expected, whether it be vampires in the night or unnaturally enlarged animals that rise from the use of nuclear weapons.  I’ve never really been a fan of slashers; I’ve stopped watching one or two because they don’t really appeal.  Slashers, unless you count Psycho and Peeping Tom, were in the future when Clarens wrote.

This book does a good job with early precursors to horror, going back to George Méliès, and spending long, lingering moments over silent movies.  The chapter on Universal and its role in the development of horror is quite good.  The slipperiness of the label, however, comes with science fiction.  As is well known, America’s interest in the fantastic in cinema tended to slip toward sci-fi in the fifties.  Some of this was also horror, and crossovers are still common.  But at the end of this book, Clarens ends up discussing mostly sci-fi.  There was a big horror revival coming the next year, however, but books of history are caught up in history themselves.

Just Handle It

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It happened again.  A few days ago I loaded my blog post and forgot to click “publish.”  The reason for this is probably silly.  Although I get out of bed between 2 and 4 a.m., I’m afraid that if I post that early other notices will get on top of anything I share and the post will be overlooked.  Well, more overlooked than my posts already are.  So I wait until 6 a.m. to click.  And some days, particularly on weekends, I’ll have the post loaded but I’ll get distracted and will forget.  I discover it the next morning, stare at it in confusion for a while and then think, “I forgot to post this.”  I have this conversation with one of my brothers, near my age, who insists he needs a handler.  You forget to do things.  Most of the time I’m pretty good at remembering—this blog is the center-point of my online existence, and I post every day.  If I don’t forget.

Weekends are very busy.  Almost as busy as work days with their shorted human hours.  And last week was particularly intense.  Two unexpected house repairs that required financing.  Two birthdays.  And grass that loved the high summer weather we had in April.  (Our neighbor is trying to sell his house and I want to try to attract a new neighbor who appreciates those who make an effort.)  As soon as I stepped outside, however, I was overwhelmed.  During the week of summer weather I’d lost the long-term battle I’ve been waging against ivy that claims both fence and garage.  And sapling trees that somehow thrive in the shaded north end of the garage that hardly ever see the sun.  And I’m trying to teach, manually, a vine how to grow up a pergola that receives too much love from carpenter bees.  Why can’t it learn from the ivy just over there?  You get the picture.  (Right now it is just 29 degrees outside.)

By the time I came back inside, I was exhausted and forgot that I hadn’t clicked “publish.”  These days it gets light around six, and on work days I get delayed by jogging.  Still, I know the click before I start work for the day.  Weekends are the danger zone.  I could use a handler.  Or maybe I should just accept the 24/7 reality of the internet and publish as soon as I load the post.  Does it make any difference?  I don’t know.  Please direct all questions to my handler.

Substitutes

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I discovered Mary Roach in a Borders store in Somerville, New Jersey.  Well, it might’ve been Raritan, technically, but it was right off the infamous Somerville Circle.  We were fairly new in town and I was looking for reading material.  I found Spook, her second book.  I enjoyed it so much I went back for her first book.  I introduced my wife to her third book and, starting with book number four, we’ve been reading them together.  (All of her books are at least mentioned on this blog; I rarely follow an author like that.) That brings us to Replaceable You, which published last year.  The subtitle, Adventures in Human Anatomy, gives you an idea of the content.  Roach is a charming science writer.  The two traits don’t often meet.  She peers at things that most of us shy away from, which, in a way, makes her a good potential horror writer.  Instead, she looks at her subjects with humor, often self-deprecating, and a sense of wonder.

Replaceable You isn’t my favorite of her books, but it’s not her fault.  Roach is about four years older than me and she too is facing aging.  This book is about parts of bodies that can be replaced, printed, or engineered.  Some of it is surprising and much of it almost incredible.  The reason that it isn’t my favorite is that it hits pretty close to home.  Two of my immediate family members have chronic health conditions.  (Life, of course, is a chronic health condition.)  I often think about the implications, but reading about them makes me uncomfortable.  As one reviewer once indicated, though, reading Mary Roach on any subject is enjoyable.

We are embodied creatures.  This is one reason that “artificial intelligence” will always retain the emphasis on the first word.  One of the surprising things I learned from this book was that organs/tissues are now starting to be 3-D printed.  Last time I looked, 3-D printing involved plastic, but in some places biological components are being used.  The tech isn’t far enough along to print actual organs yet, but there is incredible work being done.  It’s quite possible, and this is me, not Roach, that people born in a couple of decades (depending on whether we can get Republicans out of the White House, and science funding can be restored) may well be able to have biologically personalized health care that includes new organs made from their own cells.  That gets too close to eternity for my liking.  I enjoy living, but wouldn’t want to do it forever.  I’ll be okay along the way, however, as long as there are Mary Roach books to read.

Intensity

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It was the biggest excuse for breaking up with me.  “You’re too intense.”  I lost track of the number of times college coeds told me that.  At the same time, the same adjective was whispered in awe when applied to professors in class.  You wanted intense professors, but not intense boyfriends.  Was “intense” bad or good?  I don’t deny being intense.  Some of us are just that way.  In personal relationships I’ve often managed to keep it under control.  It was one of the reasons, however, that I was such a good professor.  Students seem to have responded well, even if academia had no permanent home for me.  Thus, dark academia.  Which tends to be intense.  When I throw all my energy at something, it can become intense.  But it’s also true that I’m on the receiving end of it.  My mental mapping, especially in the fallow times, means that I must try to make sense of it all.

Some periods in life are intense.  I’m sure that’s true for everybody.  Or most people.  A concentration of events when time itself seems to have collapsed on top of you and you still have a 9-2-5 for five long days before you can start to deal with the residue.   So far, since the end of November many months ago, I’ve been in an intense zone.  So much is happening that I have trouble keeping up.  Unlike a dating relationship, I can’t beg off with intensity as an excuse.  A big part of it has been the calendar.  Thanksgiving fell late and January with its cold felt like it would last forever.  Both Trump and AI simmered in the background.  And, of course, 9-2-5.

Two major snowstorms were separated by only a few weeks.  As the second was tuning up, a death in the family.  The third in three years.  A novel was finished.  As was a nonfiction draft.  Two orders from Amazon went awry.  Who has time for returns?  Because of the storms, things became double-booked.  Preparations for the 2026 Lehigh Valley Book Festival.  With my expensive books.  I really didn’t think they’d select me as a participant, but was committed.  Or should be.  My wife’s 9-2-5 also hit an intense period.  We had to deal with two major household repairs simultaneously.  An unexpected auto repair.  I checked another website (No Kill Switch) to help define intensity.  What he has to say makes a lot of sense, but the question remains.  Is intensity good or bad?  It does seem to be the opposite of boredom, when you get time to deal with things, after work.  

Crafting Byron

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For a man who lived to be only thirty-six, Lord Byron tends to be featured in very long biographies.  I’ve been curious about him, but maybe not to the tune of 500-plus pages.  I’d seen references to Elbert Hubbard’s Little Journeys to the Homes of English Authors: Lord Byron, and since it was only a handful of pages, and not very expensive, I got a copy.  As a biography it turned out to be exceedingly slim.  And written with a flowery prose.  In fact, you could read this easily in a day.  I did learn about about Lord Byron, but in this instance the author took precedence over the subject.  I knew nothing of Elbert Hubbard.  A free-thinker of the turn of the twentieth century, he was born in Illinois in 1856.  He was a successful traveling salesman but then started a commune called Roycroft outside Buffalo, New York.

The Roycrofters were crafters and artists living together and producing, in some cases influential, artworks.  The community operated from 1895 to 1938.  The buildings, which survive, are now National Historic Landmarks.  Elbert Hubbard was a philosopher and artist, as well as a socialist and anarchist.  It’s not surprising he took a liking to Lord Byron.  One of the crafting supplies at Roycroft was a printing press.  Hubbard published a series of Little Journeys, some sumptuously bound, others with paper covers, and, from experience, uncut pages.  Lord Byron was volume seven, published in 1900.  Roycroft continued for the remainder of Hubbard’s life, and a little beyond.  Hubbard and his second wife died in the sinking of the Lusitania during World War One.  His son kept the community going for another couple of decades.

American history is filled with colorful and creative individuals.  All I knew of Elbert Hubbard was that he wrote a reasonably short treatment of the life of Lord Byron.  Reading it I learned a bit about the other intensely curious and talented writer who’d died just over thirty years before before Hubbard was born.  Byron was then still alive in memory for many.  It turns out that both subject and author lived extraordinary lives.  And each, in their own way, influenced larger society.  And now, having read this small book, I’m inclined to plan a trip to East Aurora, outside Buffalo, to see the settlement of the Roycrofters.  That’s not a bad thing to come from a brief book, not expensive, to read about a poet.

Reclaiming the Past

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It started after Nashotah House.  That event shook me to my very core.  And I was approaching middle age.  I started taking an interest in my childhood.  I learned some uncomfortable truths that probably help explain the way that I am, but more tangibly, losing that job launched me back to both monster movies and the earnest need to collect books that I’d given up when I went to college to “grow up.”  Fortunately (perhaps) the internet had been invented and it was possible to locate used copies from the seventies.  I’ve written many times about the Dark Shadows books that I began collecting shortly after the incident in Delafield.  But there were others.  Many others.  Often it became a matter of identifying and finding the same edition that I’d had as a child.  (Modern reprints complicate this, but with enough patience the exact book editions can be found, and usually no more expensive than  contemporary bookstore prices.

The goal has never been to replace all of my childhood books, but those that evoked a palpable sense of wonder in my young psyche.  This was strange because I was very religious and these books sometimes challenged what my fundamentalist upbringing taught.  Some years back I had to find the exact edition of Erich van Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? that I had.  The curiosity did not extend to several of his other books from the seventies.  I got rid of these because they caused me to question my faith.  Teenagers.  In any case, I also had a compulsion to replace a book of Twilight Zone adaptations.  The cover of that book still sends me back to Rouseville.  Then I had a hankering to reread Logan’s Run.  It’d been reprinted many times, and the one I had as a kid was itself a reprint.  I needed that exact one.

My wife has been very patient with me.  I’m seeking something here.  I’ve always been haunted by the truth and there is a nagging feeling that I had grasped, only by the very tips of my fingers, a little bit of it before college.  Facing higher education (the first in my family to do so), I felt I needed to “put away childish things.”  The library that sustained me through those difficult Rouseville years was scuttled.  There’s a saying about babies and bathwater.  I’m beginning to think there may be something to it.  There were some very dark incidents in my early childhood, before I learned to read.  I think of them often.  And yet, a sense of wonder remains.  Mostly in the escapism of  old, mass market paperbacks from the seventies.

Row Your Boat

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I’ve long wondered about what appear to be coincidences.  Specifically, about movies on the same topic that seem to come out at around the same time.  I saw Gothic about a year after it was released in 1986.  In 1988 two other versions of the Shelley-Godwin-Byron-Polidori-Clairmont meeting came out.  I’ve already written about Haunted Summer.  The third of these films was a Spanish production, Rowing with the Wind.  It is the most poetic of the three.  The dialogue is often poetic and it pulls out several historical details—some of which the other two films leave out.  Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley decide to elope, taking Claire Clairmont with them.  Lord Byron does not wish to see them.  He and John Polidori, his physician are out on a boat.  Boats play a large part in this movie.  Byron, played by Hugh Grant, soon comes to like Shelley.  Polidori’s role is underplayed and he dies by suicide before the party leaves Villa Diodati.

Mary Shelley’s monster, however, follows them.  Back in England it leads both Mary’s sister Fanny and Shelley’s wife Harriet to suicide.  Extending beyond the summer of 1816, the film follows the Shelleys and Clairmont to Italy.  They have their children with them.  When they come to Venice, they once again meet Byron, but Mary’s monster kills William Shelley (their son) and Allegra (Claire’s daughter).  Obviously, death is a major theme, along with boats.  (Historically, all of these people died, but not in such close time, but close enough to be tragic.)  The Shelleys stay with Edward Williams, a friend Percy met in Italy.  The monster then leads to Shelley’s death by drowning.  Byron’s death in Greece somewhat later is narrated by Mary but not shown.

The film is framed with a fictional arctic journey by Mary to pursue her monster.  Interestingly enough, no mention is made of Polidori’s story “The Vampyre.”  There’s not even any suggestion that he set out to write it.  Movies of this meeting often point out how the vampire and Frankenstein became famous because of it.  Rowing with the Wind is an arthouse movie rather than a studio blockbuster.  It isn’t a bad story.  It tries to tap into the sorrows of Mary, and again, historically she did suffer loss.  Her mother died shortly after she was born.  A child died before the first visit to Byron.  Percy’s first wife Harriet and Mary’s stepsister Fanny both died by suicide in 1816.  William died in Italy, as did her third child with Shelley.  Polidori poisoned himself.  Allegra died at five.  Shelley drowned in a storm at sea.  Byron died while trying to fight in Greece.  This film is a fitting tribute.

Confidential Hazing

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Set in a Long Island prep school, among a somewhat secret society called the Players, this is a dark academia tale of murder and discovery.  The Players, usually numbering eight in the senior class at Gold Coast Prep, are down to six.  One of their number was murdered and the one who confessed to that murder has been jailed.  Most of the students are extremely wealthy, but Jill Newman isn’t really rich.  This is what lies behind They Wish They Were Us by Jessica Goodman.  Although technically a young adult novel there are several disturbing elements here, some worthy of Lord of the Flies.  For that we need to dig a bit deeper.  To become a member of the Players, hazing is involved.  Since this isn’t an official program of the school, the hazing is entirely controlled by the seniors who are Players, to initiate their underclassmen into the club.

Some of the hazing is pretty intense, even for an adult reading the novel.  Kids aren’t always good about thinking through the consequences of traumatic activities on other kids.  People tend to be resilient, but at the same time scars heal in different ways.  In the course of one of the hazing tasks, something goes wrong and one of Jill’s friends, her best friend, ends up dead.  Since there’s a lot of drinking and drugs involved, it isn’t always easy to piece together what might’ve happened.  The crisis occurs for Jill when her younger brother joins the Players.  She has to watch him face the hazing, and at the same time comes to have suspicions about what really happened to her best friend.  Things get pretty tense.

As adults we can easily place ourselves, in our minds, back to our teenage years.  This is something that we didn’t appreciate as teens, and even now most teens don’t realize this about adults.  Wisdom, hopefully, comes with age.  In this fictional setting, rich adults are seldom around.  Their kids, with access to nearly unlimited money, can set their own rules.  Even the police treat them differently.  I’m deliberately not saying too much about the story since it would be too easy to give away the ending.  The school officials in the book care more about preserving the reputation of Gold Coast Prep than they do about the welfare of their students, even if this leads to blackmail to maintain its good name.  And this is something that teens will come to understand only once they start to work for a company with its own secrets.