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Book Review: His Unburned Heart (Selected Papers from the Consortium for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena #1) by David Sandner

Cover art for His Unburned Heart by David Sandner

His Unburned Heart (Selected Papers from the Consortium for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena #1) by David Sandner

Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2024

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1947879768

Available: Paperback

Buy: Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com

 

His Unburned Heart is the first in a series of novellas connected by a frame story of being published by the fictional Consortium for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena. Monster Librarian has previously review volume 2, 12 Hours, and volume 3, Asylum. They’re all very different in tone, topic, and style: what they have in common is that each is about an inexplicable change to reality.

 

The first half of His Unburned Heart is a novella of the same name, and a reasonably straightforward piece of historical fiction. Prior knowledge of the people and events is helpful in providing context. Mary Shelley is well known as the author of Frankenstein. She lived an unconventional life as a young woman, marrying the notorious Romantic poet  Percy Shelley.. He and a friend set off sailing into a major storm over Mary’s objections, and disappeared. Their bodies were washed ashore much later. Italian laws about contagion meant that Percy’s body would have to be burned, but Mary, as a woman, was not allowed to come. Instead, his publisher Leigh Hunt, and their friends Edward Trelawney and Lord Byron attended. After the body had burned, Trelawney saw that Shelley’s heart had not burned away and pulled it out of the ashes. Leigh Hunt left with Shelley’s unburned heart. Those are the facts.

 

Sandner’s novella has Mary determined to witness Percy’s cremation regardless of what the law says. She goes to her friend Mrs. Mason, who disguises her as a man, allowing her to pose as one of Lord Byron’s footmen (Lord Byron sees through the disguise but says nothing). On seeing that Leigh Hunt has kept Percy’s heart, she visits and demands it back, but he refuses, so Mary enlists her stepsister Claire into helping her break in and steal the heart (Mary had a complex relationship with Claire, with a history that is only obliquely referred to: Sandner captures this in just a few lines). Sandner’s spare style uniquely draws characters whose thoughts can’t be guessed, such as Lord Byron.

 

The second half of the book is titled “The Journal of Sorrow”. In it Mary first recounts the weeks and days before Percy left on his trip, including a vivid description of a miscarriage where she nearly bled to death before a doctor could arrive at their isolated home, Percy’s intervention of bathing her in freezing water saved her life. The  depiction of her miscarriage, bleeding, and freezing, is terrifying and has a visceral impact.

 

This prologue is followed by a series of dreams or imaginings of Percy’s last hours: In her journal, Mary writes, “Some stories cannot be told except as fragments, as dreams, fits… I hold them out to you–dead leaves to quicken some new birth…” These short fragments all approach his drowning and death from different imagined angles, and somehow this unconventional, stream-of-consciousness style of writing becomes not only a series of strange encounters with Shelley and the deep, but a shape of Mary’s feelings about him. I found The Journal of Sorrow and its intense, brief, and dreamlike writing to be an incredibly powerful expression of imagination, guilt, grief, anger, regret, and love.

 

His Unburned Heart does require background knowledge to be fully appreciated, but this is a perfect Valentine’s gift for the horror lover, and for those readers especially interested in the lives of Mary and Percy Shelley this is a treat. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Teen Read Week: Guest Blog by Jason Henderson– John Polidori, Mary Shelley, and the Haunted Summer

Jason Henderson is the author of the Alex van Helsing books, about a fourteen year old descendant of the vampire hunter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula living in a boarding school near Geneva, who just might be the supernatural world’s James Bond. The first book depends a lot on the events of the Haunted Summer at Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley, John Polidori, Lord Byron, and others decided to test their ability to write an original ghost story on a dark and stormy night.

       

I asked Jason if he would write a little about the Haunted Summer. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was not the only literary work to emerge from that party at the Villa Diodiati; John Polidori is largely unknown today.Except, apparently, in Texas, around Halloween, when you can go to a Polidori Pumpkin Party. Which would be a TOTALLY cool event for any library (or teen group) to hold. I know I want to go!

John Polidori, Mary Shelley, and the Haunted Summer

by Jason Henderson


My favorite Halloween Activity is something called Polidori’s Pumpkin Party, a major leaf-blown Autumn fiesta started in Texas of all places back in the 90s. We named it after a guy named Polidori; more on him later. But the idea of the party was this:

• Invite your friends to a Halloween Party

• Cost of admission: something creative. A story (keep it under ten minutes, guys), a painted mask, a cupcake if it’s creative

• Everyone has to sit at the hot seat and present without making a fuss about how their offering isn’t any good. If they start doing that, everyone should yell, DECLAIM! Until the person stops apologizing and reads.

• Repeat until everyone has presented.

 

The Polidori Party became a lifeblood of creativity for me and my friends both in school and after because it was an excuse to be creative, to have to be creative at least once in a year. “Are you ready for Polidori”? “I still have to write for Polidori”. Everyone spent time (often literally the day of the party, but that’s life) preparing. Hint: I really recommend making this part of your Halloween tradition.

Every Halloween I think of Polidori and his friends, who were generally considered the coolest kids in Europe, in the cold summer months of 1816. They were the original haunted story-slingers, brash and overconfiden,t and often brilliant.

I wrote about them in my first Alex Van Helsing book, and most of this recap in fact bears a strong resemblance to a talk given by Alex’s mentor, the motorcycle-riding super spy Mister Sangster. Mister Sangster has the benefit of teaching on the very lake where the group hung out—we can only imagine.

It is to me the perfect Halloween story, though it wasn’t actually Halloween. It was summer, and it was cold.

The party at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816—the Haunted Summer–consisted of five writers: Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who were already quite famous; two young women writers, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (soon to be Shelley) and her half-sister Claire (whom Mary disliked so much that she doesn’t even mention her in the introduction to Frankenstein); and Byron’s doctor friend, Polidori, who wrote short stories. They were bored out of their heads, because although it was summer, there had been a massive volcanic eruption in Asia that had clouded the sky and made the weather everywhere cold and rainy. So Lord Byron issued each of them a challenge: write the scariest, most terrifying story you can.

In her introduction to the 1831 edition, Mary says the famous guys each wrote some minor pieces, and that Dr. Polidori had—and this is kind of fun—“some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole — to see what I forget — something very shocking and wrong of course.’”

I mean, we had to base our party on him.

Remember: they were all very young.

Lord Byron, on the run from creditors, was 28, Shelley was 24, fleeing his marriage, with his new 18-year-old mistress Mary; John Polidori was 21;  and Claire was 18. After the summer which birthed The Vampyre, Childe Harold Canto IV, and Frankenstein, they didn’t last long, either. Polidori was dead in five years, Shelley a year later, and Byron two years after that. Within eight years, all but Mary and her sister Claire were dead. In between were tragedies no parent should ever endure, and they endured them again and again.

But in 1831, something about the record changed. When Mary was 34, she rewrote her masterpiece Frankenstein for a new edition. She promised her editor that the revisions would be minor, a few typo fixes here and there. But it wasn’t true—the 1831 Frankenstein was a clean-up job. It got rid of  the messy politics of the earlier version, and, best of all, added her introduction, which told the story of the Haunted Summer, but cleaned that up, too: it eliminated Claire, by whom she was embarrassed, and most of all, changed what the attendants were writing about.

When I wrote the first Alex Van Helsing book, the crux of the story was that something about the change Mary made to  when she was in her thirties was an attempt to hide something about what happened when she was a teenager. That there are secrets between the lines. I feel that way today, and it is true of my own books. So there are secrets inside secrets.

Here we are in October. Capture the spirit of that crew: Byron, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Claremont, Polidori. What are the secrets you can reveal?

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Interested in learning more about John Polidori?

Find out how to host a Polidori Pumpkin Party by visiting the Polidori Society’s website.

Check out The Vampyre, the influential novella he wrote during the Haunted Summer.
Polidori also appears in Veronica Bennett’s teen title Angelmonster, which is very well written.

For a more substantial account of the evening at the Villa Diodiati and the people who were there try The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler.

And, of course, there are Jason’s own books. In the spirit of the challenge at the Villa Diodiati during that Haunted Summer, take the time to celebrate your creativity this Halloween!