Horror for Halloween

As the harvest season ends and huge combines begin clearing the fields, I always think of the legend of the Corn King. The Corn King is a ruler who is sacrificed ritually every year to fertilize the earth, so she will bear a rich harvest. He has appeared in almost every culture, from ancient Egypt and Sumeria through the current day. Author Stephen King used the legend in his short story, Children of the Corn, on which a very creepy video series was later based. King has also made a distinction between "inside horror," based deep in human motivations and fears, and "outside horror," based on non-human threats, such as zombies, ghosts, aliens and the like. For me, the inside sources of horror are always far more frightening than external monsters.  

One of the most disturbing tales based on this legend is Thomas Tryon's novel, Harvest Home. Originally published in 1973, it is out of print, but available digitally. Beth and Ned Constantine decide to leave the stresses of city life and find a nice rural setting in New England, with their defiant and asthmatic teenage daughter, Kate. Cornwall Coombe seems the perfect spot––tranquil farm country set in rolling hills, with a friendly, welcoming community.

There are a lot of characters to track in this book, and the reader is always way ahead of poor oblivious Ned, but despite what now seems like a rather trite plot (many authors have used it since), Tryon was first with the story––and best, many think. And the actual ending is so terrible that you will not be able to forget it for years. If you enjoy slowly building suspense, with an unexpected and unforgettable ending, you might want to have a look. Harvest Home is an excellent story of "inside" horror, perfect reading for a gloomy October day.

Another much-loved classic, never out of print, is Henry James's short novel, Turn of the Screw. The narrator, now deceased, has written the tale to a friend who reads it aloud. The narrator is a governess to two orphaned children, Miles and Flora, in a gloomy suburban mansion. Their guardian is their uncle, who lives in town and does not want to be bothered with the care of the children. The narrator (never named) gradually comes to suspect that her charges are sometimes possessed by two ghosts, those of her predecessor and her lover, who sometimes indulge in sexually suggestive behaviors. Can this be true, or is she herself going mad? While this is actually a novella, only about 100 pages, it is by no means a quick read. James is as dense as Dickens to read.

Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart is another first person narration by a questionably sane teller. The narrator has murdered an old man––we never really know why. "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me! For his gold I had no desire!"  The old man had a "clouded, blue, vulture-like eye" that apparently so offended or terrified the narrator that he meticulously planned and executed a murder, afterwards dismembering and hiding the body. But the old man had let out one scream, and suspicious neighbors later called in the police. Part of the general weirdness of this story is its dissociation. We never learn the setting, or the actual relationship between murderer and victim. Poe himself had wild bouts of instability and drunkenness, and most of his stories are very dark indeed.

I have never read Jay Anson's The Amityville Horror or seen the movie, but have the book in my queue for reading this fall. Probably it won't keep me up for weeks. While I'm generally quite skeptical of things that go bump in the night, that whole ugly story of the butchery of one family and the haunting of another in that pretty suburban house gives me the cauld grue. And some buildings do have presences.

I can far too easily imagine myself in Kathleen Lutz's position, offered a mansion at an incredible discount because murder had been done there. I'm a skeptic, not a believer in ghosts, I'm mostly sure. Might I have jumped at the chance?  Quite likely, a bargain in waterfront Dutch Colonials doesn't come along very often. Would you have bought it?

Review of Jørgen Brekke's Where Monsters Dwell

Where Monsters Dwell by Jørgen Brekke

Present-day seers without the benefit of oracles from Delphi have confidently predicted what the future holds for the "14ers" (babies born in 2014). Apparently, along with car keys, DVDs and light bulbs that work, dead tree books are something those little hands will never hold. I will boldly take the position that the Golden Books and Dr.Seuss are safe for a while, because tiny fingers can access them easily (no password protection) and they taste better too. It’s amazing to contemplate the disappearance of something that has been highly valued for centuries.

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." ("The Raven," Edgar Allan Poe)

Of course, that is because the value of a book extends far beyond the words encompassed between its covers. Sometimes, a good story can encapsulate some of the essence of the value of writing, and writers and books that have crossed the paths of many individuals and affected their lives by their very existence.

This is the case in Jørgen Brekke’s Where Monsters Dwell (translated from the Norwegian by Steven T. Murray; to be published by Minotaur on February 11, 2014).

It all starts with a book, a unique volume, the only one of its kind.

Efrahim Bond was working as a librarian in his office at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. He had ended up there after a somewhat nomadic career, but was satisfied because he had come across the find of a lifetime. He had fragments of a book known as The Johannes Book, written by a mendicant friar who lived in Norway during the 1500s.

It was a book handwritten on parchment, from an age when paper was becoming more common. From what Bond could read, the book contained confessions of a grisly nature. He heard a knock.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— / While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, / As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door." / 'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door— / Only this and nothing more." ("The Raven," Edgar Allan Poe)

It was the cleaning woman at the museum who made the gruesome discovery of Efrahim Bond's remains, in a state worse than anything imagined by the master of the macabre himself, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe spent much of his childhood in Richmond, Virginia, and studied at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville before he enlisted in the military. While in Richmond, he enjoyed the full use of his mental faculties; it was only later that he began to have periods of mental problems that remain undefined to this day.

About the same time Efrahim was meeting his fate, in a Kingdom by the Sea (a/k/a Norway, by the Norwegian, the North and Barents Seas) Jon Vatten rode his disintegrating bicycle to the Gunnerus Library in Trondheim, Norway, where he worked as the chief of security. One of the main treasures of this library is The Johannes Book.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. ("Eleonora," Edgar Allan Poe)

Vatten liked weekends best, because he had free time to work a bit on his thoughts about what actually killed Edgar Allan Poe. He was fascinated by the idea that such a preeminent writer should die destitute. He’d had the opportunity to visit the museum in Richmond, Virginia, the summer before.

"Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die." (Edgar Allan Poe)

Before Vatten got settled into his day, he was introduced to a new librarian named Siri Holm. Her avocation was to figure out the identity of the villain in any murder mystery before the end of the first third of the book. To do this, she has some interesting theories. But, perhaps, her main skill was seduction. The Gunnerus Library passed a quiet weekend, but on Monday morning a mutilated body was found in the book vault by the head of the library.

Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded.... ("The Tell-Tale Heart," Edgar Allan Poe)

The body is that of the librarian Gunna Britte Dahle, whom Siri had just replaced. Gunna had also been to the Poe museum in Richmond in recent months. The motive for the killing was unclear but it, like the murder in Richmond, had the air of fiction about it, as if it had been imagined ahead of time.

Over the Mountains / Of the Moon, / Down the Valley of the Shadow, / Ride, boldly ride ("Eldorado," Edgar Allan Poe)

Felicia Stone of the Richmond police follows her nose and some subtle clues, which lead her to the Norway connection, and she works with Chief Insp. Odd Singsaker of the Trondheim police to make sense of the madness. The murderer is not yet finished and the clues are few.

Grains of the golden sand— / How few! yet how they creep / Through my fingers to the deep, / While I weep—while I weep! ("A Dream within a Dream," Edgar Allan Poe)

Despite the fact that I found the murders extremely grisly, the story itself was intriguing.

Jørgen Brekke interweaves a marvelous history of the creation of The Johannes Book into the story, and tells the reader a fascinating tale of how anatomic dissection first became acceptable as a route to medical knowledge, then finally legal. He also gives some absorbing details of how early books were put together in the era when the basic raw materials were scarce. Imagine the excitement when, over 500 years ago, printer Teobaldo Manucci (a/k/a Aldus Manutius) invented strange little vellum-bound books that a reader could easily carry under his arm. Brekke's scattered pearls of the life history of Edgar Allan Poe were decorations on the cake.

We gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams. ("The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," Edgar Allan Poe)

The pundits may be correct in their predictions of a society without dead-tree books. In my own office, magazines are disappearing since the advent of e-readers, the Kindle app and newspaper apps for smart phones. But most of the people I ask have no idea of the name of the book they are reading, nor its author––and it doesn’t seem to matter to them, because the books themselves are simply chosen because they are free or very low cost.

A niece of mine goes to a school where there are no textbooks, only iPads, and the students get along very well. I will have to check whether crayons have gone the way of cursive in this school. Surely Crayola crayons are here to stay.

In fact, the country’s first totally digital public library system opened in San Antonio, Texas this week. The place (can it really be called a library?) is called Bibliotech. Appropriately, this name is inspired in part from the Spanish word for library––biblioteca. The Oxford English Dictionary defines library as "a building or room containing collections of books, periodicals, and sometimes films and recorded music for people to read, borrow, or refer to." So it is an appropriate use of the word.

There were patrons lining up to check out the online catalog on Apple touchscreen computers and check out books on e-readers. Say goodbye to judging a book by its cover.

There have been other libraries without printed books; for one, the Tucson-Pima Public library system opened such a branch, but the people who lived in the community demanded print books be added to the shelves. I am not alone.

Note: I received a free review copy of Brekke's Where Monsters Dwell. Some versions of this review may appear elsewhere under my user name there.

Review of Christopher Moore's The Serpent of Venice

The Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore

I never know quite what to expect from author Christopher Moore, but this quirky laugh-out-loud farce is typical of his irreverent oeuvre. The Serpent of Venice is a bawdy mash-up of two of Shakespeare's plays, The Merchant of Venice and The Tragedy of Othello, with a dash of Edgar Allan Poe and an infatuated sea serpent thrown into the mix.

This is the second appearance of our protagonist, Pocket the Fool (after Fool: A Novel), with the puppet Jones and his trusty sidekicks, Drool and Jeff the Monkey. Pocket has been sent to Venice by his wife, Cordelia, the more-or-less accidental queen of England, to persuade the Doge not to go to war with Turkey. While he is there, Cordelia dies in London, presumably of disease, leaving Pocket in a very sticky situation.

A triumvirate of powerful men in Venice wants Pocket dead, by any means possible. The Doge favors Pocket, whose interests are inimical to their greedy plans, and Pocket has boasted of seducing Portia, the Senator's second daughter (his first had run away with that Moor, Othello.) Senator Montressor Brabantio, Iago the soldier, and Antonio the merchant lure Pocket to the Brabantio's house with the promise of a new cask of Amontillado wine to taste. The other two conspirators help Brabantio chain Pocket in the dungeon and leave. The Senator uses long-forgotten skills to brick up the entrance, jeering all the while that Cordelia had been slowly poisoned by his hawkish cabal.

"'What are you doing?'

'Walling you up in the dungeon.'

'No you're not.'

'Yes I am. Go join your queen, fool.'

'For the love of god, Montressor!'"

Anyone familiar with Poe's creepy story The Cask of Amontillado will surely remember that despairing cry.

After several days in the dark dungeon, a female sea serpent/mermaid not averse to intimate inter-species relations begins to visit Pocket, mauling him lovingly and bringing him dead fish to eat. The smitten serpent finally pulls his chains out of the wall and deposits Pocket in front of Shylock's house on the Jews' Isle. Shylock's daughter Jessica has always wanted a slave, but Jewish law forbids it. Pocket narrowly escapes a bris at her inexperienced hands, but agrees to become Shylock's uncircumcised employee.

The Immortal Bard himself was a master of innuendo and double entendre, and his work is full of sexy puns. Did you know that any passage that contains both a lady and a glove is likely a reference to sex? Both gloves and condoms of the period were made of lambskin. Almost any cut of meat mentioned in Shakespeare has a double meaning; haunches, rumps, loins, sausages. Fruit too, especially pears. Elizabethan audiences loved their raunchy humor and Shakespeare loved to give it to them.

There is much ado about codpieces in this book; sometimes it was more reminiscent of a sophomore boys' locker room than anything else. I had never really thought about codpieces being sized, but Pocket is presented––at least by himself––as the smallest man with the biggest codpiece in most gatherings.

Moore's one-man invasion of classical literature managed to confuse me about the characters thoroughly––it has been many years since I read or saw either of these plays performed. Portia, a character from Merchant, appears here as the younger sister of Desdemona, who was married to Othello. When their father, Senator Brabantio, dies of a heart attack after walling Pocket in the dungeon, Othello the Moor, as husband of Desdemona, inherits by default his seat on the powerful Council. There is a Chorus, which at one point argues with Pocket. While I appreciate Moore's modifications of the outcomes for Othello, Desdemona, and Shylock, I'll have to reread synopses of both plays to get the characters and stories straight again. And the puppet Jones has all the best lines!

Note: I was given a free review copy of The Serpent of Venice, which will be published by William Morrow on April 22, 2014.