Thomas Harris | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Musings: Valentw’een Dinner Dates

Maybe you are cynical about Valentine’s Day, or just not into cutesy pink hearts and Valentine’s tchotckes that basically have no purpose except to commemorate an arbirtrarily chosen date but that you can’t get rid of. Like my son got me this giant plush white bear holding an embroidered plush heart…

There are options. Maybe you celebrate Galentine’s Day, and go out with your girlfriends. Or, alternatively, if you love a good scare, you could take some inspiration from artist Brandy Stark, and celebrate Valentwe’en. Brandy celebrates by holding an art show and a ghost tour. On the Valentwe’en Facebook page, she writes:

While the normal person celebrates Valentine’s Day with roses, romance, and chocolates, we who embrace Valentwe’en enjoy a time of dark romance, the Grim Cupid, and cuddling with fellow creatures of the night. For those who have longed for a second Halloween, your entreaties have been answered! Valentwe’en offers the fun of bonding for couples merged with the thrill of supernatural intrusions. It is a true collision of these two candy-filled holidays, a spiraling combination of love and death, sweetness and suspense. Valentwe’en falls on the first full moon of February or it may be held February 13th. It consists of offering black flowers to one’s love (especially black calla lilies), Halloween-themed candy, and becoming entranced by movies from genres of horror, dark romance, or dark romantic comedy. This holiday is still evolving, so the rest of the celebration is up to you!

Not being a person who does a great job tracking the phases of the moon or even dates on a calendar, my plan is to celebrate today. I’m a laid-back sort of person (meaning that I forgot to make plans) but it’s just me and two tweens on a school night, so Oreo fudge and a mildly scary family movie are about all I’ll be up to. If you want to put a little more energy into it, here are some literary ideas you can explore with the one you love (or at least love to eat candy with).

One thing that’s pretty awesome is that there are many Gothic and horror-themed books that have been made into movies and that also involve a memorable meal. One of the most interesting of these is Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, which was made into a movie that was originally released on Valentine’s Day, and has a well-known line from Hannibal Lecter:

Well, okay, maybe that is not the dinner you want to recreate. You could come up with a nice Italian red, though. You all might need that more than dinner while watching this movie, anyway.

If you want to prepare something more elegant, you will find a carefully researched, surprisingly elaborate meal fit for a vampire when Diana Bishop first invites Matthew Clairmont to dinner, in chapter 12 of A Discovery of Witches, the first book in the All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness: smoked salmon with dill, capers, and gherkins; Riesling; thinly sliced raw vension; beets with shaved Parmesan; red wine; seared rabbit spiced with rosemary, celery, pepper; a biscuit made from ground chestnuts; berries, cheese, and roasted chestnuts. Diana may not know true love, but the meal truly is a labor of love. Matthew manages to consume everything except the beets. Although I do know people who would be delighted to eat their meat raw, if your company doesn’t belong to that group, they might still go for the smoked salmon, berries, cheese, and nuts, with plenty of wine. “Wine tastes wonderful,” Matthew says, and so long as you have plenty of that, you can stream A Discovery of Witches, now on Shudder and Sundance Now, with the one you love.

Maybe you’d rather have a night out? It would take some planning, because you’d have to get there, and reservations are suggested, but you could have a night out at The Beetle House, a Halloween/Tim Burton-themed restaurant with locations in New York and Los Angeles. I’m not sure how unique the dishes actually are, but their names are catchy, and it sounds like the waitstaff dresses in character. Chef Zach Neil said,

“The idea was simple. Create a space where people who love Halloween, horror films, and Gothic dark music can gather for a meal and drinks. A safe space where it really feels like Halloween all year round and people can come and enjoy good food, good drinks, listen to good music, and feel completely comfortable to be as freaky as they want to be. This would be my home for the freaks, weirdos, and grown up Goth kids of the city.”

Zach also has a cookbook now, The Nightmare Before Dinner, so if you can’t get out to the coasts, you can at least recreate the food (and with planning, the atmosphere). Treat yourselves with a macabre meal and follow it up with the Tim Burton movie of your choice. Or any scary movie.

Whatever you choose, we hope you go into it with your whole heart, like Horatio, here. Happy Valentwe’en from all of us at Monster Librarian.
Happy Valentwe'en!

Booklist: Basement Nightmares

The basement from Cabin in the Woods

Basements are creepy. Underground, dark, leaky, moldy, musty-smelling, and full of miscellaneous junk, they’ have the potential to house and hide many horrors and obsessions. Our own basement has been all of those things, and we have been trying to reclaim it for the past six months. Leaky foundations led to mold, then mold remediation and waterproofing. An exploding pipe led to replacing drywall, painting the walls, reclaiming furniture, installing electrical lights (yes, there were no electrical lights) and recarpeting the entire thing. Which meant packing up all the junk and having the furniture moved into storage while the carpet was replaced. Let me tell you, you don’t know what you actually have until you empty out your closets and drawers.

Yesterday our new carpet was finally installed (it’s beautiful), and today all of our stuff was moved back in. It looks like we’ve resolved the dark, leaky, moldy, and musty-smelling issues, although there’s nothing we can do about the underground part, and there seem to be a lot of boxes labeled “miscellaneous” or “random stuff”. You can’t have it all, I guess. In honor of the six month long basement nightmare that now appears to be almost at an end, I have for you a list of books with basements in them that are sure to give you nightmares, too. Myself, I am looking forward to finally getting some peaceful sleep.

The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian

Airline pilot Chip Linton’s jet crashes into the Hudson River, with virtually no survivors. Guilt-ridden, he moves to a crumbling Victorian house in rural New Hampshire. While he works on remodeling the house, he discovers human bones in the basement, and the murderous ghosts of his passengers from Flight 1611 begin haunting him and demanding that he provide them company. This is a creepy and chilling story, especially, I think, if you are a parent.

The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson

The Amityville Horror is supposed to be based on a true story. George and Kathleen Lutz moved into a luxurious house in Long Island knowing that brutal murders had taken place there the previous year. Twenty-eight days later, they fled, leaving all their possessions behind. Horror fans are probably familiar with the story already– if they haven’t read the book, they probably have seen the movie. Put this in your next “if you liked the movie, try the book” display, and see what happens.

The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum

This novel is based on the events of the Sylvia Likens murder. After their parents are killed, Meg Loughlin and her sister Sarah move in with their aunt and cousins. The girls’ aunt turns on them, eventually locking Meg in the basement. Meg’s aunt draws the neighborhood children into participating in her insanity, making them complicit in Meg’s torture and debasement. Graphic, explicit and horrific, The Girl Next Door is an extremely disturbing exploration of human evil. The Girl Next Door is a horror classic, but definitely not for the faint of heart. The Girl Next Door has also been made into a movie.

The Siience of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

I have to admit that I have not actually read Silence of the Lambs, but I was at an impressionable age when I first saw the movie, and Buffalo Bill’s basement is permanently imprinted in my brain. According to this article, Buffalo Bill’s basement was modeled on a real serial killer’s basement torture chamber. All these novels based on true stories make me reluctant to ever go into any basement but my own.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This bleak novel about a father and son traveling through a post-apocalyptic landscape includes a house with a basement butcher shop where people are imprisoned and dismembered by the cannibal inhabitants. I feel ill just writing that down. Mold and moisture aren’t seeming like such a big deal now.

Now that our basement has lights, dry walls and floors, and new carpet, I don’t think we’ll have to lose sleep over it anymore. But stories about basements like these certainly put it all into perspective!