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The Witching Hour @ Your Library

What with vampires, monsters, and ghosts taking center stage, it’s really kind of amazing how much there is out there on witches! For those of a witchy bent, here’s a brew of fictional witches of all kinds. Some of them are good witches, some are bad and even evil, and some fall somewhere in-between. Got someone looking for a spellbinding reading or movie-watching experience? Here are some suggestions. Note, these are all over the map, so take care before making your recommendation.

    The Witching Hour is the first book in the Mayfair Witches series. Sure, it’s long, and it has a gigantic, annoying expository chunk in the middle, but I still find the story addictive and, well, bewitching. Par for the course with Anne Rice, in the next books (Lasher and Taltos) the story gets pretty twisted. But for gothic and erotic supernatural horror, it’s a slam-dunk.

 

 It’s impossible to write about witches without at least a mention of  Shakespeare’s literary creations, as they toil and trouble, making predictions that can lead only to disaster. Just as with The Crucible, the play-that-shall-not-be-named has been made into a movie– actually, more than once. The most recent production stars Patrick Stewart (formerly known as Captain Picard of the Starship Enterprise) who is a brilliant Shakespearean actor and only gets better as time passes. If you really want to make required reading of this play a killer experience, there’s no better way than with a live (or filmed, anyway) performance, right at Halloween.

 

        The ultimate American fairytale is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and from the book, and especially the movie, come some of our most memorable depictions of witches. Who can forget the evil, green skinned, hook-nosed Wicked Witch of the West, in her black dress and pointy hat? When most of us picture witches today, or go shopping for that evil witch costume (as opposed to the sexy witch costume) her face is the one that comes to mind. The recent but mostly forgettable Oz movie spectacular did kick that look up a notch, giving the wicked witch green claws and a truly hideous expression, and was probably the most memorable part of the entire film. Taking a different perspective, Gregory Maguire penned Wicked, a novel sympathetic to the Wicked Witch’s point of view and life. Wicked has a sequel, Son of a Witch, and also spun off a Broadway musical, complete with soundtrack. Seek them out and put them togethe with some of the gorgeous new editions of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and you’ve got a great-looking display that will attract library users of all ages. 

 

 I’ve just discovered Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan books and am really enjoying them. It’s not so much that I like Rachel, but she really shows ingenuity in getting out of some crazy scrapes, and she makes friends and allies in the oddest places. Rachel, a witch, lives in Cincinnati in an alternate world where paranormal creatures have “outed” themselves and live in a separate area of the city called The Hollows, with a legal structure parallel to the human legal system. Naturally this leaves a lot of room for chaos, much of which centers on Rachel and her supernatural business partners, who are a hoot, when they’re not being dangerously lethal. Readers who are looking for a fix after finishing the Southern Vampire Mysteries might very well enjoy Kim Harrison. 

 

      Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed are both great television series that had witches as either main or important secondary characters. One character arc follows Willow (one of Buffy’s two closest friends, for the uninitiated) as she grows as a witch, becomes addicted to magic, and overcomes her addiction. Season Six is the season that, while she grieves over her great love’s senseless death, she dives deeply into the black arts to seek vengeance. While not all fans of the show appreciate this season, it’s a very powerful and heart-wrenching television watching experience. Charmed follows the lives and decisions of three adult sisters who discover that they are witches and must work together to defeat evil wizards and demons. There’s no debate over whether these are good witches or bad witches, but their choices aren’t always so black and white. It’s a fun little show, but not one where you can expect chills and thrills. 

 

     The Witches of Eastwick and Practical Magic are both adaptations of literary works. The Witches of Eastwick is based on a novel of the same name by John Updike, and Practical Magic is based on a novel of the same name by Alice Hoffman.The movie of The Witches of Eastwick has a fantastic cast, with Jack Nicholson playing the devil and Susan Sarandon, Cher, and Michelle Pfeiffer playing three very bored women stuck in a small New England town, who are ready to rock and roll. Dramatic, sexy, and funny, it’s a wild ride. Completely opposite in nature,  Practical Magic is the story of two sisters who are also witches, with an unfortunate family curse that leads any man they fall in love with to an untimely death. This is a gentle, magical, and well-acted movie that definitely does not fall into the category of horror, and could be watched not only during the Halloween season but at any time of year.  Those who like Practical Magic might also like the novel The Weird Sisters. 

 

    There’s just something claustrophobic about small towns, whether they’re isolated in the mountains or gated communities.  Once you’re in, it’s hard to escape the supernatural… or the neighbors. That’s what happens in both Chris Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers and Susie Moloney’s Thirteen. In Bohjalian’s novel, a guilt-ridden pilot moves his family into a mountain village only to find that the unfinished basement is haunted by the deceased passengers of the plane he crashed. In addition to his personal ghosts, though, there are hidden dangers to his family from members of the local community as well. In Moloney’s book, the adult daughter of a woman who has recently died returns to settle the estate, only to find herself entangled in the lives of the people living in the suburb in which she grew up– a place where there seem to have been an unusual number of “accidental” deaths, and finds her beliefs tested by the people around her. Where are the witches in an isolated area, when a stranger moves in? Why, they’re all around you.

 

       So now let’s talk movies. The Craft is a mildly scary movie targeted at teens, with four misfit girls discovering they have supernatural powers and one of them deciding to use them for evil purposes. It has Neve Campbell and Fairuza Balk, and probably would appeal to fans of Charmed.  Hocus Pocus is about three witches resurrected by a teenager who spend most of their current Halloween also trying to capture children’s souls. While that sounds positively horrific, the child-chasing witches are played by Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker, so it’s entertaining as well. This might be a little much for younger children, but the comedy and horror balance out nicely to make this one work as a good Halloween movie for families with older children.

 

               On to scarier stuff. These you won’t want to watch with the faint of heart or queasy of stomach. The Blair Witch Project, is, well, the Blair Witch Project, a movie that’s well-known by now. Supposedly an actual film taken by college students on a trip through the woods as they explore the legend of the Blair Witch, it’s shaky looking and the camera is unreliable as a storyteller, making it incredibly creepy. I don’t know how scary people find it today, but it had me shaking in my seat when I first saw it in the theater. The last movie, Suspiria, is about an American dancer who arrives at her new ballet school to find that it houses a coven. Suspiria is an Italian horror film by filmmaker Dario Argento, who is not well-known here but is considered a master in horror filmmaking. It is extremely vicious, violent, and gory, with a creepy soundtrack, unsettling atmosphere, bizarre colors influencing the set, and disturbing camerawork. In other words, if you have someone looking for an average, mainstream movie, this is not the ticket. But if you have a hardcore horror fan walk in looking for something different, this is it. 

Really, there’s a witch for everyone, be it from fantasy, paranormal fiction, comedy, children’s books, non-fiction, or horror in its various permutations (and you can see from this list that there are a lot of those). Have a great time connecting readers and viewers with the right witchy title for the Halloween season, or, really, at any time of year!

              

 

 


 


 

Posted on October 11, 2013 by , Reply

The Invisible Man @ your library

No, not Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. This one. I understand that it can get confusing. Certainly, the reviewers on Amazon seem confused.

Why yes, I do love this picture.

The Invisible Man is often overlooked, and he’s not only important culturally, but has morphed in some pretty cool ways (link). So I thought I’d shine a light on him, so to speak, and share some information, and some resources, about this unusual monster. Note, if you’re going to be making a homemade Halloween costume for an 8 year old boy who loves monsters, as I am, this is an easy one.

Every single one of the items pictured below is related in some way to the Invisible Man. Want to find out how?

                                    

What with Teen Read Week’s theme this year of “Seek the Unseen” it seems like the perfect time to give some visibility to a human monster often lost in the crowd: the Invisible Man. While the Invisible Man doesn’t have the iconic status of vampires, zombies, man-made creatures, and werewolves, he has, in his invisible way, insinuated himself into popular culture.

As with Frankenstein, The Phantom of the Opera, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the Invisible Man has literary origins, first appearing in a novella of the same name by the famed H.G. Wells. And as with Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man is a cautionary tale about the perils of pride, in taking science just a step too far in the direction of a nightmare. In the novel, Griffin, a scientist who has discovered the secret of invisibility, and tested it on himself, arrives in a small town hoping to complete experiments that will allow him to reverse the process. Obsessed and ambitious even at the beginning, he becomes more and more detached from humanity and willing to commit destructive and amoral acts, until finally he is killed and becomes visible again. The novella was made into a Universal horror film in the 1930s, and since then he has been represented in a number of different ways: as an increasingly psychopathic and violent monster(in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for instance); as a redemptive figure unrelated to the Wells novel except for possessing the power of invisibility(such as the one in the Sci-Fi channel series The Invisible Man); and as an entertaining member of ensemble-related monster movies such as Mad Monster Party and Hotel Transylvania. Queen even introduced him into the world of music with their song “The Invisible Man”. Yet, while he continues to resurface, it doesn’t seem to me that he is especially noticeable (par for the course, I suppose). Many of the tropes of invisibility that appear throughout popular culture (including Harry Potter’s Cloak of Invisibility) can be attributed to The Invisible Man, though, including tween and teen novels (a few are pictured above)  and media (Out of Sight, Out of Mind is a favorite Buffy episode of mine)  I will take a moment to note that the original movie has really awesome special effects– here’s a link— so this is also an opportunity to pull out books on that topic!  As you prepare to seek the unknown for Teen Reed Week you might consider him, and ask teens to consider this: if you had the power of invisibility, what would you do? Where would you go? What kind of person would you want to be?

 

 

 

 

Posted on October 4, 2013 by , Reply

Teens Are Shameless Readers

Elissa Gershowitz has written recently in Horn Book about the trashy books teens read, and how sharing that they’re reading them to an adult (like, say, the librarian) makes them “avert their eyes”. I think she’s wrong about that. I’d say most librarians these days have a pretty relaxed attitude towards kids’ reading tastes, and are more likely to capitalize on those tastes than judge them. And, more importantly, kids reading what they LIKE to read aren’t ashamed of their tastes. They just don’t read their preferred texts around people who don’t respect their reading choices or take away what they want to read– they find people who are excited about those books, and will give them what they want. Whether adults include or exclude kids’ favorite books on the basis of  whether those books are “trash” or “quality literature”, those books are everywhere. Gershowitz argues that most trashy books have no staying power (some don’t, some do, just like any other kind of book). Mostly, I don’t think writers write their books with the intention of writing classics, with the exception of those literary types bent on writing the Great American Novel.

Gershowitz asks what makes one trashy book the standout above all the others of its kind. Well, today I would say a lot of it has to do with marketing. I was a newly minted children’s librarian widely read in science fiction, fantasy, and children’s books of all kinds, when I first encountered Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (widely considered trash by authorities in the field of children’s literature). My reaction was that it was a pretty good fantasy novel. It wasn’t an instant takeoff– I returned to school at the end of 1999 and hardly heard boo about it. A year later I walked into a Hallmark store and almost crashed into an overwhelming display of  Harry Potter merchandise. I read both Twilight and The Hunger Games before they became massive hits, too. What makes these books “standouts” of epic proportions is cross-marketing that is completely immersive and overpowering. It’s impossible to include Twilight in the same category as some of these other books Gershowitz mentions.

As someone who grew up during the time in which Forever, Go Ask Alice, and Flowers in the Attic were published, I believe those books are standouts in part because they address taboo topics in a frank way. They’re books my parents and teachers weren’t going to put into your hands.  They’re not especially didactic, and the protagonists speak right to you. Yes, even Cathy Dollanganger, locked in her attic in a horrifying situation as gothic as it gets, reflects back pictures that storm inside our heads. On that, I think Gershowitz and I can agree. And there’s some of that in Twilight as well, although where the book stops and the marketing starts is difficult to measure.

Contemporary YA novels are hard to compare because so much of what was taboo at that time is no big deal today. A series like Gossip Girl is like a soap opera on paper. 25 years ago those were (in theory, anyway) for adults only. The paranormal was a tiny piece of the market. With the popularity of Interview with the Vampire and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that changed. The world of children’s and YA literature today is not the same as the one I grew up with. That’s okay, but it makes comparisons difficult. The difference between what makes a book quality literature and what makes it trash changes with time.

But here’s the thing that’s different. Teens today don’t feel like they have to hide their reading tastes from the world. In places and with people who don’t respect them or their reading choices, they aren’t going to share them, but what happens is that those places and people become irrelevant to their lives. If adults don’t address those choices in a positive way, they will find themselves locked out. And reading ‘trashy books’ won’t stop with adulthood– but, for many, it will limit whether they choose to read anything else, or choose to read at all.

 

Posted on June 27, 2013 by , Reply
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