The Shunned House--H.P. Lovecraft

Well-written story that shouldn't be as well-received as it has been, even by me.  When people think of Lovecraft's good stuff, it fits this mold: bizarre delivery of a bizarre idea; local setting; big words and even bigger sentences; vague specificity; unfocused focus--and Providence.  Always Providence.  (You can read more about the guy in a previous blog entry, here.)  Scenes that could've been very scary--the disfigured people staring; the insane woman howling in the upstairs room--are mentioned briefly and done away with.  Instead the focus is on the basement dirt, the uncle, the foul odor, the tenants throughout the years who had died or gone insane.  And the elbow, of course.  Spooky stuff that seemed vampire-like are glossed over; how we got vampires from the giant evil residing beneath the sand floor is a mystery.  How acid poured on a giant elbow can drive away a giant evil--and in the form of a misty vapor--is just as confusing.

The story simply should not work.  But it does.  And well.  It is scary.  It is catchy.  It is fluent and stylistic and creepy.  It's got style.  Creepy style.  If only all of his stuff could have this quality, he would've been much more respected, much more published...His fans have been very kind to him as they continue to strongly celebrate the good and blissfully ignore the bad.  All fans do that, of course...but there's been a lot of bad.

This story isn't one of them.  It's a keeper.

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.

Musings--Heart of Darkness, Part 2

 photo: Famous scene from Apocalypse Now, on http://www.rotaryaction.com/pages/apocalypse.html

(this is a continuation of another post, which you can find here)

2.  Look at the above list of works.  Most of them are about the monster within.  To borrow from Rousseau and Freud, civilization is the mask that keeps the super-ego in control over the ego.  (Whether Rousseau or Freud thought this was good or bad is up to you, and probably irrelevant anyway.)  I'm not interested in the good or bad of it, as much as the idea that it simply is.  I have a guess that many in Rousseau's time would think that he thought this was bad (and they may be misinterpreting, though he was no fan of social mores, per se, but, then, neither was Neitzsche) and that many in Freud's time would think he thought this was good (which may also be an interpretation; I see him as non-judgmental, preferring to theorize that it simply was, not that it was good or bad; these are value judgments that neither was a proponent of.).

Anyway, the interesting thing here is that the writers in the 1890s were saying that, take away the mask (for Joseph Conrad, for example, that would be civilization), and we become unrestrained evil savages.  A Freudian interpretation of Heart of Darkness would read Marlowe as the super-ego sent to suppress Kurtz, the ego.  But Imperial England was just as much the brute, but with the mask of "civilized society" hiding its actual brutish nature--which gave birth to Kurtz.  In Apocalypse Now, based on Heart of Darkness, the masked civilized society (America, or America's armed forces in Vietnam) sends the super-ego (Willard) to assassinate the ego-driven Kurtz.  In Conrad's book, Marlowe is just supposed to bring Kurtz back to civilization, but an astute reader would wonder what such a civilized state would do to Kurtz once it had him.  Kill him and hide its base nature, is my guess, which becomes a blatant part of Apocalypse Now's plot.

So take that mask away, and we become Kurtz, or Hyde (Stevenson's potion rips the mask off of Jekyll's true base desires), or Dorian Grey (who's true base nature is captured, hidden and held by the painting), or Dracula (who's aristocratic, but not at night).  You get the idea.  The fascinating thing is that today's Hyde wouldn't be Hyde, but Jekyll.

Take the vampire films and shows out there today (please).  The vampires aren't really the bad guys anymore--it's the people.  Zombie films and shows, too: the people are more dangerous than the zombies.  So now the Freudian aspect would be that our super-ego is the vampire!  The more natural aspect of society--since everyone is truly messed-up, anyway--who the base humans can't get along with.  The super-ego that has been sent, in a way, to suppress the savage nature of humans.  And zombies--whatever created the zombies is now the mask that, when taken off, has shown humankind what it really is--and it ain't pretty.  Sure, zombies eat human flesh and essentially cannibalize--but what's your excuse for doing the same, as a human?  The point now, maybe, is that both the ego and the super-ego are equally savage and base.

P.S.--Take a look at the gangster shows and movies, too.  Tony Soprano and Jekyll and Hyde are essentially the same.

Tricks to Write Consistently

I used to write very consistently, every day.  Of course, that was before I had a rewarding, but draining, job; this was also before I had anything closely resembling a life, as well.  Now I have both, and the caveat to that, which in a million years I never would have foreseen, is that I don't do as much writing anymore.  Sitting down and getting into a writing zone now takes more time than the actual writing itself used to.  I just can't focus; I can't shut my mind down on my day, or things coming up, etc. and focus on what I need to write.

If you've read this blog for awhile, you saw entries on all of my ideas about viruses, vampires (of course; though in my defense, I started The Gravediggers in the mid-90s, before it actually became something that everyone and their brother wrote), concentration camps, WW2, and all of the other things I've mentioned as ideas.  I have a million of them, and I start things, and then I get excited about something else, or my career rears its head, or I simply lose focus on writing in general--and everything just peters out.  All of those great ideas, all of that energy and positive feeling...just...drift away.

Reading a lot used to help.  Now, all of that reading time is all I've got for creative time, so all reading, no writing.  Reading used to help writing--until about two years ago.  Then a few months ago, I started taking pictures that tied into my writing, and that helped a lot...for a few months.  Now that I've taken all the pictures I can take, that process is of little help now.  These days, it's all photos, no writing.

Then, a few days ago, I realized that I hadn't written any poems in a long time.  While I would never say I was a gifted poet--or even a good one--I can say that writing poems would focus me, ground me into whatever I was writing at the time.  The poems themselves didn't have to correlate with whatever project I was working on at the time--though they sometimes did--but the very process of writing them apparently would hone my focus to such a degree that I was able to work on my longer creations.  Somehow, as so often happens to hyper and unfocused people like me, I stopped doing that, got sidetracked, and never went back.

So now I will work on poems again, and although Frost and Dickinson don't need to worry about their posterity, maybe, just maybe, some present-day novelists should be looking over their shoulders and not ignoring the dustcloud that just kicked up a long, long way back, just ahead of the horizon behind them.  Wish me luck, everyone, and if you have any tricks to help me along, I'll gladly listen.

Manuscript Info. Garnered from More Free Stuff

Okay, for this as of yet untitled ms.--maybe The Gravediggers?--we'll start with the exhumation of 6 or 7 bodies in 1888 RI, as the father of these people had had a disturbing dream, that he'd had an orchard (which he had) but that half of the trees in his orchard would soon die.  He recognizes this as an extended dream-metaphor, thank you, Freud, and this makes him listen more to his family's eerie complaints.  His wife has been getting sick, and 5 or 6 of their children had already died.  Sarah had been the first, about 19 years old; another daughter was next, though this daughter complains of seeing Sarah, at night, sitting with her (on her?) in bed, causing her pain.  This daughter dies, another gets sick, and has the same complaint.  The last straw comes when the mother gets sick, and a son, who is of age and about to marry a girl in a neighboring town.  The mother complains of the same thing about Sarah.  So all of the bodies are exhumed, and all have their hearts burned on a nearby rock in the family cemetary, and all the problems stop. The mother recovers, but the son, after marrying the girl in that neighboring town and becoming a promising young farmer, dies. 

Nothing is ever recorded about his death, so, ah ha!, that's how "it" spreads.  Vampires, consumption (tb), or plague, I don't know.  But I'm hoping for all three.  Other isolated cases (one family member) will be mentioned also, but only in the form of consumption, to highlight the panic, but to also show how the panic and ignorance of others hides the true demon.

This all sounds like the hokey local superstition and folklore that it is, but I can make this work in fiction.  I'm pretty sure.


This summary of information was obtained through the materials gathered from the free e-books in my free e-Google.  Though I understand that Google may one day soon take over the world--the entire company would make a decent James Bond villain--I have to admit that it is incredibly convenient and useful.  I've got a couple of emails, my other blog site, and my free books all there.  And when I write, I save that writing to a flashdrive, to my emails, to my harddrive, to my Scrivener, and to my free Google documents storage.  I do not work for Google, I swear.  Not only did I get the above composite information from those free books, but I can also get the clothing, speech, beliefs, etc. from the very old books that I saved for free there, too.  My goodness is this convenient and useful.  I repeat: I do not work for Google.

So this is the beginning of yet another new work.  Wish me well, everyone, as I have a tendency to start new stuff with really good ideas and then stop them cold when I get bored with them.  This stuff here, for example, is the root of WIP 7, all novel-length.  I hope to do some combining and shuffling, but, boy, I don't know.