bloodygranuaile

This summer I picked up a copy of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s not particularly well-known novel The Rose and the Key, and I figured it would make good spooky season reading once I’d finished rereading Carmilla. And apart from the bit where partway into the month I developed a severe case of Not Being Able To Focus On Anything, For Reasons, it was! The Rose and the Key is nowhere near being a masterpiece like Carmilla, but it’s still got some enjoyable 19th-century gothic nonsense going on. You’ve got your high-spirited but isolated young woman protagonist, some sinister religious zealots–pious in public, vicious in private–a whole host of gently ridiculous village character types, some star-crossed loves and family feuds, and, once the actual action gets rolling, that most sinister of Victorian institutions, the madhouse. (OK, most Victorian institutions are sinister, but the madhouse is a big one in gothics.)

The pacing is very nineteenth-century–slow and meandering in a way that modern writing isn’t allowed to be anymore, at least up until about halfway through, then the pace picks up considerably. The ending felt a bit rushed to tie everything up in a neat little bow. I personally didn’t mind the slow beginning, as I like meandering Victorian setups; I didn’t love the rushed ending although at that point I’d been reading the book for so long I was grateful to get to the end.

While there is some period-typical British bullshit I think that overall the themes explored here retain a certain amount of relevance–pious hypocrites using their public respect, wealth, and incomprehensible paperwork to hurt those who they ought to care for; the vicious neglect and cruelty that can be hidden within materially well-off families; the pathologization of teenage girls’ behavior and emotions; medical and especially psychiatric abuse; the way people rationalize their own terrible behavior. It’d be nice if that stuff was as dated as the way the characters talk and the way they construct their social calendars, but alas.

Overall this is the sort of mediocre novel I prefer when I’m reading mediocre novels these days, because I don’t want to read brightly colored “beach read” type things due to being a dour weirdo, but I will fully admit it’s a fairly mediocre novel. It’s not quite as wackily bad as Varney the Vampyre or The Beetle, and it’s not as genuinely good horror as Carmilla or Dracula or any of the things that have become proper literary classics, but it has its moments and I had a perfectly decent time reading it.

A few Christmases ago I picked up a beautifully bound hardback copy of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla at the Strand, and then last year I subscribed to Carmilla Weekly rather than read it. This year, I decided reading the pretty book would be more fun!

Though it’s only been a year since my last reread, I once again forgot just how gay this book is. It is well-known that 19th century vampires stories–of which there are many, though for some reason every one that isn’t Dracula likes to present itself as the singular and only precursor to Dracula–are full of homoerotic subtext, and that knowledge exerts such a pull on my brain that every time I step away from Carmilla for like five seconds I apparently start thinking that it applies here, too. This is incorrect. It is not subtext. I swear to God one of these years I will remember that the homoeroticism in this one is just regular text.

At any rate, it’s such an excellent little creepy read! I swear it gets better every time I read it. Just a perfect little bite-size (heh) vampire story for October.

In my recent fit of subscribing to classic literature via newsletter, I also subscribed to Carmilla Weekly, which sent me one chapter a week of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic vampire novella Carmilla. These are again very short chapters, as there are 16 of them and the book is only novella-length (what with being a novella and all). Sixteen weeks is way more time than is needed to read a book this short, but whatever, it was fun to get a little dose of Carmilla in my inbox every weekend for four months.

The book continues to be a) an excellent work of horror, effectively building an atmosphere of isolated, mysterious creeping dread, and b) super gay. Highly recommend.

This spring, after some initial resistance, I jumped onto the Dracula Daily bandwagon, and as such have been reading Bram Stoker’s 1982 Gothic masterpiece Dracula in little bits and pieces, some out of order, more days than not for the past few months. Though I have read Dracula before, there was definitely something fun and different about reading it in real-time, playing with the epistolary form by waiting for emails from my dear friends about what they’d been up to, and being in a fandom/giant book club with the most insane minds on the Internet via the Dracula Daily tag on Tumblr. These past six months have been so much fun, and have really forced me to slow down and notice so many delicious and weird little things about the book that usually get lost when I just mainline the whole novel by myself in a few days with no one to discuss it with. It was, of course, also lovely watching so many new readers discover all the ways in which the novel differs from the many pop culture variations on it, and get outraged together over the ways in which movies and such have consistently done Lucy and Jonathan dirty, made Dracula and Van Helsing inexplicably sexy instead of the goofy old men they are, and, most unforgivably, always cut our “laconic,” Winchester-wielding Texas gentleman Quincey Morris.

One of the things that I think was great about this slow, discussion-filled read-through was that it ended up really highlighting not just overlook triumph of craft like the dry humor and the slow mounting terror of Jonathan and Lucy’s plotlines, but it also gave us enough room to simultaneously explore just how very much this story is rooted in being about a bunch of English people in the 1890s, and the ways in which they still are very relatable and relevant to situations and people we know today–Jonathan the young lawyer on his first real business trip, steadfastly ignoring how weird everything is because he can’t afford to be rude or fuck up; Seward the overpromoted young whiz kid making a podcast (with voices) and clinging to his emotional support lancet because he is actually a huge dork; hypercompetent Mina dealing with the guilt and terror by throwing herself into admin/secretarial tasks that keep everyone organized. Every member of Anti-Vampire Aktion is a nerdy jewel of classic literature and it would be nice if someday, someone adapted them all for screen without wholesale replacing them with completely unrecognizable simulacra.

But also: the chicken paprika recipe! Dracula’s unseasonable straw hat! The disrespectful zookeeper! Seeing from Jonathan’s violent demeanor that he was English! VAN HELSING’S CORN METAPHORS. I had forgotten how fucking funny this book is! It’s nice to read with a population that is primed to zero in on everything that could be joked about and ensure it is joked about good and hard. 10/10 would take a lit class with Tumblr University again.

I watched the BBC adaptation of Gormenghast after several years of never quite letting it get to the top of my Netflix DVD queue, and while I wasn’t completely certain I liked it, it was so weird that I became very curious about the books it was based on. To that end I invested in a copy of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan, the first book in the Gormenghast trilogy, to see if it was really as strange and Gothic as everyone said it was.

First off, strange it certainly is. The strangeness is highlighted by the fact that it is very, very slow–slow in ways that books straight-up are not allowed to be slow anymore, and even slow in ways that had gone fairly out of fashion by the time Peake was writing in the ‘40s and ‘50s, although maybe less so in fantasy writing than in other genres. This is also one of those odd sorts of books that is classed as fantasy because it’s a fully separate world, but in which that world existing is really the only speculative element–neither magic nor any particularly advanced technology are featured.

The world, despite its lack of overtly fantastical elements, is certainly eerie. The tiny kingdom of Gormenghast consists in its entirety of a few parts, apparently wholly isolated from the rest of the world–there are the woods and crags of Gormenghast Mountain; there is the enormous rambling complex of walls and halls that is Castle Gormenghast; and there are the Bright Carvers, a community of subsistence farmers in mud huts clustered like barnacles outside the castle walls (and sometimes up onto the castle’s outside walls). The Bright Carvers have exactly one artistic obsession among the lot of them: carving ornate wooden statues and painting them (hence their name).

Life in Castle Gormenghast is mostly a series of incredibly tedious and formal rituals that the Earl and sometimes other folks are obliged to take part in. The Earl, Sepulchrave Groan, is obedient enough to these rituals, because he suffers from an intense depression that constitutes about 90% of his personality and the rituals give him something to do to occupy his mind from how miserable he is. When he’s not doing rituals he’s hiding in the library. The Earl’s wife, Countess Gertrude, is mainly concerned only with her cats and her birds, and the one thing she and the Earl have in common is taking this whole traditions of the line of Groan thing seriously enough to produce an heir. The birth of the heir, the titular Titus Groan, seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast, is the inciting incident of the novel, which covers roughly the first two years of his life, during which he is mostly a set piece and object of attention for the various weirdos who inhabit the castle.

The main plotline involves the machinations of 17-year-old runaway kitchen boy Steerpike, who is able to machinate much more than any 17-year-old ought to be able to, partly by being very duplicitous and calculating but also because he is fortunate enough to be surrounded largely by total idiots. The characters who are not total idiots–which are mainly Dr. Alfred Prunesquallor, and, on the rare occasions she can be bothered to pay attention to anything involving humans, the Countess–eventually become a bit suspicious of him. The Earl’s first servant, Flay, also doesn’t like Steerpike very much, but in his case it has more to do with the Earl’s relentless devotion to hierarchy than actually suspecting him of anything other than having ideas above his station, and being tainted by his former association with the head cook, Swelter–Flay’s nemesis–even if he did run away.

The Swelter/Flay enmity involves them interacting less than half a dozen times, but for all that it takes up quite a bit of page space, since most of it is one or the other of them ruminating and/or plotting and/or stalking the other. Due to the dense and atmospheric style of the book I completely missed it the first time something actually Happened and had to go back and reread the paragraph. This is not a complaint; I wasn’t paying nearly close enough attention. It does ultimately wind up in a rather magnificent swordfight in the Hall of Spiders, but the path it takes to get there is long and winding and full of quietly weird shit like Flay wrapping up his knees in padding so that his knee joints don’t crack when following Swelter around in the gloom for the final showdown. These clicking knee joints had been a major part of his physical characterization for most of the preceding 350 or so pages.

Basically every character in the story has a weird Dickensian sort of name and is described in terms that make them sound like a grotesque; even the fifteen-year-old Lady Fuchsia Groan, an isolated daydreamer with long black hair, who it sounds like could have been pretty enough, is described mostly in terms of her bratty mannerisms and awkward body language. Everyone also talks oddly; most of the characters have their own very specific ways of talking oddly, but at the end of the day basically the only people in the castle who can answer a question straightforwardly are Steerpike, who is usually lying, and the Countess, who frequently doesn’t bother, but who values the skill highly enough to berate Nannie Slagg about it. I would say that everybody in this castle is insane except that one of the major plot threads involves somebody going full-bore thinks-he’s-an-owl insane, and so it is established that there is a difference between actual psychosis and just the kinds of personalities that are allowed to exist in a place as dysfunctional as Castle Gormenghast.

The language in this book is archaic enough that it sent me repeatedly running to the dictionary (or at least to Google; I don’t have any paper dictionaries anymore); some of this is because I have learned to distrust “learning” descriptive language from context, as this has betrayed me many times in my youth (the shock when I learned what actual shape an “aquiline” nose was! The bafflement upon discovering what “hooded” eyes were on makeup YouTube! The continuing annoyance at authors of all stripes’ insistence upon treating “olive” as a tone rather than an undertone!) but some is because they were genuinely fun words (can I remember any of them now? No, but I can check my search history). (OK, it appears I looked up: spilth, dace, dewlaps, crapulous, mouched, jarl, verandah, welkin, lambent, spindrift, calid, propinquital, and recrudescent. Also “querail” but that turned out to not be a real word.)

I don’t really quite know what else to say about this book. It was the slowest wild ride I’ve ever been on. It’s not like it was that hard to figure out what was happening, it’s just that what was happening was both very strange and described at the speed and lightness of molasses, and also mostly happening inside the heads of some very eccentric people. I will absolutely be reading the sequel as soon as I can justify another book purchase.

In preparation for Nona I read Harrow the Ninth for the third time. This time I tried to read it more slowly, even though my reading-slowly-on-purpose skills have somewhat deteriorated over the years. I don’t think I’m quite clever enough to have figured out who’s in the last section, but I will only live in ignorance for another week or so. (I don’t usually try to guess twists, I just want to see how they happen, but I’ve been wondering Who Is Nona for like a year now so I tried to pay attention.)

Even knowing the big reveals, this was still a tricksy little hobbit of a book. Only part of this is due to the protagonist being possibly-insane-possibly-haunted-definitely-unwell; the rest is due to much of the rest of the cast also being possibly insane, haunted, dead, and various other things (and definitely unwell). God continues to be just some guy, and extremely cringe to boot. I can’t wait for the next book.

On the recommendation of multiple people I checked out S.T. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood, a novel about the brides of Dracula from the point of view of the oldest of the three brides, Constanta.

Dracula is, unsurprisingly, a highly controlling husband; the brides have curfews and shit and are kept ignorant of fairly important basic life things like the polycule’s finances. When Magdalena and Alexi are added to the family, he’s the one who finds them and picks them and presents them to Constanta; her buy-in is obtained, but it’s clear that each addition was a done deal before she even meets them. As their sire, he gets to decide how much about their new form of life he’s going to tell them; it is not very much. He forbids them from having human friends and, over time, discourages hobbies that involve interacting with other people. When they get depressed, he rages at them that they don’t have any right to be miserable because of all that he’s given them. It is unambiguously the kind of stuff that terms like “emotionally and psychologically abusive” were in fact coined to describe (curfews!! for your spouses!!) but I’m still on my kick that that those words need to go up on the high shelf where the internet can’t reach them and we’d all be better off using literally any other terminology for a while, so I’m just going to say: this Dracula is unambiguously cruel and tyrannical and if you want to find out how specifically, you can read the book, but it involves shit like “forcibly moving people out into the middle of nowhere and locking them inside the house because he’s jealous that they can make friends too easily in the city.” Also, murder!

The format is interesting; it’s written as a confessional from Constanta to the unnamed Dracula after he’s dead (properly deaded, not undead) so it’s one of those written-in-the-second-person type deals. It’s got all the necessary indulgences of vampire fantasy, with lots of hanging out in Paris going to the opera and witnessing important historical events and that sort of thing. Our dysfunctional polycule of horny bi vampires may all be emotional wrecks but they are certainly seduced into it with a lot of luxuries (which are then slowly taken away from them).

Anyway, it is all very gothic, and you sort of know where it’s going the whole time but it is nonetheless very satisfying when you get there.

For 2021 I decided to do another yearlong read, the way I did with A People’s History of the United States in 2019, but because we were going into Plague Year #2 I decided that instead of reading any kind of edifying leftist theory or history I was instead going to dedicate myself to the legendary bloated Gothic monstrosity that has been sitting on my shelf for so many years: James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney, the Vampire: Or, The Feast of Blood. My copy clocks in at about 800 pages, but they are not 800 normal novel pages; they are 800 telephone-book-sized pages full of 8-point font.

I decided to read this in 12 76-page chunks over the course of the year not just because it is monstrously long, but also because I knew going into it that it was monstrously bad. Varney is a masterpiece of mid-19th-century penny dreadful serial fiction, meaning that by most conventional measures of good literature, it is not a masterpiece at all. It was published one chapter at a time on a weekly basis for nearly two years, so even reading stretched out over the course of one still means I am experiencing it in a much more contracted time frame than its original readers, and frankly even reading 70 pages at a time felt kind of like binge-watching one of those old-fashioned episodic sitcoms that wasn’t really meant to be watched sequentially. These things went to print with no editing, no consistency checks, and nearly no planning; the title character has at least four distinct vampire origin stories that all take place in different time periods and operate according to different and mutually exclusive mythologies. The style is stilted and overwritten and contains many scenes full of the kind of hemming and hawing that I recognize in first drafts as “starting to write the scene before you’ve figured out what the people in it need to be doing” writing, like “three pages of people getting settled into their chairs going ‘yes, sit down, I’ve got to talk to you about a thing, can I get you some tea’ before talking about the thing” scenes that usually get cut somewhere around draft two, for works where you have a draft two. Plotlines are picked up and abandoned with the carelessness of the Lisa’s mother’s breast cancer subplot in The Room. Actually there are quite a lot of things in the book that have me wanting to draw comparisons to The Room, if that gives you an idea of how hilariously bad this book is.

The plot (ish) that takes up most of the book, like 70% of it or so, is the Bannerworth saga, which the 1970’s TV show Dark Shadows was largely based off of (if you’ve never seen Dark Shadows… well, it’s not actually very good either!). The Bannerworths are a very typical mid-19th century protagonist sort of family, being genteelly impoverished, a thoroughly boring middle-class family that can barely stay ahead of the debts of a scapegrace ancestor and has been reduced to letting all their servants go and even thinking about letting out their ancestral home and renting a smaller one (this is the second lowest level of Reduced Circumstances a character in 19th-century fiction can be reduced to; the level immediately below it is “freezing to death in the street”). The Bannerworth family, having lost its patriarch some years ago, now consists of a well-meaning mother (basically the only nice mother figure in the story; I suspect Rymer of mommy issues), two impeccably chivalrous young adult brothers, and an impeccably sweet and beautiful young adult/late teenage daughter named Flora. In their immediate circle are also some friends of the family, including Flora’s also impeccably chivalrous and very boring fiance, Charles Holland, and, for comic relief, the fiance’s uncle, who is a decorated Admiral in the British Navy, and Admiral Bell’s first mate and now personal valet, Jack Pringle. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle seem to exist solely to allow Rymer to mash up bits and pieces of nautical swashbuckler into his otherwise mainly land-locked vampire tale.

No, that is not true. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle also serve the valuable function of breaking up Varney’s marriage plot schemes at the last minute, not once, but at least three times, each time with less leadup, until at the last one of these Admiral Bell just happens to be in the Church audience on the day of the wedding ceremony to recognize Varney and cause general consternation for absolutely no previously given reason at all. Honestly, even the second-to-last marriage plot had him visiting a family friend of the bridge a few pages in advance.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Varney, our fascinating villain and sometimes almost antihero, wants, over the course of the book, basically three things: the blood of young and beautiful maidens, money, and to be relieved of his cursed existence. Much of the book involves Varney pursuing plots to obtain one or, more often, both of the first two, via scheming to marry various wealthy young heiresses, or sometimes middle-class young heiresses. While the book opens with him attacking Flora Bannerworth and then embarking on a long and complicated strategy to obtain possession of Bannerworth Hall, he is eventually forced on to pursue the same tricks in a variety of inns and towns and cities around England. Later in the book he jaunts off to Italy to do just about the same thing, because you can’t really have an English Gothic novel in the 19th century without some exotic ties to Italy, or at least some racism against Italians. Eventually he returns back to England to be very melancholy and get into more scrapes involving eating lovely young maidens, escaping from mobs, incentivizing various persons to spend time in abandoned abbeys and cemeteries where they can catch terrible frights and witness things man was not meant to witness, all that lovely Gothic stuff. It all gets a bit repetitive, especially in the middle, although by the end we start getting some higher-stakes stuff, like more graphic on-page murders, and in one of the final plotlines Varney even creates a new vampire from one of the dully angelic teenage girls he attacks.

I think it is notable that while Varney is quite happy to murder people all up and down the countryside (in multiple countries) he only ever feeds by sneaking into ladies’ bedchambers and biting them while they are asleep, which certainly would be a very specific type of terrifying to Victorian readers. In several of these cases Varney is then called upon to guard the very same lady’s bedchamber for the following night, which usually goes awry quite spectacularly.

The edition of this book that I have is the “critical edition” which means it has a lot of footnotes and also some appendices. Some of the footnotes are quite interesting but others contain a lot of editorializing, including several footnotes to the tune of just “this writing is terrible.” Most of these callouts are fair but I must object strenuously to footnote 11, which is attached to the line “I am lost in a sea of wild conjecture.” I think this line is amazing and I plan to use it every time I don’t know what’s going on for the rest of my life (which is sure to be frequently, as I often don’t know what’s going on). The appendices are great, including a whole bunch of pearl-clutching editorials about the pernicious effects of penny dreadfuls on young minds, plus one wearily condescending defense of them by G.K. Chesterton, which essentially boils down to reminding everyone that there have always been stories that weren’t very good, we used to just ignore them instead of pretending they were supposed to be something they weren’t. There are also a couple other penny dreadfuls/penny bloods and excerpts therefrom, in case you hadn’t yet had your fill of murder and mayhem. But by far my favorite feature of the “critical edition” is the section breaks composed of three poorly sketched skulls. They are extremely cute and whimsical.

I really cannot in fairness recommend this book to other people unless you are really interested in terrible Gothic novels and, specifically, in the things that make terrible lowbrow fiction terrible. For good measure you’d probably have to be interested in both Gothic literature and in crappy horror movies, the kinds that I’m not even sure how to find anymore now that there aren’t video rental stores to find weird stupid shit in the back shelves of. However, if this sounds like you, and you are sure you have the time to put in to fight your way through this enormous, overwritten tome, it is certainly worth the slog, if only for Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle’s ridiculous exploits.

After reading a whole serious history book I figured the next item of business on my spooky szn reading was going to be Jillian Venters’ Gothic Charm School: An Essential Guide for Goths and Those Who Love Them. This book was published over 10 years ago now and has been sitting on my shelf for at least the last two of them, mostly just looking pretty (which is, admittedly, the main job of gothic things that sit on shelves) while I then proceeded to get all my goth advice from the website and Venters’ social media accounts.

While I therefore cannot say that any of the content of this book was earth-shatteringly new to me--I am, after all, old enough that people have started coming to me for goth advice, and I’m not even involved in whatever local goth “scene” Boston has--it was still both a delightful and useful read: delightful, because it’s nice to revisit a whole lot of Goth Content at once and remind myself that there’s more fun and active parts of the subculture than just dropping all my disposable income on candles at Hauswitch (although I certainly do love buying candles at Hauswitch), and useful, because (like a lot of folks) I have turned into something of an even-more-than-usual feral weirdo over the course of this whole pandemic thing, and I have to re-teach myself how to do… everything, really.

Because Goths are, in their own way, still normal people (or… we’re people, at any rate), the advice in this book runs the gamut from extremely Goth-specific (“common pitfalls of deciding to dress up as The Crow”) to general life advice (roommate agreements, not being a dick when you don’t like your friend’s shitty boyfriend). It’s also a nice mix of concrete, practical sorts of advice (step one in assembling a gothy wardrobe: buy some lint rollers. No, more lint rollers than that) to more attitudinal/theoretical stuff about the importance of being polite (especially for long-haired freaky people) and the pitfalls of gatekeeping. Honestly, a lot of the stuff about gatekeeping and general bad-attitude-ery is valuable advice across a wide range of social categories (looking at you, anyone who has ever complained about “fake geek girls”). The dating advice seems solid but I must admit that it amuses me (because the other option is having it annoy me) that normal people think that “fancying other people” is so normal that the idea of not doing so strikes them as so weird as to be impossible, and yet every group of self-styled freaks and radicals I’ve ever run across is completely convinced that “fancying other people” is, in fact, the freaky and radical thing that separates them from the normies (at least, until I won’t go out with them, in which case it’s back to being Scientifically Impossible not to). To be clear, I am, here, annoyed at these subcultures generally, not at Venters, whose advice does include such sadly necessary gems as “don’t assume all Goths are bisexual” (yes, even in Boston, which is apparently the most bisexual county in the U.S.).

Overall this book is lovely and has started to put me in the mood for doing gothy things in the leadup to Halloween. I have dug out my Halloween playlist and at some point next week may even drag myself to Michael’s to get frames for the Addams Family playing cards I picked up at Brimfield so I can put them on the wall where they’re supposed to be. If anyone else wants a short, readable bit of Gothy inspiration this Halloween season, I’m happy to lend out my copy.

 Sometime over the winter a friend who was aware of my “only reading about goths and lesbians and goth lesbians” challenge for 2020 recommended very strongly that I read Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines, a 600-page horror novel about a series of grisly deaths at a turn-of-the-century private girls school and the movie about them that is being shot on the premises in the present day. Said friend even went so far as to buy me a copy (on ebook, for pandemic reasons) and send it directly to my Kindle, which is the sort of thing that happens when you’re friends with a lot of librarians. This weekend I was very tired after slogging my way through this month’s segment of Varney the Vampyre and decided I wanted to read a Gothic novel that was actually good, so the haunted girls school it was.