Mind Picking : Happy Halloween VI

Over the past several Halloweens, I have told all of my true-life uncanny stories: creepy tales of werewolves and Oujia Boards; haunted walks and graveyard presences. Every year I keep thinking, "I can't possibly have a new collection of spooky tales to relate", and finally, I thought this was the year that statement would prove to be true. And then I remembered that I have already written here about another strange phenomenon that would be worthy of recalling on this unearthliest of days: haints and hags and the little folk that come in the night to pin you, helpless, to your mattress. As it turns out, I have known several people who have encountered this horrifying presence, and here are their tales:

The following was told to me many years ago by an old friend, and the events happened to his sister. Let's call her Mary. Being young and having moved pretty far from her family, Mary felt trapped in her relationship with an abusive live-in boyfriend. He constantly yelled and put her down, and she started feeling really awful about herself – a situation that changed for the better after they moved into a basement apartment in an old and lovely home. Several times in the new digs, when they would have a fight and the boyfriend stormed off, Mary would be standing in her kitchen, sobbing, and feel a warm embrace enveloping her. She would turn around, hoping to see the boyfriend…but there would be no one there. The hug was so soothing and so maternal that Mary would be comforted instead of scared; she felt that, finally, someone had her back. This went on for some months until the night that the boyfriend slapped Mary during an argument; the first time he had hit her; the only time he would ever hit her. 

They went to bed, and in the morning, the boyfriend said that he'd be moving out. When Mary asked why, he said: In the middle of the night, he woke up suddenly as though he had been shaken. He realised he was paralysed, he couldn't move no matter how he struggled, and he couldn't even turn his head or close his eyes – and this last was the most disturbing because above him, hovering near the ceiling, was an evil witchy hag, all swirling black smoke and glowing red eyes. Holding his stare, the figure began to lower itself onto him, slowly squeezing the air out of his lungs as it made its descent, and when they were eye to eye and nose to nose, the thing told him he was to leave Mary and never have anything to do with her again. He somehow, suddenly, fell into a deep sleep after that, and when he woke up with the day's first light, he told the story and left – for good. Mary realised she was happy to see him go and believed that the witchy presence was the same maternal figure who had given her comfort, and she ended up remaining in that apartment for some time alone; but never alone.

Now, I had no problem believing this story because years before that, during an evening of sharing freaky but true stories with my high school friends, Nancy said that she was going to tell us something she had never told anyone before. Apparently, when she was a young girl, she would periodically be visited by "little people" in the middle of the night. She would know they were coming when she woke up in her bed feeling paralysed. Her eyes were the only part of her that she could move and she would scan the baseboards, knowing that that's where they would appear. First a few splinters would fall away, and then a hole would be visible, through which numerous small, gnome-like figures would materialise. Without fail, one would jump up on her bed, climb onto her chest and begin talking to her, chattering away and, according to Nancy, making sure that she couldn't tell what the rest of them were up to. No matter how she tried, Nancy couldn't move or speak, and although the gnome on her chest seemed cheerful and friendly, she was terrified. After a time, the interlopers would finish their business, depart through the baseboard and replace the splinters so perfectly that Nancy could never find their entrance by the light of day. Neither could she ever remember what the gnome on her chest had been chatting about. This was not the strangest part of her story.

As I said, these visits only happened when Nancy was a young girl, and they had not occurred for some years at the telling of this story. However, just a couple of weeks earlier, her older brother had come to her with a strange story of his own. Apparently, Ron had spent the evening before at the drive-in with his friends, and as was his habit back then, he had been drinking heavily all evening – enough so that he had passed out and the friends he came with had left him alone in his truck. Ron woke up just as the second movie was ending, discovered he was alone, and decided he might as well leave right then. But when he went to reach for the key in the ignition, he discovered that his arm was paralysed; soon realising that the only parts of his body he could move were his eyes. As he scanned the interior of the truck, movement caught his attention, and there, on the dash in front of him, was a small, gnome-like creature. It laughed as they locked eyes and told Ron that he'd be a fool to drive home in his condition. Struck with fear, my friend's brother tried to agree, grunting and blinking, and the gnome disappeared. Ron was suddenly able to move again, and, seeing someone he knew in a car nearby, he was able to get a safe ride home.

Obviously, the rest of us were covered in goose bumps as Nancy told this story. She assured us that she had never once told her brother about the visits she had received from the little people, and although the rest of us found the whole story to be more than a little terrifying, Nancy had a different view: she now believed that the gnome that had visited her brother had likely saved his life, and looking back, she couldn't ascribe any malevolent intent to her night-time visitors; that it was all a matter of interpretation, of perspective.

This is still not the strangest part of the story, to me.

Within about six months, the movie Cat's Eye came out, and I saw it in the theater with the same group of friends. The movie is made up of three short stories by Stephen King, and in the third story, a story written specifically for the movie and not previously released in any book, a small gnome-like ogre creature enters the room of a sleeping girl, through the baseboards. First, the wood splinters and then a hole is visible. This nasty creature enters the room, climbs onto the bed, perches on the sleeping girl's chest, and attempts to suck the breath out of her. 

I can't describe the feeling of worlds colliding that this caused; the blurring of fantasy and reality and not quite being able to distinguish between the two. My skin crawled, my heart raced, my vision narrowed. And after the movie, Nancy didn't want to talk about it. If I reacted so strongly, I can't even imagine how she felt. 

While remembering childhood frights, I should add that my younger brother, Kyler, suffered night terrors and shadowy presences the entire time he was growing up. He told me once of the woman who sometimes came to visit him in the middle of the night – it was always a female presence, he was always helpless and unable to move, and it was always terrifying – and while Kyler said that he'd eventually tell me about it in detail some day, he never did; and now (as a hyper logical Engineer) he believes it was all hallucination and doesn't want to speak of it. And yet Kyler still continues to have the night terrors. He tried once, as a teenager, to remove his ceiling fan in the middle of the night: Mum found him, standing on his bed, turning the blades of the fan around and around as though that would screw it free. He once, as an adult in his own house, grabbed the clock radio from his bedside table and, in his underpants, ran out onto the front lawn to throw "the bomb" away. He described for me once the terrifying presence that sometimes watched him from the corner of his bedroom while he lay paralysed; a smirking cowboy whose shining eyes could only barely be glimpsed from under the brim of a wide hat. Other times, Kyler wakes up roaring and swinging his arms, fighting off something only he can see; and naturally, we always worry for the safety of his sleeping wife, Christine. (They were recently on a cruise, and in the middle of the night, Kyler got up and apologised to Christine, "I'm sorry, lady, but I've got to go and find my own cabin. I don't know how I ended up here, but my wife would kill me if she knew I was missing." He tried to exit the room in his underpants, and my sister-in-law, who had to physically stop him from leaving while their horrified teenaged son looked on from his bunk, was not amused. When he later heard of his midsleep shenanigans, Kyler embraced this as a touching story of fidelity.) For someone with such a focused and analytical mind, Kyler had always seemed to unwillingly invite the uncanny into his life.

To get back to the main thread: When I was at work at the bookstore one night, my coworker, Carrie, said that she couldn't read her book club's pick of the month because of some poltergeist activity early on in the story – she was afraid of "opening that portal again" and had to put the book in the hallway outside her apartment to get rid of it. Carrie then asked if she had ever told me that she once lived in a haunted house. Carrie was training a new cashier, Avery, at the time, and because the high school-aged Avery (chipmunk-cheeked and perkily eager to add to the conversation) said, "Oooh, I love ghost stories. My sister sees ghosts and has a million stories", Carrie proceeded to share hers –

Carrie: We had just bought a brand new house and everything was new in it – appliances and everything – but three times we had to fix the fridge. It would just die. That was in the kitchen, and on the other side of the wall from it, I had a china cabinet full of knick-knacks. In that china cabinet, pictures were always turning themselves around, you could almost watch it happening over the course of a day, and small things would fall over – I was forever straightening everything up in that cabinet, and it started to spook me. One night I woke up suddenly and there was a shadowy man, just huge, standing over me and I couldn't move but I asked, "Daniel, is that you?" Daniel is my son, and nowhere near as big as what I was looking at, but I didn't know who else it could be.

Avery: Sleep paralysis, that happens to my sister all the time.

Carrie: Right! I heard later that that's what some call it – the haint, the haunt, being ridden by the hag – but that doesn't explain the fact that the morning after I saw this figure, there was a giant handprint on the top of my dresser, right beside where I was sleeping. And then things got scarier. I woke up one morning and there were three scratches, like from an animal, across my thigh. 

Avery: Evil spirits always leave marks in threes to mock the Holy Trinity. 

Carrie: You got that right girl! (They high five.) I was so spooked that I didn't want to tell anyone about it, but when my husband came down from having a shower, he said, "Look at this. Something scratched me, I don't know when. Three scratches on my right shoulder, three on my left." That's when I showed him my thigh and I said, "We need to do something about this." So, Robert's brother's wife is a pastor and we asked her to come over and see what was going on in our house. My sister-in-law walked around and then stopped in front of that china cabinet. She said, "What's going on here?" I told her about the moving pictures and trinkets, the fridge on the other side of the wall. Then she pointed directly up and asked, "And what's going on right there?" I said that right above was our bathroom and that, besides the scratches, Robert kept thinking that he saw shadows flying past him every time he came out of there. She then pointed straight down and asked, "And what's happening right there?" I thought and then remembered that something in the plumbing was leaking below us in the basement – right there – but I hadn't made that connection before. 

Avery: Burial ground, burial ground. 

Carrie: Right? So my sister-in-law said, "I've never been here before, but I can point out where things are happening because I can see the dark spirits in motion. They're coming right out of a column here and flying into the fireplace over there." That's when I remembered that our brand new gas fireplace had never worked either.

Avery: So did you get the house blessed? Burn sage? My sister wanted to burn sage at our house and my parents said no way.

Carrie: My sister-in-law did bless the house and she had us go around the outside and circle the house in salt. And the hauntings stopped. But they followed me here, you know. One night, the store had just closed, and if you remember Jackie, she had heard all of my stories as they were happening and she asked me if everything was better since the house was blessed. We were standing beside the performing arts bookshelves at the back of the store, and just as I told her that my sister-in-law had blessed the spirits away, three books flew off the shelf and landed at our feet. They didn't fall over or drop off, they flew like someone had thrown them. I said to Jackie, "You saw that right?" And she said, "If we weren't here together, I would never believe that I had seen that." And you know what book it was? It was three copies of that Harry Potter actor's ghost movie book.

Interestingly enough, when our bookstore moved its location this summer, I had a different coworker, Braedon, joke that he thought there was a spirit in the kids section where he works; that there is a specific toy elephant that sometimes giggles (which is one of its functions, if you squeeze its trunk) as he walks by, even though Braedon isn't touching it. I briefly outlined Carrie's story and joked that maybe the spirit that was haunting her has followed us to the new store. And Braedon said, "Oh, don't worry, I've got spirits of my own that follow me." Oh reallllly? Tell me more, Braedon:

I grew up in Pennsylvania, in a house outside the city, all Gothic arches and a spooky iron gate at the end of the drive. If you have a picture of a typical old haunted house in your mind, this is it. One night, my parents were out for dinner and I was sitting at the table doing my homework, and I don't know why – I guess I was just bored or curious – but I said, "If there are any spirits here, give me a sign." And right then, I could hear from the kitchen a sound like a hand slapping against the refrigerator. Again, I don't know why I did it, but I said, "For real, if there is a spirit here, make yourself known by touching me." And right then, I was wearing a short sleeved T-shirt, and the end of my sleeve just kind of turned up on itself against my arm here. And something has kind of been with me ever since.

Have you ever heard of the shadow people? (I said I wasn't sure, and when Braedon said that they were used in old times to explain sleep paralysis, things that sit on your chest in the middle of the night, I said that I did know what he was talking about, but had never heard them called "shadow people" before.) Well, once when I was home from university and sleeping in my bed, I heard a bang and opened my eyes. It was maybe two in the morning, and it really scared me, so I laid really still and just looked around my room with my eyes barely slitted open. And as I looked at my door, I watched as it opened and then a man – I guess it was a man, but it was just made of black shadow – stepped through, turned back towards the door handle, and even though he didn't really touch the door, he reached out his hand as though he was closing the door, and without touching it, the door closed again. I was so scared and didn't dare move, and then the thing came around and sat on the other side of my bed. I could feel its weight there, and I could feel it stretch out as though it was going to go to sleep there, and then I could feel it rolling on its side towards me, as though it was staring at me. I was terrified and couldn't move. (I asked Braedon if he thought he was actually paralysed, or if he was just too scared to move. Braedon said that he thought it was more like he was too scared to move, but he got the sense that if he tried to run away, he wouldn't have been able to.) This went on for a good minute, and then it got up again. I watched it cross my room back to the door, reach out its hand, and without touching the handle, turn it, open the door, and leave again. 

Braedon explained that although he never again had an encounter with the shadow people, he often experiences small oddities – pulsing light bulbs, a sound as though someone is flicking the back of his chair or the table beside him, things moving on their own – just as though something bratty is looking for attention. Naturally, I was thinking of Carrie and her story and (half-jokingly) said that Braedon had probably opened a portal when he asked a spirit to come through and show itself and that all he would need to do was find a way to close it again. (And naturally, he then thought I was taking the whole thing too seriously and laughed at the idea of "portals".) Also interesting: Braedon then asked if I've ever seen this ghost-hunting show he named, which I hadn't, and he said it's kind of hilarious because the main guy just walks into supposedly very haunted places demanding that ghosts show themselves to him, and they're always attacking him; leaving scratches in threes, "To mock the Holy Spirit". I'm always extra interested when the stories I hear repeat themselves like that; it's hard not to sit up and take notice; want to type it all out.

I find it particularly strange that both Carrie and Braedon told me their stories at a time when I was mentally gathering tales on this subject for my Halloween post, and while most of their experiences are outside the scope of what I wanted to write about this year, I do want to zero in on what each of them said about sleep paralysis. Sure, sleep paralysis might well explain the in-the-moment experience of everyone I've written about here – this link not only gives the science behind the phenomenon, but many people have added their own frightening personal stories in the comments there – yet because it's Halloween and this is a time to embrace the spooky what-ifs, I also want to point out that there was a truly weird similarity in Nancy's and her brother's stories (not to mention how their experiences prefigured what we would later see for ourselves in the movie Cat's Eye), and Carrie's nocturnal presence apparently left a physical mark behind on her dresser; it was certainly strange to me that another coworker's story would later repeat some of her details. My brother Kyler might insist that he cured himself of his self-diagnosed sleep paralysis by starting to sleep on his stomach, but he still won't go into detail about the feminine presence that so frightened him as a child. Once again, none of these stories happened to me personally, but they were all told to me by people that I trust; by people who believed in the absolute reality of what they experienced. Make of it all what ye will.

Happy Halloween!


Strange stories from previous years:

Halloween I
Halloween II
Halloween III
Halloween IV

Halloween V

Moon of the Crusted Snow

He kicked up frozen shrapnel each time he raised a foot. A fine powder lay underneath. The conditions made him think of the specific time of year. There's a word for this, he thought, trying to remember with each high step across the hard snow. His knees raised as if to rev his mind into higher gear. He looked up to the lumpy clouds in the hope that the word would emerge like a ray of sunlight through overcast sky.

“Onaabenii Giizis,” he proudly proclaimed out loud. “The moon of the crusted snow.” His words fell flat on the white ground in front of him and he wondered which month that actually was.

Moon of the Crusted Snow is the third book I've read in the past year that looks at the collapse of Western society from a First Nations' perspective (along with Future Home of the Living God and The Marrow Thieves), with the difference this time being that we're watching a remote northern community grapple with the immediate aftermath of the phones and power going out, with no information getting through about what might be happening elsewhere. Inured to infrastructure failures on their reserve, at first folks are more annoyed than worried; but as news – and refugees – find their way into the community, these people need to start making decisions about the future. Told in rather unadorned prose, author Waubgeshig Rice has crafted a story more interesting than literary, but it does pose an intriguing question: If the lights all went out tomorrow, who would be better prepared for survival than those who have preserved some traditional knowledge? The corollary to that is, of course: And if the white people all started starving, where would they go to demand resources? 

Nick and Kevin looked at each other. They were both nineteen years old, barely men. They had grown up in families that believed in teaching their kids how to live on the land and they knew how to hunt, fish, and trap. They knew the basics of winter survival. Those experiences had hardened their bodies and helped them mature, but they looked at each other now, fragile as small children. All that training could not have prepared them for what had happened.

What I liked best about this view of post-apocalypse reserve life is that there's a believable range of personality types. The main character, Evan, is a young father who had long ago determined to learn traditional knowledge from his Anishinaabe elders and pass it on to his own children. By contrast, his younger brother, Cam, has been content to collect welfare and spend his days smoking dope and playing video games. When the crisis becomes known, there are wise tribal counselors and hotheads, caregivers and deadbeats; and when a white survivalist finds his way to the reserve with an arsenal of guns and a secret cache of booze, he is able to attract some followers with his promises of easy living. For a community that was long ago stripped of its soul – forced to move off their traditional lands and then compelled to assimilate their children in the deplorable Residential School system – the collapse of the settlers' society just might be an opportunity for the Anishinaabe to rediscover their own ways.

Apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again.

Moon of the Crusted Snow has the heft of a YA novel – and for that reason, I think it would make an excellent teaching resource – and I was intrigued enough by the concept to spend the few hours it took to read this slim book. Ultimately, I think that the questions that Rice raised are more interesting than how he answered them, but I don't regret the time I spent in his world.

Mary's Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein

 

HEART POUNDING AGAINST RIBS

Cold sweat drips down my spine
and I am seized by a wakeful dream.
I see a pale student of unhallowed arts
kneeling beside the thing
he has put together.
A hideous phantasm of a man
with watery eyes and blackened lips
stirs with motion.

Happy serendipity: I had the urge to read Frankenstein this week, and right beside it on the library shelf was Mary's Monster; a YA graphic novel/free verse biography of Mary Shelley. Despite that sort of thing not normally catching my fancy, this book's gorgeous and haunting cover called out to me – and I couldn't be more delighted to have followed up the classic novel with this inspired account of its author. From the black ink wash illustrations that so perfectly capture the moody material to the just-enough biographical information to fill in Shelley's life and literary inspiration, author/illustrator Lita Judge has created something very special here.

Mary Shelley's mother died soon after giving birth to her, and although her father had once been a loving soul, his second marriage to a neighbourhood scold turned Mary's formerly happy home into a miserable one. And despite both of her parents notoriously having been promoters of free love, when the sixteen-year-old Mary began an affair with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley, her father utterly disowned her. The book recounts the couple's dead babies, fickle Percy's affairs, Mary's need to be constantly supporting her partner's art (while neglecting her own), and various family squabbles and tragedies along the way. When Lord Byron famously challenged the members of their group to each write a truly scary tale, the seed was planted for Mary to make something out of the men's discussions on galvanism and reanimation; a writing process that took months to complete. When she did finally finish her manuscript for Frankenstein, every bit of it was informed by her personal struggles:

In an author's note at the end, Judge writes, “I represented the details of Mary's life by weaving the actual events (as documented in her journals, copious letters, and later biographies) with the themes she and Shelley wrote about in their creative work”. With an extensive bibliography and pages of footnotes linked with her illustrations, I have no doubt that Judge has crafted a careful biography in so seemingly simple a format. Further, I was struck by Judge's endnote that Mary had been dismayed by talk of scientists attempting to create life in the lab, “She had seen fathers reject their children, and to her it suggested that evil will reign in a world where life is created by men alone.” I didn't pick up on the fact that Frankenstein's monster was motherless (as Mary herself was), and from the text of the novel, I didn't get this as a major theme:

Science gives us the ability to pull back the skin of life
and reveal the truth of things. It allows us to understand
the mysteries of mountain-making and falling stars.

But knowledge isn't meant to be held as a weapon
in a battle to defy our fates and manipulate life over death.

Evil lodges too easily in men's hearts.
What will happen if they assume the power
to create life?

A few illustrations and quotes don't really do justice to the informative and moving biography that Lita Judge has crafted here; I enjoyed every bit of it. And especially in tandem with reading Frankenstein itself, this was an utterly fascinating experience.

Frankenstein

So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein – more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

When my husband saw that I was reading Frankenstein, he said, “Surely you've read that by now.” And although I was just a few pages in, I replied, “I never have, and anyone who says they know the story because they've seen a movie adaptation doesn't actually know Frankenstein either.” As the book begins, a young explorer (who believes that the North Pole, with its constant sunshine, must be a balmy, ice-free paradise awaiting discovery) is arranging to Captain an expedition north, the details of which he writes to his sister. The last letter he is able to send back to England via a passing whaling ship details a strange sight he and his men saw while briefly icebound: a dogsled was speeding across the ice and “a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs”. The next day, they rescued another man who had apparently been in pursuit of the giant, but with a broken-down sled and only one dog, they found him “nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering”. The crew brings the man onboard ship and revive him, prompting this Monsiuer Frankenstein to tell the Captain his life story, all of which he dutifully writes down in a journal for his sister's eventual reading pleasure. I was so intrigued by this framing device – how on earth does Frankenstein end up pursuing his monster across the Arctic? – that I was happy to plunge into this read as though I knew nothing of what was to come. (But further to that, I'm going to proceed in this review as though there's no such thing as a spoiler for a two hundred year old story.) I am delighted that I thought to finally pick up this book, and am in awe of the teenaged Mary Shelley who gave us this classic tale.

Wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!

After relating to Captain Walton the story of his upbringing in Geneva, Frankenstein eventually describes how his studies led him to discover the mechanism of creating life; and without ever stopping to consider if he really should, the university student spends two years stitching together human parts from cemeteries and charnel houses to create an “ideal form”. But when he brings his creature to life (he refuses to divulge the method, but it doesn't involve a spooky castle laboratory, lightning strikes or neck bolts), Fankenstein finds his handiwork so repulsive and horrifying that he flees the chamber and falls into a long-lasting fever; incidentally setting loose his monster on an unsuspecting world. 

There is love in me the likes of which you've never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied in the one, I will indulge the other.

Frankenstein eventually meets his creation (who speaks eloquently, having learned French from a family he was spying on), and having been spurned by humanity and rejected by his creator, the monster vows revenge against Frankenstein if he doesn't build him a companion. The scientist (eventually) refuses to comply, and when the monster starts murdering Frankenstein's friends and family, Frankenstein rejects thoughts of suicide and makes his own vow of vengeance:

“By the sacred earth on which I kneel, by the shades that wander near me, by the deep and eternal grief that I feel, I swear; and by thee, O Night, and the spirits that preside over thee, to pursue the dæmon who caused this misery, until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict. For this purpose I will preserve my life; to execute this dear revenge will I again behold the sun and tread the green herbage of earth, which otherwise should vanish from my eyes for ever. And I call on you, spirits of the dead, and on you, wandering ministers of vengeance, to aid and conduct me in my work. Let the cursed and hellish monster drink deep of agony; let him feel the despair that now torments me.”

I had begun my adjuration with solemnity and an awe which almost assured me that the shades of my murdered friends heard and approved my devotion, but the furies possessed me as I concluded, and rage choked my utterance.

I was answered through the stillness of night by a loud and fiendish laugh. It rang on my ears long and heavily; the mountains re-echoed it, and I felt as if all hell surrounded me with mockery and laughter. Surely in that moment I should have been possessed by frenzy and have destroyed my miserable existence but that my vow was heard and that I was reserved for vengeance. The laughter died away, when a well-known and abhorred voice, apparently close to my ear, addressed me in an audible whisper, “I am satisfied, miserable wretch! You have determined to live, and I am satisfied.”

And so, to the Arctic in pursuit of a monster. 

It's often said that Frankenstein is a warning about the unintended consequences of scientific discovery, and it is that, but it's also a commentary on the unforeseen consequences of creating any life. There are several stories within the narrative of families having more babies than they can care for, and having grown up with a famously feminist mother and an atheist father, Mary Shelley makes the case that not only is it possible to be excluded from a mother's love, but we have all been abandoned by God; where is He as we stumble naked and unprepared through an unjust and uncaring world? The only comfort we might hope to find is in friendship with one another, and at their cores, each of the three narrators (Captain Walton, M Frankenstein, and the monster) are seeking true friendship (unfortunately, Frankenstein's self-centered pursuit of glory and refusal to accept its consequences leads to him losing the best friends he ever knew). With the social instability caused by the Industrial Revolution and the challenge to longheld beliefs resulting from the Age of Discovery, Shelley was no doubt tapping into the deepest fears of her readers; no wonder she tempers her tale with lushly reassuring Romantic Era writing.

I enjoyed the varied settings – from the lakes and peaks of Switzerland, the wave-crashed shores of the Orkney Islands, to the icebound Arctic – and I enjoyed the period details. (I particularly liked that Shelley has a character lament the destruction of the Mayan and Inca empires, others weep over the “hapless fate of (America's) original inhabitants”, but sees no irony in Clerval's lauded ambition to visit India to assist “the progress of European colonization and trade”; how are those not all the same thing?) But most particularly: I enjoyed the balance between the big picture (the themes) and the engaging narrative; an emaciated man pursuing a giant across the Arctic by dogsled was completely fascinating to me; I can only imagine how that appealed to people in its day – and especially to those who might have believed that the North Pole was a balmy, ice-free paradise. So happy that I finally picked this up.

The Saturday Night Ghost Club

What follows is an account, as I choose to remember it, of my twelfth year on this planet – the summer of the Saturday Night Ghost Club. Uncle C called the inaugural meeting, and in addition to him, our membership roll was tiny: Billy Yellowbird, Lexington Galbraith and me. Later on Dove Yellowbird became the club's lone female member.

In the present, Jake Breaker is a neurosurgeon, husband and father, but back when he was twelve, he was an awkward loner, overweight and bookish, his only friend being an eccentric uncle – owner of Niagara Falls' Occultorium (purveyor of the mysterious and mystical). When new kid in town Billy Yellowbird enters the shop with a real interest in the occult, Uncle C sees an opportunity to forge a friendship between the two boys and proposes they form The Saturday Night Ghost Club. As the group begins exploring some local legends (including Niagara Falls' real-life Screaming Tunnel), I decided that this is more coming-of-age through facing fears (like Stephen King's The Body) than truly a horror story, but as the book progresses and we learn more about the characters, I eventually realised that this is so much more. From the book's beautiful dustjacket (that looks like a beat-up library edition of a Hardy Boys novel) and the deckle-edge pages that make it a pleasure to hold, to the fluid and compelling prose that had me finishing this story in a few hours, this is easily my favourite of Craig Davidson's books.

That magic gets kicked out of you, churched out, shamed out – or worse, you steal it from yourself. It gets embarrassed out of you by the kids who run the same stretch of streets and grown-ups who say it’s time to put away childish things. By degrees, you kill your own magic. Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you’d grow up to be.

Twelve is such a great age for the main characters – just on the cusp before the magic gets kicked out of them (not to mention Billy's older sister, Dove, and the effects she has on young Jake) – and to have Jake be a neurosurgeon in the present makes for some interesting stories about how the brain works (and the fascinating otherworlds the brain can create when it isn't working right). It's true that Uncle C plans their outings around urban legends and ghost stories, but it was the realistic stories of human evil (the events leading up to the creation of some local ghosts) that really made my skin crawl:

It's like with vampires, boys. Once you invite them over the threshold, you're theirs. The rat-faced man didn't even take his boots off. He walked into the kitchen tracking mud over the floor and basked in the heat from the wood stove. After looking this way and that to make sure nobody else was at home, he took a knife off the cutting board – the woman had been cutting potatoes for dinner – and sawed through the phone cord. It was then, I'm sure, that the couple got an inkling of the hell they'd invited into their home. Rat-face slunk to the sink and softly, with just the tip of the knife, tapped on the window. Tap, tap, tap, tap...little pig, little pig, let me in...

This is a coming-of-age story: not only does Jake find self-worth from his friendship with Billy and experience his first crush with Dove, but circumstances eventually eject him from the protective cocoon of childhood and force him to confront the more dangerous realities of the adult world. And by having some of the narrative occur in the present, Jake is able to comment on the nature of memory and story; acknowledge that the most fearsome ghosts might be those that are created by our own minds.

Everything I've told you is true. Every word of it.
But you must know this, too: I want it to be true. Everything in me wants that.

I enjoyed everything about the Niagara Falls setting, the well-developed characters, and the compelling plotline. I am totally surprised and delighted to have found so much meaning in my bookclub's “lightweight” Halloween read: this book is so much more than that.

2018 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalists 

• Beirut Hellfire Society by Rawi Hage.
• Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page.
• Land Mammals and Sea Creatures by Jen Neale.
• The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson.
• Washington Black by Esi Edugyen.

*Won by Dear Evelyn

Tunesday : Come on Up to the House

Come on Up to the House

(Brennan, K / Waits, T) Performed by Tom Waits

Well, the moon is broken and the sky is cracked

Come on up to the house

The only things that you can see is all that you lack

Come on up to the house

All your crying don't do no good

Come on up to the house

Come down off the cross, we can use the wood

You gotta come on up to the house

Come on up to the house

Come on up to the house

The world is not my home

I'm just a-passing through

You got to come on up to the house

There's no light in the tunnel, no irons in the fire

Come on up to the house

And you're singing lead soprano in a junkman's choir

You got to come on up to the house

Does life seem nasty, brutish and short

Come on up to the house

The seas are stormy and you can't find no port

Got to come on up to the house, yeah

You gotta come on up to the house

Come on up to the house

The world is not my home I'm just a-passing through

You got to come on up to the house, yeah

You gotta come on up to the house

Come on up to the house

The world is not my home

I'm just a-passing through

You got to come on up to the house

There's nothing in the world that you can do

You gotta come on up to the house

And you been whipped by the forces that are inside you

Gotta come on up to the house

Well, you're high on top of your mountain of woe

Gotta come on up to the house

Well, you know you should surrender, but you can't let it go

You gotta come on up to the house, yeah

Gotta come on up to the house

Gotta come on up to the house

The world is not my home I'm just a-passing through

You gotta come on up to the house

Gotta come on up to the house

You gotta come on up to the house

Yeah yeah yeah

Gosh, I knew that I was feeling ambivalent about continuing my life story - and mentally blaming it on a resistance to doing "homework" over the summer months - but summer is long over, I have successfully avoided writing anything too personal by using my Tunesday posts to record interesting present day experiences I've had with the family, and now that I realise that I haven't picked up my story since May, maybe I can prod it along a bit this week.

As I wrote in a previous post, I got the bug to move into a better neighbourhood before Kennedy started kindergarten in 1999 (and hence the loose connection to this week's fantastic song), so we happily packed up the house and the kids and moved just a couple of kilometers away. The new street was perfect - less traffic, more kids out playing, and a very short walk to a brand new school - and it felt like a massive upgrade to our lives. We moved at the end of July and had a housewarming/birthday party for Kennedy in August, and in addition to family and some old friends coming to celebrate with us, we were thrilled that a couple of neighbour girls poked their heads over the fence to see if they could come over, too. Kennedy had new friends! We ended up meeting some of the parents around this time, too, and there were many promises to get together soon. Dave and I had new friends, too!

We did go over to the next door neighbours not long after - Dave and Janet had a little girl, Colleen, who was a year older than Kennedy and a son, Matthew, a year older than Mallory - and there were several other neighbourhood couples there, too. One of the women told me that they had a ladies' bowling night that I should think about joining, and that made me tremble inside: I had been so lonely and so isolated for so long that I could think of nothing else I would like better (even if I have had very little experience bowling). I talked to Dave about it later, suggesting that maybe, just one night a week he could guarantee to be home in time to watch the girls so I could go out; and although he assured me he was "pretty sure" it could happen, that woman never asked me again, and besides, Dave could never get himself home in any kind of a regular schedule. I never did make any friends.

Kennedy had a wonderful time playing with Colleen that summer, usually joined by Alexa from the other side of us, but there was something a little offputting about Colleen; something a bit too sexually advanced for a five year old that I was leery of exposing Kennedy to (I lost my mind when Kennedy came home from the neighbours' house one day to say that they had been watching the Spice Girls movie; my baby singing, "If you wanna be my lover...") Before school started, Janet next door asked me if I would be interested in making some money babysitting her kids during the school year, and that really took me aback. She presented this to me as a great opportunity for a stay-at-home Mom (without even knowing that I had a diploma in ECD), and she was totally floored when I declined - especially with a one year old baby, I had no desire to split my attention with other people's kids. Kind of cast a chill over our budding friendship; I was the reason she had the hassle of bringing her kids to daycare.

On a positive note: For one of the last times, the kindergarten teachers from Kennedy's new school made home visits to their new students (this was discontinued before Mallory started the same school three years later). It was a lovely experience for Kennedy to meet her new teacher in our own home - they drew pictures together and talked about all of Kennedy's favourite things - and it certainly made the transition from home to school an easy one when that day soon came along. My Mum came up to walk with us to school on Kennedy's first day of kindergarten, and because Kennedy had met the teacher and had made a classroom visit and knew a few faces in the crowd, she walked into the classroom with hardly a glance back at me. Not all the tears on the first day of kindergarten belong to the kindergartners themselves.

Gotta come on up to the house

Gotta come on up to the house

The world is not my home I'm just a-passing through

You gotta come on up to the house

Killing Commendatore

If this was a dream, then the world I'm living in itself must all be a dream. Maybe someday I'll be able to draw a portrait of nothingness. Just like another artist was able to complete a painting titled Killing Commendatore. But to do so I would need time to get to that point. I would have to have time on my side.

So, maybe Haruki Murakami keeps writing the same book over and over – Killing Commendatore felt a bit like a mashup of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84 – but just maybe I want to keep reading the same book over and over: no other author so completely engages my mind like Murakami does. This book is too long, covers no new ground, and I enjoyed every bit of it (OK, except for a grown man's detached interest in a young girl's developing breasts; that felt icky). After being ever-so-slightly disappointed with Murakami's last two books, I'm happy he has returned to the familiar territory that I like so well.

I felt relieved to know I wasn't crazy, but I had to admit that the unreality of the situation had now, through Menshiki, taken on a reality, creating a slight gap in the seam of the world.

This “unreality” is spooky territory for me – a pit, a bell, unknowingly opening a circle that must be closed – and there's just something about the way that Murakami writes that gets my full interest. The plot: A recently divorced 36 year old portrait artist wants to start over, to rediscover his love of painting, and he takes up his friend's offer to stay in the empty mountain home of the friend's famous artist father. While exploring the attic one day, the (unnamed) narrator discovers an unknown painting by the home's owner, apparently entitled Killing Commendatore, and after studying it for a while, he realises that the painting is of an assassination scene from the opera Don Giovanni, reinterpreted in a traditional Japanese style of painting. That night, the narrator hears the faint ringing of a bell in the distance, and when he tracks down its source, he (and some of his new neighbours) are set on a dangerous track of self-discovery.

What's different about this book: Because the narrator is a painter, he describes the world through that medium. But he also listens to a lot of the homeowner's classical music collection, understanding how music can also describe the world and noting that Richard Strauss once said that he could perfectly capture the essence of something as ordinary as a broom in his music. It all becomes meta when you realise that this is writing about painting about music; that Murakami has a painter use the metaphor of the assassination in an opera to capture the truth about an artist's subconscious mind; that Murakami is using a painting based on an opera to describe the writing process:

I stepped back to look at the lines I'd done, made a few corrections, and added some new lines. What was important was believing in myself. Believing in the power of the lines, in the power of the space the lines divided. I wasn't speaking, but letting the lines and spaces speak. Once the lines and spaces began conversing, then color would finally start to speak. And the flat would gradually transform into the three-dimensional. What I had to do was encourage them all, lend them a hand. And more than anything, not get in their way.

Murakami also seems to be mocking those who would take his metaphors too literally: So many of his books feature a mysterious pit or well, as does this one, and when the narrator attempts to paint it, he realises that it looks like a vagina from a distance – and then laughs at the idea that anyone might read a Freudian hidden meaning into his painting. (Yet eventually, this narrator will be forced to make his way through a dark and narrowing passageway until he experiences something like rebirth. But don't read anything into that.) *And another note: I have read that this is meant as a “loving homage to The Great Gatsby”, but I don't really get that.

I felt the rush of owl wings, and heard a bell ring in the dark.
Everything was connected somewhere.

Like the Little People from 1Q84 or the talking sheepmen from Dance Dance Dance, the most uncanny part of this book for me was an unreal character who can appear from nowhere and seems to read the narrator's mind; I feel like I've read it before, the menace seems entirely in my own head, but I completely connect with these images, they fascinate me. I totally appreciate that it takes a particular literary taste to be so intrigued by what Murakami puts out there, but this is exactly what I like.

Trickster Drift

You are far from simple. You are a little universe. You are the wet and pulsing distillation of stars, a house of light made bipedal and carbon-based, temporary and infinite. You are also the void.

Cartographers used to write on maps, “Here be dragons,” when they reached places beyond their known world. When humans touch the void, they say, “Here is magic.”

I have to start by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed Son of a Trickster, and after its breathtaking ending, was really looking forward to its followup, Trickster Drift. Unfortunately, as the middle volume in a trilogy, this book suffers the fate of many mid-series novels: more placeholder than satisfying whole. Not much happens for the majority of Trickster Drift, but its thrilling and creative final climax made the whole worthwhile. Can't wait to see how Eden Robinson ties it all up!

His mom was a witch. For real. As he had found out definitively, just before he swore off the booze and the drugs. He'd always thought she was being melodramatic when she told him about witch stuff. Then he was kidnapped by some angry otters and his shape-shifting father/sperm donor stepped in to save him, along with his mother. He only lost a toe. Her particular talent was hexes, though she preferred giving her enemies a good old-fashioned shit-kicking. Curses tended to bite you in the ass, she'd told him, and weren't nearly as satisfying as physically throttling someone.

After a quick reminder of the events of the first book, we rejoin seventeen-year-old Jared nearly a year later as he approaches his first anniversary of sobriety. Knowing he needs to get away from his Mom's party house – and every temptation to dabble in magic again – Jared has decided to move to Vancouver and upgrade his high school grades before applying to college. Although they don't get along, Jared's Mom has given him the address of her sister Mave (an activist poet who desperately wants a relationship with her nephew and offers him a free place to stay in the city), and needing the support, Jared moves in.

Just as in Son of a Trickster, Jared as a character seems too good to be true: All he wants to do is study, go to AA meetings, help cook and clean around the house, and live a normal, human, life. Unfortunately, as a “chaos magnet” who has unknowingly moved into a bedroom that serves as an “interdimensional gate”, Jared's life is soon filled with ghosts, demons, and shapeshifters; and he has a hard time determining which he can trust. Jared meets plenty of new family members (who don't contribute much to the plot, but I assume they'll be important in the finale), and he keeps in touch with both his best friend back home and his Mom by text message (again, they don't add much here but we need to be reminded of them), and most of the narrative drive is provided by frequent run-ins between Jared and his Mom's psychotic ex-boyfriend who seems to be stalking him. Events do lead to an exciting finale, but it's left unclear what the final volume will resolve.

I remember marking more intriguing passages of writing in Son of a Trickster than I could squeeze into my review, but that's not the case with Trickster Drift; this simply doesn't feel as imaginative or weighty as the first book – so often the case with mid-series books. I did have some laughs, and I enjoyed being in Robinson's world again; happy to join her again to see how it all works out.