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In case you forgot, according to the Gambrel/Schoch Treaty of 2022, January 31 is Second Halloween. And since it falls on a Friday this year, I have to review something appropriate to the season.

But what would that be? I already reviewed plenty of Halloween and Halloween-adjacent books back in October. For this, I felt that something slightly different was in order. So, after some searching, I was able to scare up (ha!) this curious little volume.

If you’ve read much Lovecraft, you know he had a distinctive writing style. A style sometimes described as, “why use fewer words when more will do?” More charitably, we might say he liked to employ unusual adjectives to convey how strange and horrible many of the creatures and places he imagined were. So for instance, despite his own atheism, he would use “blasphemous” as an intensifier to describe just how thoroughly out of line with our normal rules of reality something might be. And of course, he more or less singlehandedly kept alive the use of the word “eldritch”, to the point that it is now almost synonymous with his style of horror.

The Lovecraftian mode is surprisingly seductive. Once you’ve read a couple of his stories, even if you smirk a little at how overwrought they are, you’ll likely find some of his literary mannerisms seeping into your own writing, like unhallowed shadows from the penumbra of unlighted corridors beyond time; nameless abysms swaying horribly to the piping of a damnable flute held in cacodaemoniacal claws…

See what I mean?

Osvaldo Felipe Agorarte clearly does, and has become so enchanted with HPL’s anti-lyrical prose that he has adapted famous historical documents in this manner. So for instance, the Declaration of Independence is rendered:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, but that there are dark powers beyond our understanding that seek to destroy our free will and replace it by a tyrannical rule.

And the Gettysburg Address is rewritten as:

It is for us to continue the fight against the terrors that threaten our world, to resist the madness that grips our enemies, and to ensure that our nation, under God, and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish.

(For the sake of politeness, let’s just ignore what Lovecraft’s opinions on the actual versions of either of these texts would likely have been, okay?)

Is this rewriting amusing? Yes, it is, at least to me. It’s not quite as catchy as “I pledge allegiance to Queen Fragg and her mighty state of hysteria,” but still, it makes me chuckle.

On the other hand, it doesn’t necessarily continue to be amusing after the first five or six times. It reminded me of a typical Saturday Night Live skit (at least from the days when I watched SNL, which I really haven’t done since Tina Fey stopped appearing regularly), in that it takes a mildly funny joke and carries it on way too long.

As with SNL skits, to fully flesh it out to feature length, the joke needs some sort of development. What I would have liked to see would have been something where the documents start out more or less like we know them, but keep hinting, with increasing urgency as time progresses, at the terrible forces which threaten our world. Like a good Lovecraft story, or even better, an M.R. James story, the horror needs to creep up on you gradually. If we got the feeling that Jefferson was getting vague premonitions of cosmic horror, and by the time we get to say, Calvin Coolidge, he’s really staring down the barrel of a Nyarlathotep-style apocalypse, that would be interesting. (Although it’s tough to imagine “Silent Cal” talking like Lovecraft, no matter what was going on.)

But as it is, it’s kind of a one-trick pony. Admittedly, some of the historical documents are interesting in their own right, and I’d never even heard of some of them, so it was educational in that respect. And it is illustrated with some appropriately grotesque artwork, like that seen on the cover. On the other hand, it’s set in a font that I guess is meant to be Gothic, but frankly looked like a baroque, serifed equivalent of Comic Sans, which makes it a bit of a chore to read.

All in all, it’s an interesting concept, and could be the basis for something promising, but probably isn’t worth buying at its current price, unless you are madly in love with HPL’s prose and simply can’t get enough of it.

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Imagine this: one day you are wasting time scrolling through political Twitter in an election year. Amid all the angry ranting, the stupid jokes, the obligatory posturing, the bots, the polls, etc. you see some rando post a cover of a book, saying something like, “this will explain it.”

The book looks interesting, so you make a note of it. It’s expensive on Amazon, so instead you wait to get it from the library. Meanwhile, politics continues. The election happens. A great deal of pixels are expended by people writing about the election, the transition, and the meaning of it all. Social media is the epicenter of all these different sources of opinion, competing to emit the “hottest” of all possible “takes.”

Finally, you read the book. The book is over sixty years old. Indeed, it’s older than one of the candidates in the election. Most of the media we are familiar with today did not exist when it was written. Innumerable technological and cultural changes separate the book’s era and the present day.

So you know that whatever agenda the book’s author had, it can’t possibly have had much of anything to do with the current controversies. He didn’t have any type of modern “derangement syndrome”. Any such hang-ups he may have had are entombed with him. After all, you know what happened between 1962 and today, whereas the book can ipso facto only make educated guesses.

You might expect the book to feel outdated or quaint or charmingly naive. After all, many books from these bygone eras evoke nostalgia for their time, and what American hasn’t occasionally felt wistful for decades past? On the other hand, you might expect the book to feel like a relic in another way, to be offensive, or to expound views of the world that we find at best laughable or at worst repugnant. There are certainly a lot of old books that do that, too. When you read old books, your reaction is usually, “Ah, the good old days!” or “Oh, how far we have come!”. There is also a third category, which is “<sigh>, nothing ever changes…”

The Image is different. It does occasionally evoke all three of these feelings in various places. But none of them form your dominant reaction. Instead, it’s more like…

Well, put it another way: when you read an old book you expect to know more about your own time than the author of that book. That’s not to say you’re “smarter” than the author in any way; just that you are aware of facts that they are not. You read old books, generally, to either understand Universal Truths, or else to learn something about a particular period in the past.

This Daniel J. Boorstin, though… he understands our time perfectly. And he knows us—better, methinks, than we know ourselves.

JFK was still alive. Watergate not only wasn’t a scandal yet, but the place hadn’t even been built. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were just names on a map to the average American. And the nearest thing to “social media” was fan clubs.

Yet, though he was writing in the oft-romanticized era of a supposedly more innocent America, Boorstin saw, with terrifying clarity, the shape of things to come. Like a prophet of old, he inveighs against evils that 1960s America must have seen as remote and unfathomable, but are now familiar to the citizens (prisoners?) of the internet age.

The pervasive alienation of modern life; this strange world of propaganda, manufactured controversies, of information warfare, where elections turn on social media ads, and celebrity influencers shape the course of geopolitics… this is the world that anyone my age or younger has grown up in, and which, if we are to lead happy, fulfilling lives, we must somehow navigate. Or perhaps even escape.

Of course, just as a fish cannot know what water is, having never known its absence, it is hard for us to clearly see the pseudo-world that surrounds us. That is Boorstin’s other great advantage: he knew the other world, the one that came before… and so he is well-suited to be our Virgil, guiding us through post-modernity.

I know, this seems like a tall order for a simple book. And make no mistake, I’m not saying that reading it will instantly solve all our troubles. Like the famous quote from The Twilight Zone says, it will not end the nightmare… it will only explain it.

Let’s begin, shall we?

***

Boorstin starts off innocuously enough with a definition of “pseudo-event”: i.e. a manufactured event that exists solely for the purpose of making news. The quintessential example is the press conference, when politicians and other public figures speak to reporters. Any one who has ever watched a press conference knows there is an inherent artificiality to them, and yet they remain major topics of discussion among pundits. As Boorstin puts it, “demanding more than the world can give us, we require that something be fabricated to make up for the world’s deficiency.”

Once you’ve read Boorstin’s description of pseudo-events, you start to realize that the news is full of them. On a typical day, there are far more pseudo-events than real ones in the headlines. And one pseudo-event can spawn more. A good modern example would be when President Obama, after a controversy surrounding a clumsily-worded answer to a question at a press conference, held a “beer summit” to try and smooth over hurt feelings.

Increasingly, politics has come to be dominated by those most adept at generating pseudo-events. To use one of Boorstin’s examples, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s great talent was his ability to manipulate the press–many members of which despised him–into providing breathless coverage of his flamboyant announcements of names and lists of alleged communists.

As Boorstin explains, in the era of modern media, even a politician doing nothing at all can be “news”, e.g. Senator so-and-so’s silence on a given issue can spawn a whole series of speculative articles. The entire category of news known as “current events” is completely saturated with pseudo-events that it takes a truly spectacular development for reality to break through.

Pseudo-events are one epiphenomenon of what Boorstin calls “The Graphic Revolution”: the logarithmic increase in the transmissibility of, and demand for, news. This revolution began with the invention of the telegraph in the 1830s and continues to the present day.

One consequence of the Graphic Revolution, as the name implies, is the proliferation of images. Whereas before people learned information about the world primarily through wordy descriptions, either spoken or textual, beginning in the 19th century, images could now be readily created and reproduced. This change in how information was transmitted began to slowly redefine how people perceived reality, to the point where images could actually overshadow the real thing they were meant to represent.

(It’s not billed as such, but on top of everything else The Image is a fantastic chronicle of American history. Boorstin concisely narrates the flow of major technological and cultural changes that have shaped the country’s growth.)

Boorstin gives example after example of how pseudo-events can be staged to seem more interesting to viewers on television than those witnessing the event in person (e.g., a parade for General Douglas MacArthur’s return to the United States) or how a minor comment by a senator can be blown up into a full-fledged controversy. Real events are later re-enacted for the cameras, and so the reenactment rather than the reality forms the dominant image in the public mind.

Summing up, Boorstin says that, “our ‘free market place of ideas’ is a place where people are confronted by competing pseudo-events and are allowed to judge among them.” With the rise of pseudo-events, which are neither wholly true nor wholly false, Boorstin argues, “the American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality.” Which has frightening implications for America’s democratic institutions. When a government is built on the idea of a well-informed populace, what happens when the very concept of what it means to be “well-informed” becomes blurry?

So, by now I hope you are saying to yourself, “Well, this sounds like a very intriguing book. Perhaps I shall have to see if I can acquire a copy.”

Reader, I have not finished summarizing the book yet. What I have described above is only Chapter 1.

The Image is not just about the collapse of America’s governing institutions as a result of our increasing inability to discern lies from truth. As Arthur C. Clarke would say, “nothing as trivial as that.” From here, things are going to get much weirder, much darker, and much more personal. What we’ve covered so far is like the titular play in the book The King in Yellow: where reading the seemingly-innocuous first act sucks you in, and only once your eyes fall on the opening lines of the second act do you descend irrevocably into madness.

Except, of course, in reverse. Obviously, I think that reading The Image is actually a path to sanity, to making sense of an increasingly mad world. Then again, Hildred Castaigne would say the same thing about the play The King in Yellow, so it really is all a question of trust.

I make a pact with you, dear reader: you check out the free sample on Amazon, and see if you’re intrigued enough to want to read the whole thing. Then come back here in, oh, I don’t know–shall we say two weeks? Two weeks it is! And there will be no more shadows between us, only truth, as exists between master and apprentice blogger and reader.

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This is a classic novel about an envoy to a planet known as Winter, a world as cold as the name suggests and populated by ambisexual humanoids. Naturally, this results in quite a culture shock for the envoy, Genly Ai, who has to deal with understanding their alien nature as well as the intricate political machinations that take place between the various nations of the planet. His primary guide to understanding this is a politician named Estraven. (Hilariously, auto-correct wants to change this to “estrogen.”)

The first half of the book is lyrical, mystical, and well-nigh incomprehensible, at least to me. I had trouble keeping track of who was who, what was what, and generally following what was going on. Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it. Actually, I enjoyed it quite a lot, in the way one can enjoy a beautiful piece of music.

But then in the second half, things started to coalesce. Estraven, in particular, becomes a phenomenally well-developed character who starts dispensing pearls of wisdom like this:

“To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here ‘all roads lead to Mishnory.’ To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road…

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

What an absolutely killer insight! It’s the sort of gem that makes me so glad I read the book, and make it a perfect entry for Vintage Science-Fiction Month. This is why we observe it every January; it’s an opportunity to look up classic books like this and find what it was that made the foundational works of the genre so striking to generations of readers.

Estraven and Genly are eventually forced to work together to make a nightmarish 80 day trek across a frozen wasteland. (I highly recommend reading this book on a snowy winter night if possible.)

These scenes, while maybe a little repetitive, were still very effective. The two characters, having nothing else to do, learn a lot about each other and themselves. By the end of the journey, I absolutely loved Estraven, who is really one of the most fully-realized ‘alien’ characters I can recall. Which makes the way the story ends all the more powerful.

The book is remarkable for the way it depicts a truly alien world. I only know of a few modern authors–A.C. Flory and Lorinda Taylor, to name names–who have attempted anything like this. And no wonder, because it’s very hard to do, but done well, it makes for a remarkable, dream-like experience to read. They say the value of reading is that it lets you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Well, in this case, it’s more like 800 miles in an androgynous alien’s skis. And that, my friends, is what science-fiction is all about.

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Look at that cover! It’s sharp, and scary, and eye-catching. I knew I had to read this the minute I saw it. The title is intriguing too, calling to mind Brutal Doom, the mod that made the infamously gory and violent video game Doom even more gory and violent. I found the whole composition so arresting that I decided to buy it on the spot.

As it turns out, this is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style of book, and (again evoking Doom, albeit with considerably less gratuitous carnage) it is largely set on an abandoned moon base which has been overrun by creatures known as Saturmeks: alien entities highly reminiscent of Daleks with chainsaws.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself! The protagonist of the book is Hilary Hils, a research assistant to Prof. Vyvian Wylie. Hils is accidentally teleported forward in time to the moon, where a research base has been taken over by the aforementioned Saturmeks.

And that’s where you come in: from there, it’s up to you to decide how Hils will proceed. Will you simply sit quietly and wait for Prof. Wylie to fix the machine and rescue you? Or will you start exploring the moonbase, and even try to stop the hideous aliens? The choice is yours, and which ending you get depends on how many points you have, which are acquired periodically at certain critical moments in the story. As a hint: risk-taking and boldness are rewarded. I mean, who takes part in an adventure story just so they can make the “safe” choice?

It’s a fun and surprisingly gripping experience, and I found myself chuckling as I eagerly hopped from page to page to see what the consequences of my decisions would be. It combines the interactivity of a video game with the added demands on the imagination required for reading. It wouldn’t be a bad choice as a gift for a kid in the 10-12 age range who doesn’t typically enjoy reading the books assigned in school. From what I’ve heard, there are a lot of them these days.

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One of the rules for writers, laid down somewhere in the fragments of an ancient Instagram post by the mad literary agent Abdul Al-Hazred, is that a writer should give their audience what they expect. A steady hand at the tiller and no surprises, that’s what readers want! And if a writer must venture outside their typical comfort zone, at least they should do it under a pseudonym, so people don’t accidentally get exposed to something they didn’t expect.

How powerful is this rule? So powerful that even the richest and perhaps most (in)famous living author conforms to it.

Naturally, because I am a rebel without a clue, I like it when people break this rule. So I was delighted when one of my favorite authors decided to do exactly that in this book.

Travailing Through Time is a very un-Bertoccian book. Usually, his stories are about millennials trying to navigate modernity, usually with a heavy dose of ironic detachment and witty pop-cultural references.

Travailing Through Time is different: it’s about hardworking farmers in colonial New England. Simple, God-fearing people, who have no time to spare for ironic detachment. As for cultural references, well, they basically begin and end with the Bible.

In short, it’s a picture of a people and a place totally different from us and ours. Having established this, Bertocci then proceeds to introduce, in a clever way, a glimpse of a more modern sensibility. Only a hint, nothing more.

Both the drama and the humor of the story come from the obvious questions: what would people of the past make of us? When we look back in history, it’s too easy for the people to appear to us as caricatures. Which of course is also how we would appear to them. It takes work to really know and understand a person, or a people, or a place.

And since the New Year is always a time for reflection, this seems like a good time to ponder the questions raised in Bertocci’s ingenious little story. What do we really know about the past? And what would the past make of us? Leopold von Ranke said “All ages are equidistant from eternity.” We mustn’t think of ourselves as somehow “better” than the people of another time just because we are more recent. It’s 2025, after all.

All these big ideas, Bertocci packs into a witty and entertaining short story. A perfect choice for starting the new year off the right way.