Big Blasts

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Nonfiction authors have to make decisions when writing books about collected, collective phenomena.  Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders had to decide which volcanoes to include in Volcanoes in Human History.  The idea of the book is fairly straightforward—show how those sleeping monsters have sometimes long-term effects on human lives and culture.  Some of the choices were no-brainers: Mount Vesuvius, Santorini, and Tambora, obviously.  Toba, the largest known eruption, fell out of bounds because it went off long before Homo sapiens had learned to write.  Indeed, that eruption almost led to our species’ extinction.  Since I’ve been interested in volcanoes for about the last year or so, this book fit the bill.  It gives several snapshots of what happens when the earth’s mantle starts pushing up into the crust on which we live.  It also has lots of geology in it, some of which I struggled to understand.

The authors begin with the Hawaiian Islands, and the local mythology about Pele.  Then they move on to Thera, which created Santorini and ended the Minoan civilization.  Next, Vesuvius is not only the only active volcano on the European mainland, but its 79 CE eruption was the first written about by an eyewitness (Pliny the Younger).  The chapter on Iceland is more about the various notable volcanic activities but tends to focus a little on Laki.  Then comes Tambora, the most deadly volcano in human history.  Krakatau, also known as Krakatoa, was also deadly but is quite well known, in part because of a book by Simon Winchester.  It’s covered in the next chapter.  Mount Pelée—not to be confused with Pele—in the Caribbean is next.  In 1902 it wiped out an entire town of 30,000 people.  Tristan da Cunha I’ll come back to.  The last one covered is Mount St. Helens.

Tristan da Cunha is a place I’d never heard of.  Located about as far from any continent as you can be in the Atlantic Ocean, it’s occupied by about 200 people.  The founding humans were of European extraction, and the colony grew from 2 to about 300.  In 1961 the volcano that comprises the island erupted, which led to the inhabitants being exposed to modernity for the first time in about two centuries.  I found this utterly fascinating.  All of the chapters have interesting information, but some of it is pretty heavy going concerning geology and plate tectonics, but it does have quite a bit of human interest as well.  It made me glad that I live nowhere near a volcanic hot spot.

Self-Identify

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The temptation is surely there.  I imagine it must be especially high for those with common names.  (I often think that parents surnamed Miller or Smith or Jones really don’t do their children any favors by giving them any of the dozens of very common names.)  The temptation I’m talking about here is to give yourself a cute email name.  Believe me, I’ve seen some doozies.  Cute names are fine for family and friends, of course.  When you go to send something to a professional, however, you’ve got to think how it’s going to look.  I can’t speak for all industries, but I know that in publishing what is perhaps valued more than anything else is someone with a professional demeanor.  An email that comes in with a slightly salacious username will struggle.  You need to show that you’re serious.

Names are tricky things.  My stepfather was surnamed Miller.  For high school and college I used his surname.  It was when a wise minister pointed out to me that my professional name (presumably Reverend, at that point) had to be nailed down to be consistently applied, that I had to make a decision.  At that point, in seminary, I legally reverted to my birth name.  I was born Steve A. Wiggins and I wanted to be known as Rev. Wiggins—that never happened, but I did end up as Dr. Wiggins before it was all over.  I once had a colleague, back when email first came out, that used his initials.  They were a combination of m’s and n’s, strung together.  This made it difficult to get the address correct and their handle was eventually renamed to something more manageable.

I suspect some cute namers forget that their moniker looks a bit unprofessional.  Perhaps they don’t care.  It’s certainly their right not to.  When you want to start building a professional portfolio, though, it’s time to consider that perhaps boring alternative.  I’ve also known people to include “Dr.” or “Ph.D.” in their email handles.  Among the profession, however, we tend to use first names unless someone insists on asserting some kind of rank.  Our parents name us.  Email names are a chance to show how we’d rather be known.  I’ve worked for places where emails are automatically assigned as first initial last name (swiggins) and that always looked weird to me.  I preferred those that went with last name first initial (wigginss).  Or better yet, the personal email account that lets you choose for yourself.  Just remember, if you want to be taken seriously, you might not want to go overboard.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Avoiding AI

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I try to avoid AI whenever and however I can.  Being an Apple user, I’ve stopped asking Siri for anything.  Our television isn’t smart.  Our stereo consists of components that don’t secretly conspire with one another.  They use physical cables and have no bluetooth or other software in them.  But with constant “upgrades” on computers, which we have to have because AI is so good at hacking, my daily life has been invaded by Al.  This came clear to me the other day as I was finishing up a short story I’d been working on.  The creative process take time.  I’d started this one months ago.  I get lots of ideas and I start many stories that get dropped when another hook comes along.  Then I’ll remember what drew me to an older idea and go back to finish the neglected piece.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

It takes courage to submit stories for publication.  I get a lot of rejections, as most writers do.  That means I go for periods without trying.  Besides, all the journals say you should regularly read them to get an idea of what the editors like.  If you work 9-2-5 and have your own blog, and you like to read full books, this can be difficult.  You can, of course, just shoot into the dark.  But I digress.  I finished a story recently and copied it from my writing software into Pages.  Since I use a Mac, Microsoft Word conversion is the last step before submitting a story.  Most publishers go the clunky Microsoft route.  Up until the day I tried to save said story, I hadn’t realized just how much Al had insinuated himself into my operating system.

When you go to save a Pages document, the default used to be “Untitled.”  That was never a problem for me because I’d go in through the finder and change it manually.  Now Al is “reading” your document and suggesting a title for you.  This particular story had a creative title that existed in my head, but not in the body of the fiction itself.  At least not in any obvious way.  I opened a new document in Pages, pasted my content in and went to save it.  A title that missed the point of my story entirely glowed in the Save As field.  Al wanted to “help” by naming my creative fiction.  If there was a way to turn off AI on my Mac, I would.  I don’t want it.  I try not to use it at all.  With software updates nearly weekly now, how long before the creative process, when done on a computer, is taken over completely? Hey Al, I don’t want, or need, your help.

Whose Stars?

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Star Trek or Star Wars?  I used to hear this among sci-fi fans.  I grew up with Star Trek in the sixties and saw Star Wars in the theater.  Science fiction can shape our future.  Both for good and for bad.  I’m convinced, for example, that many Silicon Valley technocrats are Star Trek people who grew up emulating Mr. Spock.  No emotion, pure rationality.  That idea has come to stand for the faulty equation of brain = computer.  This is incorrect.  As AI began to be developed, the idea was that if we could rationally program computers with human rational thought, they could be taught to “think.”  They clearly forget pon farr from the episode Amok Time.  Even the full-blooded Vulcans know that logic will break down once in a while.  Even now Al is demonstrating that in real time.

Star Wars, on the other hand, depicted a paperless universe.  Nobody, not even old Obi Wan, or the even older Yoda, is shown with an ancient book.  Reading isn’t part of their life.  Tech is.  This idea, I suspect, helped spur on ebooks.  And audiobooks.  I’ve been a proponent of environmentalism since the seventies.  One of the few areas where I think the exploitation of trees is necessary, however, is in the making of books.  The other day I was in a very hopeful meeting where it was pointed out that there are moves afoot to start limiting screen time.  Get people reading books again.  I’m not really conflicted about this, despite my excessive work on this blog.  I spend very little time on social media.  Apart from this blog it’s maybe ten minutes a day.  I spend, if at all possible, at least an hour reading books each day.

Many analysts tend to think that the internet hasn’t really made human life better.  More convenient certainly.  But better?  There was a kind of exquisite longing to reading about a book in a catalogue, walking to a bookstore, ordering it and waiting a few weeks before receiving it.  Such things caused no harm.  Is it logical to speed things up if we can?  Sometimes clearly yes.  At other times, it’s fun to run amok.  To take a walk without your phone.  To pick up a book to spend an unrushed hour or two reading.  These were pleasures.  Now we turn on our devices and hear about the chaos Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu are causing.  All the deaths and suffering they wreak on the innocent.  Would Mr. Spock say this is logical?  Even Luke Skywalker would pull out a book to escape for a while.

Photo credit: NASA

Strange Academy

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Things have changed in academia.  Fifteen years ago, after my ouster from the classroom and research crowd, scholars studied such things as monsters, horror, and exorcism at their peril.  Not taken seriously by “rational” thinkers, such phenomena were largely considered a waste of time and effort.  Much of that is beginning to change.  And not just in religious studies.  Religion is an apt discipline to examine prodigies and unusual experiences, but I’m seeing more academic disciplines drawn into the discussion.  Philosophy, history, sociology, and even law, ponder how belief in supernatural beings fits in the bank of human knowledge.  This is something that AI has no hope of “comprehending” (as if it’s doing anything more than pretending).  These are very human concerns and, it turns out, they may be more rational than previously assumed.

Such things entered academia as pop culture was reevaluated as worthy of study.  Although ephemeral, what has the interest of the masses is important to understand.  Horror is increasing in visibility and more and more people are admitting their interest in it, at least occasionally.  A lifelong lover of the weird, had I known that this direction was available, in my former life, I would’ve been one of the first to sign up.  Horror, as we now call it, has been around since the Bible and before.  Ghost and monster stories were part of the earliest civilizations.  Often they’re simply there—assumed rather than postulated.  Many people today, some of them quite educated, also believe that there’s more to the world than what fits comfortably in the laboratory.  Although my last several books have been written for nonspecialist readerships, employed academics are writing for that more rarified readership.

Perhaps the thing that’s truly changed is that studies about such things are being published.  Various academic presses, it seems, have ventured into the “what if” territory.  We’re all asking if maybe the world is stranger than we were taught in school.  Our knowledge in technology has grown at what feels like an alarming rate, while our understanding of the shadowy side of our psyches, and the world itself, is only starting to get underway.  In my personal reading I keep trying to steer away from university presses to the world of trade publishing, but with the new interest in the strange, I find myself being drawn back.  You like your explorers to have a bit of skepticism, and an open mind.  Seems like the academy is starting to welcome such thinkers.  I’m glad to see this happening, because the world is a very strange place. If only it’d happened a little sooner.

Undersea Series

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As A Series of Unfortunate Events goes on the volumes become more adult in their complexity.  The writing is still recognizably Lemony Snicket, but the laughs are fewer and the plot is thicker.  Although The Grim Grotto is perhaps the one book (post book three) that I remembered the best so far, there was much I’d forgotten.  Rescued from the Stricken Stream by a submarine named Queequeq, the Baudelaires meet Fiona Widdershins, the step-daughter of the eccentric captain.  She becomes Klaus’ first love interest, just as Quigley Quagmire had for Violet in the last book.  Searching for the missing sugar bowl to help the V.F.D. against the schism, they encounter the eponymous grotto where Sunny is poisoned.  One of the things I remembered clearly from reading this some two decades ago was how worried I was for Sunny, although I knew she couldn’t be killed off.

Literary references abound in this volume.  The Herman Melville references are obvious enough, but I was impressed that Handler gives a brief lesson on Plato’s cave analogy and brought in several other literary figures as well.  Contrasting Melville with Edgar Guest (and I admit that I had to look up Guest) is brilliant.  Guest wrote optimistic poetry which earns him the scorn of Snicket.  Indeed, when Count Olaf shows up, late in the story, the crew of his submarine (in a riff on Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea) wears suits with Guest silhouettes on them, as opposed to the Queequeq Melville images.  The book also introduces children to the poetry of Lewis Carroll and T. S. Eliot, and I’m sure that there are others I’m forgetting at the moment.  It’s a service to young people to stimulate their interest in other writers.  I’d forgotten that “briny beach” comes from Carroll.  Even the tedious bits of this volume service a didactic purpose.  There may be spoilers below.

Not that The Grim Grotto is without humor.  Apart from the roasting of Guest, the reference to the Mediocre Barrier Reef was a laugh out loud moment.  And the tying together of loose threads.  The hook-handed man is Fiona’s brother.  Josephine’s family ran the destroyed aquarium, and Mr. Poe shows up near the end only to be eclipsed by Kit Snicket.  There is so much to like here.  Including the thin line between good and evil that the children keep coming back to.  Returning to the series after two decades with only the movie to partially remind me of the tale has been enjoyable so far.  Even though they weren’t part of my own childhood, I’m glad to make their reacquaintance now.

Fear Not

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It takes quite a lot to get me to buy a book from InterVarsity Press.  This is something I think Kutter Callaway would probably understand.  My childhood was haunted not only by my family circumstances, but also by fundamentalism.  When I learned I could run, I did.  When Be Afraid showed up on Theofantastique, however, I didn’t hesitate.  Some of us have found healing and a positive message in some horror.  I agree with Callaway that some series, or concepts, are too nihilistic to really get anything out of.  In this fascinating book, we are given a tour through some dark places by someone who’s still evangelical, but who admits to watching, and even enjoying horror.  And being in California, he can actually meet and interview some of the people who make the films that guys like me watch.

I understand this book began as a podcast.  Since my biggest fear these days is running out of time—I’ve got so much I want to get done!—I have trouble finding time for podcasts.  My stack of books to read miraculously never grows any smaller, no matter how many volumes I pull off the top of the stack.  I started this book a little skeptical, but I was soon won over.  Callaway advocates “fearing rightly,” and he knows something many won’t admit: we’re all afraid.  Some of us tamp it down pretty securely, but others of us stare it in the face until we have to flinch.  And a good number of us grew us in conservative Christian households.  One of the things I found interesting following the author through the contours of his fears is that a number of people who work in the horror film industry have, or still, identify as Christians.  I learned that Wes Craven was raised in a strict Baptist household and attended Wheaton College.

One of the recurring themes on this blog, as well as in my own books, is that religion and horror are closely related.  I explore this through my mini-reviews of horror movies and of various books.  I know some of the actually employed academics who work in the field.  And I’ll freely admit that the end of my teaching career at the hands of “Christians” has colored my own experience of horror.  This little book turned out to be a fascinating read.  And it led me to trust that the author wasn’t trying to covertly convert me.  If you have a religious background and are curious about horror, I’d recommend it.

Harvest Time

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Dark Harvest literally sat atop my literal “to read” pile for almost a year.  Norman Partridge’s book came into my possession sometime after Halloween last year but I wanted to wait until, well, harvest season to read it.  It’s a very good choice as autumn really begins to settle in.  It’s a story with its own world and its own rules.  In a small town in a farming community, a dark ritual is kept alive by a powerful group of local citizens.  On Halloween night, a specially grown pumpkin atop a crucified scarecrow, comes to life.  One of the people from town cuts the scarecrow down, carves it a face, animates it with candy, and hands it a butcher knife.  The October Boy, as he’s known, heads to town.  Meanwhile, the local boys between 16 and 18 are sent out with makeshift weapons to stop this monster.  If it makes it into the church before midnight, serious consequences will follow.  The boys, hungry from a week of fasting, prowl the night, looking to be the winner who takes October Boy down.  All of this is overseen by the town’s cop.  Things can get out of hand on Halloween night.

This is a horror story with heart.  I won’t put any spoilers here, but I will say, as in the best of horror, the monster isn’t who you think he is.  This elaborate game has taken its toll on the town for generations.  This Halloween, however, four people are out to stop it.  Supernatural horror that pays off the suspension of disbelief, Dark Harvest is also an emotional tale.  It’s a story of loss and one about the high cost of observing convention for convention’s sake.  Having the ending set in a church brings religion and horror together nicely.  And it also raises some deeper questions for those who care to steer that way.  Sacrifice is a major theme in the story.

I’m glad I waited until Halloween season to read this one.  A short book, it doesn’t take long to get through.  And it presses the right buttons for the season.  Partridge is an author who really gets what the autumnal setting can do for a horror story.  I enjoy good horror set in winter or summer as well.  (Okay, so spring too.)  There is, however, something special about novels that engage seriously with harvest time.  Harvest has always had a deep symbolic value that’s often overlooked in what is, inherently, a spooky period.  I really appreciated the author’s afterword as well.  I’m glad I waited for the right season.

Horrorigins

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Among those who write about horror, and those who talk about it, a common question is what drew you into it.  The origin story of your fascination.  I read a book where the author posed that question: when was the first time as a child you really felt fear?   I paused and thought.  Thinking back, the better question for me is when do I remember not feeling fear?  I spent a lot of time scared as a child.  I was born insecure, I guess.  Things frightened me.  I had more than my fair share of phobias and garden-variety fears.  Even as I grew up, it didn’t seem that my siblings were the same way.  I was the scaredy-cat.  We all liked watching monster movies on Saturday afternoon, however.  My gateway to manufactured fear was Dark Shadows.  The many posts on this blog about that series should indicate how formative it was for my young psyche.

If you get to know me well enough I’ll tell you some of the traumas I faced early on in this earthly existence.  Being the child of an alcoholic, I kept a close eye, and ear, on my environment.  I still want to know just where everybody is.  I don’t want someone startling or scaring me.  I don’t like surprises.  And I watch horror as therapy.  It’s cathartic.  And I write books about it.  One of those hopeful books is about the spirituality of living in the dark.  This isn’t something I willing chose.  No, it was what I was born into and had to learn to cope with.  I do like to “arm myself with knowledge.”  I read about the world and my small, scary corner of it.  Most everyone I read about had a well-adjusted childhood with one moment when fear coaxed them in.  That wasn’t my experience of it.

As we age our memories of childhood take on different shading.  Picture albums preserve the good times.  “Smile for the camera.”  My mother used to worry about me because I didn’t smile much as a child.  I was afraid.  I hadn’t yet learned how watching scary things might help me.  Besides, I had siblings close in age and there were always distractions around.  These days I’ve overcome most of my phobias.  Becoming a parent, although it introduced new ones, led me to try to overcome some of the older ones.  I sincerely hope trauma doesn’t get passed on genetically.  Maybe I’ve ended up where I have for a reason.  Watching horror gives me a chance to choose what form it will take.

Puzzle Conscious

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Those of us who write books are all working on putting together a puzzle.  Even though we often disagree, it is part of the same puzzle.  We’re trying to expand human knowledge.  Some make a living doing it, most do not.  As this thought initially occurred to me, I wondered if it applied only to nonfiction.  It doesn’t.  Even the novelist is participating in piecing together this immense, at least planet-sized, puzzle.  We don’t understand consciousness.  Some of us are convinced that it pervades other living beings as well.  Philosophers far more brilliant than yours truly have suggested that if consciousness is emergent then it can be traced back to matter itself.  Our human part of the picture is pieced together in libraries.  Those collections of human thought.

Being raised in a literalist environment, I thought books (nonfiction) were researched and written leaving the author mostly in the background.  I’ve come to realize that a nonfiction book is the author’s interpretation, having read the many interpretations of others.  And that each tome is part of the larger conundrum of mapping out human consciousness.  No matter how minor the publisher or how poor the sales, the book is, to some degree, a piece.  The puzzle we’re trying to construct is missing many, many pieces.  Long ago we surpassed the point at which one person could read every published piece of human knowledge.  Now, lifetimes would be required, and even then no one person could put it all together.  Consciousness is very slippery that way.  Not to mention the many, many unpublished books.  The task is immense and the end result is our contribution to the knowledge of how this universe works.

The humble contributions that I’ve attempted to add to the conversation may seem irrelevant.  They certainly haven’t brought in fame or money.  Those of us who write feel compelled to do so.  Others have no such compulsion and each of us has our role to play.  My thoughts go back to monks in the medieval period.  Many of them copying, a few of them composing, sacred objects.  Books were rare and all handwritten.  Today those that survive are priceless treasures.  They’re also pieces to a vast puzzle.  As we try to understand this very strange, very weird world in which we find ourselves, many of us still turn to books.  What we may not realize as we open the cover, is that we’re doing our part in a collaborative exercise in which we’re all involved.  Even if the puzzle is never fully completed.

A 48,000-piece puzzle

Still Headless

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I found J. W. Ocker through Poe.  Specifically, through his book Poe-Land.  I guess I read it last year about this time.  We had a brief email correspondence when I told him about my Sleepy Hollow book and he told me he had one coming out as well.  I’ve had Chasing the Headless Horseman on my list ever since.  Ocker is a travel writer.  (Like most writers he’s branched out into other areas as well.)  This book is a kind of memoir travelogue, telling of Ocker’s long-time relationship with Sleepy Hollow.  For some of us, the story is compelling in an almost ethereal way.  In our own ways we explore it.  Ocker also reviews the movies that Washington Irving’s story has begat.  He also explores the intimate connection the Headless Horseman has with Halloween.  He even delves into Irving’s role in Christmas.  These are all things I stumble on in my own book, but what we’re doing is quite different.

Chasing the Headless Horseman is a fun romp through a place I’ve only been once.  We’ve never lived close enough or had funds enough to visit frequently.  When my daughter was still at home, we made autumnal literary trips, one of which took us to Austerlitz, New York.  And on the way home, through Sleepy Hollow.  I still remember looking at the map—yes, a paper map!—and seeing the name “Sleepy Hollow.”  I hadn’t realized that it was a real place.  At this point in time, Sleepy Hollow, as an official place name, had only existed for eleven years.  It was October and it wasn’t crowded.  Reading Ocker I realize that if we ever try to return in October it will be a very different experience.  Since our one visit, it has become a major Halloween town.  With parking problems.  Last year I looked at hotels and realized that if you want to get within about fifty miles of Sleepy Hollow in October, you have to pretty much book your stay a year in advance.

Ocker is more personable than me.  He interviews people.  He asks them about living in Sleepy Hollow.  He also shows us where historical markers and statues stand (I’m a fan of those too), and which archives have what artifacts.  I always read in awe.  In fact, last year when I traveled to Boston for work, I visited as many places from Poe-Land as I could, given the constraints.  Now I have a similar list for Sleepy Hollow.  If you can’t make it there personally, do yourself a favor and read Chasing the Headless Horseman.  I’m glad I did.

October Puzzles

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The holiday season should begin at Halloween.  In my mind, if I can make it to Halloween, I can make it through the rest of the year.  Besides, the holidays are the only time I allow myself to work on jigsaw puzzles.  Puzzles slow cognitive aging, according to an article or two on the National Institute of Health, but I’d do them anyway.  I’ve loved jigsaw puzzles since I was a kid.  Part of our holiday tradition is that “Santa” leaves a nice one under the tree.  This year I sent a note to the North Pole requesting a Halloween-themed puzzle.  It arrived for my birthday instead.  One October weekend while recovering from either a flu or Covid vaccine (I get them at the same time) I decided to put it together.  I wasn’t concentrating well enough to read or write.

We have a couple other Halloween-themed puzzles.  Last year, to celebrate the publication of Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, I put together the one we have of John Quidor’s painting of the Headless Horseman chasing Ichabod Crane.  We also have a puzzle with horror movie posters on it.  Maybe it’s time to start a new Halloween tradition.  With things so expensive these days, tricking out the house for treaters is costly.  I went into a Spirit Halloween earlier in October and saw costumes priced at $100 (almost enough to buy some of my books!).  I know Halloween is a major spending holiday now, but that puts things out of reach.  Besides, we now have three Halloween-themed puzzles, so I can rotate them and use what we already have.  And maybe help this creaky old brain from declining too swiftly.

Puzzles satisfy a need for completion.  Who doesn’t like the satisfaction of getting something done?  And they leave you with something fun to look at for a few days.  Of course, over Christmas I tend to work on them with family, and lots of interesting conversation can take place around the puzzle table.  And my mind turns to the wonders of the holidays starting around August, but I wait until later in the season to reward myself with things like puzzles.  (Scary movies are fair game year-round, of course.)  Puzzles are kind of a parable for life.  They represent taking chaos and making order out of it.  There’s the drama and fear that pieces could be missing.  The struggle to visualize what might fit into such a space when all the remaining pieces look so ordinary.  If the holiday season began earlier, puzzle-building season could be expanded to the benefit of our brains.

Sweet Horror Music

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I don’t often write about music because it’s far too personal.  And very important to me.  I’m not a casual listener, for the most part.  When I listen to music I listen to music.  Still, sometimes it seems to hit the spirit of the moment.  When innocently watching a horror movie (When the Lights Went Out) I heard a catchy song I’d never been aware of hearing before.  The film was set in the seventies and the song was the slightly salacious single “Little Willy” by The Sweet.  Since this was a “based on a true story” movie, they were shooting for period authenticity.  I was alive and somewhat aware during the seventies.  I knew, and liked, The Sweet’s hit “Fox on the Run.”  I really couldn’t name any other song of theirs.

Image credit: Majalah Varianada. Public domain in Indonesia, where published, via Wikimedia Commons.

I lived in a small town and there was no internet.  We got our information from school, television, books, newspapers, and magazines.  And word of mouth, of course.  Much of what I learned about music was from someone telling me something.  I heard Alice Cooper bit the head off of a live chicken.  Actually, Ozzy Osbourne had bitten the head off a live bat.  You couldn’t rely on word of mouth, but about popular music that was about all that was available.  In other words, I knew nothing about The Sweet.  Since I never heard anything more after “Fox,” I’d figured they were a one-hit wonder.  They got shelved, in my mind, until I saw When the Lights Went Out.  As these things usually do, my curiosity about them had to await a day off work when I could indulge my curiosity.  I looked them up online and discovered, to my surprise, that they’d been around since the early sixties, making them an early rock band.  In the often tangled history of early rock, they didn’t become The Sweet until the late sixties.

Their peak came in the seventies, although according to the internet, in the way of George Washington’s axe, they still exist (one of the original lineup is still alive).  We live in an age of antique early rockers still performing.  I’m sure music must be a tough business.  Staying popular for decades can’t be easy.  Now we can find the history of a band with just a few keystrokes.  We can call up their music on some streaming service.  Or hear it over the loudspeaker in just about any shopping venue.  When I hear music, I pay attention to it.  And about the only thing I remember from that horror movie is a song by a band I’d long forgotten.  Not bad for a mediocre film.

Bible Movies

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I’ve noted elsewhere that no database exists, that I know of, where every movie showing or featuring the Bible is catalogued.  I used clips from films that had the Bible in one of my Rutgers’ Jan Term classes (four hours is a bit long of a stretch to talk).  The years have worn away some of the memories, but while thinking about The Sheep Detectives I thought of Nell.  Not because the movies are similar at all, but because they both use the Bible.  I’m not discussing horror here, since I do that plenty elsewhere.  I single out Nell because I remember it.  Since I tend to keep things, my notes from the class—probably on some unreadable disc—may preserve the movies I used.  Absent the notes, I’m having trouble with my recollection.  I may have discussed them on this blog but even the search function grows weary with so many posts.

It was in that class, however, that the seeds for Holy Horror were planted.  Two of the movies were Sleepy Hollow and An American Haunting.  Those I remember.  (It helps that I met the author of the novel on which the latter was based while at Rutgers.)  I do wonder, apart from Nell, which non-horror movies I used.  There was a good handful of them.  Since that class was over 15 years ago, instant recall is lacking.  For purposes of understanding how the Good Book is understood, however, having a comprehensive list would be useful.

I excluded movies based on the Bible.  These are the kind of thing that make a web search useless.  All they bring up is The Ten Commandments and its ilk.  What struck me at the time was that the Bible occurs quite frequently in movies.  Typing this out reminded me that O Brother, Where Art Thou? was also among the cohort.  Who can forget the cyclops Bible salesman Big Dan?  But what were the others?  Constantine was probably among them.  And Pulp Fiction.  I’m sure a couple more weren’t of the scary sort.  Ah yes, Muppet Treasure Island had to’ve been among them.  Was Footloose?  Probably.  I may not remember all the movies whose clips I used, but I do remember doing web searches even then and finding them frustrating.  The Bible appears in tons of films.  As far as I’m aware, nobody has thought to catalogue all of them.  Were I still a professor, I’d be suggesting a research project for some eager doctoral student.  And, of course, I’d still have ready access to my notes.

Monster Mash

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You think you know a guy.  Actually, I never claim to be a Washington Irving expert.  Sure, a read three or four biographies, while researching Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, but the idea of that book was to trace the story he wrote forward, not to make stunning claims about Irving himself.  Still, doing this kind of research you tend to think you know a bit about the life of a person.  Irving was awkward around women but he seemed to fall in love from time to time.  He was engaged at least once (in his mind, at least twice).  His first love, like that of his younger contemporary Edgar Allan Poe, died young of tuberculosis.  Irving had considerable success with his first novel A History of New York, putatively written by Diedrich Knickerbocker.   He was sent off to England by his family and it was in Europe that he wrote the book that made him famous, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.  It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Irving stayed in Europe for 17 years and wrote other books that kept him going.  None would match the acclaim of The Sketch Book.  (It also included his tale, “Rip Van Winkle.”)  Since he remained in Europe, his fame was trans-Atlantic.  He was doing what few could—making a living by writing.  Most who did so, or tried to, struggled financially.  One of those people was Mary Shelley.  She’d begun writing Frankenstein when she was 18.  Twenty when it published, two years later she was widowed when her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned.  Shelley had a rocky relationship with his aristocratic family and Mary made a living by publishing lesser known pieces.

At some point—keep in mind Mary Shelley was a young widow and often lonely—Shelley tried to initiate a romance with Washington Irving.  He was older and, perhaps playing into her thoughts, an established writer.  That’s what she longed to be.  Irving was not interested in this particular relationship.  He’d fallen in love with an American girl traveling Europe with her family, and had been burned.  As Halloween approaches, this interesting confluence of the creators of Frankenstein’s monster and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow—two iconic seasonal monsters—has its own kind of wonder.  Neither Irving nor Shelley were “horror writers.”  That concept wouldn’t emerge until much later.  Nevertheless, they had brought to life two characters without which Halloween as we know it would be severely diminished.  You never know what might happen when you publish a monster story.