Vote for my book cover image!

First off, I am pleased -- no, thrilled -- to announce that I have finally finished my book of short stories. They're all horror stories, all set in New York City. I'm set to publish it in October. Currently I'm in the throes of editing and formatting the text, as well as working out the cover design. I've narrowed it down to two possible covers, but, as some of you may know, I have terrible trouble making decisions. For those who don't: I have terrible trouble making decisions. In that spirit, I cordially invite you to vote for your favorite book cover image:

1. The Pulpy Cover:

2. The Scary-Picture-with-Clouds Cover

Please do vote for your favorites. Also, "You suck at Photoshop, get a real designer" is a valid vote. (Oh, and please note I am still tweaking the skeleton/Statue of Liberty Image.)

Get your votes in by September 19th!

Thanks everybody!

Dark Water(s), Withholding, and Point of View

For whatever reason, I decided this past week that I really needed to see both versions of Dark Water. (Maybe because it's been so rainy lately?) I picked up both Hideo Nakata's 2002 original and the 2005 American remake.

Watching these two different approaches to the same story turned out to be really helpful for me in terms of thinking about how character point-of-view can add to or detract from horror in storytelling.

The Hideo Nakata version of Dark Water allows the main/mother character (Yoshimi, played by Hitomi Kuroki) to see the ghost and interact with it far earlier than Walter Salles' version allows Jennifer Connelly's Dahlia to. Yoshimi sees the ghost about fifteen minutes into the film, whereas Dahlia doesn't see anything supernatural until almost the very end. Instead, Salles has her little girl, Ceci, see and interact with the ghost for most of the film, which has several unfortunate side-effects. First, allowing the child a privileged POV vis-a-vis the ghost is something we see all too often in horror films, and therefore feels hackneyed and trite. Second, it doesn't necessarily pay off in the specific context of the film. This is supposed to be Dahlia/Yoshimi's story, so to rob her of agency by not allowing her to see the ghost lessens its impact overall.

By contrast, confining the ghost to Yoshimi's POV in the J-horror version calls her mental stability into question in a much more effective way than Salles/Connelly's dull, repetitive neurotic shriekings at, say, an unfinished load of laundry. The audience has far more empathy for poor Yoshimi, who is seeing horrifying visions, than it does for Dahlia, who merely comes off as alternately whiny and strident for most of the film because essentially the only thing that's really bothering her is a drip in her ceiling. Oh, yes, and her flashbacks to her childhood.

Which brings me to another point: these flashbacks, as well as some other really obvious scenes in the Salles film, hammer home their points a little too hard. In the Hideo Nakata film, we are told obliquely that Yoshimi had a neglectful mother; in Salles' version, we are told this explicitly, and repeatedly, as though he doesn't trust his audience to make any connections for themselves.

Finally, one last little gripe I have with the writing in this film is that it is riddled with missed opportunities. The writers let things be far too easy for Dahlia. For example, when she is late to pick up Ceci from school because of a job interview, there are absolutely no consequences. She shows up late and kindergarten teacher Camryn Manheim cheerfully says, "Oh no worries, we put her in the after-school program." Little Ceci is happily reading a story with her fellow future latchkey kids. Phew! Good thing that scene ended comfortably! I'd hate for there to be any conflict in this story. In Nakata's version, the child's father ends up taking her home from school, and a bitter parental fight subsequently ensues.

Everything just comes so easily to Dahila. In her job interview she is hired on the spot. Yoshimi runs out of the interview to pick up her child and doesn't find out until later that she actually got it anyway. Oh, and a little reality-based nit-pick? Dahila is a former copy-editor who gets a job as a lab assistant at a radiology clinic. With absolutely no medial training. "I've always been interested in medicine." "You're hired!" Sure, why not? I mean, maybe in the heady pre-recession days of 2005 you could just waltz into a doctor's office and demand a job, I don't know. Seems to sound a bit of a false note to me. Anyway. Minor gripe. But it does relate to the writers' total inability to allow Dahlia to feel anything really serious at all for basically the first hour of the film.

Which brings me back to the concept of POV, and withholding information.

Why do Salles et al not allow Dahlia to get into anything honestly frightening for such a very long time?

I think perhaps they were trying too hard to create atmosphere and maintain suspense, all at the expense of storytelling.

As a writer, I find I am very often afraid to give too much away lest I undercut the Mystery of It All. The writers of Salles' Dark Water seemed to suffer from this same insecurity. Certainly withholding some information is necessary for suspenseful storytelling, to an extent, but so then is revelation. Let them see the bomb under the table for goodness sake. By withholding so very much in the first hour of the film, the American version just ended up boring the pants off me.

Extended scenes of Dahlia and Ceci on the Roosevelt Island tram, at the lawyer's office, at school, in the apartment, etc. began to wear me down. The scene where they view their potential new apartment seemed to be filmed in real time. Without an ounce of exaggeration, I've seen actual New York City apartments in less time than it took John C. Reilly to show us the one in Dark Water (his best lines in this scene: "There's the stove. There's the dishwasher."). As a result, the pacing in this film suffered terribly. Which is a shame, because the last 45 minutes of the movie actually weren't bad. It's amazing how easily I can see this in someone else's story and yet I commit this same error constantly while writing my own. Scene after scene of exposition and atmosphere-establishing clog the beginnings of my stories despite the fact that I must have been told to start in medias res about a thousand times.

Suddenly it became clear to me how POV and info withholding (and by extension, pacing) are intimately entwined. If you deny your main character access to the world of the story by overly restricting his/her point of view, you'll end up excessively withholding information, and a delayed story-start will be the inevitable consequence. Yes, you can certainly give secondary characters information and integrate them into the storyline but you've got to remember who your main character is and not lose sight of that.

Again, I think the temptation with writing horror is to withhold excessively out of fear of losing suspense or coming off as unsophisticated. But the alternative -- a boring 60 minutes of watching Jennifer Connelly on the phone with her landlord -- is much, much worse.

When You Reach Me

I just finished reading Rebecca Stead's thrilling YA novel, When You Reach Me. It's a bit of a genre-bender, starting out as a mystery and becoming more science fiction-y by the end of it, with plenty of the best kind of YA coming-of-age tenderness and poignancy all mashed up in there. I have kind of a pet peeve with really maudlin coming-of-age stories (I'm looking at you, Bridge to Terabithia) so I doubly appreciate a book that makes me cry while never stooping to manipulation. When You Reach Me walks that fine line ably, with such spare, unsentimental prose that the emotional effects of it cut that much more deeply. I kept having to stop whilst reading it on the subway and pretend to look up at something verrrry interesting and invisible on the ceiling.

With finely woven mystery elements, exquisite attention to detail, and some superb characterization, even in the minor characters (like Alice Evans, the shy-bladder girl at school), When You Reach Me doesn't drop a single stitch. Stead's obvious geek-girl fandom of Madeleine L'Engle is endearing, too, since it puts the reader in the place of sharing some collective memory -- what girl aged ten-to-twelve was not enraptured by L'Engle trilogy? -- and creates a kind of instant intimacy with Miranda, the protagonist. A vintage NYC setting only helped matters in my mind, as did the wonderful character of Miranda's mother, a frustrated, artsy type forced to toil humiliatingly in a law office. Next time I go to work I may wear purple and black striped stockings.

P.S. I found the image here.

Sprucing up the old homestead

I hope you like Spinster's re-design. I'm rather fond of it. It works in tandem with my new site, A.J. Sweeney, which I am now using as a semi-official "author site" to showcase my pretty little tales of death and murder, most of which were written under that pen name, and www.andreajanes.com has had an awesome new face-lift, courtesy of the kickass web-designer Oleg Jelezniakov at OJ Works. Spinster Aunt will remain, as ever, a place for me to get cranky online. I feel positively modern.

Dale Carnegie and me

I've always kind of ignored Dale Carnegie. I never really wanted to win friends, or, you know, influence people, so I kind of figured I didn't need him. Then I stumbled across a book at a relative's house called "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" and the title amused me so I picked it up -- I admit it -- ironically. Me, the big city big shot, flipping through ole Dale Carnegie's moth-riddled homilies and laughing at chapter titles like, "When life gives you lemons, make a lemonade"! Oh, those old-timey 1940s people, they were soooo funneeee! And then, as poetic justice would have it, I got my comeuppance. I couldn't stop reading the goddamn thing. I even took it on the subway. People saw me reading it. Yeah, they saw it. They saw the title and everything. And I didn't care!

See, the thing is, Dale Carnegie is completely and utterly badass! They ought to call this book, "Shut the fuck up and stop whining, you pussy!" It would sell a lot more copies. Seriously. There are case studies where people are like, "When I was stranded on a raft in the South Pacific for 22 days, I realized something..." and "On the beaches of Normandy I finally managed to cure my insomnia" or "After an operation that restored my sight, I wept when I saw the tiny rainbows in a soap bubble as I was doing the dishes, and I never complained about boredom again." These are just paraphrases of course. The real quotes are much more devastating and awesome (lots of wars and excellent Great Depression stuff). You see, essentially, the book tells you to stop worrying because, probably, you have nothing to worry about. I mean, if you're an American (or North American, or Westerner in general) and you're not impoverished (like, food stamps and foreclosures poor, not I-can't-afford-a-daily-latte poor) and have all your limbs and your sight, and you don't have cancer, then you have absolutely nothing in the world to complain about. It's all trivia. And de minimis non curat lex, dude. The law does not concern itself with trifles.

What, you may be asking yourself, oh gentle reader, is the point of this post? Generally the Spinster does not dispense advice. (Though now that I am venturing into this territory, if only for one single outing, I'm glad it could be of the decidedly old-fashioned and non namby-pamby variety.) I guess I just wanted to do something nice for once. This book, despite some of it's more bizarre advice (e.g. you don't need sleep; you must believe in god or you're screwed, etc.) is kind of amazing. So if you've gotten to the point where you're tired of the sound of your own voice complaining about shit, go get a copy of this book. It's verrry soothing.

Oh, and for all the writers out there -- everything in HTSWASL goes double for you.

All right, that's enough of my soft side. Let us never speak of this again.

Writing Bits

Since I've been remiss in getting my links up on my website, here are a few to tide over my raging torrent of fans.

Fiction

Nethermead A woman walking in Prospect Park meets someone unexpected.

A Fitting Tribute A young girl designs her own tomb! Featuring haunted wigs!*

The Attraction A story about a time machine, and the one person who must never use it.

Morbus A tale of greed... and cholera! (Note: you actually have to pay for this story! PDFs cost $2, print editions cost $5)*

* Highly recommended for young adult readers.

Non-fiction

Interview with Corinne May Botz

Film Reviews

Sleeping Beauty

The Secret Beyond the Door

The Ward

This weekend I watched The Ward -- John Carpenter's first film in a decade -- on a thoroughly gloomy drizzling day and I really wanted to love it, but there were just too many cumulative weaknesses, mainly in the script (well, and some of the perfs, too) for me to honestly say he drove this one home. Still, there's a subtle magic to The Ward, mostly in its B-movie cheapie goodness; it comes off as grindingly low-budget, something that could have come out of Val Lewton's RKO production unit in the 1940s, a feature I value highly in a horror film. That Carpenter manages to squeeze scares out of three sets and five actors is admirable indeed. The main problem I had with The Ward was its shoddy script.

This whole "review" is really just going to be one great big spoiler, because I can't really discuss what I see as the main story pitfalls without it. So if you haven't seen the film, take note that I really, really liked the opening credits, and come back in 88 minutes.

Ah, there you are. Nice to see you again. OK, we can continue.

Didn't you like the opening credits? Come on, medieval woodcuts, Horgarth etchings, circa-1950s stock photos of shock treatment? In chronological order? How could you not? As an archival photo researcher, I was especially thrilled by that credit sequence. (Yes, I work as an archival photo researcher for documentaries when not writing. And yes, I am available for hire.)

Unfortunately, things start to sputter as soon as the narrative kicks in. The film progresses in fits and starts, with occasional moments of suspense strung among much atmosphere-y mood-setting. The action picks up when the ghost of murdered mental patient Alice Hudson starts aggressively pursuing the heroine in addition to all the other girls in the ward, and we are treated to some truly fun running-around-being-scared sequences. That all the characters are stock cutouts bothered me until the final twist was revealed -- then it somewhat made sense.

But -- and here come the spoilers --I was slightly disappointed by the multiple personality disorder explanation. I'm not sure why, since I particularly like any narrative of dissociative amnesia or dissociative fugue. Fractured identities are always awesome (story-wise). Perhaps it was because so little was done with diagnosis of MPD once we got to that exposition-heavy portion of the script. The whole third act felt verrrry hastily slapped together, and I'm not sure but that the final twist couldn't have been handled better. Putting aside all my other problems with act three, I'd even be happy with just a revised version of that final twist.

If I had a world of my own, this is how I would have ended it: the scene plays out just as it is now, with Alice looking into the mirror. But instead of Kristen's demon-ghost arm grabbing at her, she'd just be staring back at her placidly from her reflection. And then Alice could say something like, "I'd never let them kill you, Kristen," and smile at her. You know, indicating she's still crazy. Or maybe not say anything at all. Lately I've been of a mind that being crazy is scarier than actual supernatural beings. Maybe it's just a phase I'm going through and in six weeks the pendulum will swing and I'll be bored by psychological horror again. But right now I find myself unmoved by Kristen's demon-ghost arm.

Which leads me to another thing: is Alice Hudson a ghost, a demon, or what? I mean, obviously it ends up with her just being a hallucination, but for most of the movie -- when we think she's a supernatural creature -- we're not sure what she is. She seems to be a ghost, but then Kristen is able to injure her with the axe. I kind of like that, though, that she doesn't fit into a clearly identifiable taxonomy of baddie.

I also have to say I like the way each personality was killed off. The death of each girl was actually a sign Alice was getting cured. What we non-crazies would see as an unequivocally positive event was represented as a horrible trauma on screen (it clearly hurt Alice to give up her safety personalities). This is indeed a twisted way to look at becoming healthy, as well as a fresh approach to the possible meanings of murder.

Although The Ward is not unflawed, it certainly takes its place alongside Shutter Island and Bedlam (1946) as an interesting foray into the dark side of the cure.

Time-Travel Ride debuts at New Coney!

Have you ever longed to travel back to a simpler, more innocent time? Then step right up and ride THE ATTRACTION, the world's first time-travel device with automatic chrono-wipe (TM)! Lets you experience all your nostalgia with none of the fuss of accidentally eliminating your own existence! Try it now! Warning: epileptics must not ride THE ATTRACTION.

Promotion paid for by the New Coney marketing department.

Haunted Venice Part III: Parte the laste

And so our imaginary journey through the streets of Venice comes to an end. The last two itineraries have blurred into one another, so I'll go just ahead and heartily recommend to one and all to buy the book, whether you're going to Venice or just plan to sit in your own backyard and imagine you're somewhere lofty and far away. I'll leave you with one last story, this one about beauty, for beauty has been on my mind of late (did you know your skin stops regenerating new cells or some shit after you turn 30? According to L'Oreal it does).

So, voila: The Fairy who Bestowed the Gift of Beauty


A young girl, just freshly turned sixteen, was walking home from Vespers one evening when she spied a beautiful woman all dressed in white. The beautiful woman watched her silently as she passed. This happened every day for three days and the young girl became curious. Who was this strange creature? On the fourth day the woman said, "Girl, wouldn't you love to become as lovely as I am?" And of course the girl replied, "Yes."

The woman told her to go home and cover all the mirrors in the house with white cloth and wait until midnight, when she would be visited by three beautiful ladies who would bestow their beauty upon her. "Do not be afraid, do not call upon the Virgin Mary," the woman said.

The young girl went home and did exactly as she was told, but in her excitement, she forgot to cover one mirror. The three women showed up at the stroke of midnight, dazzlingly radiant. But in the one small mirror she forgot to cover, the young girl saw the reflection of their backs: hideous, hairy and malformed, like "those of an animal."

The girl screamed and ran out of the house. On the street, she smacked right into the beautiful temptress who had conned her into this in the first place.

"Fool!" cried the woman, for she knew exactly what the girl had done.

She advanced toward the girl, who backed away. As she cowered she saw that the beautiful woman had the hairy cloven hooves of a goat peeking out from beneath her robe.

"Mother Mary, save me!" screamed the girl.

A bright white flashed from the sky, and when it had vanished, the evil fairy was gone.

The moral of this one? Don't trust a beautiful woman with ugly feet.

****

I'd love to do an imaginary ghostly travelogue again some time. If you're reading this, you must have a ghost story or two from your home town. Why don't you share it with me? Or, maybe you can suggest another town I can do a series on. Haunted Cincinnati? Haunted Krakow? Haunted Panama City? Do tell, won't you?

Kino

Hi readers,

Today is a bit of a somber day. I went to the memorial service for Don Krim, long-time president of Kino International and my former boss. If you are a movie fan at all, you'll want to have at least one Kino DVD in your house: "Movies without Kino would be like parks without trees, museums without paintings." Do me a favor and check their catalogue out here. If you live in one of those fancy high-priced cities with tiny movie-houses, you might even be able to find some of their theatrical offerings. Kino is definitely holding the torch for a lot of the best foreign, silent and classic films, and in an age when so many distribs are going -- or have gone -- out of business, it's important to show them we care, and that we appreciate Don's service to cinema. If you're short on cash, you can get a lot of their stuff on Netflix, and of course you can like them on FB or follow them on Twitter.

On a personal note, Don was a great boss -- he was always fair and equitable to those who worked for him and with him, and was incredibly generous and kind to me for the nearly four years I worked there. I remember being amazed to learn he actually paid his interns. In a business where this is almost unheard-of, I think it goes to show what kind of person he was. He believed in paying people for their work: an old-fashioned concept from a true gentleman.

"A Fitting Tribute" finds a home

My short story "A Fitting Tribute," has found a home over at Lightning Flash e-zine. The story was inspired by Charlotte Canda and Carmilla, and by my ex-roommate's girlfriend's weave, which would float on the floor in ghostly tumbleweeds....

Haunted Venice, Part Two

Our second appointment with death begins in the sestiere of Castello, near the salizada de Pignater, where there is featured the sotoportego dei Preti. I think salizada means street and sotoportego means arch. No translation of these words is provided in the book, so hey, you'll learn by immersion! Over the arch you'll find a brick heart, which you can touch for a good luck charm if you're looking for that special humanoid to mate with. Here's the romantic story that goes with it:

Once upon a time, when "magic and reality peacefully shared the same dimension," a fisherman named Orio (yum) caught a mermaid in his net. Naturalment, they fell in love, and she agreed to give up the life aquatic to marry him. There was only one problem: because of a witch's curse, every Saturday she would turn into a snake. She warned him not to try to see her on Saturdays but of course he disobeyed. No biggie, though, because once they were married the curse would be lifted anyway (maybe it was contingent on her not having legs or something). Are you still following? Good. So now the mermaid has legs and she's a regular human wife and she keeps house and squeezes out some kids and everything is going fine until one day she grew ill and died, poor thing. The fisherman misses her but, hey, life goes on. Plus, an interesting thing is happening: no matter how sloppy the fisherman and his kids are, the house always stays clean. It's like some kind of ghost-maid is taking care of them or something. But Orio doesn't put two and two together and one day when he returns home from fishing unexpectedly early only to find a snake -- a snake! -- in the kitchen, he chops it in half! Orio, nooooo! Sure enough, the house thereafter grows messy and cold, as his dead mermaid snake-wife was to visit nevermore.

I think the moral of this story is fairly clear: don't do housework.

Moving right along, we get to another deliciously irreverent tale, that of "The Magician who Joked with the Devil." I quite like this one: in the late 15th century there lived a man who practiced black magic. He was cruel and mean and despised by all, and he was comfortable with that. One night he was out walking when the moon went behind a cloud and it was too dark for him to find his way home. So he summoned his old pal Lucifer and asked for a torch, which was summarily provided. After he got home, he snuffed it out and put it in the woodbox to use again later. In the morning the maid opened the woodbox and screamed -- inside was not a torch at all but a charred arm! Now, this is my favorite part of the story: the magician's reaction. Apparently, he just laughed. Oh Old Scratch, you are a funny guy! You sure got me!

Zing! I love that he isn't disturbed in the slightest that he just used a flaming human arm as a torch.

As long as we're on the subject of wizards, here's another story I liked in this itinerary: "The Wizard with the Heart of Stone." It takes place near the Arsenal, in front of which stands a frightening-looking stone lion.

In November 1719, the mangled bodies of two sailors appear floating in the city's canals. The corpses look as though they've been torn apart by wild beasts. Six days later, another body surfaces, that of Jacopo Zanchi, a Venetian who apparently "lived hand to mouth" with his wife Giovanna. Now, Giovanna had a bad rep and occasionally turned tricks for money, so nobody was surprised when she stood outside the house of a merchant named Fosco and started screaming, "Murderer! Bastard -- you'll pay for what you've done!" I mean, bitches be crazy, right? Now, Fosco leans out the window and hisses, "We'll see, woman, where your boldness will take you, on the next stormy night!" Slightly suspicious, no? Ten days later, said storm blows up but nothing happens, not for hours and hours. Giovanna walks the wet streets; business is slow. Then, at one o'clock in the morning, an "arch of fire" sizzles out of Fosco's house and "literally materializes the old man" in front of the statue of the stone lion. He walked around the lion, running his fingertip along its body, until a huge bolt of lightning appeared and struck it with a blinding flash of brilliance. Slowly the stone crumbled and a huge flesh and blood lion emerged, roaring, from its casing. The lion bounded down the alley and pounced on the helpless Giovanna. The wizard then began to cast a spell on a second lion, but a guard witnessing the scene rushed toward the wizard and plunged his sword into his chest. Now, according to the book, "with a tremendous roar and a blinding flash of lightning, everything suddenly fell silent under the driving rain: the mangled body of the woman on the paving stones, the guard's blackened sword on the ground. There was no trace of Fosco, except for a heart of stone near the razor-sharp sword: it was the stone heart in his chest that could change stone into flesh." Then the guard picked up his sword and cut off the lion's head. Instead of falling to the ground, "the head rose several meters up into the air, and with a final roar exploded into a black substance which covered everything below."

Awesome!

The guard then cut off the head of the second lion, whose body still stands before the Arsenal today. If you look closely, you can see the line around its new where a new stone head replaced it.

(Now this is a slightly amended version of the tale. In the book, there are three lions, and two women, Giovanna and her friend, also a hooker. But this abridged tale retains the essential awesomeness of the original.)

There are a number of bad-weather stories in this itinerary, as it turns out. (I suppose humans need something to do while waiting out the rain and snow.) The next one takes place on a cold, snowy night in November 1917, and is called "The Death Shawl." It's a classic tale of a waifish little girl who flags down a passing gondola with a call of, "Doctor, doctor, come help my mother, she's sick!" and the doctor therein agreeing to help the poor little thing (although he is somewhat puzzled -- "How did she know I was a doctor?") and he helps the sick woman just in the nick of time because she totally would have died of pneumonia if he'd gotten there even a minute later and when he says, "Good thing your daughter flagged me down," the mother replies, "But doctor, she's been dead for a month...."

I just like the classic simplicity of this tale. It's the kind of ghostly tale you could really believe might have happened in the dreary aftermath of the War when death was present everywhere and half of Europe consorted with the ghosts...

But what a downer to leave you with. Our final tale shall also deal with stormy weather, but in a lighter way:

Saint Peter was a stand up kind of guy but, unfortunately for him, his mother was a total scrod. She was such a mean, jealous, selfish woman that she inevitably ended up in hell when she died, despite St. Peter's pleas with god to extricate her from the underworld. Finally, though, god relented and allowed Peter's mother to visit him on earth once a year for fifteen days, seven days before and seven days after the feast of the apostle. Peter was delighted, but the old hag was "so full of envy and spite that every year she brings with her storm, winds and hurricanes, so that no one feels sorry for her anymore, and can't wait for her to go back where she came from."

Haunted Venice, Part One

I've been working my way through the four itineraries described in Venetian Legends and Ghost Stories; here are the highlights from the first walking tour:

The tour begins at the gothic church Santi Giovanni e Paolo and wends its way over to the campo de Gheto Novo. At the Gothic church, author Alberto Toso Fei entertains us with the story of the Bell Ringer's Skeleton. In this 19th century tale, a curiously tall bellringer is approached by a medical doctor who, marveling over his strange proportions and giant hands, convinces him to sell his body to science. The bellringer accepts, as the doctor pays up front. Now I bet you think you know where this is going, right? But no, no body-snatchers here. The bellringer merely assumes he'll outlive the aged doctor, and happily takes the money to the tavern every night thereafter, where he drinks and drinks to his heart's content. Unfortunately, the bellringer, who's never had so much money all at once before, goes a tad overboard and ends up drinking himself to death. Whoops! Guess who's body's on display at the Museum of Natural History right now? Sucker! Watch the booze kids: that's the moral of this story. Ghost quotient: medium. The spectral skeleton apparently climbs up the tower to ring the bell at midnight, then stumbles down to the street to beg the passersby for enough money to buy himself back. Might've been scarier if the premise wasn't so wryly amusing. [Disclaimer: "ghost quotient" is an entirely meaningless criterion I just invented now to make this sound more fancy.]


Along we walk, and, strangely the author skirts the tour past the Island of the Dead, possibly because he disdains the obvious... although he does tell the perfect story to imagine whilst staring out over the water: The Cosmographer who stole Lucifer's Dreams. Fra Mauro, a monk living on San Michele in the mid-1400s, was an amazing cartographer who left a treasure trove of maps when he died. The only strange thing about him: he never once left Venice to visit any of the places he drew. This is how he did it: he saw the images in dream -- not his own, mind you, but the dreams of the devil, which he (get this) projected onto the cloudy skies above Venice. Art! Hubris! Proto-cinema! I love it. But, as all things the devil wrought, these dreams sometimes slipped out of his grasp and moved through the skies freely, terrifying townspeople and directing witches on their way to the sabbath. Some say they can still be seen up there on cloudy nights, when a storm rages... Weird quotient: high. This story is pure awesome.

We keep toddling along on our imagination tour just until the fondamenta dei Mori, where we stop at number 3399. There, we learn the story of Tintoretto -- yes, the painter -- and how his daughter was nearly tricked by a witch. Apparently a beautiful, mysterious woman told the little girl that she could become a nun if she hid her communion wafers instead of eating them in church, and instead took them home and hid them. Once she had ten, she'd become a nun. The girl obeyed the woman but halfway through the plan, freaked out and spilled it to her pops. Tintoretto was wise in the ways of the witch and knew the old crone would recruit the girl to the craft once she got the ten wafers. He told his daughter wait five more days, then invite the woman into the house to get the wafers. Of course, once the witch crossed the threshold, the artist "rushed her with a knobby stick" until she screeched, changed herself into a cat and flew out the window. Witch factor: medium to high. I like the idea of the witch recruiting a youngster through deceit, like a drug pusher.

Finally, at the Gheto Novo, we learn of the Plague of the Children, a twist on the Pied Piper tale, where the sins of parents are thrust upon their sons and daughters. In the summer of 1576 there was a Plague in Venice and many people died. But in the Jewish Ghetto, a strange thing happened: only children died. One after the other all the children perished, but not a single parent died. They begged the rabbi to find a solution and he pored over esoteric books like Buffy the Vampire Slayer for days and days to no avail. Finally one night he had a dream: in his dream he saw little children playing and dancing in the graveyard. He tore the shroud off one of the children, whose ghost returned the next night to beg for it back. "I cannot return without my shroud," the ghost child said. The rabbi refused unless the child could tell him the cause of the Plague of the Children, and the child told him it happened because a woman had killed her newborn. Well, they brought that crazy bitch to justice and, sure enough, no child died in the Ghetto again... for the rest of the summer. Little lamb* quotient: High. I love the idea of a ghost child wailing, "Give me my shrouuuuud!"

There are far, far many more stories than these; I've merely selected my favorites. No doubt any ghost aficionado will find their own favorites if the buy the book, and no doubt the tour will be even more impressive if walked while glimpsing the macabre floating island of death and such things. But for now, I am content with my virtual tour, and happy to let myself imagine what the ghosts themselves might look like something even someone present at the scene might be forced to do (ghosts have a strange habit of being uncooperative with tour groups and often failing to appear on demand).

One last little bit of business: nowhere in the book does the author mention how long it would take to walk this route, though I doubt it very much matters since time has no meaning in the land of the dead....

Join me next week for part two, where for wizards and mermaids and sainted mothers.

* Little lambs mark the graves of dead children in Green-Wood Cemetery.

The Man In The Picture and other Venice Ghosts

Just got through finishing Susan Hill's The Man in the Picture, a capably executed novella of the M.R. James school. I generally agree with the criticism out there -- it's classic, restrained, elegant, a wee tad disappointing at the end -- but am intrigued enough by her style to go out and get a copy of The Woman in Black. It's not easy being a writer of classical ghost stories these days, and I'm happy to have found someone with a similarly old-fashioned sensibility. Look for a review of that soon.

There's not much more to discuss about The Man in the Picture, other than I very much liked its use of an inanimate haunted object (I love me a good inanimate haunted object!) but the book is a handy springboard for introducing my newest adventure, the first in what will hopefully be a recurring series: virtual tours through haunted cities. The first, of course, will be Venice (I've already alluded to it here) and draws heavily upon this book, since I've never actually visited the place. (The book is the magic lantern show to my 19th century country rube.)

Before we actually wander the haunted streets of our imaginations, a little background on Venice, specifically on Venice as a trope in the horror canon. According to TVtropes.org, cities with canals instead of streets are a perennially popular setting for works of fantasy, though they're not sure why -- perhaps it's an aesthetic thing, or perhaps it's simply because watery bi-ways are so unusual. My theory hews somewhat closely to the latter; the unreal, shape-shifting quality of water opposes all that is solid -- earth, asphalt -- and thus lends itself to fevered imaginings, to the dreaming of dreams. And in dreams, of course, we all know the symbolic qualities of water include birth, death, sex, the deepest parts of the psyche: the perfect setting for our darkest tales.

Perhaps the most famous suspense story set in Venice is Daphne du Maurier's "Don't Look Now," though a significant portion of "The Talented Mr. Ripley" is set in Venice as well. (The is also a ghost story called "The Haunted Hotel" by Wilkie Collins, which I shall clearly have to read.) "The Man in the Picture" joins this illustrious crowd as its narrative moves between the Most Serene Republic and sedate Cambridge. Hill's descriptions of the city are marred with dread: "It seemed to me to be a city of corruption and excess, an artificial place, full of darkness and foul odors... [of] dark and sinister water." In the course of the book, two young couples visit Venice on their honeymoon; the first couple visits quite innocently, the second seem drawn to it even though they know it brought death and tragedy in the past. In Hill's world, the city and the eponymous painting depicting it exert a dark power over anyone who beholds them.

Though I'm sure it's a perfectly delightful city, thanks to speculative fiction I can now only think of Venice in terms of gloom and darkness. Why not profit from my fear and misery, gentle reader? Come with me on a journey that starts dark and will only get darker. Headless monks, drowning witches, the sighing ghosts of dead children... all these things await you as you shiver through the summer months in various dank and moldy catacombs, taking the Deathly Grand Tour with your beloved Spinster Aunt...

Venetian Cemetery Photo courtesy of Lisa Manetti

Ghost books, follow me home

I'm currently reading two books about ghosts and Venice: Susan Hill's The Man in the Picture, and Alberto Toso Fei's Venetian Legends and Ghost Stories, which jumped off my friend's bookshelf and thrust itself into my hands back in February, and so I obligingly took it home. The chapter titles alone fire the imagination: The Flight of the Witch, The Sigh of the Severed Head, The Sad Song of the Mermaid. Perhaps, as I move through the book next week and through the rest of the month, I shall post updates, imaginary travelogues, that take you and I through the very hauntedest haunts of the city watery graves! And, of course, a review of The Man in the Picture is forthcoming as well!

It's a great day for millinery

5:56 a.m. Kate's in the car! She went for the Grace Kelly look -- good call. That's what you wear to become a princess. I hope this spells the end of the strapless trend in wedding dresses for a little while.

I've been up since 5:30. The good china's out, the tea's on, and both the Queen and I are wearing yellow.

Update: For more on my extremely important impressions of the Royal Wedding, pop over to my Twitter feed!

Double update! The Toronto Star issued a special commemorative coin! I will try very hard not to lose it.

Triple update: Grace van Cutsem rules:

There's still snow in the colonies

I'm in Huntsville, Ontario. There are patches of snow on the ground. We're elbow deep in preparations for the royal wedding tomorrow. My Nana gave us a quick tutorial on how to sit whilst drinking tea (ankles crossed). My sister briefly read a recipe for scones, then seemed to get bored and wandered off to do something else. My niece is safely asleep in her Disney Princess sleeping bag. I'm enjoying this history on the creepy history of the royal family, watching as much pre-wedding coverage as possible and eating pie. That is all.

A Very Royal Weekend

Dear readers,

As many of you may know by now, I am flying to Canada tonight then driving up to Huntsville, Ontario to watch the Royal Wedding on TV with my Nana. Stay tuned for frequent updates on dresses (mine -- what, I'm going to dress up too, you know!), the tea I drink, the amount of whiskey I pour into my tea, and what I put on my crumpet.

Love,

Spinster Aunt

This just in: girls can drink whiskey now

According to my good friends at the Canadian Press, women are just discovering this awesome new thing called bourbon.

"I think there's this sense of relief that finally we were at a point where we can be taken seriously as women who enjoy bourbon and the lifestyle that accompanies it," said Mary Quinn Ramer, a founding board member from Lexington.

And man, what a lifestyle it is. It's pretty much all success all the time.

Here's another fun fact: "Bill Samuels Sr., concocted the Maker's Mark recipe in the 1950s, but it was his mother, Margie, who coined the brand's name and came up with the idea of adorning the bottles with dripping red wax."

I'm thinking Mama Margie's "idea" came about kinda like this: "Oh fuck me, I spilt the goddam wax again!"

Insidious (2011)

Insidious is a tautly-crafted, old-school, genuinely terrifying movie.

Some of the crappier reviews of Insidious throw around the word "cliche" but don't you believe it. Don't believe the inept and condescending critics who say things like "you'll like it if you've never seen a horror movie before." Genre is wasted on these dorks, who prissily sit there and tick off the things they recognize from other movies. Yes, the film references other movies in a fan-boy kind of way. Deal with it.

As for those who complain the scares are lame, well -- ! The much-derided baby-monitor scene spooked the hell out of me. I don't know, I guess I find simple things like demon voices on baby monitors frightening. I'm a simple woman, I guess. But the scene I really, really, REALLY loved more than anything else in the movie was the one in which the weird midget guy starts playing "Tiptoe through the Tulips" on the record player while Renai (Rose Byrne) is outside putting out the garbage. I love the way it's shot, with her hearing the record before glimpsing him through the window. I love the use of sound in both these scenes. (One critic said the film relied too much on sound. Say what?) And what about the scary old lady in the photos, getting closer in each picture? How on earth can anyone not find these concepts, these images, scary as hell? And don't say it's because you've seen a lot of scary movies before. If a 19th century newsie ghost started fucking around with your record player, you wouldn't act so cool.

Things do break down a little in the third act, I will concede that. I can see the necessity of the father fighting for his son, I liked the romp through the haunted house, I even liked the twist. (Again, as with the whole genre-versus-cliché argument, there's something satisfying about a twist that you see coming.) And oh how I loved all the ghosts crowding into the house. I don't know that I would have given up that pleasure, even though I sort of wish the story had diverged after the seance scene. (How I would have done it? Let the demon posses the boy, kill the boy. Maybe I would not have gotten a PG rating.) The break-down, as I see it, only stems from the necessity of tying up the story. In other words, there's less of that amorphous creepiness I so enjoy, and more plot strands dutifully tied up. It doesn't feel like a climax so much as a chore duly executed.

Luckily for me, the rest of the film more than makes up for the imperfect third act. The true genre pleasures are all present and to those who decry them as clichés, I have to ask them: "How would you have done it? What totally original spin on the concept of haunting would you have come up with?" Or, more theoretically, "Does it make you happier to deny yourself the pleasures of genre than to immerse yourself in them?" Likely I would be greeted with silence. But not an ominous silence because, you know, that's totally been done before.