I should start by saying this ramble comes from someone who hasn't read the whole series yet. I only just started book 3 (Eclipse), and the fact that I picked it up at all after the many annoyances I found in book 2 (New Moon) is at least one compliment I can pay Stephenie Meyer. I do want to know, at least on the surface, in a soap-opera way, what happens with these characters. There's also the desire to obtain the whole picture so I can ridicule it, or at least critique it, better. I admit that. But both desires are there for me, conflicting and warring and sparkling absurdly in the sunlight. I haven't had such a bipolar reaction of being compelled to read more and wanting to smack the author and the characters every other chapter since discovering Thomas Hardy about ten years ago.

As I've recently discussed on Facebook and elsewhere with dirae, kenshi, and others, the "vampiric death = sex" metaphor shines glaringly clear the more you read of the Twilight series. (And it was immediately and almost hilariously obvious in the film, with Robert Pattinson using all his considerable James Dean angst to convey vampire-Edward's difficulty in keeping his hands, teeth, and other body parts off that jailbait girl-crush of his.)

But Edward's way of dealing with it is the dull, mildly religious-conservative route: abstinence only. In some ways I find it refreshing, I suppose; a book for teens that's free of sex, drugs, or swear words. On the other hand...is that really the teen life any of us knew?

When Joss Whedon introduced his teenage heroine (Buffy Summers) to a "nice" vampire (Angel), and later a not so nice one (Spike)--well, I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer yet (which everyone should), but much more dramatic things happened. Believe me, the subtext of "vampires=sex," and the correlating "sex can equal death," rapidly became text. Buffy's interactions with Angel and Spike illustrated it loud and clear, and with about fifty times as much fascination, humor, and heartbreak as the chilly Cullens have inspired in me so far.

Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite veered other directions with their vampire series. Rice's vampires were, she claimed, chaste, but please; every scene was about how sensually obsessed they were with each other. Brite just went ahead and made her vampires all promiscuous lovers, having them use sex to draw in mortal victims as well. You want a really sharp, horrifying picture of the "vampire sex as death" thing, even involving teenagers, go read Brite's Lost Souls.

For that matter, going back farther, anyone over the age of about 16 who reads Bram Stoker's Dracula can clearly see the Victorian horror of female sexuality inherent in the story. Demure young women get forced to taste blood, and they turn into red-lipped, heaving-bosomed seductresses whom one must stake and decapitate as soon as possible. Yet there's a thrill in it too--everyone knows that Dracula and his she-vampires are considered sexy and alluring, at least in the lives they've taken on outside the book. Within the book itself they're not exactly painted in the most flattering terms. But the fact remains, Stoker isn't afraid to let more bad things happen to more good people than Meyer seems to be. When Stoker writes about his vampire sneaking into a young lady's bedchamber, that vampire isn't there to "watch her sleep." He's there to bite her neck, feed her his blood from his bare chest, and Make Her His.

Speaking of watching her sleep: again, anyone over about 16 who reads the Twilight books is a bit troubled by the stalker-like, semi-pedophiliac nature of Edward Cullen. For whatever reason, it hasn't occurred to young teens on the whole, but a man sneaking into your bedroom night after night, without your knowledge, just to watch you sleep, is scary, not romantic. Call the freaking cops if this is happening to you. Furthermore, we adults immediately find it weird that 100-year-old immortals would want to attend high school over and over, instead of, say, college at least. But you know who finds the scenario just perfect? High school girls, that's who. And that's part of the allure of the Twilight series as a whole: we are entirely locked into Bella's first-person, impulsive, obsessive, honest, female-adolescent point of view. Even when she annoys the hell out of me, I find it weirdly interesting to read what is, in effect, her diary. I just wonder if the books might not benefit from the point of view of an actual adult once in a while too.

(Yes, I hear Meyer's writing a new one from Edward's point of view. But he's not exactly your usual adult, so we'll see...)

On a note unrelated to sex and death, but still related to realism in the teen world, there aren't nearly enough cell phones or computers in Meyer's books. The kids mostly call each other on land lines and pass each other handwritten notes. It's almost as if...gosh, as if the author is someone my age who's remembering how things were back when she was in high school. I still don't text-message, so I feel her reluctance to fake it in fiction. On the other hand, teens are eating this series up despite the anachronism. Goes to show, there's no predicting what will fly and what will crash in the world of fandom.

All the same, vampires have been done to (sexy) death. Guess I'll have to try my hand at making Greek gods, fairy folk, ghosts, or selkies the next hip thing instead.

Okay, here's the good news I didn't exactly present coherently yesterday:

My novel The Ghost Downstairs can now be pre-ordered on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. Hurray!

These JUST went up, so not all the details are ready (book covers, blurbs, etc.), but the publisher will get in there and remedy that before the official release date.

Note that this pre-ordering is only for the paperback edition. The ebook edition probably cannot be ordered until the release date (April 3), but then of course it arrives instantly when you do order it.

Naturally I'll be happy to send autographed bookplates (stickers) to anyone who wants one to stick inside the book. Also, soon I'll have the first chapter up on my site for you to read while you wait for your full copy. I'll keep you posted on those developments.

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In other news, thank you for sending in so many great ideas for ghostly reads. Your favorite ghost stories, along with those of everyone else I asked, can now be read in one big list on Amazon's Listmania.

(If I didn't add yours, it's only because I couldn't find it.) I even went ahead and added The Ghost Downstairs, in the hopes that others will discover it via our list--along with many other good books!

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Next post (two in one day; this won't happen often): a perfume giveaway to celebrate!

My novel The Ghost Downstairs comes out in less than a month now, on April 3 (*dress rehearsal of confetti! whee!*), so in honor of that, I ask you:

What are your all-time favorite novels (or shorter stories) featuring ghosts?

The ones that come to mind for me are from my childhood, and are YA books: The Ghost Next Door by Wylly Folk St. John and Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn. In addition, I rather enjoyed Nora Roberts' "In the Garden" trilogy, which dealt with a haunted house owned by a garden nursery proprietor. And who could forget Jacob Marley and the three Christmas ghosts coming back to haunt Ebenezer Scrooge?

Hopefully when you answer with your favorites, I'll remember some other good ones, or discover some new gems.

Dude. My mom recently collected old family stories from her side, via various far-flung cousins, and this one stands out. To say the least.

The Nolans were a large family of Irish Catholic immigrants living in the Midwest in the 1870s, and were devastated when the mother died of illness. In accordance with her deathbed wish, her daughter Rosa willingly joined a Catholic girls' school in Iowa. After that, at about age 16, feeling that the best way to help her bereaved father and brothers was to pray for them and serve God, she joined a convent.

Her dad and brothers didn't entirely like this idea, as this was the type of convent where once you got in, you didn't talk to the outside world anymore. In fact, the nuns enforced the rule so strictly that when Rosa died some time later, nobody informed her family. Her father only found out by traveling to the convent and asking about her. The nuns' explanation was something to the effect that Rosa belonged to God/The Church now and not to the world.

Well, the dad did what any good father would. He went home and collected his sons, and they all drove the wagon back to the convent under cover of night, snuck into the cemetery, dug up Rosa's coffin, and took it home to rebury it, allegedly somewhere on the farm.

As you can imagine, Nolan family feelings for Catholicism after that point weren't of the fondest, but apparently several did remain with the church.

But seriously. Dude. Grave robbing. I am so going to write a short story about this.

Why the haunted house icon in the midst of the winter holidays, you ask? Because way back around Halloween, I won the haunted house short story competition at TheNextBigWriter.com, my workshopping site of choice. Prize was $30 and I'm much delighted. Before you get too ecstatic for me, I'll mention there were only 11 entries total. All the same, I happily invite you to read my entry, "Mr. Flannagan's Garden," which has finally after a long delay been put up on TheNextBigWriter's sister site, Booksie.com.

Word count is just under 5000. Rating is PG for "some scary images," as the movie biz would say.

I'd like to fix it up for a dark fantasy fiction magazine if anyone has suggestions for a good one. Asimov's?

In any case, happy holidays (late or timely), and stay out of the creepy gardens.

Way #8271 to mess with someone's head:

If you see a new neighbor moving into a house, stop and say in a superstitious voice, "So the old Jenkins place finally sold, huh? You guys spent a night there yet? Um, no reason. Well, never mind, I'm sure it'll be fine. Good luck."

(Surely you wouldn't have friended me if you didn't want these glimpses into my head.)

When the same thing happens three times, it officially becomes a pattern (say I). So how's this for odd?

Incident 1: Circa the year 2000, I wrote a story featuring a character based loosely on a friend on mine. In the novel, he only has his father; his mother has died. A few months after I wrote it, the friend's *father* died unexpectedly. Would have been creepier if it had been the mother, but I found the coincidence sort of strange. Then...

Incident 2: I wrote a different novel, featuring a character loosely based on a guy at work. As far as I knew, the guy himself was happily married; but in the novel, I had him divorced and carrying on an affair with a much younger woman. I later found out that the work guy actually was divorced, and was getting engaged to a much younger woman. OK, still, just a coincidence; not exactly eerie. But now...

Incident 3: Earlier this year I revised a novel, inserting an event in which a nurse accidentally kills a patient. The patient is an alcoholic who has liver cancer. I based him in my mind, kind of, on the former owner of our house, who was indeed an alcoholic and who has caused us a zillion headaches from his weird-ass home improvement projects. (We've found empty Milwaukee's Best cans under the deck and behind the drywall.) Today my husband tells me that he talked to a neighbor, and found out that the former owner died recently. Of cancer. Don't know what type, but now, besides of course feeling bad for the guy's family, I'm feeling a little like I've accidentally been typing on The Computer Of The Fates.

But actually, these incidents probably only mean that I sometimes read people better than I realize, and see what's likely to happen to them based on the clues they give off. Anyway, it's nothing compared to all the things I've written that *haven't* happened.

Haven't happened yet, that is. Anyone want me to base a character on you, and have you inherit a million dollars and a gorgeous castle in Europe?

Edit: I thought of a 4th incident! While in the middle of reworking a story about a lad whose new crush ends up being his long-lost cousin, my uncle announced that he apparently had a daughter he never knew about. An old girlfriend called him up; the daughter was just turning 18, and they wanted blood tests to be sure; etc. So we had a new long-lost cousin! Only, it turned out that she wasn't actually my uncle's daughter; the mom was mistaken to say the least, but still...timing was strange, no?

I heard about the case of Mr. and Mrs. H's supposedly haunted house on "This American Life" last Halloween, and meant to post it here. Upshot: feeling chilled, fatigued, and weirdly suffocated in some rooms of your house? Hearing and seeing strange things? Yeah, you might want to check for carbon monoxide before you go blaming ghosts. It can produce all those symptoms and more--"more" in some cases meaning "death."

Thought it was interesting, since not only should it make a lot of people rethink their ghost stories, but it might actually save some lives.

I still hope ghosts are real, sometimes, sort of. But a good scientist eliminates other explanations first.

All right, everyone, I'm going to do it. It may be reckless, it may be painful, but I'm determined. I have knocked it long enough without trying it, so now I'm going to try it, and I won't be stopped.

I'm going to read a Danielle Steel novel.

Pray for me. Maybe I'll soon be back to report that someone's loins are being struck with the hammer of desire. Here's hoping.

The book I just finished caused me to invoke my rare "Do not read after dark" rule: The Haunting of Hill House by (I almost wrote "Danielle Steel") Shirley Jackson. Brilliant if weird, and very very spooky without actually showing any ghosts. But we all know it's what you can't see that's scary. And, in the end, it was actually more interesting than frightening, so a well-done story overall.

Way back in May '03 I got LJ'ers to tell me about supernatural experiences they themselves had seen/heard/felt. My friends list must have had a lot of turnover since then, so in the spirit of Halloween, I shall ask it again:

Do you have any ghostly encounters? Will you tell us about them? I want only first-hand ghost stories, stuff you personally experienced, not a tale handed down from your grandfather or your mother-in-law (even though those may be cool). Also, feel free to do your best at explaining it - e.g., "But then, I was looking through a pane of glass, so I suppose it could have been a reflection..." - just to make this as scientific as possible.

Banshees, poltergeist, telekinesis, and other strange earthly phenomena are fair game, too; it doesn't have to be an actual visible "ghost."

As to whether I believe in ghosts: my answer basically is that I haven't ever seen one, but some part of my mind thinks they're possible. Or, rather, hopes they're possible, because it would suggest life after death and all kinds of interesting physics-related things.

Let's have 'em!
*switches on a flashlight for the spooky-up-the-face-lighting-effect and hands it to whoever is first*

For your Halloween literature needs, check out the page I just discovered:

Horrormasters, an online free library of classical ghost/horror/occult stories. Cross-referenced by type (short story, novella, novel, poetry) and subject matter (ghosts, werewolves, seances, killers and sadists, body parts, etc.). Lovecraft, Poe, Shelley, Stoker, and many I've never heard of. Also some I wouldn't call horror at all - such as Northanger Abbey (teehee!) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (unless you count crimes against happy endings as a horror device) - but a very cool resource all the same.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to decide which to read next: George MacDonald's Lilith or Walter de la Mare's The Return.

Call me an old-fashioned pagan, but this was huge fun to read.

Written in 1794 in the space of ten weeks by a 19-year-old Englishman, The Monk is sensationalist, scandalous, racy, melodramatic, irreverent (was in fact called "blasphemous" at the time, of course, which made sales skyrocket) - and is considered to be one of the classic Gothic novels of the English language. It wins that honor in spades, in my opinion.

Quick plot summary: Ambrosio, handsome and austerely pure Abbot of a monastery in a Spanish city, finds that one of his novice-boys is actually a young woman in disguise. She gets past his scruples and seduces him, leading him down an increasingly criminal path to ruin, involving lies, rape, murder, and the aid of evil spirits. There's also some living-happily-ever-after for the innocent characters who were his victims, just to keep it from being a total downer. But it's way too delicious to be a downer anyway.

You know, I read Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, which supposedly started the whole Gothic-novel trend. (Or was it Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto that started it? Well, anyway...) Udolpho was hard to get through. It was exceedingly long, with seriously dense prose. And, in the end, all the ghosts and eerieness were explained away by smugglers hiding in the walls, or something like that.

Not so in Matthew Lewis. We've got ghosts, demons, witchcraft, curses, spells--and all of it is real. And to spice things up, we've also got intersecting love triangles, people getting locked in tombs, sex-mad monks, pregnant nuns, and the Spanish Inquisition. I ask you, what's not to love?

Granted, it's got the kind of high-flown dialogue you'd expect in an 18th-century Gothic novel: I'm sure no one, at any time in history, has ever actually said something like "Ah! Ambrosio, can I have been deceived? Can you be less generous than I thought you? I will not suspect it. You will not drive a Wretch to despair; I shall still be permitted to see you, to converse with you, to adore you!" (Oh yeah, it's got some weird Capitalization of Nouns here and there too.) But it's still a damn sight easier to follow than Milton or Shakespeare.

Goths who like their novels on the literary-classic side (but still with plenty of blood) should have a look at this one. Classic-lit buffs who like their novels on the bloody/Gothic side should also give it a whirl.

I owe a tip of the hat to Camille Paglia for bringing up this book in Sexual Personae, and illuminating the lurid daemonic charms of it, beneath the goofy melodrama. (Egads, did I just say "daemonic"? I've been reading Paglia too long...)

P.S. I read this book for free, as an e-text, downloaded from Project Gutenberg. Hurrah for copyright expiration!

Sure, it's early, but just to get it said on time:

Happy Halloween, all!

Whether you prefer your black-garbed, spooky, homocidal horsemen with heads or without.



*flings dark chocolate morsels, individually wrapped and almost entirely free of razor blades*

Round this time of year I tend to get this little tune in my head; a tune in minor key that they taught us in grade school:

Have you seen the ghost of Tom?
Long white bones with the flesh all gone
Ooh-ooh-ooh-oooh, poor old Tom
Wouldn't it be chilly with no skin on!

Googling on it proves that it's widely known, but no one seems to know who wrote it. So, is this a song that just a few schools learned? Or nearly all kids in the U.S.? Or all over the world? Now I'm curious:

Poll #198560 The Ghost of Tom
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 56

Do you know this song?

ETA: Here: I found a midi file of the tune, so you can learn it if you don't know it.

Welcome to Halloween week! Is this a great time of year of what? Well, unless you're in California, where it still hasn't rained and in fact is on fire; whereas Seattle broke rainfall records last week and is expected to dip into freezing temperatures by the end of this week - but hey, I'm not here to gloat.

bluesound dug up this article in which Channel 4 (British, I take it) ranks the 100 scariest moments on film, ranging from entire movies to opening credits of a TV show (good ol' Dr. Who...). I haven't seen many of them, but I was pleased that they included Salem's Lot, the Stephen King miniseries from 1979, and that they picked out the exact scene that I was describing to Steve the other day as Something Which Freaked Me Out Royally In My Childhood. This got me thinking about other scenes and other films, so I decided to do my own list of scariest moments in TV or cinema (going with far fewer than 100):

Things On Film That Have Scared The Wits Out of Me Or At Least Have Made It Really Difficult to Sleep Easy
(In no particular order.)

1. Salem's Lot: I don't ordinarily find vampires all that scary - they fall under "cool" more than anything else - but when a teenage undead boy is floating in the fog outside his brother's window and tapping on the glass, with those freaky white vampire eyes and that ghastly vampire smile, that is quite within the realm of "scary." Especially when you're, like, eight.

2. The Sixth Sense: This was a really well-acted and psychologically interesting movie, and was even tear-jerking at times, but did I mention it also scared me half to death? Hard to pick just one scene that was the worst: Haley Joel Osment screaming in terror while locked up with a clawing ghost in a tiny closet at the top of a staircase? The hanging people in the courthouse? Or, no, wait! I've got it! The ghost of the little girl, pursuing him all over the apartment and ending up right there with him in his tent sanctuary in the bedroom. Gah. Now I've got myself looking over my own shoulder.

3. It: Stephen King again, damn him. I saw this miniseries before I read the book, and though I didn't have anything against clowns before, I certainly did after that. Who'd have thought that the idea of having your ankle seized by a homocidal clown in a storm drain would be so chilling? "We all float down here..." *shudder*

4. The Changeling: Did anyone see this movie besides me and the other girls at that slumber party? It's a basic haunted-house formula, but done with effective creepiness. The ghost, as most truly disturbing ghosts are, is a child, and thus plays chillingly childish games with the solitary fellow who lives in the house. There's this little ball that keeps bouncing down the stairs, by itself. The fellow finally has had enough, and picks up the ball, drives to a bridge, and throws it in the river. When he gets home and closes the front door behind him, what does he see? The ball, innocently bouncing down the stairs toward him, out of the shadows above. Yeah. You know you're a good filmmaker when you can freak people out by bouncing a ball down some stairs.

5. The X-Files: I hesitate to admit this, because it was just a trendy, fun show. But back when I was watching it regularly (circa '98-99), it had a reliable way of giving me nightmares. Not the alien stuff, really - I don't have an alien phobia. But some of their freaky-religious-death episodes disturbed me in deep ways.

There were others that scared me as a kid but that wouldn't bother me now - moments in Raiders of the Lost Ark, say, or the alligator biting off the guy's hand in Romancing the Stone (yes, you can laugh). But the above list, I think, could still scare me.

As for The Blair Witch Project...eh...*shrug*. Saw it on TV. Wasn't impressed. Somehow, knowing it's a fake documentary and that the actors are just tortured students being filmed in a park somewhere kind of takes the supernatural thrill out of it.

Sleep tight...if you can! Mwuhahaha!

This is a shot in the dark, but: there was this book I read when I was about 8-10, a novel, a ghost story, and I cannot remember the title or the author. It has been bothering me for years. Today I searched thru Amazon and Google for about an hour and turned up nothing. So I thought maybe, just maybe, one of you might know what it is. It was about a girl who encounters and sort of befriends the ghost of another girl who used to live in this house. The ghost's name was Miranda. I think she originally drowned in a well or something. She had a favorite stone owl, with yellow glass eyes, that was hidden somewhere (hollow trunk of a tree, I think), and told the modern girl where to find it. The book was probably for the 10-14 age range. It must have been published at least 15 years ago. And that's all I remember for sure. Any ideas? Heh.

[Edit, 3/29/03: jedmiller rocks! He found it: it is The Ghost Next Door, by Wylly Folk St. John. Think I'll go order a copy and see if it's actually as good as I remember.]

Other random things:

"Nasturtium" comes from the Latin words meaning "nose" and "twist/torture". Eat a nasturtium leaf and you will see why. Yowza. Spicy! (Nice addition to salads, though.)

[Edit 3/29/03: Photos taken down because a) they're stupid and b) I was NOT fishing for compliments (or at least, not on my looks; maybe on the amusing Photoshop effects...). I genuinely thought the first was unflattering; but you all were obliged to follow rules of politeness and say nice things anyway. Which is sweet of you, but that wasn't the point and I feel silly now. Tempting to take a vow of silence some days.]

I have long noticed that there just isn't much Halloween music out there. Not compared with, say, Christmas music, anyway. However, I would really like some, so as to enhance the spooky mood of the increasingly long cold nights and the wind rattling the dead leaves, and so forth. (At least the nights in California are somewhat Octoberish. Stupid days are still warm and sunny.)

Anyway. I already have (and enjoy) Dead Can Dance, Enya, Loreena McKennitt, This Mortal Coil, the 'Nightmare Before Christmas' soundtrack, and a Gothic rock compilation. Can anyone suggest some really good, spooky, not-too-cheesy music for this season? Much obliged. Danke.

In other news, Steve-my-husband is re-reading LOTR now. Yay! Already finished FOTR and has moved along to TTT. I think the latest TTT trailer inspired him. That's just how cool it was.

So, sweet dreams, all. I'm back to studying.