Late Shift

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M. L. Rio is best known for If We Were Villains, a book I have on my shelf but haven’t read yet.  She’s one of those rare PhDs who can write, and her punchy, irreverent style has a way of drawing you in.  Graveyard Shift is actually a novella (a cynic would say a way to get you to pay a full novel price on a piece a bit too short to qualify), so it’s a quick read.  It’s a little difficult to classify, genre-wise.  The copyright page suggests thriller, which means not-quite-horror, but with elements of it.  Taking place over one night (and just over 100 pages), its the story of how a college student journalist and her friends crack the case of a mysterious shallow grave they discover one night at their usual hangout, behind an abandoned church, Saint Anthony the Anchorite.  Edie, the journalist, has to find a story to headline the next day’s edition, and the grave provides it.

The story involves mushrooms and rats, sleep deprivation, and lots of smoking.  Still, it’s a well-crafted tale that holds your interest.  Of course, I noticed the centrality of the church to the story.  It’s so much a part of things that the disparate group of friends identify themselves as Anchorites.  An anchorite is essentially a hermit—a monk who prefers not to live communally (cenobites, a name taken up by the Hellraiser franchise, are monks in community).  Of course, the friends aren’t monks, just young people in a college town who like to be out at night, and maybe solve mysteries.  The church is both a focal point and a kind of vector in this world where unusual activities take place after dark.  It shouldn’t be a spoiler to say the friends solve the mystery and begin to help address one another’s problems.

I like brief books.  I don’t mind moderately long novels—when they start getting over 400 pages I get a bit anxious.  I have to admit that Goodreads has made me conscious of how many books I read in a year.  And since I like to blog about books, it also helps to finish them in a timely way.  Besides, escapism is especially important at the moment.  If you like stories about college kids, under-employed professors, bartenders and others who manage to eke out a living before family and mortgage change everything in your life, you’ll probably like this one.  It’s not really a horror story, but it’ll keep you turning pages, which is what books of any size are meant to do.

Cuckoo’s Roost

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John Wyndham is someone I discovered through movies.  Often considered a science-fiction writer, his works cross over into horror, particularly on the silver screen.  Many years ago I read Day of the Triffids and, having seen Village of the Damned, wanted to read The Midwich Cuckoos.  It was a pretty long wait.  I kept thinking I might find a copy in a used bookstore, but it never happened.  When I saw a reprint edition I ordered it with some Christmas money.  There are some horror and sci-fi elements to the story, but there’s also a bit of thriller, as it’s called now, thrown in.  The book is quite philosophical because of the character Gordon Zellaby, a Midwich resident who keeps thinking about what is happening in terms that don’t match the expectations of other, more prosaic thinkers.  In case you’re not familiar:

Midwich becomes unapproachable for a period because an alien ship (the sci-fi part) has covered it.  Everyone in the village is asleep for a couple of days.  When they awake, generally no worse for wear, they soon discover that all the women of childbearing years are pregnant.  They all give birth about the same time to children that look eerily alike and have bright golden eyes.  The officials know this has happened but adopt a wait-and-see attitude.  Meanwhile, the locals get on with things but they discover these new children develop about twice as quickly as humans do and they can control people with their minds.  They also have collective minds so that their brainpower is quite above that of Homo sapiens.  Zellaby makes the connection with cuckoos—birds that lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and after they hatch shove the other chicks out of the nest.  Indeed, this is a story about what if cuckoos were humanoid aliens who tried the same thing with people.  Told with a British stiff upper lip.

The story slowly unfolds and gets scary as it grows.  I saw the movie quite a few years ago and the details were lost on me, so I was learning as I read.  I suspect that it differs from the book quite a bit.  Perhaps it’s the Britishisms that make this story less of a horror tale.  There’s a kind of jocularity to the style, at least for a good bit of it.  The serious issues of how governments and individuals interact is raised and discussed to a fair extent.  Even though the book is fairly short, there’s a lot going on here.  But now I need to watch the movie again.

Therapy with Books

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I’ve been doing this for years and just found out there’s a name for it.  Bibliotherapy is a treatment method that uses reading to deal with anxiety.  It is closely related to writing therapy, which I also use.  Both have been self-moderated, in my case, and both have been part of my way of coping for decades.  I was actually surprised to learn that these are valid methods of treatment that some therapists use.  I knew about journaling (I suppose blogging counts), but the larger picture was never in focus.  We live in stressful times.  We went through a very stressful four years about, let’s see, eight years ago.  This time I’m intentionally using bibliotherapy.  Reading a book (eyes off the screen, please!) is a way of entering another reality for a while.  Already this year I’ve stepped up my reading, as much as work will allow.  (And now, proofs.)

Writing is therapeutic as well.  Both reading and writing engage your mind.  And can remind you that there are other things to life besides headlines.  I’ve been writing a lot of fiction lately.  That doesn’t mean I’ve been publishing a lot of it—that part’s still very difficult for me—but writers do it because that’s what writers do.  And it makes me feel better.  More balanced.  One of the truly difficult things in my life is when I’m on a roll, particularly with fiction, then I have to stop for work.  The whiplash is almost too much some days.  I realize that you can’t make a living out of pouring your soul into words, unless you’re very lucky.  And even then I suppose it might soon start to feel like work.  Maybe some day I’ll find out, but until then reading and writing will see me through.

I know I’m not alone in this.  There are other people out there who spend as much time as possible between the pages and/or with pen in hand.  There’s nothing like it.  These therapies can change your mood.  Give you hope.  Make you feel complete.  And this can happen whether something you’ve written gets published or not.  I admit to having seen therapists from time to time; I probably should do it more.  None of them, however, have suggested bibliotherapy.  It’s something I stumbled onto myself.  That’s probably no surprise.  I bumble my way through life most of the time.  We all know, I suspect, when our brains are firing properly, what makes us feel better.  The shelves that surround me most of every day certainly know.  And there is a name for it.

Cloistered

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Free will.  I’ll go on the record as a proponent.  Any kind of determinism gives me the willies.  At times, however, it does feel as if we’re merely pawns.  Katy Hays deals with the concept of fate, and the occult world of tarot, in The Cloisters.  The writing is quite compelling and the story moves along at a good pace.  It follows Ann, a graduate from eastern Washington who wants to get away from the town where her father was killed.  She accepts the offer of a summer program at the Met in New York City, but because of a mix-up ends up at the Cloisters instead.  I’ve never actually been to the Cloisters, but this novel makes me want to go.  At this museum of Medieval and Renaissance art, Ann works with Rachel, another assistant, Leo, a gardener, and the curator, Patrick.

Rachel has been at the Cloisters for some time and Patrick, her boss, has become enamored of tarot decks and their history.  He’s been seeking perhaps the oldest complete deck known and has come to believe that perhaps the cards do have the ability to tell the future.  Ann befriends Rachel.  The two begin to make discoveries, particularly Ann, but Rachel, who is independently wealthy, manipulates her, taking advantage of the fact that Ann never wants to return home.  Then Patrick is poisoned.  I won’t reveal whodunnit here, but the last half of the book has several twists that make you reassess whatever conclusions you may have drawn.  It’s a fascinating story, well told.

This novel is another example of dark academia.  Much of it takes place in the library of the Cloisters and Patrick holds a Ph.D. while Rachel is a graduate student.  Ann is about to enter a doctoral program.  All of them have some fairly dark secrets in their lives.  And all of them are driven.  The story has elements of social commentary as well, particularly concerning how life in New York City will drive people to extremes when the competition makes this necessary to survive.  Although three of the four commit crimes, they are all likable people.  Three of them are academics as well.  All four are quite intelligent.  I was drawn into this tale from the start and even as the darkness was revealed couldn’t bring myself to dislike any of the characters.  Some novels have antiheroes that you just can’t feel for.  The Cloisters moves in the other direction, and it does make you wonder just how much choice you actually have and how much is left to fate.

Learning Bunnies

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Although it was released during the first Trump administration, Jojo Rabbit was written before he was sharp bit of dust in the GOP’s eye.  Still, in the second debacle, it seemed like a good time to watch it.  Its message is appropriate for any time, but especially now.  Jojo is a ten-year-old boy who’s an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth.  So enthusiastic that he has Hitler as his imaginary friend.  He buys the party line without even thinking (he who has ears to hear, let him hear).  Jews are evil, according to the rhetoric.  Monsters even.  Jojo’s mother tries to help her son, missing his father, understand that love is the better way.  Then Jojo discovers something.  A girl his deceased sister’s age has been living in the walls of his sister’s room.  He quickly deduces that she is a Jew.  Were it not for her threats to implicate him and his mother, he would turn her in.

An unusual coming of age story, we see Jojo do something rare—he matures.  Getting to know Elsa he can’t reconcile what he sees with what he was taught.  She’s not evil.  She has no horns.  She’s not rich.  She fell in love with a guy and wants the same thing anyone wants.  The conflict faces Jojo every day as he decides he must learn about Jews to report this intelligence to the authorities.  The authorities, however, know Germany is losing the war.  It’s only a matter of days.  When Hitler dies by suicide, Jojo fully realizes that he has been simply following along instead of following the evidence.  His mother was hanged for not being loyal to the party and his father, he learns, was also helping the Jews.  In a moment of singular hope, Jojo grows up.

Movies can teach lessons.  Some are widely enough viewed to make a major impact on society.  Can any of us imagine a world without Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker?  In this era when sensible people seem to have forgotten that fascism is evil in its nature, films like Jojo Rabbit are important.  Thinking is not a crime.  Learning is not a crime.  Even if they’re being touted that way by the wealthy in order to protect their privilege.  We watched the movie for entertainment on a Friday night, but I received an education instead.  I wonder just when the message of love fell out of Christianity.  But then, I think it becomes clear when you think about particular movies and how we’ve come to be where we are.

and Seek

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I’m afraid there may be spoilers—but not for the ending—below.  Discussing this story will be difficult without giving some things away.  Kiersten White’s Hide has given us an imaginative world with masterful misdirection.  Fourteen people a bit down on their luck, and strangers to each other, are offered an opportunity to win $50,000.  They have to hide in an abandoned amusement park for a week where two of them will be caught each day and the last person remaining wins.  The novel mostly follows Mack, a woman whose father killed her family while she survived by hiding.  Not only does she have survivor’s guilt, but she’s been homeless and the shelter director thinks she’ll have a chance at winning the prize.  There is a lot of social commentary here, as well as a monster.  Okay, spoilers below.

The minotaur is a most useful monster.  The backstory here isn’t in Greece (well, the deep backstory is, but that is only played out partially here) but in Asterion.  No state is given for the town, and the contestants can’t be given that information.  They’re locked in the park, with supplies, but very little information.  Then the contest starts.  After a couple of days Mack and a couple others begin to suspect that something’s wrong.  Those who get caught while they’re hiding leave personal effects behind, and since they all need the money that seems unlikely.  Then their host stops coming, leaving the bewildered contestants on their own.  Mack and those she’s befriended come to understand that being “out” is really being eaten by the minotaur.  Well, they don’t realize it’s the minotaur.  The one who does gets eaten before he can tell.

In any case, this is a tense horror story based on a classic tale.  There is, of course, a rationale for the murderous behavior in a modern setting.  White keeps you waiting quite a while to learn what it is, and there are plenty of places where I thought I’d figured out how it’d end only to be proven wrong.  And she gives believable character sketches and explores the kinds of motivations that drive different people who find themselves needing an income.  (One of the characters was raised in a religious cult—bonus!)  Those who are poor aren’t always at fault, but those who are wealthy will do anything to preserve their excess.  We see that playing out in daily life, even as it’s being explored in fiction.  The minotaur isn’t always what we think it is.  And the more you think about its insidious origin story provided here, the scarier it becomes.

Deep Backlist

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It’s kind of a personal archaeology.  Exploring the terrain of one’s own mind, that is.  Back in January, I mentioned my “deep backlist,” which is actually my “to read” list stored on an online book vendor site.  When it comes time to buy (or provide a gift request for) a new book, this list is my first stop.  I started the list in 2010.  Since I’m cautious about book buying (believe it or not), there are many items on that list that never got purchased.  And if I go back far enough, I have to confess to myself, there are books I really don’t want to read anymore.  At least not at this time.  That list, however, is a snapshot of my interests at the time an item was entered.  I don’t delete things from it unless I actually get them.  Life has taught me that when interests fade it’s usually not permanent.

Sometimes I think I should be more intentional about my reading.  When I was writing Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, I was adding lots of books related to the subject.  Many of them came off the list as I purchased and read them, but not all.  Although I’m currently involved in my next writing project or two, I don’t remove the remaining Sleepy Hollow-inspired books because I may well, depending on length of life, come back to them.  The same is true of all my books from Holy Horror on.  Depending on where I am on that list, I can tell what book I was working on, and not a few that never got finished.  An accountant once told me that if you are writing books to earn money (as paltry as those earnings may be), the books you buy may be tax write-offs as business expenses.  Such is the mind of capitalism.

My wishlist is a personal archaeology of some poignancy.  It took me many years after being shunted out of academia (no matter how dark) before I found employment stable enough to allow for me to start writing books again.  Weathering the Psalms was started around 1997 or 1998.  It was published in 2014.  Even after that it took a couple years to realize that I could write Holy Horror.  And there are other books that, if I’m honest with myself, I know I won’t have time to write or finish.  I find scrolling through my “deep backlist” an inspiring but melancholy exercise.  We all have layers, and strangely enough, even the books that we wanted to read, or just remember, can speak volumes about who we are.

First Tower

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In these days when daring to think feels dangerous, R. F. Kuang’s Babel: An Arcane History feels dangerous to read.  Good literature is like that, even if it’s uncomfortable to read as a “white” man.  A fantasy largely set in Oxford, it’s based on the premise that languages, when placed next to one another, engraved in silver, have enormous power.  The power to run an empire.  This is a post-colonial story, and I took comfort in the working class support, for their own reasons, of exposing the very dangerous world of capitalism.  With its “human capital” as we’re now being called by businessmen.  But I digress.  Four students, three from abroad, are brought to Babel, a tower in Oxford that houses the Royal Institute of Translation.  Their use of their native tongues helps build immense power in this Oxford tower.  Power that fuels Britain’s imperial goals.  But all is not well in academic paradise.

Slowly three of the four scholars come to realize that their home countries are being exploited for purposes of yet further exploitation.  The wealth always flows back to England, and even the small emoluments it offers to those other nations cannot negate the fact that the end goal is British superiority.  The protagonist is Chinese, taken from poverty to live in academic luxury, in exchange for what was his birthright—his linguistic ability.  It doesn’t end well.  This is not a happy novel.  But it does highlight something we seldom consider; our language ability is truly an amazing thing.  We try to convey a fraction of what’s going on in our heads to another person, and that person has some ability to understand it.  And languages are ways of thinking.  I used to tell my students that all the time.  It’s more than just words.

This is also a fairly long book.  As with most fairly long books, you’re left feeling it once the story concludes.  Even though language allows us to communicate, it’s sometimes uncomfortable to hear what someone else is thinking.  We don’t have to be woke to realize that Black, or Asian, or indigenous experience is quite different from what we call “white.”  And such voices deserve to be heard.  We live in a time when white men don’t like to be told that they’ve participated in oppressive behaviors.  Probably most of them (for I believe people are generally good) are not intentionally evil, but they participate in a system which can be.  And often unthinkingly so.  Thus these days thinking feels dangerous.  And this book will make you do so, nevertheless.

Not Afraid

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It’s something many of us do.  Trying to explain why, while religious, spiritual, and moral, we find horror fascinating.  I read Brandon Grafius’ Lurking under the Surface, and when I learned about Joseph Haward’s Be Afraid: How Horror and Faith Can Change the World, I figured I’d better read it too.  Haward is a British Baptist minister who seems to support progressive causes.  He also enjoys horror.  He even finds it prophetic.  I have to admit that when I read the foreword by John E. Colwell I was afraid that this would be one of those books.  You know, the kind that only half-likes horror because their religion tells them so.  Colwell is no horror fan, and his foreword doesn’t set the tone for what follows.  Haward finds horror homiletical.

When I was young I used to see movies and analyze them theologically with my friends.  This was in college and seminary, mostly.  We’d discuss the implications of movies—sometimes horror—and how they fit into our Christian worldview.  This book is like that.  It’s Haward’s reading of various horror films, some television, and some novels, integrating them into his theological outlook.  The book is more about theology than it is about specific horror films, although it does mention quite a few.  The discussion is sometimes hard to follow because the paragraphs are so incredibly long and the style is very theological.  I got the feeling that Haward would be an interesting person to have a conversation with.  His book didn’t really do it for me, however. Some things are simply better in person. (I do know Brandon Grafius, and enjoy our talks.)

I’m not into horror for the violence.  Haward tends to point to that element, but I’m generally looking for the mood.  And avoidance.  Also when I was young I learned the truism, “He who lives to run away, lives to run another day.”  I like to think that I’m brave, but violence really bothers me.  My family finds me a contradiction; I won’t watch movies that are based on “true events” unless they’re speculative.  I don’t need reminding that people can be horrible to each other.  I know that from scanning the headlines and from watching the election results.  No, I use horror to help me cope.  And it works best when I know there’s something supernatural going on.  I’ve grown out of theologizing about movies.  I took plenty of theology courses in college and seminary, but they seemed a bit too abstract to be helpful.  Then I’d go out with my friends and watch a horror movie on the weekend so we could talk about it.  There’s a bit of that nostalgia here.

Steering

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I’ve always been self-critical.  Often when someone points out something I’ve done wrong I’ve already figured out that I’ve made the mistake and the reminder is painful.  I can’t help but think that my childhood made me this way.  In any case, since I haven’t ever found much success is writing, I figure I must need help with it.  Recently I’ve read books on various aspects of writing by Stephen King and H. P. Lovecraft (published posthumously).  I’ve read quite a few more over the years.  I recently saw Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K. Le Guin.  I confess that I haven’t read a ton of Le Guin’s fiction, but she is treated with a great deal of reverence in literary circles that I figured a bit of advice from a master couldn’t hurt.  Besides, it isn’t a long book.

Books about writing aren’t volumes that you fly through, though.  Steering the Craft has ten relatively short chapters and ten writing exercises, some in multiple parts.  As I read through I stopped and did each of the exercises.  I really didn’t want to cheat myself of the experience of learning from a departed sage.  The experience was refreshing.  As will surprise none of my regular readers, I’m in the midst of another writing project.  The thing about steering is that you’re constantly doing it.  And if the captain is someone who’s been through these waters, it’s best to listen.  At the same time—and Le Guin was very aware of this—hard and fast rules tend to be neither.  What spells success for one author becomes abject failure for another.  Some of us write because we must, whether anybody reads us or not.

But the exercises.  Exercise is good for your health.  Even writers with native talent need to stay in shape.  I’ve been doing creative writing, in one form or another, constantly, since at least the Nixon Administration.  Publication began in the academic realm when I was working on my doctorate.  I had my first fiction piece published in 2009.  Keen eyed readers will notice that is the same year I began this blog.  I’d been pretty much booted from academia by then, but I’d been writing in the meantime.  Essays, novels, short stories.  Then I tried a nonfiction book or two.  There is a great gulf between writing and publication.  An ocean, in fact.  And if you hope to cross an ocean, it is always helpful to learn how to steer.  I’m still trying to learn why my boat seems to be leaking, though.

Measuring Books

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You know how some email servers stock your inbox with ads?  I almost never pay attention to them.  Then one for Books by the Foot showed up.  I had to click.  The basic idea is simple enough: you want to look smart so you fill your shelves with books by a company that sells them by the linear foot.  You can get color coordination, rainbows, old books, you name it.  Now this isn’t a free ad.  In fact, this is a rather sad state of affairs.  I’m sure their antique books have been vetted for any real treasures, but the fact that people want to buy books just for display evokes, well, melancholy.  I’m pleased that books retain their cachet as symbols of pride, but these are not books for reading.  I’m left with mixed feelings.  The website states that they have over 5 million books on hand.

At least they’re not selling ebooks.  I love books.  They are a wonderful symbol and I suspect they are among the most noble things that humans achieve.  I grew enamored of books as I entered my tweens.  I was terribly shy by that point.  We had moved to a new, and rough small town where I really didn’t know anybody.  Life, which hadn’t been exactly a picnic to that point, seemed to be getting scarier.  So I read.  And I never really stopped.  Ironically, during my professorial days I had less time to read entire books.  Those who’ve dabbled in higher education know that at even the hint of organizational skill you get bumped into administration, whether you want to or not.  And administration is busy work.  Yes, even professors have it too.  In any case, when I got bumped back down to being a mere adjunct, I started reading a lot again.

One time one of my bosses asked me how many books I had.  This was early in the pandemic when we were seeing inside each other’s houses for the first time, via Zoom.  My office is one of my main book repositories.  (Along with the attic and the living room.)  I answered truthfully that I’ve never counted.  I started using Goodreads in 2013 to keep track of the books I read.  In those early days I didn’t put everything in there (who hasn’t read a book they’re embarrassed to admit to once in a while?), but when I started the reading challenges in 2016 I did.  Mine has been a life defined by books.  Starting with the Good Book, and including many quite the opposite, I have earned books by the foot.  But I’m not selling.  Symbols have value beyond cash, at least in my mind.

Motorcycle Trip

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Among my introductory lectures to students was one that covered genre.  I recall saying something along the lines of “when you read something your expectations of genre influence how you understand it.”  Strangely, my own writing sometimes defies easy categorization, but I find it disorienting to read something without an idea of whether it’s fact or fiction or whatever.  I suspect I’m not alone in this.  When my wife suggested we read Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance together, I wanted to know what it was we’d begun reading.  The BISAC code (the category on the back cover of a book) simply said “Philosophy.”  I took almost enough philosophy in college to minor in it, so I had a general idea of what philosophy might look like.  Then I remembered reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and found myself back at the question of genre again.  Was this philosophy, autobiography, or a novel?  All of the above?

Now, I’ve known about this book from college days on.  It was in the college bookstore and I’m pretty sure it was assigned in some classes (not the ones I took).  What threw me was the autobiographical part.  Was this fiction?  The philosophy parts were pretty stout stuff.  And was Phaedrus real or imaginary?  Of course, you start getting some inklings that Phaedrus and the narrator are the same.  And that the latter isn’t a particularly good father.  The edition we read came with a helpful introduction that suggested that Phaedrus was the one with a correct outlook all along.  And an afterword that told how Chris died during a mugging when he was only 22.  There was pathos all over this tale.  Even when we finished I wasn’t quite sure what we read.  It’s sometimes classified as an autobiographical novel or philosophical fiction.

Rejected over 120 times, the book became a national bestseller when one editor took a chance on it.  (That is how publishing works.)  Perhaps the most poignant part of the book is the author.  What’s more, Pirsig wrote the book by getting up and writing at the same time slot that I use, so he could work a regular day after.  And he had been in a psychiatric hospital and had received electroshock therapy for schizophrenia.  Clearly a lot was happening behind the scenes for this most unusual tome.  Among the academic publishing crowd it’s common to hear that Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was a book that many bought and never read.  I did find that one a bit rough going too, but I do wonder how many engage with the philosophy in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  There’s heady stuff here to ponder.  And I’m glad for that one editor who thought differently from all his colleagues.

Perhaps More?

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Publishers use the term “deep backlist” to refer to titles that they published long ago.  That’s always the phrase that comes to mind when I browse my “to read” list.  That list was started, in its current online repository, a decade-and-a-half ago.  When I delve into the “deep backlist” of items I placed on the list years ago I sometimes can’t remember where I learned about them.  Such was the case with N. T. Morris’ debut novel, Elmwood.  Someone recommended it years ago and I finally came into possession of it.  A moody tale about a town haunted by a cult, it is a nice effort as a self-published horror novel.  If you read a lot of fiction you start to notice some of the signs with self-published work (and there are many good reasons to go that route).  Morris offers a well-designed and aesthetically pleasing book.  The story does end with some loose threads, however.  There may be spoilers below.

Aidan Crain finds the victim of what appears to be a serial killer.  His difficulty coping with it leads his wife Laura to suggest that they get away from it all in the little town of Elmwood.  They rent out a house she found online, but it turns out to be haunted.  The people of Elmwood aren’t terribly friendly to strangers, but since the goal is to get away from city life, the young couple doesn’t much mind.  Except the ghosts in the house are accompanied by a dark presence in the woods that keeps calling to Aidan.  One of the tricky bits for me was determining what were dream scenes and how they related to waking scenes.  This is often part of speculative fiction, but a solid editor would lead you in the right direction in such situations.

The story tries to fit a lot in, leading me to think—rather uncharacteristically—that it needs to be longer.  The house was owned by a serial killer who’s part of the cult that killed the victim Aidan found many miles away.  The cult has been culling both locals and visitors for years and the police department appears to be complicit.  As do some local business owners.  The darkness in the woods, which is defined more or less as evil itself, seems to control the cult and it wants Aidan to join.  Some of the loose threads at the end suggest that Morris’ next novel will be a sequel to this one.  I can’t recall how I learned about Elmwood, but I’m glad to have finally read it.  It’s a good shot at becoming a horror writer from my personal deep backlist.

2024 in Books

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I’m trying to figure it out.  My annual last post is my book reflection for the fading year.  I keep track of my books on Goodreads, and I always join their reading challenge to keep myself honest.  What I can’t figure out is why I fell below 70 books this year.  (The official total is only 61.)  I set my goal below that, of course, because I’m no fan of setting targets impossibly high.  The only thing I can figure is that some of this year’s books took longer than usual to get through.  Maybe on average they were longer than my typical fare.  In any case, my favorites among the fiction I’ve read are these:

For standard horror I especially liked Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and Ivar Leon Menger’s What Mother Won’t Tell Me.  Interestingly, neither was speculative.  I do seem to have slipped in that category a bit.  Gothically speaking, Thierry Jonquet’s Mygale, Rebecca James’ The Woman in the Mirror, Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches, and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus were all memorable.  I started reading Dark Academia somewhat intentionally this year and I would argue that Sarah Moss’ The Ghost Wall fits since the professor’s up to no good in the woods.  Piranesi by Susanna Clarke also fits for a similar reason, only not in the woods.  I enjoyed both.  For literary fiction, edging back into horror, A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet was very good.

My reading tends toward nonfiction (occupational hazard) and here there are categories also.  In the general category, Andrew Laties’ Son of Rebel Bookseller stayed with me.  Don Foster’s Author Unknown was enjoyable and eye-opening.  I also really enjoyed Mark Thomas McGee’s Fast and Furious.  For books on horror I read Stephen King’s Danse Macabre and his On Writing.  (I also read one of his novels.)  Both of these were quite good, I thought.  I also learned a lot from Olga Gershenson’s New Israeli Horror.

I see that I also read quite a lot of unusual nonfiction.  Most of it I quite enjoyed.  The most conventional of them was David Robson’s The Expectation Effect.  I’m fascinated by the power of the human mind, so Mitch Horowitz’s Uncertain Places and D. W. Pasulka’s Encounters gave me considerable pause early in the year.  Carlos Eire’s They Flew, a weighty tome, was well worth the time it took.  Among the reflective/spiritual nonfiction my favorite was Katherine May’s Wintering.

I very much enjoy my end of year reflection over the books I’ve read.  I don’t plan my reading for the year in any systematic way.  I will say that I received quite a few titles over the holidays that I’m looking forward to posting on these this coming year.  And I suspect a few new titles will appear along the way as well. I do hope to get past 61, in any case.  Read through 2025!

The Dark Season

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It was on Goodreads that I first saw The Gathering Dark.  Since I’ve been trying to read more short stories, I decided I should give it a go.  Subtitled An Anthology of Folk Horror, it sounded like important for a viewer of said folk horror.  Anthologies, both fiction and non, are uneven by nature.  And something that wasn’t clear at first is that this was a young adult collection.  I’ve read YA books before, of course.  Some of the most creative fiction of the last couple of decades has been for that demographic.  The feature I noticed most here was that the horror was mostly gentile, kind of like the horror in my fiction.  I never consider myself a YA author, however.  Occasionally my characters are teens or twenty-somethings, but for the most part they participate in the adult world, where something is wrong.

Youth is, of course, a fraught time.  We’re exploring relationships and trying to sort out the changes taking place in our bodies and our lives as we leave the larval stage.  There’s a kind of natural horror to it.  At the same time, “folk horror,” like horror itself, is a slippery term.  Some of the stories seem to be based on urban legends, and that is definitely the present-day source of folk horror.  When it’s found online it’s often called “creepy pasta.”  It can be the basis for horror stories, and I’ve seen a few movies that make use of it.  Folk horror tends to favor rural settings (true of all the stories here), and superstition, and isolation.  Often it involves pagan religion, but here only one story dwells in that territory.

Overall I found the collection interesting and well written.  A number of the stories did evoke the feelings of what it was like to be young and afraid.  I do wonder how the anthology came about.  There’s no introduction and, I know from my own publishing experience that anthologies are a hard sell to most publishers.  I’ve noticed Page Street books before.  They recently began accepting horror written for adults.  They already have a strong YA list, thus The Gathering Dark.  They’re also committed to diversity, and that clearly shows throughout this collection.  I think it’s important to read young adult literature now and again.  It is, literally, the literature of the future—this is what forms young people’s tastes.  This particular book was a national bestseller, and it earned some notice on Goodreads.  And that was enough to draw me in.