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Witches on Trial @ your library

“Are you a good witch, or a bad witch”? That’s the first question Dorothy is asked when she arrives in Oz. Kind of a bewildering question even if you haven’t just had your house blown into a magical country by a tornado and recovered from a bang on the head. Of course, the answer to that question is decided pretty quickly, since her house has squashed the Wicked Witch of the East. But that’s the way decisions seem to be made when it comes to judging who’s a witch and who is not. Lucky Dorothy managed to gain the support of the people of Oz, but that pendulum usually seems to swing in the opposite direction. And in America, the most notorious example, although not the only one, happened in Salem, Massachusetts.

        

     

 

 Even children know the story of the Salem Witch Trials, and if they don’t, they really should. Any community can be shaken up by mass hysteria, the source of the horrific events that took place in this quiet New England town, and with the presence of social media in our midst, it can spread faster and further than ever before. Witch hunts are certainly no longer just the province of the superstitious. For a really excellent, accessible, and gorgeously illustrated historical account of the Salem Witch Trials, I recommend seeking out Rosalyn Schanzer’s  Witches! The Absolutely True Story of the Disaster in Salem. While the target audience is really older children and young adults, this is a great choice for general readers of any age. A great follow-up title is the Newbery winner The Witch of Blackbird Pond. That award is an award for excellence: don’t let the fact that it’s an award for children’s literature stop you from reading it (Kit, the protagonist, is sixteen). While it’s set in Connecticut in the early 1600’s, it does a great job of bringing home how personal and irrational these persecutions could be. It’s a memorable title you won’t be sorry you’ve read.

It’s hard to talk about Salem without bringing up Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. This is probably the first play I ever saw (my aunt was in it, in the dancing scene at the beginning). While it’s short, it surely makes an impact (it has been made into an opera, and may be the shortest opera I have ever seen). The  play brings to life the Salem Witch Trials and the hysteria that accompanied them. The Crucible, written in the 1950s during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare”, is, under its surface, a rather pointed allegory about the “witch hunts” against supposed Communists that occurred during that time. Miller demonstrated exactly what I wrote about above: that incitement to mass hysteria is no longer limited to the superstitious, and any of us can become a target at any time. There’s an excellent movie adaptation of The Crucible, with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, as well. It’s frequently used in American Literature classes to engage students’ interest in the play, which is generally required reading for those classes (Want to give required reading pizzazz? Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder can do that). I haven’t seen this next movie, but The Salem Witch Trials, originally a miniseries on CBS, and starring Kirstie Alley and several other notable actresses, is supposed to be a very good fictionalized version of the events of that time.

Authors have taken varied approaches to the events of the Salem Witch Trials and to witch hunts in general. One surprise is Robin Cook’s medical thriller Acceptable Risk, which involves a subplot with one of the main characters discovering she is related to a Salem witch. I don’t know that you can say that Robin Cook is actually a good writer, but he is a compelling and memorable one– books of his that I read in high school still stick with me. I constantly hear complaints from my dad that there are no good medical thrillers out there anymore, so why not take this chance to resurrect what is admittedly a rather elderly title?

More recently, Alexandra Sokoloff produced Book of Shadows, a supernatural thriller/police procedural that involves a contemporary witch living in Salem, who gets involved in helping a police detective solve the mystery of the murder of a college student that appears to have Satanic overtones. While not directly tied to the original trials, I happen to enjoy Sokoloff’s books, and many readers who normally skip over witch-themed horror may find themselves drawn in to this.  And within just the past few months, the last book in Melissa de la Cruz’s trilogy Witches of East End, Winds of Salem, was released. While the image above is of the first book in the series, the second, Serpent’s Kiss, and the third, Winds of Salem, have a strong thread involving the Salem Witch Trials. With Witches of East End just coming out as a television series, including these books in a display on the Salem Witch Trials  is a great way to draw readers in to a witchy world as Halloween approaches. These books are more urban fantasy than horror, but paranormal lovers will get right into them.

Witch hunts haven’t been limited to Salem and its environs, though. Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times, a non-fiction graphic novel by Rocky Wood and Lisa Morton, with shocking and effective artwork by Greg Chapman, also details witch hunts in Europe, from the time of the Black Death through the Reformation and finally to the Enlightenment. With torture and burning witches alive being methods often used by witch hunters, you can imagine what the artwork must be like. The book, written by Lisa Morton and Rocky Wood, noted scholars in horror non-fiction, treats its topic respectfully and seriously, and won the 2013 Bram Stoker Award for Best Graphic Novel.

The movie Season of the Witch does not pretend to be a serious, non-fictional account of the Burning Times in Europe. It does take place in Europe, during the Middle Ages, at a time when accusations of witchcraft were very serious. Two former knights, played by Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman, are assigned to escort a young woman to an abbey to face accusations of witchcraft. It’s not a great movie, but it’s entertaining, and keeps you guessing as to whether the woman the two men are escorting actually is a witch.

There are a lot of other books, movies, and other materials on witches out there, so maybe I’ll come back to the topic again, but I think this is a good collection to get those interested in Salem, witch hunts, and witchery in general, started on that TBR pile.

 

 

 

 

Posted on October 10, 2013 by , 1 comment

Defining Horror Fiction: You Can Do Anything You Can Sing

I just wrote about Booklist taking the opportunity to spotlight horror fiction this month. As part of their spotlight they also had a piece by Joyce Saricks, author of the Readers Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction, called “Reconsidering the Horror Genre“. I have heard so many negative and dismissive comments about the horror genre from librarians of my acquaintance that it was a fun surprise to find a librarian writing about horror who actually likes it and thinks about it. The only other prominent librarian I can think of who does so is Becky Siegel Spratford (note: we also have fantastic librarian reviewers).

I tend to agree with Saricks that straight horror fiction has really suffered with all the genre blending that goes on today- it’s why we find ourselves here at MonsterLibrarian.com reviewing paranormal romance, urban fantasy, thrillers, dark fantasy, science fiction… As I’ve written in the past, mainstream publishers (and the Wall Street Journal) will go to some lengths to avoid slapping the genre label of “horror” on a book (Mulholland Press, a new imprint from Little, Brown, seems to be an exception).

But I’m not sure that I agree with Saricks’ definition of horror fiction. She writes that what makes a book true horror is that “the nature of the menace cannot be explained rationally”. As soon as an explanation of what’s going on comes into play, she says, the book doesn’t qualify as horror anymore. A lot of zombie books posit a virus or scientific reason for the zombie plague- does that mean they’re not horror? I think there are a lot of authors out there who identify themselves as horror writers who would disagree.

Saricks writes that “the key to horror is the pleasure we take in experiencing fear generated by the unknown”. If a novel is predictable, does that mean it’s not horror? Because there is a lot of predictability in genre fiction of any kind, and if you’ve read enough of it, it’s not hard to tell what comes next. It’s actually been pointed out to me recently that sometimes it’s the “train wreck” nature of the plot that is the most horrifying- you see what’s coming, but there’s no way to stop it.

She continues by saying that horror fiction is defined in part by a foreboding atmosphere, that it deliberately keeps readers guessing, lost in the dark. I agree that atmosphere and setting can be important in horror fiction, and sometimes what you can’t see, what’s in the fog, makes for a truly terrifying tale (in fact, it’s a tradition of the Monster Librarian to watch the movie The Fog every Halloween), but the setting doesn’t have to be misty and dark. It can be a shopping mall, someplace bright and cheery with lots of unsuspecting innocents, or a girly slumber party. In fact, places and events that seem normal and even happy can make for some serious scares once evil is on the loose.

She wraps it up by saying that horror fiction should leave endings unresolved. I have to disagree with this as well. Some horror (and some fiction, generally) needs an unresolved ending, but sometimes it’s better to wrap it up, and sometimes the real horror of the story, the part that sticks with you, has nothing at all to do with the ending (that’s the case for me with Alexandra Sokoloff’s The Price I’ve been permanently spooked by that book).

This will seem like a digression, but I promise it’s related. When I took a class on Opera and Musical Comedy in college, the absurd and disturbing characters, events, and relationships that take place in opera made me shake my head in disbelief. My professor put it in perspective for me. He said, “In opera, you can do anything you can sing”. It’s the music, the raw emotion, the drama, the humanity and inhumanity that make opera a transcendent art form that has to be experienced live. Whether you understand the words is unimportant- the story carries you on the sheer power of life lived larger-than-life (trust me, The Tragedy of Carmen is just as powerful when the supertitles fail, ahem, Indianapolis Opera).

And this is also the truth of horror fiction. In horror fiction, a writer can do anything he or she can imagine, but it has to bring to the forefront that raw emotion, and bring the human experience of fear and dread and love and conflict alive.

Do you agree with Saricks? Do you agree with me, or think I’m nuts? Could be both, I guess. Have I convinced you to support your local opera company?

What do you think are the defining characteristics of horror fiction?

Posted on August 25, 2011 by , Reply

Horror @ Your Library

The American Library Association has a marketing initiative called “@ your library”. Their conference is rolling around (it’s in New Orleans this year) and ALTAFF (Association of Library Trustees, Advocates, Friends and Foundations) is holding a session called “Mystery and Horror @ Your Library”. When I saw that I thought “How cool! My professional association is actually shining a light on horror fiction and highlighting horror authors”!

Library Journal’s description of the event gives you an idea of how a lot of the profession thinks of the genre.

Mystery and Horror @ Your Library. Mystery, of course. But horror? Horrors! Best-selling authors in both genres will make your spines tingle.

So, very cool of ALTAFF to buck the trend, right? Except that not a single one of the authors writes horror. Cammie McGovern is on the panel. She’s written a fantastic literary mystery called Eye Contact. Erica Spindler writes romantic suspense. C.S. Harris writes the Sebastian St. Cyr books- historical mysteries. Bill Loehfelm is a crime novelist. S.J. Watson is the only one who might qualify, as a writer of psychological thrillers, but he appears to be a first time author whose first book, Before I Go To Sleep, came out on June 14 of this year.

It sounds like a great book, and I am sure someone on our staff would love to review it (hint, hint), but I don’t think he’s necessarily the best candidate to represent an entire genre. There are so many horror writers out there who would be articulate and passionate, and happy to promote the genre and talk about their books and their “writing life”. How about Brian Keene, Scott Nicholson, Alexandra Sokoloff, Lisa Morton, or, for a librarian’s perspective, Becky Siegel Spratford?

I think this is why we have such a problem with recognition of the genre. Librarians can’t even identify what belongs in it, or who writes it (except for Stephen King). This week I sent out a list of potential review titles- probably 20 books were on the list, at least. One reviewer wrote me back to tell me that she had searched her library system to find if there were any copies of the books available there. Her library system has 58 libraries. Yep, that’s right. How many of the books was she able to find? One. One horror novel off a list of 20, in a library system with 58 libraries.

I appreciate that ALTAFF is trying to promote the genre, even if they can’t exactly identify what it is or who writes it. But what’s the reality? For all the librarians out there, let me ask… where’s the horror @ your library?

Posted on June 21, 2011 by , 2 comments
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