Little Gems

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On a recent diversion to a curio shop we like, I found that one of the “Dark Shadows” paperbacks they had was one I hadn’t read.  Dark Shadows had, of course, spurred a pretty amazing franchise for its day.  It’d sunk its fangs into many young people who would not have otherwise been inclined towards soap operas.  I’ve written several times about the spin-off books by Marilyn Ross.  That series encompasses much of my childhood.  This particular book was a knock-off with the same branding titled The Dark Shadows Book of Vampires and Werewolves.  Now, to be fair, the asking price was about the same as a trade paperback price today—a little less, even—and the collection included, I saw at a glance, Polidori’s “The Vampyre.”  So now it sits on my shelf next to the other Dark Shadows books.  Apart from the gimmick of listing the book as edited by Barnabas and Quentin Collins, it is actually a nice period piece.

In addition to Polidori, eight stories I’d never read.  Two of them make the claim of being non-fiction, and a third maybe.  The tales, which favor vampires over werewolves, also include what are some little gems.  One is a story by M. R. James (“Count Magnus”).  Other noteworthy members are “Wolves Don’t Cry” by Bruce Elliott and “The Vampire Nemesis” by “Dolly.”  “For the Blood is the Life,” by F. Marion Crawford, is also good.  In other words, the collection was better than I suspected it would be.  I’d not read any of these before, so they were all new to me.  I was particularly intrigued by “Dolly.”  Apparently the author of The Vampire Nemesis and Other Weird Tales of the China Coast has remained anonymous since its 1905 publication.  The book has been rediscovered in modern times, and I’m now curious about it.

Although I like to think myself immune, I am sometimes susceptible to branding.  For whatever reason, that olive-green oval-cutout cover design, when spotted in the wild, makes me ecstatic.  My childhood wasn’t ideal, and I remember when I started to find these books used.  It was a very challenging phase in my younger years.  I knew even then that these cheap paperbacks would take me away from my troubles for a while.  And they would transport me back to an even more troubling period of my childhood when I would watch the show after school with my brothers.  A visit to the curio shop from time to time may be just what the doctor prescribes.

Cool Book Festival

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So yesterday I was at the Lehigh Valley Book Festival.  (It occurs to me know that I should perhaps post such notices in advance, but I know few people in the area where I live.)  I was there displaying my books.  I have participated in the Easton Book Festival for at least four years now, but I had only recently learned about this event held in Bethlehem.  The weather was clear, but cold for an outdoor event that involves a lot of sitting—it put me in mind of having to put on gym shorts and tee-shirts to go outside one November in college to have the coach lecture us about football, with no moving or actual playing involved.  It turned out to be an endurance test.  Not quite of the Shackleton magnitude, but I am sensitive to cold and it was struggling to reach 40, and this on the 28th of March.  At least there was a cool breeze.

Several lovely people stopped to talk and showed some interest in my work.  I’m grateful to all of them.  As an author you often wonder if you really are alone in your interests.  Since my table was next to a run of three tables of children’s books—when those authors decided on an unauthorized move of their tables into the sun (we were on the shaded side of the building), they did not invite me to join them—I was a bit self-conscious.  Parents hurried their kids past my modest display.  I took a quick swing through the other stands and I think mine was the only one for adults.  Many people glanced and frowned as they walked by, but several people got it.  I know there are local horror fans out there, but I have trouble finding them.

The Lehigh Valley Book Festival isn’t huge and several people just happened upon it, asking why we were there.  It was held at the main branch of the library and it is fairly centrally located in town.  Also, there was a cherry blossom festival taking place on the other side of the library.  I couldn’t be certain but it seemed that many more people were headed for that.  And honestly, I’ve lived in this area for going on eight years and I just learned about the festival last fall.  And I’m a book guy.  Not too connected locally, I’ll admit.  There was enough interest that I might consider it again next year (if selected again).  Especially if the temperatures are back towards the seasonal norm.

Red Thread

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Theseus would never have survived the labyrinth without the help of Ariadne.  After escaping the minotaur, the two eloped and, according to some versions of the myth, Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the isle of Naxos.  This story has been told and retold countless times, and even served as a source of inspiration for the movie Inception.  Back when I was thrashing about dark academia, trying to make a living as an adjunct professor at Rutgers and Montclair State, I taught classical mythology at the latter.  These were in the days of PowerPoint lectures, and I knew a few things about doing them: slides shouldn’t be overly wordy, and they should have images.  People are visual learners.  During my three semesters at Montclair, I developed my PowerPoints peppered with images found online.  I recently remembered one of Ariadne on Naxos, and I really wanted to find it.

My Oshkosh slides were burned onto CDs, but now tech has moved beyond that and I have no readers for burned CDs.  My hopes of finding the name of the artist in the credits on the slide have not been fulfilled.  I turned to the all-wise internet.  Image search after image search brings up nothing close to that particular picture.  I thought it was a painting, but it might’ve been a pastel or colored pencil drawing (it was from a relatively contemporary artist).  I simply can’t find it.  I remember the subject, and the image, but neither its formal title nor its artist’s name.  The information exists, but on unreadable discs.  On those same discs rest the sermons I preached at Nashotah House.  I sometimes think of them and would like to look at them again, to refresh my memory.  I can’t, however, access them, although they are on discs in the closet just behind my back.

Not the image I was looking for (image: Bacchus and Ariadne. Guido Reni).

We let technology drive our lives.  It comes with costs.  I recently talked to a young person who was buying a nice journal and some writing implements to use in it.  They told me that although they’d grown up with computers, and the internet, they wanted the very human experience of writing by hand.  My default for taking notes is still by hand.  If only I had done that when adjunct teaching…. I remember well how frantic those days were.  I was teaching up to eleven classes in one year (a typical professor has three or four), driving between two campuses.  Eating in my car.  I didn’t really have much of a chance to note individual artworks in a notebook, figuring I’d be pining to remember them many years later.  I could use Ariadne to help me out of this labyrinth.  I know right where she is, but the isle of Naxos is inaccessible.

Bounce Back

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I confess to being a graphomaniac.  I write a lot.  I’ve done this pretty much most of my life, and so I tend to have backlogs, both fiction and nonfiction.  This is necessary background for this bit of friendly publishing advice—avoid bounce-backs.  What I mean by this is if an editor tells you “no,” don’t come back a week or two later with another project.  It speaks of desperation when an author does that (and believe me, I know about desperation!).  Publishing is a slow industry (which is one reason that AI is so dangerous).  Authors who can quickly pull together a new proposal, let alone a manuscript, in only a couple of weeks may as well wave a red flag at an editor.  Give it some time.  Give it some thought.  There are plenty of publishers out there, and targeting one for repeat requests isn’t likely to achieve success.

Photo by Samuel-Elias Nadler on Unsplash

We all know the rebound relationship.  You’ve just been dumped and you need to find someone to fill that hole in your life.  The person selected too quickly is a rebound, or bounce-back.  In my experience, such relationships don’t end well, if they ever get started.  It’s a life lesson we sometimes don’t think to apply to that other passion many experience—the desire to be published.  Many of us have publishers that we want to be associated with.  Mine is W. W. Norton.  My very first publishing job interview was with Norton.  They flew me from Milwaukee to New York City for an interview.  I didn’t get the job, but it was like being let go by the girl (or guy) you just can’t have.  The bounce-back, in my life, was Gorgias Press.  And you can piece the rest of the story together from this blog.

In any case, if you’re inclined to learn from the voice of experience, don’t keep pushing after you’ve been told “no.”  Please understand that I know how this desire feels.  If you want to be published, you need to be professional about it.  And sometimes you need to take a strategic approach to reach a more lofty goal.  I started writing my first attempted novel at about sixteen.  It was never finished.  The first one I completed was in 1988.  I had to take a few years off to write a dissertation, then a second book (during which time I began a novel that I only recently finished).  Please note, that span of time was over twenty years.  Publishing is a slow business, and the bounce-back is a sure way to gain a reputation you don’t want to have.

Still Haunted

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Having watched Haunted Summer, I was curious about the origin of the screenplay.  I’d read that the movie was based on a screen treatment by Anne Edwards, a screenwriter and novelist, but that it had been rejected.  Edwards then transformed her screenplay into a novel that was published in 1972, over a decade before the film came out.  It’s sometimes easy to forget that movies spend quite a long time in development.  For example, about four or five years ago it was announced that Lindsey Beer was going to write and direct a new Sleepy Hollow movie.  That was the proximate cause for my writing Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  I wrote the book, found a publisher and then watched as sales only bumped along the bottom and still no Beer film appeared.  Timing isn’t always my strong suit.  In any case, I decided that it would be good to read Edwards’ book as a follow up to the film.

Marketed as a gothic novel, it came out in my beloved mass market paperback form.  It’s now not easy to find.  The story is well researched, but fictionalized, of course.  The five Regency Era creatives—Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont—had gathered near Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816 (the “haunted summer”).  Famously, the idea for Frankenstein came out of ghost stories they told each other to pass the time during a rainy summer.  Polidori’s story, “The Vampyre,” also traces its origins back to that night.  Edwards’ novel focuses on Mary, making her the narrator.  Since it is a novel some fictional elements are added to what happened that summer.  To me, the most obvious was moving the ghost stories from Villa Diodati to Castle Chillon.  This allows Edwards to introduce Ianthe, a tragic keeper of the castle.

The story focuses on Mary as a strong woman very much devoted to Percy Shelley and standing up to Lord Byron.  Her lack of regard for Polidori was a little jarring since, it seems, historically, she felt sorry for him.  In any case, other than the changes Edwards introduces, the plot largely follows what happened during that summer.  The climax of the book is Mary’s telling of the  basic story of Frankenstein in Chillon Castle.  I found the Author’s Note of particular interest; novelists are also researchers, even if not always treated as such.  The historical incident of this meeting drives my interest, and this largely overlooked novel is a piece of a larger puzzle.

Logan Again

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A couple of friends, both younger (ahem), liked my recent post on Logan’s Run.  As did someone my post on Goodreads.  I was pleased to see that.  I was alive, but not yet literate, when the book was originally published.  So, predictably, I sat down to watch the movie again.  My wife had to work that weekend and I had last seen it in 2011.  This time, the book fresh in my mind, I was able to notice just how much the movie diverges.  For practical reasons, the movie has people live to 30 instead of 21.  The issue was finding enough young actors (this was the seventies, after all) who could carry off the story.  Michael York was over thirty, but he could pass.  The book is a romp across the country, and it would be unbelievable in the film if Peter Ustinov were able to walk from Washington DC to Los Angeles.  

The movie has Logan dedicated to Jessica, but in the novel they have to grow to love each other.  In the film, Logan is sent on a secret mission to find Sanctuary, which, it turns out, doesn’t exist.  The novel has Ballard (transformed into “the old man” in cinematic form) disguised as Francis, Logan’s fellow Sandman, from pretty much the beginning.  On the screen, Francis remains a dedicated Sandman to the end.  Gone are the zoo animals in Washington, the hovercraft chases, and the little children who save Jessica’s life.  Granted, a lot in the novel would be very difficult to transfer to celluloid, and changes had to be made.  The whole episode of the religion of “Carrousel” isn’t in the book, but was added to give the movie coherence.  I did find it odd that they included the scene with Box, which really doesn’t fit the film.  

In any case, it warms my heart that some of my younger friends have fond memories of this movie.  It’s definitely a period piece.  Fitting for the seventies, there’s kind of an atheistic undertone to it.  Sanctuary only exists in people’s minds.  Nobody is “renewed” (born again).  But not all is doom and gloom.  The old man quotes from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, by T. S. Eliot.  (That fact is the only way that I could get my daughter to watch the film.)  And it does have an optimistic ending.  Logan and Jessica decide they want to stay together—marriage was ancient history in their world.  And the young people, my greatest hope for the future, came to see the old man was fascinating.  Something that gives this particular writer a true sense of hope.

Entitlement

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I’ve been guilty of this myself, so the first stone is being cast straight up into the air over my own head.  Academic authors misunderstand how to title a book.  The fact is, these days, that libraries often make their choice whether or not to buy based on the main title—no time for subtitles!  Trade books tend to sell with flashy, if somewhat ambiguous titles.  A well-selected title is truly a thing of beauty.  This tends not to work for academic books.  The librarian wants to know, at a glance, what the book is about.  After being in the editing biz for about seventeen years now, I can honestly say that the vast majority of authors just don’t get this.  They propose catchy, even clever titles that say nothing concerning what the book is about.  Many of them are titles of several other published books.  What’s called for is a descriptive moniker.

Again, I’ve made this mistake myself, but many of the guild have a difficult time distinguishing between the books they write and those that you find in bookstores (trade books).  This is understandable enough when you’ve put years of your life into writing the tome and you want to get some notice for having done so.  Getting notice is a trick all its own these days, but if you’re willing to settle for even average sales, attend to the title.  The book business itself has changed.  For example, back when I was writing my first book (which did have a descriptive title), academic books sales with established publishers sold at least around 300 copies, pretty much guaranteed.  So much so that some presses would print 300 copies and when they sold out the book was put “out of stock indefinitely.”  (You don’t put books “out of print” since authors often have legal recourse to request the rights back.)

That “at least 300” level has now shrunk to under 100.  One reason is there is far too much being published these days.  Publish or perish has come home to roost.  Libraries, which tend to struggle, have to be selective.  And picking a book with a chipper but non-descriptive title is not likely to happen.  So you cleverly title a book, say, Nightmares with the Bible, and it sells fewer than 100 copies.  (In my defense, I understood that it was likely to be made paperback, given the target readership for the series.)  Lesson learned.  Trade titles need to be left to trade books.  And let’s be honest; if your book is a research book written for other researchers, library sales are generally your only hope.

Vengeance Is Hers

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A Lesson in Vengeance, by Victoria Lee,  is a novel with some twists that I’ll try to conceal.  It is a kind of young adult horror-themed dark academia novel.  I really enjoyed it although there are a few improbable events.  That’s the way of fiction with an unreliable narrator.  Felicity Morrow, a girl from a wealthy Boston family, is enrolled at Dalloway School.  Dalloway is a girl’s prep school in upstate New York.  Felicity had to take some time off, during which she was institutionalized, after the death of her best friend, and lover, Alex.  Now that she’s back at school she feels the ghost of her friend coming back for vengeance.  She lives in Godwin House, which only has space for five.  It’s also part of the story of the Dalloway five, girls accused as witches when the school was founded, who all died there.

A new girl is starting at Dalloway this year.  Ellis Haley has already written a published novel and is working on a second.  She lives in Alex’s old room.  In spite of their rocky start, Ellis and Felicity become friends.  Then more than friends.  Meanwhile, they’re both working on their senior projects but Ellis wants to form a fictional coven and replay the way the Dalloway five died, for her novel.  Things grow tense as Felicity begins to remember more and more about what happened to Alex.  Then a murder takes place.  I won’t say more about the plot.  The last several chapters are ones where putting down the book is a real struggle.  You want to know who did it.  And since Felicity is the narrator, you gather that she must survive.  But this isn’t without danger.

The horror elements involve ghosts and witches.  Since Felicity is revealed to be an unreliable narrator it’s unclear whether the ghosts are real or not.  Most of the events are revealed to have had naturalistic answers, but one remains as either a real ghostly visitation or a delusion on the part of Felicity.  I read this book as part of my ongoing fascination with dark academia, and I’m glad I did.  It’s quite a well-told story.  Enough information is held back and revealed in moments of insight as the story unfolds that I was kept guessing until very near the end.  And the final realization only hits at the very end.  This is a good entry into dark academia for anyone wondering where to start, at least in my opinion.

Creepy Cryptids

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J. W. Ocker and I have a few things in common.  We’re both Edgar Allan Poe fans.  We both have an interest in the odd.  And we like to visit places where something strange is commemorated.  It gives me hope that there are likely more such people out there.  I read Ocker’s Poe-Land a few months back and knew I’d be coming back for more.  The United States of Cryptids caught my eye.  This book is for fun, but with a serious subtext—our world is a weird place.  Dividing the country into four regions: Northeast, South, Midwest, and West, Ocker traveled across the country looking for stories, or better yet, memorial statues and/or plaques, of cryptids.  Defined broadly.  These cryptids can be sightings of something unusual, folklore, or, in some cases, confessed hoaxes.  He makes the point repeatedly that cryptids make for great tourism opportunities.  There are people like me that will seek out such places, given half the opportunity.

Quirk Books, which has been unfortunately experiencing some difficulties of late, functions as a sort of home to oddities.  And cryptids fall into that category.  Ocker does point out, on a serious note, that any animal reported to have been encountered prior to scientific description was a cryptid.  Perhaps the most famous case is the gorilla, which many non-Africans believed to be mythic until one was actually found.  Or the coelacanth.  In any case, discussing cryptozoology is a dicey thing to do.  If you take it too seriously you’ll be ousted from polite society and if you handle it with too much humor, true believers will shun you.  Ocker manages to find the middle ground here with a book that is fun to read and yet gives you ideas of places to visit or concepts to explore.

Reading Ocker’s books makes me think that maybe I take things a bit too seriously from time to time.  That’s one reason that it’s important for me to read authors like him.  I’m plagued with a need to know.  Not everybody is, of course.  I do tend to take things with an amount of earnestness that others sometimes find too intense.  It’s probably my childhood that’s to blame.  That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a lighthearted treatment of unknown animals.  And I do try to keep a somewhat open, if critical mind.  There’s a line, sometimes fine, between having fun with and making fun of.  Ocker enjoys the odd enough to know which side of that line to walk.  Or drive.  Now, where did I leave my car keys?

Googling Books

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I admit to Googling my own books from time to time.  (I know, I know!  You’ll go blind if you don’t stop doing that!)  Since I haven’t yet seen any royalties (or reviews) yet for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, I searched for it.  Google now has a page topper, generated by AI, I suspect, that goes across specific searches such as for a person who’s got some internet presence, or a book.  Not all books get such a banner, however; yes, I’ve looked.  My Sleepy Hollow book, however, pulled up a page topper.  It was still a work in progress, however.  By the way, I did this search with results not personalized; Google knows people like to see themselves topping a page.  So here’s what I saw:

Okay, so they got a number of things right.  This is the correct book and the description seems correct.  The publication date is right and I did indeed write Weathering the Psalms (still my best selling book).  But what’s going on with Wal-Mart?  They have the title correct but that picture?  Although I watch a lot of movies, I’m pretty sure this one has nothing to do with Sleepy Hollow.  What I tried to do in that book was find every extant movie on the story and watch them.  It is possible I missed some (the internet isn’t built to give that kind of comprehensive information, which is why human authors are still necessary).  Besides, AI has hallucinations, and this seems to be one of them right here.  It couldn’t find a copy of the cover of my book (which appears on the left-hand side, but apparently the right…) so it filled something else in instead.

None of my other books get their own banner/topper on Google, except A Reassessment of Asherah.  That isn’t my best selling book, but it is my most consulted.  That banner, however, also has mistaken information.  It says it was originally published in 2007.  The original date as actually 1993.  Web-scraping may not help with that.  The book, as originally published, didn’t have an ebook, and the information about it largely comes from the second edition, published by Gorgias Press.  But then, only humans are concerned with such things.  There are no sultry women staring out of one of the topper windows, so the images appear to be correct.  That’s one of the funny things about being a human author—you want the information about your books to be right.  Of course, I should probably cut down on the Googling of my own books.  It’s unseemly.

The Black Monk

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Back at Nashotah House the local ghost was called “the Black Monk.”  A plausible origin story circulated with the name; a student broke through the ice on the lake one winter night and met his demise.  Some even claimed to know which was his gravestone in the cemetery on campus.  I really didn’t give much thought to any of this until I learned that Anton Chekhov wrote a short story titled “The Black Monk.”  Now, I don’t know if some literate Nashotah student was referencing Chekhov or if the color was just fitting for a cassocked community of quasi-monks.  In either case, I decided to read the story.  The Russian tale involves a man named Kovrin.  He holds a Master of Arts degree, in the way that degrees in Russian stories bring the holder a great deal of respect.  He was raised by a wealthy farmer who owns extensive orchards, and, needing some time to relax from his city schedule, goes to stay with his former guardian and his daughter.  While there he relates the tale of the Black Monk, who was seen all around the world, and maybe even in space, from where he walked in Arabia or Syria, a thousand years ago.  It was rumored that he would return a millennium later, and, as it turns out, Kovrin sees him.

G.K. Savitsky’s illustration “The Black Monk,” public domain via Wikimedia

Kovrin is a successful, bright, and cheerful scholar.  He begins to see the phantom and have conversations with him.  The monk assures him that he (Kovrin) is extraordinary, a genius even.  That other people, satisfied with mediocrity, melt into the herd.  True genius, however, is often perceived by others as madness.  They have long conversations.  Kovrin marries the farmer’s daughter but their relationship is troubled.  One night she awakes to find him speaking to an empty chair—nobody else sees the Black Monk.  Convinced that he is mentally ill, she and her father put him in a doctor’s care and his new regime of lifestyle changes prevents further visits of the Monk.  Kovrin, however, grows sullen and dull.  He realizes that his genius is gone and that he has become ordinary.  His marriage falls apart and when he goes on a vacation to the Crimea, he once again sees the Black Monk.  His feelings of being extraordinary begin to return, but he dies that night.  His corpse wears a smile.

This tale had me thinking.  It’s not clear that Kovrin was really mad but no doubt he’d been quite intelligent.  He was given a university chair and received the praise of others.  It was the cure that destroyed him.  It robbed him of his enjoyment of life and also led to the downfall of the farm since his father-in-law died and his daughter, now separated from Kovrin, writes to curse him for his insanity.  The farmer and his daughter aren’t always sympathetic characters, but until his dying day (literally) Kovrin had lost all that made his life meaningful.  The Black Monk admits he’s an apparition, but Kovrin was clearly brilliant while he met and conversed with him.  I’m not sure of any parallels with Nashotah House, but it has a character in common with Chekhov’s story.

On the Run

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I come down on the side of book.  Usually.  In the book or movie first debate.  I have to confess, however, that I learned about Logan’s Run because of the movie.  It was quite impressionable on a teenage me, thinking that in such a world I’d have less than ten years left.  I bought the movie tie-in book and read it.  It was very different from the film.  I only remembered one scene from the book and so, nostalgia smothering me, I had to read it again.  The book was actually published in 1967, when I was quite young.  The movie came out in 1976, as did the tie-in novel.  The story has been replicated since then but the basic idea is that in the future overpopulation leads to the radical decision that everyone dies after turning twenty-one.  This is a world of the young.  Politics are handled by computer, and Sandmen, like Logan, hunt down and kill runners—those who try to escape their mandatory death.

There are a number of things to say about this.  One is that the two authors, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, had distinguished writing credits.  Another is that this is good sixties sci-fi, but belles lettres less so.  I still enjoyed reading it again.  It had been literally fifty years.  When this was written a population of six billion was considered unsustainable.  We’re now at over eight billion and it does seem as if we’ve tipped some kind of balance.  Another thing that stood out, one of the dangers of future-projecting sci-fi, is that newspapers are still a thing in the future.  They’re hardly a thing now.  They do make predictions for 2000, so maybe they should’ve pushed things out a bit further before committing.

In real life, the “developed” world actually has a problem of too many of us seniors and falling birth rates.  Nobody to take care of us when we no longer can.  This seems to be true in the United States, Japan, and China, at least.  Hopefully we won’t go to Logan’s solution.  So, as the book title suggests, Logan decides to run.  There’s a fair bit of religion in here.  He runs to find Sanctuary but, until very close to the end, intends to kill Ballard, the guy who helps runners escape.  There’s lots of adventure, several changing scenes, and a fair bit of testosterone.  Still, the story isn’t a bad one.  It’s old enough (ironically) to be a classic.  And yes, it’s still in print.  Part of my childhood has been restored.

Gothic Dreams

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I love this book.  Roger Luckhurst understands that the gateway to horror is the gothic.  In Gothic: An Illustrated History he offers a world-wide, luxuriantly illustrated tour of both classic and contemporary gothic.  As a category, it’s difficult to diagram precisely.  Luckhurst does it through a series of themes: architecture and also form, various landscape settings, how the four cardinal directions appear in the gothic imagination, and, of course, monsters.  Each of these themes is divided into four or five chapters.  Not wanting to rush, I limited myself to a chapter a day, but I’m sure I’ll be dipping back in again.  This is the kind of book that both gives you ideas of new books to read and movies to watch, and affirms the choices that you’ve already made in those regards.  In other words, this is a place horror fans would naturally feel at home.

The gothic entered my life at a young age, partially because I was living it (unwittingly) but mostly because it appealed to me.  It made me feel good watching monster movies and Dark Shadows with my brothers, and later, reading gothic novels.  There’s definitely a nostalgia to it.  I loved gothic architecture from the moment I first saw it.  Not that Franklin had soaring cathedrals, but there were some very nice Victorian houses in town.  And when I saw cathedrals I felt a strange stab of joy.  Although I sublimated my love of gothic while working on my academic credentials, I couldn’t stay away from ruined castles and abbeys  in Scotland.  Although I was trying to be a scholar, I knew what secretly inspired me was made of coal-blackened stone.  Even if I didn’t say it aloud, the monsters of my imagination lurked there.

The narrative accompanying the wealth of images in this book probes what makes gothic tick.  It would be impossible to cover it all in one tome, of course.  My current fascination is with dark academia (an aspect perhaps too new to be in Luckhurst).  Dark academia’s draw is that it revels in the gothic, placing it in educational settings.  But it can occur anywhere, as Luckhurst clearly shows.  Anywhere that there might be shadows or reflections.  Anywhere that experiences nightfall and autumn.  Anywhere people must face their fears.  While my usual avocations always please me, when I see the gothic addressed directly it takes my breath away.  No doubt, mine has been a strange life.  One in which, even before I reached my first decade, I found the gothic vital and necessary to an odd kind of happiness. This book brings it clearly into focus.

Dark Dreams

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I’ve been pondering the role of religion in dark academia.  While not a major element, it’s certainly present in Ashley Winstead’s In My Dreams I Hold a Knife.  There are plenty of plot twists, and I’ll try to avoid giving away whodunit, at least ultimately.  The basic idea is that a group of seven students, the “East House Seven,” band together at Duquette University, a near-Ivy League school in North Carolina.  They get into some college hijinks, but things turn dark when one of them (Heather) is murdered their senior year.  Jessica Miller, one of the seven, has become a corporate climber, despite her family background, and ten years later she goes to Homecoming to show off her accomplishments.  But things don’t work out as planned.  Heather’s younger brother, who works at Duquette, has been doing some detective work and uses Homecoming to confront those who remain about the murder.

The seven (which actually involves an eighth student) pretty much date among themselves.  Some of them, including Heather, are quite wealthy, but not all.  Jessica isn’t among the affluent, and another of the seven, Coop, ends up dealing drugs to make money on the side.  Heather’s boyfriend was suspected in the murder, but had to be released for lack of evidence, and he decides not to attend Homecoming.  Those present for the event are confronted by Heather’s brother and the story is told as flashbacks from the Homecoming to events that took place during the college years of the seven.  As I say, I won’t reveal who did it, but each of the remaining seven is suspected until the reveal comes near the end.

For me, these kinds of stories are a little difficult to follow because of the number of active players.  Jessica reveals herself to be an unreliable narrator, and although the story felt long to me, it takes quite a bit of space to get to know all the characters well enough to understand their motivations.  Two of them were raised religious, which is what ties this theme into the novel.  The wealthy students aren’t exactly the kinds of people to emulate, and those raised religious end up being the good ones at the end, although they do participate in Greek life with its parties and other activities that college encourages.  (Sorry about the long sentence.)  Overall, this is a good story, but it’s hard to give too much sympathy to the group as they do have shifting alliances and are mostly power-hungry.  Yet, isn’t that like life itself?  It is dark academia. 

The Power of Yes

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In going back over my fiction writing, I had a realization.  Both the first novel I tried seriously to get published (still not) and the first short story I submitted to a journal were accepted the first place I submitted.  That perhaps seemingly insignificant fact is quite important.  Like most, or at least many, writers, I’m a great self-doubter.  This probably comes from not knowing many other people personally and having a Calvinistic-level assessment of my own work.  Affirmation is rare in my experience.  Having a publisher say, “Yes, we like this” early on in my attempts to publish fiction was a tremendous boost and gave me the courage to try again.  It didn’t take long for the rejections to start rolling in, but I knew that someone believed in me.  Belief is far more important than most people think.  Worlds can be built on it.

The publisher of my debut novel decided to back out of the contract when the acquiring editor left.  I know, different editor, different game.  But this was under contract.  Thirteen years later it remains unpublished, not for lack of trying.  I began re-revising it in recent times since I’ve found a potential publisher and reading it I could see what might’ve frightened off others.  Still, I stand by it.  The book was written in a style very different from most of my subsequent fiction.  Characters speak their minds instead of being beat down by the system.  Readers of my academic work would be shocked.  That’s one reason that I use a pseudonym.  I sometimes wonder what I’ll do if the novel ever does get published.  It’s difficult to promote and keep your identity secret.

The point is that we never know what good we might do when we encourage someone who underestimates themself.  This may seem an odd thing to say when so many arrogant individuals command the world stage these days.  There are many people, however, who might accomplish great things if someone only gives them a little encouragement.  I think of this constantly in my work as well as my private life.  Is all this person needs simply some uplift?  Publishing can be a harsh world.  You put yourself out there and people like to start taking pot shots at you.  I’ve received much criticism over the years, and this has been primarily for nonfiction publishing.  The reviews some fiction writers receive, whether on Amazon, Goodreads, or even in print, can be unkind.  Some of the critique may be deserved, but why not offer it up with a word of motivation rather than Schadenfreude?  It can make a huge difference.