A History of Vampires in New England--Thomas D'Agostino

photo: Book cover from Goodreads.

I'm only the third person to rate this book on all of Goodreads...Just sayin'.  For more of my book reviews, my book list, and other nerdy book-related things, please visit my Goodreads site here.

The previous two reviewers gave this book an average of two stars.  I don't see how, as it never pertains to be something it isn't.  It's a book that reviews, summarizes and, frankly, rehashes information that's already out there, but puts it all in one place, and does so with a website's writing feel to it.  (If anything, the real complaint is the $17 tag Borders had put on it.)

Of particular interest to me were the stories of the vampires I'm incorporating into my novel--or trilogy, or whatever--tentatively titled THE GRAVEDIGGERS.  These, mostly, are the stories of Sarah Tillinghast, Nellie Vaughn and Mercy Brown, all woven into one.  (Nellie Vaughn being more or less a mistaken Mercy Brown, but with the now infamous epitaph on her gravestone; and I focus more on Stukeley Tillinghast, Sarah's father.)  And there's a lot to say about them, specifically because the author comes from my neck of the woods, and so is able to write about his visits to some of the places in his narratives.  I've been to some of these places myself, so it was interesting to see pictures of places I have already been to, and to compare our impressions and thoughts.  Essentially, this book was useful to me as a sort of place to gather all my notes--notes I didn't even have to write.  Not that I don't have a whole three-subject notebook of them anyway, as well as many journals and emails to myself.

A criticism would be that this book mostly cites just two others, one of which--Michael Bell's FOOD FOR THE DEAD--is vastly superior.  This one gives just the facts, ma'am, while Bell's gives that, and extensive first-person investigation, more thorough research, and even some slightly comical interviews.  Unless you're writing a novel--or trilogy, or whatever--about this sort of thing, and you only want one book, get Bell's.  But if you have the coin, spring for this one, too.  It's thinner and different and not as well-written or extensive as Bell's, but I think it useful, anyway.  Particularly good were the Introduction, the history of TB, and the description of "Life, Death and Superstition in Early New England," especially for my work.

Check out The Keep near Mercy Brown's grave, but do so at dusk, on a cold February day, like I did--and heed all due respect at this and other such places.  The crypt (or The Keep, as it's called) is really, really, creepy, even more so than the stories, or graves, or anything else.  D'Agostino's book has pics of inside of it, which are invaluable for my work because you can't get inside The Keep anymore--it's bolted shut.

Parker's Last Spenser

Sixkill wasn't bad, though it's not anything we haven't seen before.  Since it's perhaps the last Spenser, it's too bad because Hawk doesn't make an appearance.  In fact, that's the curiousity here.  It's like Parker had nowhere else for Hawk to go; Hawk's been in Southeast Asia for awhile now.  Yet Sixkill is another Hawk, really, except a Native American rather than an African American.  Same poor chances as a youth (though certainly his chances had been better than Hawk's); same transformation into strong, bench-pressing gym rat and killer with little conscience.  Odd Spenser as 'enry 'iggins thing there.  Anyway, a comfortable and quick read; finished the whole book in a couple of hours, which is a very positive thing and a slightly negative thing at the same time.  But it's like the latest Pirates and Indiana Jones movies: You know what you're going to get, and you don't even want anything better because you just want what you're comfortably happy with.  If you wanted deeper complexity, you'd read James Ellroy or Cormac McCarthy, right?

I knew Robert B. Parker, having spoken to him a few times when I worked at Borders and then many years later at booksignings.  Very honest man; admitted he wrote just for the money these days.  Admitted he had a thing against college because he'd been pinkslipped from Northeastern.  He had grudges, apparently, but he was honest about them.  And he gave me the name of his agent and said for me to pitch to her, and drop his name.  How awesome is that?!?

Dogtown

Reading a really interesting book right now, maybe one of seven at this point.  (I read books as I write them, apparently--many at once, taking an effort to finish one.)  Anyway, it's called Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in A New England Ghost Town.  Buy this.  Very interesting and well-written.  Alternates chapters between a notorious murder there in the 1980s and its history since 1623.  Interspersed are shorter sections of the author's reason for going there; and how her listlessness matches that of other notable people who have been drawn there.  The place seems to be a magnet for the "lost," many of whom become found, but also some who have not, such as the murderer.  The town now is a ghost town.  All that's there are markers of old cellar holes, glacier rocks with odd messages carved into them, courtesy of an eccentric millionaire, tons of walking paths, many of which end nowhere, and a sense of oddness and loneliness.  Apparently nobody has lived there since the early to mid 1800s, when many citizens died from disease and the Revolutionary War, and the leftover widows kept dogs for company.  Then the widows died, the dogs went wild, and everyone else left for the Gloucester shores (Dogtown is in the higher ground of Cape Ann, which is actually an island.) or stayed there and died as their houses fell apart around them.  Truly fascinating book, odd and interesting in its design.  If you're a writer, you'll want to emulate this.  Underappreciated book available for cheap.  Buy it.  It made me also want to buy Anita Diamant's The Last Days of Dogtown, which I did via Borders.com for $1.99.  This book brings to literary life many of the real people the first book mentions.  Read the first, then the latter.  If you're like me, you'll want to visit Dogtown, Massachusetts.

Mary Karr

My latest find is Mary Karr, famous for her memoir trilogy: The Liar's Club, Cherry, and Lit.  I've wanted to read the first for a long time, but was put off by the criticism I'd heard that, despite being a great writer, she'd tended to frankly whine about her usually-deranged mother too much.  That would just be too much for me to take, and would also be an exercise in bad faith, if you'll pardon my existentialism.  So I put it off, and waited...

Then I picked up Lit, which I thought was short for literature, or maybe a gung-ho "lit out for the west" reference, either spiritually, or spatially, or psychologically or emotionally.  Or whatever.  Shows you how much of a square I am.  Or maybe just how much I've not been "lit" since college.  I'll bet she'll hit on all those references after awhile, but rest assured that, at first, it's about how she and her mother have been too often drunk.

But it's also a lot more than that.  The writing was soooooo good, that I immediately bought it, and used my Borders 33% coupon, Borders Bucks, and teacher discount to get the trilogy--all for about twenty-two bucks.  Not bad.  (No wonder Borders isn't doing well.)  The writing is so good, I thought I'd share some random snippets, both from her own passages and from her many references.  Enjoy.  (All of these are from Lit.)

Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.  (257)

He tells me the story of a writer who...opened to the flyleaf [of his own remaindered book] only to discover his own signature above the note To Mum and Dad...(169)

Man exists only insomuch as he is separated from his surroundings...It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.---Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (161).

Well, if God doesn't exist, who's laughing at us?--Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (124).

You wear a mask, and your face grows to fit it.---George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant" (61).

You start with a darkness to move through
but sometimes the darkness moves through you.---Dean Young, "Bright Window" (34)

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,

and it was miserable, for that's how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat

literature.---William Matthews, "Mingus at the Showplace" (11).

Not one thing on the planet operates as I would have it, and only here can I plot my counterattacks. (7)

I am leaning the top of my head against the door when I spot for the zillionth time--the burnt-out lightbulb I fail every day to change, the cartoon idea I every night fail to get. (10)

On my fun scale, it ranks with the Nuremberg Trials. (8)

There are tons more, but that'll have to do.  Don't think from the number of references that the book is mostly just her quoting other people's good things.  She writes more than enough of her own.  Very, very good writing.  Every sentence zings and has separate importance.  Each one stands alone.  The wit (and mood) is razor sharp.  Very stylized, but done so well that you don't realize it while reading.  For any writer, and/or for anyone who's known a crazy, this one is for you.

James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway--and Dan Simmons

A friend of mine is leaving Sunday to go overseas for a few months, so he and I hung out for awhile tonight.  Where would two writers hang out on a Tuesday night with the salt and sand trucks haunting the roads and with both guys short on money?  Borders, of course!  Since his birthday is Saturday, I figured, Why not get him some books and then go out to dinner?  So what do you get an educated guy who's passionate about literature and writing?  James Joyce's Ulysses, the granddaddy of literate, educated, passionate writing.  C'mon, it took a landmark obscenity judgment in 1933 to allow its distribution in the U.S. at all, and the last 30 pages is one sentence--and much of that is the evocation of a young woman's stream-of-consciousness and lustful thoughts.  (One wonders if it would have been as big a deal had it been a man's lustful thoughts.)

Then I heard he'd never read Joyce before, so I got him Joyce's Dubliners, too.  I have to admit that the real treat of that volume is the short story, "The Dead."  As brilliant as Ulysses, in a much more compact and different way.  The last image of snow and ash-like substance is genius.  Lastly, because he'd never read Hemingway's short stories before, I bought him a complete collection of Hemingway's short stories, the Lingua Vica Edition, or something close to that.  A friend of mine, who works there, sang the praises of "The Killers," and mentioned its obvious effect upon Quentin Tarantino, which is a leap I will also take.  I preferred "Hills Like White Elephants," which my friend said was horribly overrated.  He was denounced by another friend of mine who works there.  This latter friend is the husband of my 6th grade teacher, because this state is like that.

After buying him these classics, I bought myself Dan Simmons' Drood, and another, earlier book by Simmons.  All of this cost me under $20 because I used my better half's 33% coupon, plus a 15% coupon I found in my wallet from a survey I did for Borders, plus another 15% coupon I found as I was leaving the house.  I took the survey for that one and used it just in the nick of time.  The remainder was paid for by a $30 gift e-card from a friend of mine--Thanks, F.!--and the final tally for me was under $20.  I hope to have the time to read these two books sometime in the next 9 months. 

An Older Lady, A Table and Two Chairs

This made me smile.  I'm sitting here in the Borders cafe, reading Daniel Dafoe's Journal of the Plague Years (free, online), when this little old lady wearing a long, thick black coat, with her hair done up and sprayed rather heavily, walked slowly to a nearby table, dragged slowly back to her table the chair that those people had borrowed from her table, set it firmly on the other side of her little table--I'm looking at it now, the two chairs are fitted perfectly across from each other, pushed in, just so--and picked up her napkin, threw it away, and picked up her magazines, put them away, and then looked over her table, realized that it was neat and the way she had found it--if not better--and walked away.  All of that very slowly, very deliberately, and with no other purpose than that's the way it's supposed to be.  That's what you do.  You clean up after yourself, throw your own napkins away, put your own magazines away, and replace anything that had been taken back to where it belongs.  The people who had borrowed the chair from her table hadn't returned it to her table, so she went and brought it back.  Slowly.  This lady must've been 75 if she was a day.  People half her age--hell, a third her age--are not as well-mannered as this.

I'm probably not, either.  Maybe you're not, too.  This is a dying trend: the belief that things should be just so, and that you're responsible for making it that way.  Especially if it had been that way when you got there.  You clean up after yourself in this life.  I'm looking at the table and chairs again: the chairs are perfectly opposite each other and both pushed in as far as they can go, both touching the round base of the center leg of the table.  They are EXACT, facing each other, and this lady was not suffering from any sort of anal retention/obsessive compulsion behavior.  She just put things back the way they were.

This struck me as so unusual and wonderful that I just had to write about it.  I took a picture of it with my cell phone--again ruing the fact that I never take my camera with me when I know that moments like this happen to me all the time--and I hope to put the picture with this entry.  I did it!!!  YAY!!!

And I have to say, for those of us of a certain age, that there are two important things here: that it seems as if fewer people are raised this way (as this lady had been) and that, hey, I took a picture with my cell phone, emailed it from the phone to my email, saved that picture from the email to my Mac, and then uploaded the picture from my Mac to the blog.  This is quite unbelievable to me.

Borders vs. B&N; 1985 and IT

Photos: Sidewalk and lights outside of my local Borders; IT cover, from stephenking.com

Okay, so...to catch up.  You may have noticed that I've been researching a lot lately--over 10 hours over a couple of days at Borders, where I went through 8 books, emailed a ton of notes to myself, and didn't have to buy anything.  (Sorry for the downer info. of HIV/AIDS, Measles, Ebola, and other scary as hell filoviruses out there.)  Researching is better there than at a library because at a bookstore you get all the latest books and information on a subject.  In the library, not so much, at least not around here.  All the while sipping coffee or espresso, seeing friends--and talking out loud to them.  Yes, another reason to prefer Borders over a library.  I also prefer Borders over B&N, too.  B&N has a better selection, especially for artsy books.  But...the atmosphere at Borders is better.  More sitting room in the store and in the cafe.  Bigger tables in the cafe, too, which is important when you're slogging through 8 books and emailing notes to yourself on a laptop.  I never had to place the laptop on my lap, which I hate to do.  I also know a few people who live near the one I frequent; I practically have my own table there like I used to at a local college at Donovan Dining Center.  Seriously.  About 11-12 years ago, students and faculty alike would find me there, upper floor, go up the stairs, first table on the right against the window.

Anyway, I also got Stephen King's new book, and may read it after (or, what the hell, during) the current stressful time--important stuff going on at the job, don'tcha know.  I thought I would pose a question:

Which Stephen King book, or movie, is your favorite, and why?  Readers may answer it either via an email to me--see above--or via a comment--see below.  Just write the title, and I'll post about the one with the most votes in a week.  If the answer is none, say that, too, but, c'mon, how can you not like any film or book of his after all this time and permeation of our culture?

I'll start by saying that my favorite adaptations are Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, Misery, The Shining (for technical brilliance and imagery only), and the original Sissy Spacek/John Travolta Carrie, in that order.  My fave books include: IT, Misery, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, The Stand and The Shining.  If forced to pick one, I'd choose IT, for many reasons, not the least is which because I can clearly remember getting on my Huffy 5-speed bike in 1985 and pedaling to a local Stop & Shop, where I bought the book in hardcover and read the whole thing in fewer than three days, almost around the clock--school, read, sleep (just a couple hours; I've always been an insomniac) and repeat.  With my father shutting my bedroom light off on me all the time.  He'd leave; I'd flick it on, and round and round we'd go.  And it gave me a little mantra in times of crisis; for some silly reason, it's always worked:

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

And the scenes: the haunted house at Kansas Street; Neiboldt Street; the kid shouting, "That would've been out of ----ing Yankee Stadium!"  Pennywise the Clown, of course.  Beverly Marsh and the old lady who wasn't an old lady.  And, hell, I miss the excitement of riding my bike to buy a book, all that youthful energy, the anticipation...Today I drive to buy books; couldn't imagine riding my bike there.  Back then, it was done without a thought, no problem, see ya in a little bit.  Today the thought of it makes me groan.  I'm gettin' old.