The Aviary

I just finished reading Dark Matter by Michelle Paver. About which two things:

1) Y'know how sometimes you finish reading a book you loved and are immediately seized with the very particular sadness of knowing you can never read it for the first time again? That's where I am right now. After being at least vaguely disappointed by basically every horror novel I read in 2020, it's wonderful to start out this year with a book that was exactly everything I wanted it to be. I need to buy myself a copy.

2) I find the discussion questions for book groups that are occasionally included in books irritating at the best of times, as I feel compelled to read them and they're nearly always bad but there is something especially infuriating at getting to the end of a perfect beautiful ghost story to find that one of the discussion questions is "was the haunting real?" That's just - it's the least interesting or important way to talk about a ghost story, please stop.

Currently, I am reading The Invited by Jennifer McMahon, which is a fun and enjoyably ghost/haunted house story with the twist that the protagonist is in fact building the haunted house in question. However, it is also doing one of my least favorite horror things, which is:

Female Protagonist: I am the protagonist! I might be a SAHM mom or I might have a career but it's probably not in the sciences. I am likely interested in history to one degree or another.

Her Boyfriend/Husband: I definitely have a job in a STEM field. I encourage my wife's interests because they are endearing to me, but I do not really take them seriously.

Female Protagonist: I have had an experience wherein I encountered something supernatural! Within the universe of the story, this is absolutely true, but my boyfriend/husband did not witness the event.

Her Boyfriend/Husband: I absolutely do not believe in the supernatural (because I am a Rational Man in a STEM field) and thus do not believe that your experience happened the way you described. I will condescendingly try to convince you that it could not have happened.

Female Protagonist: I am continuing to have supernatural experiences!

Her Boyfriend/Husband: Despite mounting evidence, I still will not countenance the existence of anything supernatural and will instead berate you when you talk about your experiences in increasingly belittling ways.


A) I hate this dynamic so much and am not much appeased by the fact that it usually ends with the husband/boyfriend's death due to a supernatural occurrence and b) I have been trying to recall if I have ever seen the dynamic with the genders swapped. It would probably still be irritating, but I'd be interested in reading/watching a story with that dynamic, if only just the once.

Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror: I will now spend my first chapter talking about Nosferatu.

Me: Okay, rad, I love Nosferatu. I am wondering if you're going to backtrack and cover The Cabinet of Dr Caligari at all, however. Seems, y'know, relevent.

Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror: ::continues to talk about Nosferatu and Albin Grau's interest in vampires::

Me: It's just that you don't have an index or any sort of list of works that you're going to discuss and while those are valid choices, it means that I can't check to see if you're going to cover things.

Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror: ::discusses Aleister Crowley's influence on Nosferatu::

Me: That is absolutely super interesting but now I'm really distracted by this question. I mean, it's cool if you aren't going to talk about Caligari - I just want to know.

Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror: Did you know that F W Murnau was queer?

Me: I DID NOT, as the horror films of the 1920s are not my specialty but I am both happy to learn than and also unsurprised, as it is as an article of faith with me that all early horror film is queer as fuck.

Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror: Did you know that, on average, 1300 German soldiers died per day during WWI? That's more people than live in your town.*

Me: Holy shit.






*Three hours later, I realize that I cannot add. Poulsbo has a population of 10,000, not 1,000. So this is not more people than live in my town, but it is more people than live in my Dad's hometown.

So, I'm rereading The Shining for the first time in...a while. It's not my favorite Stephen King but it's good and solidly enjoyable. (And not, for me personally, scary enough that I can't read it before bed, which is a plus.)

But.

Y'all, I read enough of a certain type of fantasy literature as a child that I to this day immediately and automatically read any word that looks weird and made up backwards just in case*. And I get that the characters often literally can't do that but I can only engage with the book as written media. And given Stephen King's habit of picking a significant word and having it recur and recur and recur throughout whatever he's writing**, by about halfway through, the fact that we are still acting like the meaning of "redrum" is a big scary mystery is just annoying as all hell.





*Every once in a while, I run into a Harry Potter fan who still has not done this with the Mirror of Erised. It is always a fun time.

**Which usually I'm pretty into.

Good things:

The other day, I discovered that a horror author I very much like and whom I thought had only ever written two books - T.E.D. Klein - had, in fact, written a third book. Or, at least, had a collection of some of his previously uncollected short fiction published in 2006. It was a limited release and copies now are prohibitively expensive, but a nearby library system had one. So I put in an ILL request and got it in less than a week! It is in my bag right now and I get to start it on my break! (And then maybe I will reread The Ceremonies, because it's been long enough that I don't remember the details of the scary bits.)


Not so good things:

One of my first patrons of the day brought in a book that he had to return because it was on hold for someone else, but wanted to put it back on hold for himself. Which I did for him, and then told him, in response to his question, that he was now 10th in line for it and it would be a little while before he got it back. And he frowned and walked away, loudly monologuing about how sad and disappointed his wife would be that they wouldn't be getting it again sooner. 10 minutes later, his wife came up to check out and loudly told me that she was, indeed, disappointed.

People, fussing at me does not get your book here faster. I do not control the holds queue.

Ahahaha, my library is getting me an ILL copy of Les Mains d'Orlac in English translation.

Oh my god, I love the ILL system. It is the best thing.

(Triumph, Galatea!)



ETA - Also, in looking for other translations of fiction by Maurice Renard, I found this page. Which appears to want to sell me not only Maurice Renard but also a) Lord Ruthven fanfiction, b) a book in which both Victor Frankenstein and zombie Napoleon appear, and c) Sherlock Holmes vs Fantomas.

I'm sorry, just, all of that is utterly absurd and wonderful and I want all of it.

What an amazing time to be alive.

The problem with being a fan of somewhat obscure older horror in the age of the modern internet is that one gets spoiled. I mean, if I want to read basically any work of horror literature that's currently in public domain, someone has probably put it up somewhere that I can download it. Usually for free, but if not, for a very reasonable price. Which is awesome!

But it only works if the work was originally in English*.

And that is why I am currently feeling ridiculously annoyed by the fact that I apparently cannot access a reasonably priced English translation of Les Mains d'Orlac. Because I want it and I read nowhere near enough French to just download the original.

I guess I just have to learn more French.





*I have no doubt that non-native speakers of English experience this all the time in the reverse which would be equally annoying and I'm sorry.

So, here is an awesome thing!

The Seattle Public Library has a form on their website where you plug in your name and email address and some info about the kind of books you like or don't like, and their librarians will make you a personalized 5-book recommendation list.

I filled out the form a few days ago, saying that I was particularly looking for horror recommendations and listing some of my favorite horror novels as well as some details about what kinds of horror I like best. (Cosmic horror, body horror, low on sexual violence.) It took about five days, but the list I got is awesome. And the librarian wrote me a nice chatty email, describing the recommended books and why he thought I might like them. The email actually recommended more than five books, since he included a lot of "if you like this one, you might also try this," and "our library doesn't have this right now, but we should be getting it soon." The books he recommended that I've already read were ones that I'd quite liked, which makes me pretty confident about the ones I haven't.

They are, of course, mostly books that they have in the Seattle Public system, but you don't have to have a card there to try out the form, and there's no reason you can't take the recs to your own system or to amazon.

It is pretty great. You should try it.

Happy Halloween!

I am putting all kinds of audio horror on my mp3 player. I have way more of it than I could possibly listen to today, but that is what happens when I get enthusiastic. And hey, now I have a recording of The Repairer of Reputations that I can listen to any time I want. And House of the Vampire. Who wouldn't want that?

Along those lines, so that I can link to radio drama as well as straight audiobooks, I will point out that all of October has been Undead Month on the horror podcast at Relic Radio and there have been vampires every Wednesday. And an interesting episode of Quiet, Please set in the American Southwest and has a zombie conquistador. (It also has some period racism, so...) I don't feel like there's enough horror set in the Southwest. Or possibly there is, and I've just missed it. In any case, here is an addition. 8)

The first time I can remember encountering Ray Bradbury was through a set of cassette tape recordings of him reading short stories. I got them from the library - I can't remember if I picked them out myself or not. My mom may have pointed them out, since I do remember her being supportive of my interest. I couldn't have been more than 10 or 11, which is probably the perfect age for first encountering Bradbury.

I listened to those tapes over and over. I remember that the stories terrified me, that his reading of them was horrific and fascinating. My experiences with horror up to that point had been confined to works from the 1800s and the kinds of horror that we offer children: Short and Shivery, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Those tapes had The Veldt and The Crowd and The Dwarf. I was hooked. At my school's next book fair, I bought a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes and read it over and over. I still have that copy.

I loved his science fiction (though I never much cared for Fahrenheit 451) and I loved his stories about boyhood (though I never read Dandelion Wine) but it was his horror I loved best. Even at 10, I was who I am now: the kind of kid who wanted to always live in October. Bradbury got that, understood and fed that longing for the dark and the things inside it. His stories seemed to me to always be filled with saudade, one that I shared, and reading them both satisfied and intensified it. Bradbury is a good companion for a kid who wants to grow up to be a monster.

I spent several years between high school and college thinking that he was dead and was surprised and delighted when he came out with a new book. It was like a letter from a friend you thought you'd never hear from again. But now he's really gone and there will be no more letters. I'll miss him.

Goodbye, Mr Bradbury. I hope it's October where you are.

In which I have trouble with books:

The thing about The Monk is that it's not really a breakfast book. I mean, I am enjoying it. We have yet to get to the Satanism and torture and all, but there has been a pregnant nun (who was taken away for punishment - we haven't seen her since, so I don't know yet what that punishment is) and the titular monk (Ambrosio) has discovered that his best monk friend (Rosario) is actually a woman (Matilda) who crossdressed as a monk because she's in love with him and wants to be close to him. Which means that we have to have pages and pages of Ambrosio trying to send her away for the good of their collective souls but she's so beautiful and might kill herself and she was his best friend when he thought she was a guy and also she posed for the picture of the Madonna that Ambrosio has really inappropriate thoughts about. See, this is what happens when people are raised in monasteries and not allowed to go outside till they're 30. Currently, Ambrosio has been unexpectedly bitten by a snake and Rosario/Matilda is tending to him. Wikipedia tells me that Matilda is secretly a witch, so I imagine Ambrosio will get better.

So it's fun, but it's not a breakfast book. Mostly because of the capitalization, which I have yet to figure out any sort of rhyme or reason for. It's like Matthew Lewis just threw some random capital letters at the pages and let them stick where they would. I can deal with the kind of capitalization where the author capitalizes words s/he wishes to emphasize but if that's what's going on here, Mr Lewis must want to emphasize practically everything. Also, he often capitalizes pronouns and I don't have the mental energy at breakfast to stop and remember that he's not talking about God and instead is just referring to the main character. It's oddly tiring.

Thus, this morning I ended up poking around my kindle to find something that would serve as a breakfast book (not boring, haven't read it too recently, not too mentally taxing, nothing icky). And succumbed to my periodic temptation to poke at The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu. Every once in a while, I remember that I put that on my kindle and I try to read it. And the thing is, Sax Rohmer could write. The first chapter or so (as far as I've ever gotten) is very exciting, in a pulp adventure sort of way, and I love pulp adventure. Nayland Smith bounds into his friend Dr Petrie's rooms and immediately turns out the lights, all Final-Problem-airguns, shows him where he's been shot with an arrow dipped in cobra venom, and then whisks him away to try and prevent a hideous murder. I mean, that's pretty thrilling stuff, right? You'd be intrigued. But then - horrible racism.* Before we ever even get to meet Dr Fu Manchu. I would like to meet him. I love diabolical genius evil masterminds anyway, and I'm fully prepared to root for him over Nayland Smith, who is a horrible racist. Anyone who gets nicknamed the Lord of Strange Deaths is all right by me, y'know? And at least in a book, he can be an actual Chinese person, instead of a white dude in yellow face. So there is always a temptation to try and stick it out, but I am usually defeated by about the middle of chapter two.

Is there pulp adventure that isn't horribly racist? Or misogynist? I would really like some.





*Possibly you are thinking, "This is a person who regularly reads and enjoys Lovecraft." And you are right - Lovecraft was also a horrible racist. I can manage Lovecraft because his stories, while horribly racist, are mostly about squishy squiggly things that drive people insane. Whereas Sax Rohmer is actively writing about Combating the Yellow Peril. It is perhaps a small distinction and useful only to me but there you go.

Things:

- Hey, did you know that if you press cntrl-alt-down arrow, your monitor display flips upside down? Because I did not know that and it just happened to my coworker. Which is pretty much the best computer problem to have: it's hilarious and easily fixed. Hurrah!

- The thing about having Christmas knitting to do is that I end up looking at a lot of patterns of other things I want to knit. Like this. But, see, the nice thing about that is that I always have yarn left over when I make socks and I could just make a few at a time and then, eventually, have an awesome patchwork knitted blanket. Which would fulfill my long-standing desire for a new afghan on my bed without feeling like it's a thing that I have to work on all the time. That sounds like an excellent idea.

- I woke up this morning with the desire to reread Dracula in my heart. However, I have way too many other books right now and several of them are interlibrary loans or things that the library purchased because I requested them, which much therefore be read first. I am also currently between audiobooks. You would think this would present an obvious solution, but instead I am full of indecision. There are a hell of a lot of Dracula audiobooks (or dramatizations) out there, you guys! It is hard to choose - do any of you have a favorite?

- One of the aforementioned books that I am reading is Monsters in America by W Scott Poole, which is pretty awesome so far (though I do wish he would have used footnotes instead of endnotes - flipping back and forth is annoying). There are sections on sea monsters and one of the chapters begins with a Mountain Goats quote (from "Lovecraft in Brooklyn"), and the author is not all et up with the Freud, which makes me happy. It is very enjoyable.