Boo-Boo

1 Comment

After an unfortunate encounter with a paper-cutter in which one of my thumbs didn’t fare so well, I sought a bandage.  This led me on a reverie since the bandage I found was in a box that I’d brought home from my mother’s apartment.  Mom was a practical woman and I’m sure she would’ve approved, although the item was selected in a moment of grief that still hasn’t completely dissipated.  As my wife was binding my wound the thought recurred that my mother wouldn’t be needing these physical assuagements any longer.  Like all of us, if cut she bled.  She’s beyond that now.  A person’s affects linger and contain pieces of their memories.  This particular box was plastic and therefore reusable—which is precisely what Mom did.  She taught me how to bandage myself and I’ve used that knowledge many times over the decades.  It’s something I don’t need YouTube to figure out.  Time is a gift.

When writing about recent times, I recently learned new vocabulary regarding decades.  For example, the first two decades when I was culturally aware were the seventies and eighties.  Together they’re known as the xennial period, named, presumably, after “generation X.”  (I’m a very late boomer, as well as a late bloomer.)  I found that fascinating.  Then I was reading something that made reference to the “noughties.”  This delightful word is the British term for “aughts” or “aughties”—the years between ’00 and ’09 of any given century.  We hear plenty about the “twenties,” “thirties,” and so on, so I became curious about the correct term for the second decade of a century.  Either “tens” or “teens” is acceptable, but it seems that in formal writing this should be transcribed by numbers. I guess teen ages are always difficult.

Our divisions of time demonstrate our preoccupation with both mortality and round numbers.  More and more people are living the entire way through a century, from aughties through nineties.  For most of us, however, we can, if things go well, use our birth decade as a rough guide.  I’m not likely to make it through the fifties, but it isn’t impossible.  If I do I guess I’ll need to upgrade my WordPress account because my daily posts will have used up my allotted memory by then.  In the meantime, I do need to buy some new bandages for the time in between.  When I do I’ll put them in a simple plastic box, and I will remember the gift of time I shared with my mother.

A Bookseller’s Son

Leave a comment

Be kind.  One of the best reasons, apart from innate rightness, is that we don’t know the burdens other people carry.  Yes, some will tell us and others will not, but one thing is certain: we all bear scars.  I met Andrew Laties because of the Easton Book Festival that he organized.  Andy is half-owner of Book and Puppet Company, an independent bookstore in that town.  A colleague of mine from Lafayette College introduced us back in 2019.  Whenever I go to Easton I stop in the store and pick something up.  Andy has kindly slotted me into each annual Book Festival, except last year, because of a burden I happened to be carrying.  I recently finished his book, co-authored with his son Samuel, Son of Rebel Bookseller: A Very Large Homework Assignment.  Andy had revealed one of his burdens before I read it, and I appreciated the slight cushioning of the shock.

Samuel is a posthumous co-author.  I have had friends—too many—who have lost children.  It is a devastating blow.  I’d casually chatted with Andy for five years without realizing he had this to bear.  This book is an unflinching stare at the unfairness of life.  You get a good idea of what Sam must’ve been like, through his writing and his father’s description.  His brilliance is evident, even as we learn of his mental illness.  The two often go together, and even contemporary successful authors, such as John Green, have  revealed their mental struggles to the world.  There are many great writers, like Edgar Allan Poe, who clearly had some issues.  The stigma must disappear.  Our culture would be so very poverty-bound without it.

Son of Rebel Bookseller is available on Bookshop.org.  Or, if you’re in Easton you can stop into the shop.  The title makes reference to Andy’s previous book, Rebel Bookseller, which I mentioned here a couple years back.  This, however, is a much more personal story.  An anguish screaming to be released.  Something that I’ve picked up on during editorial board meetings at work is that books by authors with a compelling personal story have something special about them.  They may not end up published by the Big Five, and they may really find only a local readership.  That doesn’t mean, however, that they can’t have an impact.  The vast majority of books have limited readerships, and some of them are far more important than those that line bestseller lists.  And this one reminds me once again the importance of kindness, and striving to be as humane as a human can be.

Fear of Spiders

Leave a comment

To anticipate, “mygale” is French for “tarantula.”  I learned about Mygale, also published under its English translation, or else Serpent’s Tail, from a Goodreads review.  It’s increasingly difficult to find good, short books.  I knew little about it other than it is a “thriller” by Thierry Jonquet.  The book contains one of the most cleverly drawn plots I’ve encountered in some time.  I also believe it could slip into the horror genre.  I’m reluctant to say much because the pieces are revealed so intricately that to summarize would be to ruin the effect.  I will say that if you’ve seen The Skin I Live in you know the basic idea already.

I will opine that this story demonstrates that a book need not be excessively long to be a good novel.  Some of us appreciate the economy of language that illustrates Pascal’s famous quote, “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”  My first relatively descent novel was about 230,000 words, or, in other words, well over 400 pages.  The publishers I half-heartedly queried said it was too long.  When writing short stories I quickly learned that many journals only take them if they’re under 3,000 words, some only under 2,000.  As a result, I began writing short.  That’s not exactly true.  I write the story as I want to tell it, then I cut it down.  Again and again.  Short seems to be the fashion in the internet age.  Ironically, the books on my too read shelf all seem to be quite long.  That’s why I decided to give Mygale a try.

I’m glad I did.  The story may not be for the most squeamish, but it’s certainly not blood and gore.  It’s a little confusing at first, but it comes to make sense.  And the ending is somewhat satisfying.  It’s not happy by any means, but it’s well told.  Some classify it as science fiction, but there’s nothing too impossible about it.  It’s set in France around the 1980s.  No space ships or ray guns to be seen.  Genres can be tricky in the face of creativity, but the final act, if you will, reveals this to have been horror all along.  Well, I hope I’ve been able to give a sense of this book without giving any spoilers.  Talking around a subject comes with years of classroom experience, I guess.  I will say the spider isn’t literal.

Clergy Problems

1 Comment

I believe Revival is the most recently written Stephen King novel I’ve read.  It was pretty good—it certainly scores high on the religion and horror scale, although it takes quite a while to get to the horror part.  Part of the problem for me is that I liked Charles Daniel Jacobs.  I tended to relate more to him than to Jamie Morton (the narrator/protagonist).  Perhaps this was because, like Jacobs, I studied to be a Methodist minister.  And like him, came to have a rather different view of what is really going on in the world.  He’s clearly King’s villain, however.  Or “fifth business” as he’s termed in the novel.  The secret lightning he seeks turns out to be a kind of MacGuffin.  I was curious to know more about it.  The novel, as is typical, has several subplots but the main one is how Jamie and Charlie face what’s after death in a tragic climax.

Charlie starts out as a Methodist preacher.  When his wife and son are tragically killed, he becomes a huckster who actually has tapped into an electrical power that can heal people.  It often, however, leaves bad aftereffects.  Jamie, who knew him as a kid, is cured by him from a heroin addiction.  Their paths continue to cross over the next fifty years or so—this is a longitudinal story—as Jamie comes more and more to distrust his childhood hero.  Charlie can use electricity to perform wonders and it make him rich.  He wants more, however.  He wants to see beyond death to assure himself that his wife and son are in a better place.  It seems to me that that motivation isn’t a bad one.  The only way he seems a villain is that he doesn’t really care for other people.

The story is well told but it doesn’t have the same “classic” feel as some of King’s earlier novels.  He well understands, however, that horror and religion belong together.  I haven’t read all of his novels—not by a long shot—but clergy aren’t rare and when they’re present they’re implicated in the horrors, or in this case, responsible for them.  These are important insights, as others have also noticed.  Revival is one of those books that requires some reflection.  It certainly feels like something written by a man facing the limitations of the aging process.  And not necessarily at peace with it.  Ministers sometimes do go bad—they’re only human—but they can also lead to real change.  I, for one, am interested to hear what King has to say about it.

A Footnote

Leave a comment

I was recently compelled to use footnotes.  I don’t mean the clever asides that capable writers sometimes utilize to spice up subjects by making points off topic.  No, I mean the kind with author, date, title, city, publisher, page number.  I deal with footnotes daily—it’s an occupational hazard.  As a recovering academic I’m trying to get away from using footnotes on everything from grocery lists to daily meeting reminders.  Cite your sources!  That’s the kind of rhetoric that’s pounded into the heads of bright young people, often preventing them from learning to think for themselves.  At this stage of my life a footnote is more often trying to find someone who agrees with what I’ve observed for myself.  Hmm, did anyone ever say that before?  If so, where?

My concern goes down to the level of cities.  Yes, cities.  Standard format requires you cite the city in which a book was published.  This ridiculous pre-internet artifact had a purpose originally, but I have worked for two international publishers and I can tell you two related, and perhaps contradictory points: employees can tell which office a book is from: New York or London.  And unless you work for said publisher there is almost no way for you to know.  So if a publisher has offices in a dozen cities, you need to write a dozen of them in your footnote.  Does this sound like a rational thing to do?  Don’t get me wrong—it’s important, very important to cite the publisher.  But it’s not like there are a ton of presses around with the exact same name.

There’s a move among some reference experts (refperts, if you like) to do away with the city in footnotes.  It’s a reasonable guess that Cambridge University Press is pretty widely recognized.  And that Cambridge is located in Cambridge.  Or course, there’s a Cambridge in Massachusetts, and I hear there’s a university there as well.  In any case, if you don’t know where a publisher’s located, there’s a remarkable invention called the internet where you can look it up!  Pedanticism comes naturally to academics, I suppose.  Had I not been one I would probably have had no reason to write such an anal post as this.  Still, there’s a larger point: when is one able simply to assert what one knows?  I frankly don’t remember the page on which I read most facts I point out in my writing.  Often I notice them myself and recognize them as facts when there’s good, solid evidence.  Of course, I really should footnote that.  If I can remember in which city the appropriately named Random House is located.

How do you footnote this?

Drac Ops

Leave a comment

Just don’t ask, okay?  Like most things in my life, I discovered Dr. McNinja way past when it was popular.  Who knows?  Maybe it’s still popular.  I’m not the best judge of that kind of thing.  I’ve read a few graphic novels in recent years, generally when someone lends them to me, or when a movie I like is based on them.  Now, the thing about Dr. McNinja is that it started out as a webcomic.  People younger and more with it than me have shown me other people younger and more with it than me making a good living web cartooning.  They don’t have 9-2-5s and they live, going by their videos, in nicer houses than I do.  So when someone suggested I look up Dr. McNinja I found an old-looking website saying it was no longer online.  The author had published it in book form.

Even though I work in publishing, I find it difficult to tell if a book is out of print.  We live in that strange purgatory where IP (intellectual property) can be kept on life support until copyright expires without ever really having to print more books when they run out of stock.  They’re never truly out of print.  I’m guessing that’s what happened when on Amazon you see that only used copies are available.  So which McNinja to select?  The one with a cover that riffs off Plan 9 from Outer Space, of course.  That movie keeps coming back into my life.  It’s one of Fox Mulder’s favorites on the X-Files.  In any case, I was hardly prepared for the amazingly creative imagination that Christopher Hastings has.  If you start with Operation Dracula! From Outer Space you’re entering the story in media res, as the academics say.

I confess to liking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when it first came out.  These days the exoticism of eastern Asia is frowned upon by academics, but it’s still there in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, so why not?  In case you’re wondering, there is a reason behind all this.  I can’t tell you at the moment, however.  I can say that if you’re looking for a wild, wild story with lots of unexpected twists and turns, Dr. McNinja will not fail to win approbation.  I’m dithering on whether to go back and start from the beginning—these print volumes are becoming collectors’ items, it seems.  And no matter how much fun it is, reading graphic novels always feels like cheating to me.

One Another

Leave a comment

Like much of the other information that I’ve managed to pick up in these six decades of wandering the planet, my knowledge of horror is self-taught.  In truth, I’m an eclectic reader—my various, periodic obsessions generally stem from books I’m writing.  For my unwinding time, however, horror stories seem to do the trick.  Nobody I know in person reads horror, so my recommendations are generally the results of other books I read.  That’s how I found Thomas Tryon’s The Other.  Although I’d only learned of it recently, it has been a classic in the field for many decades.  After having read it, I can see why.  And unlike many fiction works with an afterword, this edition has one worth reading.  Maybe you’re unfamiliar with the novel?  If so, in brief, it’s about twins.  It’s about twins.

Identical twins.  Holland and Niles Perry were born over the cusp of midnight, giving them different birthdays while still being the same age.  Unlike stereotypical identical twins, however, Holland is evil and Niles is good.  As the novel unfolds it contains some twists that, if like me you haven’t heard the story, really do work.  They live in a small town in Connecticut with their widowed mother, older sister and brother-in-law, maternal grandmother, and a couple of domestics.  An aunt and uncle, along with a cousin, settle in.  (It’s a large house.)  Family dynamics are strange and the locals grow increasingly impatient with Holland’s antics.  The Perry family is, however, long established and well respected.

Doesn’t sound very scary, does it?  That’s the genius of the work.  It’s a slow burn but when the fuse reaches the powder it leaves you trembling.  Nobody taught me how to find and read horror.  I’m still pretty much a novice and it seems that novels these days tend to have weight problems.  I was glad to find The Other wasn’t excessively long.  It shows that literary horror is possible as well.  Like Shirley Jackson, Tryon received acclaim for his work.  (And like Jackson, his novel doesn’t balloon out to over four hundred pages—something of a rarity these days.)  I guess I’m just a bit surprised it took so long for me to find out about this one.  I don’t want to give any spoilers because this is a beautifully constructed novel and knowing what happens might deter other readers.  I wouldn’t want to do such a disservice to a book I wish I’d known about when I was younger.

In Praise of Libraries

2 Comments

It felt like a rare, and momentous moment in a young writer’s life.  While working at Routledge I happened to notice that the New York Public Library did not have a copy of A Reassessment of Asherah in their catalogue.  The first edition was published in Germany, so I wasn’t surprised that it was not there.  Gorgias Press, however, had published a second edition and few people were citing it.  I contacted the office on Fifth Avenue and offered to donate a copy.  A librarian contacted me and we set up a time.  I went between the stone lions (Patience and Fortitude by name), met my contact, and handed my work over without ceremony.  He seemed genuinely glad to have the book and I felt like I’d made a small contribution to a big city.

When I need a pick-me-up I look at WorldCat.  WorldCat is a conglomeration of library catalogues where you can find just about any book, including obscure ones, such as mine.  I recently hopped on to see how many libraries had Holy Horror.  (The answer is 90.)  While there I decided to check my others.  Nightmares with the Bible registered 68.  These numbers aren’t bad considering neither publisher markets the books and they’re priced too high.  The Wicker Man is still new and is only in 42.  What surprised me was when I looked back.  A Reassessment of Asherah is in 305 (total for both editions, one being in the New York Public Library).  What really surprised me was Weathering the Psalms, which 324 libraries claim.  Since it’s priced under $30, maybe there is something to the idea people will buy books if they can afford them.  As an editor I know that sales of monograph over 300 are considered successful.  Two of my books qualify.

Publishers don’t share sales information.  I can look up those at my current publisher, and I can check some on Nielsen’s BookScan (now called NDP BookScan), the service publishers use to get an idea of other publishers’ sales.  That’s the same Nielsen that does television ratings, by the way.  Searching my own titles there is too depressing, so I stick to library catalogues.  Libraries are feel-good places.  (I couldn’t help but notice that Princeton has all my books—thank you, Tigers!  The seminary has my first two, but the university has my books on horror films.)  I can just feel all the ideas in the air.  And I’m humbled to have contributed to them in a way, no matter how small.

Sequel Pondering

Leave a comment

Of course I’m working on another book.  I can’t say what it is at the moment, but one of the projects I’ve long been contemplating is a kind of sequel to Holy Horror.  The problem is that if the first book didn’t sell very well (the premise is perhaps too academic), a sequel couldn’t be expected to do any better.  I’m still working on sloughing that academy skin.  But I keep watching what we insist on calling “horror” and the more I do, the more I find the Bible in it.  Others have taken up the gauntlet—mostly academics who have jobs that encourage such behavior—of connecting horror and religion.  The Bible’s role, while a subset of the larger field, has its own particular parameters.  In one of my notebooks I have a list of 23 movies to add to my analysis.  I know that there is a twenty-fourth, but it’s only streaming on an exclusive service and still costs a bit too much for something that doesn’t come with a plastic case.

In any case, Holy Horror just scratched the surface.  One of the factors I’ve mentioned before is that there is no database of the Bible’s appearances in film.  It would be an extensive list altogether, and a substantial number of horror films would be on it.  In general, it seems, people really aren’t too interested or intrigued by this fact.  I certainly am.  Our society is a curious mix of sweet and salty.  We want to think we’re too sophisticated for religion, but religion undergirds just about everything we do.  Otherwise it’s pretty difficult to explain how the Bible keeps showing up in horror.  Usually as a mysterious artifact.

I recently saw myself referred to as a biblical scholar.  There’s no doubt that I taught biblical studies for many years.  I even wrote a book interpreting one aspect of the Good Book.  My degree, and my interest, however, has always been historical.  I follow this history of ideas.  Although many people don’t understand my current horror fascination, it’s clear this is another jog down a trail of history.  How did we get to the point that a totemic (the scholarly phrase is “iconic”) Bible became a stand-in for God in movies?  I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to write Holy Sequel, although, if my profession ever permitted it, I’d certainly have the interest in doing so.  There’s a lot to be learned from such explorations.  That’s true even if the books containing the information only appear on a few dusty library shelves.

Playing Authors

Leave a comment

My family looked at me funnily, but not for the first time.  With a holiday gift card I’d ordered a book on the card game Authors that I’d blogged about recently.  You see, there’s not a ton of information on it on the web, and it was a formative influence in my life and I wanted to know more.  I suppose it’s typical for someone raised as a fundamentalist not to immediately think of evolution, but Authors has evolved over the years.  And quite a lot.  For one thing, you can’t copyright an idea and other game-producing companies made their own versions of the original game.  And what I’d assumed had been the original (since it was the one I had as a child) was only one of many versions.  The book even documents the Bible Authors game I’d mentioned.  My real interests included that age-old question—did it ever include Edgar Allan Poe?

Today is Poe’s birthday.  It’s fair to say that he’s one of the most recognizable authors in the world now.  He also had a tough time being accepted.  This book, which I haven’t read through—it’s more of a reference book, in any case—points out that Poe was indeed included in more than one edition of the game.  He isn’t one of the strongly recurring authors (which include several of whom I’d never heard).  This is the fate of writers.  Reading about Dickens lately, I came to realize that even after several best-selling novels (at numbers that would make any modern publisher gloat), he was effectively living off debt until well into his forties.  And he died at 58.  He was famous, but until his final years not what you could consider wealthy.  

Another realization dawned.  Writing for a wider readership means getting away from academic publishers.  I had an agent interested in my current book project for a couple of months before he decided it wasn’t for him.  I’ve also come to see that several authors I respect, and whose books are priced below $20, have published with presses that aren’t part of the Big Five.  And they earn some profit from their efforts (unlike academic publishing).  In other words, becoming an author of either fiction or non, often involves book sense that I’ve been slow to gain.  At the Easton Book Festival a few years back I met several local writers who were putting additions onto their houses with the royalties they earned.  I’d published three books at that point and was turning my pockets inside out hoping for forgotten spare change.  Authors is a game.  Those who are included are those who figured out how it’s played.

Life Learning

Leave a comment

One thing a recovering academic must learn is that the vast majority of people don’t really care what drives the academy.  They aren’t too worried about larger issues as systemic racism, or various groups’ feelings of unequal treatment.  In fact, most people are just looking to get by, keeping depression and hopelessness at bay.  There are few avenues to break out of the middle class, and even fewer to move up from the lower.  And going to school hasn’t been presented to most people as an opportunity, but as a chore that must be done until work can be secured and they can pursue surviving on their own.  This truth comes to me time and again when I’m reminded that deep thinking doesn’t sell books (not unless you’ve already established a reputation) and that if you try to bring the concerns of the academy to the public, they’ll look the other way.

The real trick, it seems to me, is educating people without them knowing they’re being taught.  People don’t like being talked down to.  Understandably.  When I listen to people without college educations, I learn a ton.  This is my matrix as well—it’s where I grew up.  Higher education changes the way you think, but it shouldn’t prevent you from communicating with those who are the vast majority of people in the world.  Anything can seem to be normal when it happens long enough, even living in ivory towers and discussing things almost nobody else cares about.  You see, I’m a realist.  And I still have a lot to learn.

When I write my books, my style is accessible but my topics are academic.  It has taken me years to realize this simple fact.  Anyone can read my books from Holy Horror on and understand them, but why would they want to?  The questions raised are those of the academy, and those in the academy know you by your specialization (ancient West Asian religions, historically declined, thank you).  A glance at how my Academia.edu page is viewed tells the story.  Nobody who visits there is interested in horror films or this blog.  They want the resource that can’t be renewed—my work on ancient history of religions.  I’ve moved to horror because I find lots of very intelligent people here.  Like those with whom I grew up, they are generally ignored by the academy.  They are also very accepting of outsiders.  You have to unlearn being an academic.  And it might just lead somewhere productive.

Truthful Fiction

1 Comment

Octavia E. Butler is a name I’ve known for some time.  Various people, most of whom I don’t know, had recommended her books, particularly Parable of the Talents.  It turns out to have been one of the scariest novels I’ve ever read.  It’s not horror—it’s science fiction.  It’s scary because it’s just too plausible.  The first inkling I had that something was amiss was when I read how Andrew Steele Jarret ran for president to “make America great again.”  Jarret pretends to be Christian to get the vote and America suffers terribly when he’s elected.  I flipped back to the copyright page.  1998.  I read on anyway.  It’s not too often you find a sci-fi book about someone starting a religion.  And named after a biblical story, as well.  I was doing fine until Jarret’s supporters destroyed Olamina’s peaceful community and enslaved the survivors.

It’s all just too plausible.  Of course, there’s a lot going on here.  Butler was an African-American whose ancestors had been slaves.  The religions presented in the book are a bit too black-and-white, but the followers of Christian America behave like many followers of Trump.  Butler saw this two decades before it happened.  The slavery part of the book was difficult to read.  There was so much pathos here, so much deep memory.  Although Olamina is a flawed character, she is a visionary with the best interest of the human race at heart.  This dystopia is perhaps a little too close to reality.  Those who recommend the book say that it’s hopeful, so I kept on reading.  And yes, there is a hopeful ending.  Getting to it left me floored.

Religion defines us.  In the growing materialism—false, as anyone who feels deeply knows—the idea that a story could be built around religion seems unlikely.  Butler has done that, and done it in spades.  I was surprised to learn that she’d studied at the Clarion Workshop, not far from where I grew up.  Being from an uneducated family I never heard of the Workshop until I was an adult.  And besides, it left Clarion, Pennsylvania for Michigan before I even got to high school.  Still, it gives me a sense of connection with a woman who saw more than many did.  Although Parable of the Sower is earlier, I’m not sure that I have it in me to pick it up.  At least not right away.  I’m still trembling a bit from Butler’s second parable.

Ninth Day of

Leave a comment

I read Les Standiford’s The Man Who Invented Christmas back in 2017 and learned a lot from it then.  Some of what I read on the bus, however, has faded a bit with time and I was curious to read it again in the light of the reading I’ve done about Washington Irving.  Irving was a bit older than Charles Dickens and had, it seems, given Dickens the idea of writing, first, a sketch book (Sketches by Boz), and second, writing about Christmas.  From what I’ve read about Irving, he had a cautious liking of Dickens but wasn’t terribly impressed.  Standiford does note that it was Irving who suggested an American tour to Dickens (it didn’t turn out well) but he (Standiford) indicates that Irving was a staunch fan of his English colleague.  Were I able to spare the time, I would follow footnotes and read letters to see if I could get to the heart of the matter.  Of course, I’ve become much more interested in the history of modern literature in recent years.

It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Dickens in English literature.  As Standiford points out, he helped to invent novel publication as we know it.  Although he took up the gauntlet of international copyright (something Irving had earlier understood as important), he became internationally famous partially through pirated works.  We still use the phrase “What the Dickens” to express surprise. (It turns out that the expression predates Charles—now that’s influence!)  As Standiford notes, however, we’ve passed the era when a single author can have such great influence.  Dickens was a singular talent and read by vast numbers of his compatriots and also grew a respectable readership in the United States.  He also had a great deal of influence on how we celebrate Christmas.  I was this time looking for Irving lurking in the shadows.  And I found him.  Dickens was an enthusiastic fan of Irving.

Standiford brings Irving into the discussion often, but also perpetuates the association of “It was a dark and stormy night” with Edward Bulwer-Lytton (who did use it) without mentioning that the phrase originated with Washington Irving.  One gets the sense that Irving was completely eclipsed by the work of his young fan, Charles Dickens.  Standiford mentions Irving quite a lot in this little book, but it’s about Dickens and not his American colleague, of course.  And Standiford also notes that crediting Dickens with the “invention” of Christmas is overstatement.  The story is nevertheless fascinating.  To me this second reading underscored the importance of Irving for the Christmas holidays, and also how terribly difficult it is to make a living as a writer.  I’m glad I came back to it, even when life otherwise threatens to be too busy for re-readings.

Reading 2023

Leave a comment

As has become my tradition, I’ll end the year reflecting on the books I’ve read.  For a variety of reasons this is the first time in nine years that I haven’t cleared seventy books.  (I ended up one shy.)  But looking back over what I read, I may see some logic behind this.  Many of the books were academic, and specifically, academic in fields outside my formal training.  That also means they generally didn’t make it to my list of favorites.  2023 was also unusual in that it wasn’t until about late spring that I started to read books I really enjoyed.  The first on my list of memorable titles is Andi Marquette’s The Secret of Sleepy Hollow.  This was followed by a couple other fiction titles, Grady Hendrix’s Final Girl Support Group and Gina Chung’s Sea Change.  Those ended up being my favorite three fiction titles of the year.

For nonfiction, I finally read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, memorable, if terrifying.  Also along the lines of history, I found Lesley Pratt Bannatyne’s two books Halloween and Halloween Nation, to be particularly good.  Mark Dawidziak’s Mystery of Mysteries may well have been my favorite historically-oriented book of the year.  Donna Kornhaber’s Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction was also quite well done.  I always enjoy books on horror films, and two on The Exorcist were noteworthy: Nat Segaloff’s The Exorcist Legacy and The Exorcist Effect by Joseph P. Laycock and Eric Harrelson.  Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies by Matthew Strohl, which I read a bit earlier in the year was also quite good.  By far the most helpful book in a personally troubling year was The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy.

In years past I’ve generally had more commendable books on my list.  I did, however, finish the last three Dark Shadow’s novels by Marylin Ross, reaching the bucket-list item of having read the entire series.  I also found Jessica Verday’s three-volume series strangely memorable, although written for young adults (found here, here, and here).  While the number of books I really enjoyed wasn’t as high as in some other years, these highlights make me optimistic regarding 2024.  I used to follow the Modern Mrs. Darcy’s reading challenge guidelines, until they stopped being published, and now I find myself left to my own devices, for the most part.  Much of my reading is driven by research, and I suppose I should also mention that my own fifth book was published in 2023 as well.  I don’t expect it’ll be anybody’s favorite, but it is nevertheless an honor to be part of the conversation.

Bears Repeating

Leave a comment

I read Robert C. Wilson’s Crooked Tree before I began this blog, I guess.  I remembered it being better than it seemed this time around, but it works as a horror novel.  In fact, the first third or so was quite unnerving, although I’d read it before.  After that the plot tends to require greater suspension of belief.  But then again, American Indian horror has come a long way since then.  Wilson, according to the limited information about him online, isn’t an Indian.  These days publishers are very concerned with appropriation—something that wasn’t an issue back in 1980.  And these days the work of Stephen Graham Jones, who is both a Blackfoot and an excellent horror writer, raises the bar considerably.  But Wilson is honest about the situation in his laying out of the novel.

Axel Michelson is a lawyer and he’s working to preserve the fictional Crooked Tree State Forest and prevent development.  Many of his colleagues and neighbors in Michigan are Indians, and so is his wife.  Axel’s efforts are hampered by a sudden onslaught of black bear attacks.  The description of the first three or four are scary enough to dissuade you from ever going camping again.  Axel’s assistant is an Ottawa and and he and his family suspect a bearwalk is involved.  This is the reason I read the novel the first time.  As a Native American folkloric monster, the bearwalk is difficult to uncover.  There are a couple more novels—one of them hard to find—that feature the tales, and there’s a university press book on folklore that has some accounts.  Not much more is out there that I can locate.

A bearwalk is a kind of shape-shifter.  A spirit that can control bears, in this case.  Axel becomes the white savior who uncovers the ancient ritual to stop the bearwalk, which has taken control of his wife—his main motivation for stopping it—while the Indians can’t figure out what to do about it.  They do tell him about the ritual, but mourning the loss of their culture, they fear it’s gone forever.  Meanwhile the bear attacks continue but once the shock of the first few attacks has worn off, they don’t scare so much.  There’s also a lot of supernatural involved, mostly drawn from native traditions.  It seems clear that, like Axel, Wilson did quite a bit of research on American Indian folklore.  He treats the Ottawa culture with respect and wrote a novel that might’ve had more influence than it seems. It’s well worth the read the first time around.