Shadow off Campus

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I’ve been to quite a few academic conferences in my life.  Some have been held in neighborhoods declared “unsafe.”  I even had a job interview in a hotel room (such can’t happen now) with a college that didn’t want to pay the fee for using the society’s services.  (A friend who’d also interviewed with the same school said to me afterwards, “I thought they were going to jump me!”)  (Neither one of us got the job.)  I even went to a conference where I had to drive through a crime-ridden neighborhood to get to an off-site hotel.  But I’ve never been to a conference where someone was murdered.  That’s the premise behind Kathleen Kelley Reardon’s Damned If She Does.  Reardon’s keenly aware of the kinds of issues women face in the professorate.  There are some unsavory guys in the profession and power is very difficult to wrest from those who hold it (generally white men).  In this follow-up to Shadow Campus, she tells Meg and Shamus Doherty’s experience with murder, and more, at an academic conference.

Academics are so necessary for studying things closely, opening up true understanding.  They are, however, people too.  And people can be petty, vindictive, and selfish.  They’re usually not inclined to murder, however.  I’ve been meaning to read that book about the murder of a religion professor at the University of Chicago several years ago precisely because such things are so unusual.  In dark academia, however, events like that are fairly common.  The thing is, many academics are also quite smart.  If someone were to put their mind to an undetectable murder, hmm.  The old gray matter starts churning.

In Damned If She Does, the apparent motive is publication in prestige journals.  In the end, it turns out that there’s more to it than that, but it’s somehow believable that a matter like publication could lead to homicide in academia.  As an editor, and writer, myself, I know how important publication with specific presses can be.  Even after doing this for over thirty years, an acceptance notice creates a sense of validation like no other.  Dark academia explores such territory.  I suspect that I’ve always been a bit naive when I’ve attended conferences.  I go, present papers, and keep interactions, well, academic.  I’ve heard whispers of them being places of temporary flings and I’ve seen colleagues use them as places to party.  On occasion I’ve seen established scholars very inebriated.  They’re people too, of course.  And as long as nobody is murdered, the code seems to be that what happens at a conference stays at the conference.

Around Us

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Our Wives Under the Sea is a gentle, but chilling horror story by Julia Armfield.  Two women are married and one of them is a marine biologist being sent on a submarine to explore deep ocean life.  A planned three-week voyage becomes six months and when the sub finally surfaces again, Leah, the biologist, has “come back wrong.”  She’s transforming.  Something happened to her under all that water.  Told alternately by Leah and Miri, the story is one of loss and mourning and lack of any reasonable explanation.  Haunting, in a word.  The writing is exceptional.  And probing.  I quite enjoyed this book.  I can’t recall how I first heard about it—it was published in 2022—but I knew I wanted to read it even then.  The sea is that way.  Moby-Dick, cited in an epigraph, has always been my favorite novel.  One of my early reading memories is Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (also cited here).  The story is a winner.

There’s something about the ocean.  We, in reality, know little about it.  Penetrating the crushing depths requires a well-funded science, something we’ve moved away from in favor of personal greed.  Life takes unexpected forms deep under the surface, even as we deplete the resources we can reach—over-fishing and consuming.  We’re never told what it is Leah and her crew-mate see so far down.  We all know of lantern-fish (lately in the news) and other sub-surface terrors.  We don’t know the potential life we might discover if we only cared to look.  The company that sent Leah down, however, is as shadowy as the government.  Promising help but not answering the phone when you call.  Yes, this is a haunting book.

Mostly, however, at least in my reading, it is about coping.  We attach our lives to others and when something changes them we have to try to adjust, because love is that way.  Caregivers understand.  The novel evokes both the endless draw of the ocean and its mystery.  Even as a child I wanted to live on the stormy east coast, preferably in Maine.  I wanted to be near the water.  As my mother was in her final decline, one of her dearest wishes was to return to the ocean.  She’d spent a fair bit of her childhood in New Jersey and always felt the draw of the sea.  She was no swimmer, but just being near the ocean was something she loved.  And that has passed down, it seems, to my generation.  Fearful yet drawn.  It is the dilemma that can lead to effective horror stories that make you both think and feel.

Mass Market

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The mass market paperback.  This may very well be one of the best symbols of my younger years.  One of the largest distributors of mass market paperbacks (Readerlink) has announced that it will no longer distribute them.  It seems that the writing, instead of in readers’ hands, is on the wall.  Mass market paperbacks are the least expensive formats of books to buy.  Publishers have increasingly been tending to push trade size (about 6-by-9 inches)—they can charge more for them.  They don’t fit easily in your pocket, however, and well, they cost more.  Often, as someone who reads in public, I find myself wishing more literary fiction was still produced in mass market form.  Only the best selling authors ever make it down to that size.  I miss being able to stick a book in my pocket.  

The mass market paperback’s story began with railroad books, once innovated by my erstwhile employer, Routledge.  The form we recognize today only really took off in 1935.  When I was growing up, I considered all other formats somehow too big.  My book collection and reading habits began with mass market size.  When we moved to our house a few years back, I repurposed an old dresser as a bookshelf.  The top drawer slots were just tall enough for mass market books.  I discovered that I really didn’t have enough of them to fill that shelf.  Books have grown bigger.  Now, working in publishing I realize profit margins are thin in this industry.  Many publishers need the big sellers to help make up for disappointing sales of other titles.  (You have to have thick skin to be an author, I know from experience.)  They need to stay solvent.

But still, this feels like the end of an era.  Books in this format have been around really only less than a century.  Literacy—reading for pleasure—among the masses hasn’t been around much longer.  Books were expensive and were afforded by the elite, then cheaper forms and formats became available.  The electronic revolution has made much of life more convenient but some of us miss the challenge of having to fold a road map and never really knowing, for sure, where we are.  We’re also the ones who likely have a book in the car.  On the occasions when I don’t, I often regret it.  And one of the ways to encourage people to take books with them is to make them of a size that would sell thousands.  So many, in fact, that they would be given the title “mass market.”

Craving Enchantment

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I really want to know, but just can’t figure out, how to write like Katherine May.  My wife and I read her book Wintering and now have added Enchantment.  In many ways I seem to be like May; we may be different shades of neurodivergent, but I understand what she says.  Indeed, at one point in Enchantment she talked me down from a writer’s dilemma that had me worked up for days.  But I can’t write like her.  I have times when my rhetoric for a blog post or two might come close, but I have tried to sustain it for an entire book, so far without success.  My background was perhaps too sullied by academic writing, although May is also an academic, so I may simply be making excuses for lack of talent.

That’s too bad because Enchantment is meant to improve your outlook.  Subtitled Awaking Wonder in an Anxious Age, it consists of life lessons the author learned during the pandemic.  I often, if I allow myself in this constant struggle for my time, experience the sense of wonder May describes.  I enjoy walking in the woods, watching heavenly bodies, staring into a river or pond, and trying to draw lessons from such things.  Lately, however, I find myself rushing through them because I have something else I have to do.  Daily, it’s the 9-2-5, of course.  That schedule overloads my weekends with things that have to be done even if I want to spend time appreciating the enchantment I can find, if I have the time.  Sorry, I’m letting the anxious part take center stage.

This is a wonderful book.  I admire the way that May is able to face down her own struggles with grace and remain open to possibilities.  I found such things much more readily when I was at Nashotah House.  There were moments between classes and there were semester breaks.  We lived in the woods.  By a lake.  There was wonder there, for the taking.  Having a young child to introduce to the wonders of nature definitely helped as well.  Children force you to see through new eyes (it’s not a surprise that May has a young son when writing).  Too quickly we grow up and let capitalism tell us what to do.  It takes so much from us and gives so little.  I’m looking out my window at nature, as I write this.  I know it has enchantment to offer.  I also know that work begins in fifteen minutes.

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.

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.

Bibliographer for Hire

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Why is bibliographer not a job?  Why can’t a person make a living categorizing knowledge?  I ask this because I see YouTube videos of people saying your job should be what you enjoy doing.  What if you enjoy creating bibliographies?  You see, my research methods are a bit unconventional.  They kind of have to be since I have no institutional support for my writing, and yet I want it to be intelligent and informed.  That means I have to locate my own sources and inevitably, when I’m compiling a bibliography, I’m happy.  Even if it means ferreting out obscure sources and trying to learn where something was originally published, I’m still at the top of my game.  (Yes, this is one of those things that the longer you’ve been doing it, the better you get at it.  These days it means learning to engage the internet for research.  Since it’s more of a money-making venture geared towards entertainment, that can be tricky.)

I remember those days of typing out bibliographies by typewriter, smearing White-Out all over, or trying to use that ribbon stuff that was supposed to be able to type over mistakes.  My friends and fellow students hated bibliographies.  Secretly, and perhaps perversely, I was enjoying myself.  You see, a bibliography is gathered knowledge.  When I finish reading a nonfiction book, particularly one where I want to do further reading myself, I go through the bibliography.  I want to know the origins of ideas.  There’s an irony here since my last few books have featured quite a few of my own ideas supported by what I’d read.  And I know that unless I provide a precise footnote, anyone who might read my work might wonder “how I know” what I’m writing.  It’s increasingly becoming one of those “pay attention to your elders” sort of thing, I guess.

But the bibliographies I could compile!  The really tricky part when writing The Wicker Man was the word limit.  I know authors who struggle bringing the bibliography down to required length, and I feel for them.  I really do.  You see, a bibliography is a record of what it took to get me to write this book.  These are the things I was reading, pondering.  Or found along the way.  There’s an art to a bibliography as well.  Some topics seem to attract authors with last names beginning with a certain letter, for instance.  Or others seem to have a dearth of another letter.  I may be the only person who finds such things fascinating, but can’t that be a paying job?  It is most interesting work, and categorizing knowledge is a full-time job.  If only it was a paying one.

Book Stages

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Books appear in stages.  All publishers are different.  These platitudes encapsulate my experience in finding a venue for my ideas.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth has just appeared in McFarland’s spring and summer catalogue.  I haven’t seen the proofs yet, but I suspect I will before too long now.  What’s with the spring and summer catalogue?  Well, believe it or not, books are seasonal.  Publishers go by seasons.  For many academic publishers there are two seasons: Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter.  The timing of certain books may fall in a specific place within those seasons but many academic books are aimed at classroom adoptions so early spring and early autumn are the most popular times.  It’s no coincidence that academic conferences also cluster around the semester system, the big ones being either autumn or spring.  Academics have a migratory instinct.

Personally, I’m hoping Sleepy Hollow will be out in late summer.  I don’t have any control over that, but it’s about then that normal people’s thoughts start turning toward falling leaves, long nights, and monsters.  Every year there’s a day in August when I step outside and literally smell autumn in the air.  As a kid seasons seemed like something as rigid as a biblical law: spring was March through May, summer June through August, and so forth.  The older I get, the more I realize how negotiable seasons are.  The Celts celebrated the start of spring in February.  Yes, there are lots of cold days yet to come, but the early signs of spring have begun.  For early risers, we finally start to observe earlier sunrises.  (These technically start around January 10, but they’re slow getting out of bed.)

You might think the ideal season for a book on spooky stuff, like Sleepy Hollow, would be timed for release in the fall/winter cycle.  Not necessarily.  Both Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible hit the market after Halloween.  Normal people’s thoughts had shifted to Thanksgiving.  I’m pleased that Sleepy Hollow will be released a bit earlier.  Summer is ideal for Halloween-themed books.  And yes, I devote a chapter to Halloween and the Headless Horseman.  They are closely related.  So I was glad to receive McFarland’s spring/summer catalogue and find my book on page two.  I don’t have a publication date yet, but I’m looking forward to being part of the discussion about one of my favorite ghost stories of all time.  Speaking of which, it’s almost time to begin gathering firewood for next winter, or at least it will be in summer.  And it’s not that far away.

Worse Seed

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Not too long ago I watched The Bad Seed.  In the 1950s it probably wasn’t considered horror, but it is quite a scary movie.  I’d classify it as horror—not all fifties horror was guys in rubbery suits.  When reading about the movie afterwards, I learned the novel had a darker ending (the movie was pretty dark as it was).  So I decided to read the book by William March.  The movie’s fairly faithful, up to the ending.  As usual, the novel adds more detail and reveals some things rather differently.  For example, Christine Penmark, the mother of Rhoda, can’t ask her father if she’s adopted.  She “learns” this through inference.  Indeed, the book leaves you wondering if she’s actually mentally unstable.  The proof that she’s the daughter of a serial killer is strong but not definitive.  And her father is already dead when the story opens.

The school outing, where Rhoda claims her second victim, is where the movie opens.  Rhoda is expelled from the school because the women who run it can’t abide Rhoda’s dishonesty.  The character of Leroy is very well portrayed in the movie, but he too seems to have some kind of mental illness.  Monica Breedlove is accurately presented as a busybody, but she too spends a lot of time analyzing people, including herself.  Rhoda is, of course, a literal sociopath.  It’s fair to say the novel is an extended exploration of mental illness of various sorts.  I remember from growing up in the sixties that many conditions that are now regularly diagnosed simply weren’t recognized.  Kids were blamed for bad behaviors that were, in all likelihood, caused by being somewhere on the spectrum.

Much water has passed under the bridge since the fifties.  This book was a bestseller then, but I only learned about it last year.  Indeed, it’s been adapted to film three times and was a Broadway play before all that.  There was a sequel released a couple years back.  Rhoda Penmark is herself a trope of the narcissist who lacks empathy.  Hmm, where else do we see that?  It’s still analyzed as primarily a “nature verses nurture” novel, but I suspect there’s something more going on.  We’ve moved beyond Freud and this novel probes what goes on in the minds of those who spend too much time alone, as well as who happen to be the mothers of pathological child murderers.  And the ending is different, but the movie’s is equally as bleak.  The Bad Seed a good book for this particular January.

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!