"Ushers" by Joe Hill

Martin Lorensen is a young man who’s been extremely lucky, or he’s extremely guilty. Twice he’s narrowly escaped death – a train wreck and a school shooting. Both times, his escape was a last-minute thing – a panic attack kept him from boarding the train and an upset stomach stopped him from entering school and returning home. In the train wreck case, he warned a mother and daughter not to board.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The Mystic Chords of Memory: Reclaiming American History – Wilfred McClay at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

In William Blake’s Lambeth – Spitalfields Life.

 

“Tragedy,” poem by Jill Spargur – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Andrew Fuller on the Politicization of the totality of our lives – Michael A.G. Azad Haykin at Historia ecclesiastica.  

Shifting Landscape – poem by Kelle Belmonte at Kelly’ Scribbles.

"The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson

“X” marks the spot. Pirates hunting for buried treasure. Parrots perched on the shoulders of pirates. Treasure maps.  

It all came from a single source.

 

In 1883, Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson published The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys. It has been first serialized in 1881 and 1882 in a children’s magazine, Young Folks, under another title – Treasure Island, or the Mutiny of the Hispaniola. It was under the title Treasure Island that the novel became what may be the most adapted book of all times, inspiring films, radio programs, comic books, television series, theater plays, musical compositions, and even video games.

 

It was the first book by Stevenson I read, about age 10. Not long after, I read his 1883 novel The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses, his adventure (and romance) story of the War of the Roses. I recall reading it three times; I found it far more compelling that Treasure Island.

 

If I read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), I’ve forgotten when it was. It’s become so much of the general culture that it’s difficult to know if I read it or saw the movie(s) a dozen times. I read the edition just published by T.S. Poetry Press, illustrated by Sara Barkat, and it surprised me. It’s not the story of the stark contrast of the good and evil in all of us, or the dangers of scientific experiments. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Poetry book – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

T.S. Eliot and the Fight to Recover What Has Been Lost – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.

 

The enormous humility of C.S. Lewis – A.N. Wilson at The Spectator.

"The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James

Many consider The Turn of the Screw by Henry James to be one of the best, if not the best, ghost stories. The novella was first serialized by Collier’s Magazine in 1898; reading it today is to read a classic gothic horror story. James, apparently, needed money, and he deliberately wrote a story he was confident would sell. It did. And it did more than sell. 

The Turn of the Screw influenced Joseph Conrad when he wrote The Heart of Darkness. Numerous movies based on the story have been made. It inspired Benjamin Britten to write an opera. And the story has been told and remade over and over again by many authors, including Joyce Carol Oates. 

 

The novella is a kind of story-within-a-story. A group of people celebrating Christmas Eve in an old house are talking about ghost stories. One, a man known only to the reader by his first name, Douglas, says that he has a manuscript given to him some 20 years previously by a woman when she died. The others convince Douglas to send to his home to get it, and it arrives the next evening. 

 

Douglas begins to read the story which begins straightforwardly enough. A young woman is engaged to be a governess to a niece and nephew left in the charge of their uncle, their parents having died in India. The boy is usually at school; his sister lives at the uncle’s country home, called The Bly. The man sets one unusual requirement: the new governess is not to contact him about the children, for any reason whatsoever. She travels to the home, which is quite large, old, and rebuilt and added onto many times.

 

Henry James

The first problem is that a letter arrives from the boy’s school; he’s being “sent down,” or expelled. The cause isn’t specified. After meeting the boy, the governess can’t imagine what might have happened, and she decides to ignore it, for the time being. The second problem is that she begins to see a man around the house, looking in a window from outside or near the house itself. When she describes the man to the cook, the cook is shocked. It is the description of a particularly nasty valet who once worked there. The problem is that the man is dead. Not too long after, a second person is spotted, that of a woman, the former governess, who also had died. And what the governess comes to realize is that the two apparitions want the children.

 

Or do they? Could it be a case of the governess having an overactive imagination? Is she possibly suffering from a mental illness? 

 

James (1843-1916) is considered as having been one of the best novelists writing in English His works include The Ambassadors, Portrait of a Lady, Wings of the Dove, Daisy Miller, The Bostonians, and Washington Square, and he published numerous short stories, novellas, plays, biographies, and criticism. Critics point to James as the transition between the Realist School and Modernism.

 

The word most frequently used in describing The Turn of the Screw is “ambiguity.” A major reason the story leaves so many readers unsettled is that it never really answers the question of ghosts versus madness. But that is its genius; it is a horror story regardless of which interpretation is accepted.

Stories of Art and Crime, edited by Lawrence Block

A dock worker at the Metropolitan Museum of Art falls into an opportunity to sell paintings attributed to Renoir but really aren’t.  

A Gauguin painting of “Girl with a Fan” tells several stories simultaneously, including the World War II bombing of the famous Van Gogh “Yellow House.” 

 

Using a Hieronymus Bosch painting as a guide, someone is someone is killing people. 

 

The desire to find cave paintings as significant as those of Lascaux lead to a story of revenge. 

 

Charlie the barber is trying to get past PTSD after imprisonment by the Japanese in World War II; he may look like a Norman Rockwell painting, but he’s anything but.

 

Lawrence Block

These are five of the 17 stories using works of art as their inspiration in Alive in Shape and Color, edited by prolific (and legendary) mystery and suspense writer Lawrence Block. This volume followed a successful and similar effort: In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper. Most of the same writers signed on to the second volume, so they must have enjoyed the venrure as much as the reader does. 

 

In addition to block himself, the writers include Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Jeffrey Deaver, Joyce Carol Oates, Nicholas Christopher, Gail Levin, and more. They each chose the painting they wanted to write a story about, and the artists represented (in addition to the ones mentioned above) include Georgia O’Keeffe, Salvador Dali, Balthus, Auguste Rodin, Rene Magritte, Michelangelo, and more. 

 

Most are crime stories (they would be, given the authors), but a few fall into the category of horror. All of the stories are dark ones, or they tell stories that examine the dark side of the human soul and mind. A particular favorite is “Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity” by David Morrell, in which more than one person faces insanity in tracking down what happened to Vincent Van Gogh and his own insanity. 

 

Art, crime, horror – if you like the combination, Alive in Shape and Color is a veritable feast.

"The Smell of Cedar" by River Dixon

No one deserves a customer like Sarah. No one deserves a neighbor like Sarah. No one deserves a co-worker like Sarah. No need to mention friends, because Sarah doesn’t have any.

When Sarah was a child in school, she was called out of class during a math exam. A policeman was waiting. It seems Sarah’s mother had killed the mailman. Sarah gets no additional explanation, but she is sent to live with her grandmother.

No one deserves a grandmother like Sarah’s. We understand why Sarah’s mother did what she did. And we understand why Sarah became the person she did. The grandmother taught Sarah to suppress all of her feelings, trust no one, never cry or show any sign of weakness. And to teach her, she has the cedar box.

River Dixon

The Smell of Cedar, a novella by River Dixon, lures the reader into the story with what seems like a tale about the secrets a cedar box can tell. And it does have secrets, including how it turns children like Sarah into homicidal psychopaths.

Like I said, no one deserves a grandmother like Sarah’s.

Dixon is a poet and short story writer who’s published five books, including Left Waiting and Other Poems, Colder: A Collection of Poetry and Prose, The Stories in Between, and Beyond the Field: An Illustrated Short Story. He’s also contributed stories to two volumes of the anthology Static Dreams: A Dark Anthology from Twisted Minds. He lives with his family in Arizona.

Dixon writes dark stories, and The Smell of Cedar is certainly that. (I’ve read his poetry, and he does not write dark poems about homicidal maniacs.) It’s a mesmerizing tale, with a few graphic scenes, requiring frequent setting aside to catch your breath. 

Related:

Poets and Poems: River Dixon and “Left Waiting.”

Billy Coffey’s “The Curse of Crow Hollow”

It begins normally enough: a small group of teenagers plan a slightly disobedient get-together up by long-abandoned mines up in the mountains. By the time the night is done, the small town of Crow Hollow will be under a curse, a curse that leads to hysteria, destruction, and death.

This is Billy Coffey’s The Curse of Crow Hollow. It is a dark tale, unremitting and unrelenting, a story that builds to a series of climaxes that will leave the town devastated, and reader with chewed fingernails.

The story centers on five families: Bucky Vest works at the town dump, while his wife Angela watches television soap operas and daughter Cordelia believes she’s in love with Hays Foster. Hays parents, Landis and Kayann, own the local grocery store. Mayor Bickford and his daughter Sharon still mourn the death of his wife and her mother. David Ramsay is the church pastor; at home is his wife Belle and daughter Naomi, while his son John David stays with Chessie and Briar Hodge, the town’s suppliers of moonshine.

The teens stumble into Alvaretta Graves, long rumored to be a witch. A confrontation ends with Scarlett striking Alvaretta, who speaks a curse on the teens and the town. And the curse begins immediately.

It’s Coffey’s darkest tale yet and, I would argue, his best. It’s been a pleasure to watch his writing grow and develop. This is a story that would be difficult for any writer to keep command over, moving as it does through the main characters, minor characters, side stories and secrets buried in the past. But Coffey does it, and does it well.

Billy Coffey

This story is a far cry from his first two novels, Snow Day and Paper Angels. The turn toward dark tales began with When Mockingbirds Sing, followed by The Devil Walks in Mattingly and In the Heart of the Dark Wood. The last three are set in the same general area of the Blue Ridge Mountains as The Curse of Crow Hollow.

Of particular note is the unnamed narrator, who speaks with a Southern accent and a voice that is both knowledgeable and yet almost chilling. Who is this? It’s a man, likely an elderly man, but his identity isn’t revealed until the end.

With The Curse of Crow Hollow, Billy Coffey is breaking new ground. He’s moved in a more literary direction. He has plumbed the depths of the emotions and realities of small town life. And what he’s best known for – telling simple but great stories about ordinary people – is in full flower.

Photograph by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Gospel According to Stephen King?

This article originally appeared at Christian Manifesto.

Two or three times a day, I receive email notices of conversations on discussion boards, usually about Christian fiction. The subjects are all over the place, from a request for help for a software application to a question about Idaho state law governing autopsies.

One recent discussion stream caught my attention, but only after it had been underway for a few days. The question was about the use of the omniscient narrator, and whether it was something a fiction writer could do and not put off an agent or a publisher. (Like a lot of similar questions, those who know say don’t do it – unless you can get away with it.)

As the discussion went along, one participant appealed to Stephen King, citing his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. That wasn’t so unusual in and of itself. But as soon as that comment was made, several others added their citations to King’s work. It was clear that King was seen as a significant authority on the subject.

A few days later, someone posted a short article on a blog about Christian fiction that asked what books on writing would readers recommend – and while there were the standard references to Strunk & White’s Elements of Style and a couple to Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, there are far, far more to Stephen King’s On Writing. (My own favorite books on writing are John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction and Mario Vargas Llosa’s Letters to a Young Novelist.)

My own knowledge of King is limited mostly to his early works. The first novel of his that read was Salem’s Lot, and then I read Carrie, The Shining and The Stand. Of those I’ve read, I liked The Shining the best, and I still have vivid memories of one of the main characters driving up a mountain in a fierce Colorado snowstorm.

He’s published a lot of books since then, and On Writing came out in 2000. It’s not exclusively a “how to write” book, but more of a combined personal memoir, writing manual and how he recovered from serious injuries after being struck by an automobile while walking.

So what is it about Stephen King in general and his On Writing in particular that makes him (and it) so appealing to Christian novelists and writers?  And this appeal is broader than only to the writers of Christian horror, suspense and supernatural, a genre that’s developed only in recent years and by many writers who were directly influenced by King.

One is obvious. King is a terrific writer and storyteller. He’s a master of suspense, and even if you’re not interested in writing a suspense novel, there’s much to be learned from how he constructs his novels and stories in general and suspense scenes in particular. In other words, we can appreciate his writing for the same reasons anyone can appreciate his writing.

Second, despite the horror aspects of many of his works, his stories are “clean” – you don’t find gratuitous or obligatory sex thrown into the stories like you find is so much contemporary writing. (I read a buy-in-the-supermarket romance novel last year to see what it was like, not only were the “adult” scenes written badly, the entire novel was written badly.) (Several weeks later, it showed up on the New York Times’ paperback bestseller list.)

A third aspect to King’s appeal is how accessible his writing is for Christians, even with all the blood, gore, plague, ghosts, stalkers and vampires. His writing, as varied as it is, hews to the basic story format – setting, conflict, climax and resolution. This is a format, a structure, that is familiar to us from the story of the Bible overall and the story of Christ. One can’t call King a “Christian author” is the sense that the Christian Booksellers Association would use that term, but his stories are structured like “the story” we know and his themes – good vs. evil, redemption – are the themes we’re intimately familiar with.

They’re the story and the themes of The Book.

Mike Dellosso's "Frantic"

Marny Toogood is a pump jockey at a gas station in Maine. A car arrives at the station, driven by a rather large man with a young woman sitting in the back seat. Marny’s taken by her eyes, which seem to follow him around the car. He’s also taken by the note she leaves behind on the ground: “He’s going to kill me.”

The car drives off. Marny stares at the note. And then he acts, and fast, running to jump in a car to give follow them.

Marny’s life is going to change forever.

Thus tarts Mike Dellosso’s new novel Frantic, and a frantic ride of a story it is. Marny, who carries considerable baggage from his past that includes what he believes is a curse in his relationships, will discover and accept a new role in his life: to save and protect the girl, Esther, and her brother William. They are being held captive by Gary, the driver of the car, who believes 11-year-old William is the anointed one who needs his protection, because the voice in his head tells him so.

And to protect William, Gary will leave a trail of bodies across New England. Running from Gary, Marny, Esther and William flee to Esther’s father, only to find themselves in the arms of an even greater evil.

I’ve read all of Dellosso’s previous novels – Scream, The Hunted, Darlington Woods, and Darkness Follows – and this is his best yet (and the first four were all good). In Frantic, he’s taken his writing and storytelling skills to a new level. In the process of terrifying the reader, Dellosso also writes a compelling, believable story. The writing is simple, straightforward narrative, and conveys an urgency that builds and builds, and even includes one unforgettable car chase scene.

He draws the characters of Marny, Esther and William with care and even love. They become real characters the reader comes to care deeply about (and terrified for). And yet Dellosso also makes Gary a three-dimensional villain, gradually revealing what has turned him into a ruthless killer.

Marny finds himself unable to save Esther and William until he realizes that he has to surrender control of himself. This is the larger theme of Frantic, one Dellosso has developed fully and well in all of his novels but especially so in this one.

Jonathan Weyer's "The Faithful"

The Rev. Aidan Schaeffer is a young assistant pastor who has lost his parents in a fire, lost his fiancée to another guy, and is now losing his faith. It doesn’t seem things can get any worse, particularly since his knows his crisis in faith is going to lead him to unemployment.

But things do get worse. Much worse. His former fiancée is murdered in what looks like some kind of cult sacrifice. He becomes a suspect. And then footprints begin appearing in the snow, seemingly all by themselves. And Aidan hears voices. Soon he will have to deal with ghosts, demons and "bone conjurors."

Aidan Schaeffer’s crisis in faith is being introduced to a supernatural horror, and without faith, he doesn’t stand a chance.

The Faithful is Jonathan Weyer’s first novel, a solid entry in the category of Christian supernatural horror, and it’s a fast-paced, captivating and ultimately satisfying work.

The story functions on several levels. There is the murder investigation. There is the crisis of faith and what it means for Aidan’s work, combined with church politics. And then there is a romantic story, as Aidan finds himself attracted to one of the investigating detectives. The novel works well on all three levels.

Weyer, himself a Presbyterian minister (in my own small, conservative Presbyterian denomination, in fact, but there's no personal connection), knows his way around church staffs and elders boards, and the details ring true. He also is well versed in all of the “new atheist” claims as well as the philosophical and even theological territory staked out by science. His main character has to confront his own inconsistencies and faulty reasoning just when his faith needs to be its strongest – and there’s a lesson here, too, about dependence upon God.

“The Faithful” is scary and riveting. Weyer tells a good story, one that may be more familiar and more real than we realize.

Christian Horror/Suspense

In the past several months, I've been expanding my reading of Christian fiction. During the Christmas holidays, I spent two hours at a local Christian bookstore, poring over the fiction titles (and occasionally stealing away to listen to samples of contemporary Christian music -- I found Brandon Heath while doing this). I bought a pile of books and consumed them -- authors like Dale Cramer, Charles Martin, Taylor Field, Nancy Moser, Elizabeth Musser and Annette Smith.

A number of these novelists write in the "women's fiction" genre, which, I'm told, is where I'm doing a lot of my own writing. In addition to these, I discovered a genre I was generally unaware of because I simply hadn't been interested in it -- Christian horror and suspense. There are some big names here (like Ted Dekker) but also lesser known authors who are equally good, writers like Mike Dellosso. I liked Dellosso's The Hunted, but I loved his most recent one, Scream. I wrote reviews of both on Amazon. If you like a scary good read, either one (or both) of these will more than satisfy the itch.