[Book Review] Covenant with the Vampire

Covenant with the Vampire, by Jeanne Kalogridis

(The Diaries of the Family Dracul, Book One)

© 1994 Dell Horror

It's been a long time since I read Bram Stoker's Dracula, but this prequel, set fifty years before the events of that tale, brought back to me with vivid clarity the creeping dread and shocking horror of the Dracula mythos. Part of Dracula's allure is his ambiguity, his inability to be defined, the impossibility of pinning down exactly who -- or even what -- he is. Is the vampiric antagonist of Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic horror novel truly the same person as the historical Vlad Tepesh, Vlad the Impaler, or is he just some random undead who's putting on airs? Is he even just a vampire, or does the hair on his palms and his ability to turn into a monstrous wolf make him also a werewolf?

I was a little afraid, at first, that revealing the "origins" of Count Dracula might dampen his mystique. Monsters frighten us because they represent unknown quantities; once you label and categorize them, once you assign them a backstory and a clearly delineated set of powers, they go from terrifying existential horror to monster of the week. Fortunately, revealing some (but not all) of Dracula's origins and motivations does nothing to diminish his power to terrify audiences, at least in this instance.

I was impressed and pleased to discover that Covenant with the Vampire is written, like the original Dracula, as an epistolary novel (or "novel made of letters"), with each chapter taking the form of a diary entry from one of the main characters. This use of multiple viewpoints and voices lends the novel texture, plus credibility as each character's account of events corroborates or expands upon that of the others. It also sets us up for a lot of dramatic irony: being privy to the inner thoughts of each of the main characters, we (the readers) inevitably know more than any one character is ever aware of, which means that we can only watch in mute horror as characters take actions and make decisions which we, knowing better than they, wish desperately to warn them against. The diary-entry format also gives us a sense of immediacy and urgency, as the characters explain to us where and when they are recording their thoughts: on sleepless candlelit nights, on scraps of paper stolen between visits from a nosy sister-in-law, on sunny mornings that make it difficult to trust one's own memories of the night before.

The story begins on "5 April, 1845" as Arkady Tsepesh, last male scion of the family Tsepesh (descendants of the infamous Vlad the Impaler), returns with his heavily-pregnant English wife, Mary Windham Tsepesh, to his ancestral home, Castle Dracula, following news from his deformed elder sister Zsuzsanna Tsepesh that their father has fallen gravely ill. Arkady and Mary arrive mere hours after his father's passing, and it is during the vigil for the deceased that we catch our first glimpse of Great-Uncle Vlad.

As you've probably guessed already, "Great-Uncle" Vlad is really more
of a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-uncle.

Over the course of a mere two weeks in the Transylvanian mountains, Ms. Kalogridis ever-so-slowly peels back the façade of normalcy, revealing a world of incest, torture, mass-murder, and of deals with devils both figurative and literal. As Arkady learns more and more of Great-Uncle Vlad's peculiar behaviors and future goals (e.g., moving to England with its "teeming millions"), and Mary begins to listen with increasing credulity to the whispers of the servants, and Zsuzsanna begins to attract -- and even to invite -- the sexual attentions of her wicked uncle, the net which entraps our characters within Castle Dracula and its estate grows ever-tighter. Mary's complicated pregnancy (to say nothing of the castle's extreme isolation and Vlad's increasingly controlling nature) prevents them from leaving freely, and so husband and wife are forced to bide their time and pay homage to a monster in their midst, a wolf in boyar's clothing.

"You look different, Uncle Vlad: have you done something with your heir?"

As Vlad begins to feed with greater regularity, he transforms from a decrepit relic into a terrifying patriarch; likewise, Castle Dracula itself transforms from Arkady's beloved-though-gloomy childhood home to a macabre prison, filled with and surrounded by secrets and death. As Vlad begins to seduce his many-times-removed grand-niece, we are given a firsthand account of what it actually feels like to become strigoi, in all the sensual and incestuous details -- though on a technical note, does it still count as incest if she's eleven generations removed from you? (Actually, don't answer that.)

As Arkady explores the estate and its grounds in pursuit of fleeting glimpses of his long-dead brother Stefan, he makes a grisly discovery in the woods beside Castle Dracula which results in what the old Ravenloft setting would call "a malign paradigm-shift", in which everything he knew, or thought he knew, about his uncle, his family, and the very nature of reality itself comes crashing down around his head. I can't tell you any more without giving too much away, but suffice it to say that if you're a fan of the creepy, the macabre, and the outright horrifying, Covenant with the Vampire will amply satisfy your disgusting predilections (you nasty little pervert, you).

As readers, our foreknowledge of what ultimately happens in Bram Stoker's Dracula -- that any attempts to kill Dracula are doomed to failure, that he must produce at least three "brides" and turn poor, mad Renfield into his creature, that at some point his mortal servants must abandon him and his castle to fall to ruins -- has the effect of producing great dramatic tension. We know that these things must occur in order for Stoker's narrative to make sense, but knowing that the blows must come but not knowing how or when they will fall, or in which order, may be the cruelest torture of all. 

Stranger Things, Season 1 (Netflix, 2016)

Yes, I realize that I'm a little behind-the-times reviewing this one (okay, a lot behind-the-times). In fact, that kind of shock at my total lack of pop-culture knowledge is kind of the reason I watched Stranger Things in the first place. When my brother-in-law realized that my wife (his sister) and I had never seen the show, he immediately went out and bought it for us on DVD as his Christmas present to us. We decided to start watching it on New Year's Eve, but we planned to space out our viewings, only watching one or two episodes a day. You know, in order to really soak it up instead of just bingeing and being done with the whole thing in a day or two.

Turns out, even the idea of stretching it out to two days was some serious pie-in-the-sky thinking. We could barely wait long enough to go to the bathroom between episodes, and waiting to switch in the next disc felt like long-term deprivation. The series grabs you by the balls right from scene one and never lets go, not for a single moment. The whole first season feels like one long balls-to-the-wall thrill-ride (in a good way) interspersed with moments of heart-pounding, tingly-palmed dread (again, in a good way), with an occasional dose of comedy to lighten the sometimes-oppressive mood. 

I won't bother giving you a blow-by-blow of the first episode -- that's easy enough for find online, though I would caution against digging too deeply for fear of spoilers. Instead, I'd rather talk about the show's overall structure, and the various media from which it draws inspiration.

Not pictured: parental supervision.

Stranger Things begins on the night of November 6, 1983, with the mysterious disappearance of one twelve-year-old boy, and chronicles the fallout from this and other paranormal goings-on in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana. The cast is divided into three largely-distinct groups (tweens, teens, and adults) who discover/encounter disparate facets of the strange events occurring in their town, but -- like the blind men and the elephant -- none ever have the whole picture (at least, not at first). The result of this splitting-up is to create a narrative which sometimes feels like three separate shows which share a setting and thematic elements, which cross into each others' realms with increasing frequency as the various investigators begin to share information and fit their pieces together. Imagine that Buffy and Angel had been spliced together into a single show and you wouldn't be far from the mark.

Tonally, Stranger Things feels like a mashup of Freaks and Geeks and The Goonies (if they'd both been written by Stephen King, that is), plus a little bit of E.T., John Carpenter's The Thing, pacing and visual elements from Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street, and maybe just a dash of... I don't know, Akira? Maybe some Parasyte? A bit of Alien and Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Maybe I'm getting too deep in the weeds here, trying to pin down everything the Duffer Brothers referenced. There are no new stories, after all, and it's completely natural for elements of an author's best beloved stories to show up in an author's work. Besides, nostalgic shout-outs must always take a backseat to story and character development.

You might not be afraid of Christmas lights yet, but you will be.
You will be.

First and foremost, Stranger Things is a scary story, of the type that humans have told around campfires since time immemorial in order to scare the bejeezus out of each other. Throughout the constant twisting and turning of the plot, the falsehoods exposed, the hidden pasts uncovered and dark truths revealed, Stranger Things keeps returning to the time-tested standbys of classic horror: the atmosphere of foreboding, the darkly-hinted clues of a sinister presence, nigh-unbearable escalation of tension, the masterfully-executed jumpscare, and of course, the horrifying reveal. I can't tell you much about what's actually horrifying here, because not knowing is what makes it so damn scary. Much of the supernatural elements of Stranger Things are never explained in full, and the viewer is left to extrapolate and wonder, to think about and to worry, as you turn out the lights and pull the covers up to your chin:

What the hell was it that I just saw? 

Is it really gone, or was it just pretending?

And could it come back?

Pleasant dreams, readers. I'll let you know how Season 2 turns out.

[Book Review] The Casual Vacancy

The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling

© 2012 Little, Brown Book Group

I realize I'm a few years late with this review, but for a long time I wasn't sure I'd ever read this book. My wife read it when it came out, and she told me the story was so dark and tragic that it'd probably just depress me. I gave her permission to tell me how it ended, and when she told me, I decided that it did sound a lot darker than Ms. Rowling's previous works. But after becoming familiar with Rowling's Cormoran Strike mystery novels, I figured that whatever was in The Casual Vacancy couldn't be any darker than Career of Evil, so I decided to give Vacancy a try.

A lot of readers were surprised and dismayed to discover how grim and pessimistic this book is, despite the fact that Rowling repeatedly stated that this would emphatically not be a novel for children. Vacancy is an unflattering portrait of humanity at best, and a disturbing tour of human misery at its darkest (it's never lurid, though -- Rowling simply reports on her characters actions without judgment, for the most part).

The novel tells the story of a fictional West Country village named Pagford, which is a satellite of Yarvil, a nearby urban center. The two municipalities are separated by a country estate, a previous owner of which sold some land to Yarvil, which they developed into a housing project called "The Fields". This greatly upset the citizenry of Pagford, since the land on which the Fields were built was part of Pagford Parish, meaning that Pagfordians were on the hook financially for the crime-ridden, ugly, and squalid Fields and the families (including many drug-users and welfare-recipients) who live in its squat, ugly cinderblock houses.

Vacancy opens sixty years after these events, with the sudden death by aneurysm of Pagford Parish Councillor Barry Fairbrother, leader of the small-but-vocal faction of the parish council who are in favor of keeping the Fields as part of Pagford Parish. Having been born in The Fields and bootstrapped himself into a position of respect and power within Pagford, Barry was a living example of the narrative which he hoped to make reality for others from The Fields. Unfortunately, his death leaves an empty seat on the Parish Council, which the anti-Fields faction hopes to fill with one of their own.

The novel's main arc tells the story of the election which is held to fill Barry's empty seat, but it also zooms in on the petty rivalries, domestic unhappiness, infighting, and class-warfare which plague the picturesque Pagford. I won't attempt to explain all the characters and their relationships herein; that task would be better-suited to a spoileriffic character-map like this one. All you need to know going into it is not to worry if you can't keep all the families straight in your head; by the start of Part 2, you'll pretty much know who everyone is and who they're related to.

I was impressed at how scrupulously Rowling avoided making even the most sympathetic characters into paragons of virtue. It would have been easy for the author to (for instance) cast Dr Parminder Jawanda, the discriminated-against Sikh physician, as a poor unfortunate who is unfairly judged by the backwards inhabitants of Pagford -- but Rowling resists such temptation. Parminder is relentlessly critical of her youngest child Sukhvinder, a fact which (combined with her poor academics, obesity, and the relentless teasing she endures at school) drives the poor girl to self-harm, unbeknownst to Parminder.

For that matter, the children of Pagford are hardly paragons of youthful innocence. In fact, you could argue that most (or even all) of the truly tragic stuff that befalls Pagford during and in the wake of the election is their fault). Once one kid gets it into his head to post damaging information about his father on the village council forums under the username The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother, before you know it, practically all the kids are doing it to sabotage their own parents' chances of winning, with predictably damaging results for everyone in Pagford and the Fields.

I was particularly struck by two things in this novel: the shocking pettiness and cruelty of almost everyone from every social station, age bracket, and walk of life; and almost total lack of honest communication in any given interpersonal relationship. On the one hand, this seems fairly realistic to me, even if it doesn't paint a very flattering picture of humanity and left a bad taste in my mouth. On the other hand, it made me very, very glad that I escaped from high school with a shred of my human decency intact.

Overall, The Casual Vacancy is not an easy read, and will likely leave you feeling drained and discouraged about humanity in general. But it's also a novel which taps into the primal tribalism which continues to stifle progress and meaningful debate on both sides of the Atlantic, and as such, is a novel which I strongly recommend to pretty much everyone who has strong opinions, one way or another, on the subjects of drugs, poverty, the welfare state, and man's responsibility (or lack thereof) towards his fellow man.

On Meditation

Earlier today my meditation app, Headspace, asked me a simple question: "Does meditation feel like part of your life or something separate?"

The answer, of course, is complicated. Isn't everything, though?

On the one hand, I feel like meditation is a part of my daily life in many ways, and no longer entirely separate from it. The techniques I've learned in the last year-or-so of meditation (noting, breathing exercises, mindfulness, etc.) have had a big impact on my daily routine. I feel like I get less caught up in thought-spirals, and it's easier for me to "surface" from engaging tasks because I've had some practice at letting go of whatever I'm doing or thinking at the moment and coming back to the breath.

On the other hand, I feel like my morning meditation, when I can fit it in before work, is a welcome break from my everyday life. I spend so much of my time jumping from task to task that ten to twenty minutes of quiet time spent sitting on the balcony with my eyes closed is a nice change of pace. It's a moment where I quietly ask myself to remember that things are pretty good: I woke up on the right side of the sod, as they say.

There was a time when a question like the one above would have caused me consternation. I would have become obsessed with parsing out an answer, with analyzing whether a thing can be both separate from and part of something else. But now, I just look at the question and smile at it. "Huh," I say to myself. "That's a very interesting paradox."

And then I let go of the question, and come back to the breath.

Thoughts on Thrift Stores

In a way, thrift stores and secondhand shops are like museums of our collective failure to measure up against our own hopes and dreams; or of our failure to accurately predict what our hopes and dreams would be in the future. They collect the detritus of things we wanted, or thought we wanted, or others assumed we wanted: cheese knives and exercise equipment, ships in bottles and books on personal finance, cookbooks full of recipes ranging from faddish diets to diabetes-inducing confectionery. Tupperware sorted by color and shape, hand-painted porcelain Hummel figurines and row upon row upon row upon row of wine glasses. Aunt Mildred's fine china that we could never be bothered to wash by hand one the one night a year we would actually use it; good china that never got used at all; ugly, mismatched porcelain bowls we always hated but we were in college and poor and they worked alright so we couldn't just throw them away and buy new ones until after we graduated and could finally chuck the hideous things. Racks upon racks of t-shirts commemorating everything from the track teams of unfamiliar universities to cancer-walks. Jeans that we will never, ever fit into again no matter how hard we diet. Small forests of garish silk neckties, patterned to complement suit jackets which haven't been fashionable for twenty years. Eighty prints of the same T-shirt, donated by the local silkscreen shop due to a small-but-vital miscommunication with the client about what the shirts should actually say. Three dozen copies of a local rapper's debut album, each with liner notes hand-packed by his friends and family.

[Book Review] A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula K. LeGuin, 1968)

The first thing I did upon waking this morning was pick up my recently-purchased copy of Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea and eagerly consume the remainder of the book, which I had read last night until I could no longer keep my eyes open.

I was in sixth grade when I first encountered this book in the school library. I changed school districts just after finishing the book, and the new school didn't have the other books in the series, so it gradually fell by the wayside and was forgotten. Until recently, when I saw a copy at the Dawn Treader and remembered really enjoying it the first time around. I'm really glad I bought it when I had the chance, because this book has reminded me of why I fell in love with fantasy in the first place, and its stunning power to enrich our lives with fresh perspective.

I think I may have been too young to really appreciate this book the first time around, because there's a lot going on here that I didn't notice the first time around. I must have completely failed to realize that Ged (a.k.a. Sparrowhawk, the main character) is not a white guy like virtually all fantasy protagonists (his skin tone is described as "red-brown"). I also failed to realize what a big deal that is, especially for a book published in 1968, when (as Le Guin herself said it) "everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill."

Sparrowhawk, by FreShPAiNt

I also feel like I'm finally old enough to really understand and absorb the lessons which the book teaches about patience, self-knowledge, and the responsibility which comes with great power (I just wish I had taken these lessons more to heart as a young man, rather than insisting on learning them for myself, the hard way). As the Archmage says to Ged after the young man's pride and hubris have left him gravely injured and loosed a terrible evil upon the world:

You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do....

I was also captivated by the lovingly-rendered descriptions of sea and surf and sky, of windswept moors and mist-hidden isles, narrow flotsam-choked inlets, great calm bays, and the endless, heaving waterscape of the Open Sea. Le Guin has an anthropologist's eye for culture and and a naturalist's eye for setting, and it makes me appreciate my own landscape (and the lake right behind my new house) all the more fully.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury, 2005)


It's not often that I wish a thousand-page novel could have been even longer. Rarer still is when I finish such a novel and immediately turn back to page one so I can start it over again. But that is exactly what I did with Susanna Clarke's masterful, eloquent, and exquisitely-constructed novel. By turns humorous and eerie, quotidian and otherworldly, Strange is already high on my list of all-time favorite books.

While no summary could really do justice to a novel of this size and complexity, here's a rundown: Magic has been dead in England for close to three centuries -- ever since the mysterious Raven King rode out of England and into Faerie -- until the secretive and reclusive Mr Gilbert Norrell resurrects the craft and becomes a celebrity overnight. Soon, one Jonathan Strange appears on the scene: a young gentleman with an intuitive gift for magic. Handsome, gregarious, and bold, Strange is everything Norrell is not. Together, they form an unlikely master-apprentice duo, and pool their considerable magical resources to aid England in its war against the dreaded Emperor Napoleon. But the friendship men so different as these cannot last forever: Norrell hoards information like a miser hoards gold, and Strange is drawn ever more strongly towards the mad, wild sorcery of the Raven King, widening the rift between teacher and pupil.

It's hard to know where to begin reviewing a work of this magnitude, but I suppose the most logical place to begin is the book's language, which is a pastiche of Georgian literary English (imagine a blend of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, with a perhaps a splash of Charles Dickens). That might sound like it would be impenetrable, but the modern reader will have no difficulty there. As a matter of fact, it's much easier to read and understand than even Jane Austen, whose language was (in my opinion) uncommonly straightforward for her era. The peculiar spelling of some words ("chuse" instead of "choose," for instance) only adds to the impression that we are reading an actual document of the period, being written by someone who speaks the same language as the characters depicted.

Clarke makes use of numerous and often lengthy footnotes to give the novel a tone of mock-scholarship, by explaining the characters' references to historical events and magical theory without having them awkwardly explain things to each other for the reader's benefit. Apparently she initially considered making this an epistolary novel, and although she scrapped that plan, the footnotes became the perfect way for her to explore the medieval history of her world without compromising its narrative flow.

Portia Rosenberg's ghostly-grey illustrations lend the novel an atmosphere of gloomy magnificence. They bleed away from the gray illustration to a smoky nothingness, lacking a clear boundary, giving the impression that there is much more to this world which we only glimpse through a glass darkly.

Clarke does an excellent job of giving historical context to those who may not be great students of history, but as an American I found that there were many references to real historical events which I had heard of but, not knowing how they ultimately turned out, I was left unsure whether anything had been altered by the magicians' presence.

Oddly, it seems that even the presence of spectacular magic would change very little about the course of history. Even with two magicians and their scrying-dishes working full time on the war effort, Napoleon is continually outsmarting Britain's generals. It seems to me that, even if the gentleman's code of conduct prevents them from actually killing anyone, it should have been possible for them to cause some great personal tragedy to befall him, such as gout or an attack of hayfever.

But all of this is just nitpicking. Perhaps by making her alternate, magical history so similar to our own, Clarke is trying to show us that history has a vast momentum of its own, and that the presence of one or two men (even magicians) is not enough to entirely alter the course of history. Or maybe she's saying that our own history is just as magical and strange as this simulacrum she's created? Either way, Clarke's attention to historical detail is astonishing. Her inclusion of actual historical personages (such as King George III, Lord Byron, and Lord Wellington) shows a keen eye for historical psychology, and makes these normally distant, almost godlike figures, into real breathing humans, with whom we might take tea and conversation on a winter's day in northern England.

And speaking of the North: Clarke's love for northern England, in all its gloomy majesty, pervades every page of this book. Most Britons (especially northerners) love to joke/complain about how terrible and gloomy their weather is, but Clarke paints a loving portrait of windswept moors and grey winter hills, of darkling forests and white winter skies filled with cawing ravens.

The brown fields were partly flooded; they were strung with chains of chill, grey pools. The pattern of the pools had meaning. The pools had been written on to the fields by the rain. The pools were a magic worked by the rain, just as the tumbling of the black birds against the grey was a spell that the sky was working and the motion of grey-brown grasses was a spell that the wind made. Everything had meaning.

These are not the kind of images you would ever find in a travel brochure, but I find that they strike a chord deep within me: being from Michigan, her descriptions of wet, muddy earth and puddles reflecting pale grey skies has given me a new appreciation for the natural beauty of the place I live. I've noticed that after reading this book, I spend a lot more time looking at the sky and the landscape around me, and I just can't shake the feeling that, well... I'll just let Miss Clarke tell you in her own words:

This land is all too shallow

It is painted on the sky

And trembles like the wind-swept rain

When the Raven King goes by.