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I’m a big believer in tradition. Not for nothing have friends compared me to Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. Especially on topics like Halloween and college football, I am something of a zealot on matters of tradition. And I have to be! A tradition is like a plant: it must be nurtured, tended, and cared for. Otherwise it dies.

Today’s book is an example of a dead tradition. The introduction informs us that “reading a ghost story on Christmas Eve was once as much a part of traditional Christmas celebrations as turkey, eggnog, and Santa Claus.” In Victorian times, the “Christmas ghost story” was a cliché, but now the only trace of it that still exists in the popular consciousness is in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and its many adaptations. (In the words of Bart Simpson, “TV writers have been milking that goat for years.”)

A cartoonist known as Seth aimed to revive this tradition, by republishing classic ghost stories, of which this is one, originally published in 1925. It’s about a young man who sees a ghostly woman in a bookstore, which was previously a residence. In a little-used annex, he finds a manuscript of poems she had written in life. Thinking perhaps it will put her spirit at rest, he decides to publish them himself.

Now, you might say, that sounds like a simple enough story. And it is—but the Victorians had another tradition, you see, and that tradition is also preserved in this volume. That tradition is: incredibly overwrought prose.

I’m no stranger to complex writing. I grew up on Gilbert, Hardy, and Lovecraft, you know. I’m not one of those people who thinks writing should be as concise as possible, as I’ve said more than once. But damn, this thing is something else. Everything is described in the minutest detail, and once you’ve got through reading it, you realize that you don’t know much more than when you started. It reminded me of Henry James, only more so.

It’s not actually a bad story in itself. It has kind of a twist, and it’s a twist that I think will appeal to writers in particular. I’ll give you a hint: how would you feel if someone published your drafts without permission? But the problem is that I had to plow through so much ornate verbiage to get to it that by the end I’m like, “is that it?”

That said, maybe it would work better read aloud to friends by firelight on a cold December evening, while drinking eggnog. Perhaps eggnog mixed with a goodly helping of rum. Then you and your friends could enjoy the story together, and engage in the delightful parlor game of debating why the room was green and what it symbolizes. And isn’t that the real point of reading?

Well, no, of course it’s not. That would be silly. Still, like the ghost of Maiden’s Peak haunting the summer festival, I enjoy keeping alive all the old legends that people have forgotten over the years. And I must thank Lydia Schoch for bringing this book to my attention. It took four years, but I finally got around to reading it! 🙂

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They call him the Bard for a reason. Shakespeare took the English language and used it like he owned it, constantly inventing memorable turns of phrase. He was so good at it that by now it actually works against him. You’ll be watching a Shakespeare play and somebody says something and you roll your eyes and go “oh, that old cliché… oh, wait,” suddenly remembering that it wasn’t a cliché back then.

We still have some creative users of the English language with us today, even as modern communication technology homogenizes speech patterns. Adam Bertocci is one of them, and his latest book shows off his skill at the playing of words.

It’s a simple enough story, about a teenaged girl named McKenna who is cast as Mercutio in her high school’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Now, I have to confess my ignorance: I’d forgotten there even was such a character in R & J, if I ever knew it. It’s not my favorite Shakespeare—give me Macbeth or better yet, Coriolanus, any day.

But anyway, McKenna is assigned the rôle, as people used to call it, and it’s a tough challenge for her, because Mercutio, in case you also forgot, is a male. So she has to get in touch with her masculine side, and she figures that the best way to do that is hang out with her brother’s friends, including the boy she has a crush on.

What follows is a typically Bertoccian mix of wit and philosophy. Because of the age of the characters, it’s less about the angst of figuring out life as an adult, and more about the experience of growing up in the first place. As a result, it has more of a carefree, breezy quality to it, which is exactly as it should be.

I could go on, but I’ve been rallying people to read Bertocci’s books for years now, and I have a mind to keep on doing it. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and read it already!

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I promise, I really will get back to this blog’s main purpose of reviewing indie books soon. This strange detour we have been on for the past few weeks is actually related to that project, albeit—in typical Ruined Chapel style—not in an obvious way.

You see, I am trying solve a problem. The problem is what we might call ensloppification. (There’s another term, but I decline to use it.) In other words, why is everything becoming awash in slop? It’s getting hard to even find the kind of books I enjoy reading, due to the fact that the entire market for books is now being flooded with slop. Not all of it is AI-generated slop either, though I think some non-trivial and swiftly growing amount is.

Nor is this problem limited to the realm of books. Every facet of life is subject to this problem. There is a profound feeling among people my age that everything has gotten worse in a significant, yet undefinable way since the end of the 20th century. Maybe this is just nostalgia. But I submit to you that it isn’t. That it is rather the acceleration of trends documented by (among others) Paul Kingsnorth and Daniel J. Boorstin. These trends have been with us for centuries, but are now becoming increasingly large parts of life.

Which is not to say they are all bad. As one commenter pointed out, Kingsnorth’s “Machine” has brought with it innumerable material benefits. And when you come right down to it, slop itself can be viewed as a good. Give a starving man slop, and he’ll enjoy it as though it were a banquet. Give a gourmand a banquet, and he may well complain that the meal is ruined because the appetizers included plain gouda when he specifically asked for smoked. It’s all a matter of perspective.

That’s why I like to seek out different, rare perspectives. The author of today’s book is a case in point. In my opinion, Yukio Mishima is probably the greatest ultranationalist bisexual samurai bodybuilder ever to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you can find anyone else at the intersection of that Venn diagram, I’d like to hear about them.

So what is Sun and Steel about? Well, the truth is, it’s a self-help book. But, um, not exactly a typical self-help book.

The quick summary is that Mishima was a quiet, sickly, bookish youth who demonstrated great facility with words, and not so much with sports and physical activity. But later in life, he realized the importance of physical exertion and muscular development to complement his artistic and aesthetic sensibility. So he started working out with weights and getting fresh air and sunshine, and in doing so, developed a closer connection with his own body.

That’s the CliffsNotes version. But see, there’s more to how Mishima approaches this than “lift heavy stone, make sad head voice quiet.” As in:

It was thus that I found myself confronted with those lumps of steel: heavy, forbidding, cold, as though the essence of night had in them been still further condensed. 

He makes lifting a dumbbell sound like a magic ritual in communion with powerful spiritual forces. They should have given him the Nobel just for that. And he’s not done:

Muscles have gradually become something akin to classical Greek. To revive the dead language, the discipline of the steel was required; to change the silence of death into the eloquence of life, the aid of steel was essential. 

Of course, this isn’t actually what Mishima wrote. It’s a translation from the Japanese. But something tells me it’s a good translation, because that sticks with you.

In summary, exercise strengthens not only the body, but the mind as well. People forget this, but the mind isn’t just the brain. It’s more complex than that, and anyone who has ever done any kind of physical exercise knows that it has a noticeable effect on one’s mental state.

So far, so good. But now, we have to talk about the more problematic aspects of Mishima’s work. You see that subtitle about “Art, Action, and Ritual Death”? Yes, well, it’s time we talked about that last bit. Part of Mishima’s desire for a powerful physique was driven by his wish to die young as an impressive and tragic figure, rather than wasting away in old age.

What’s more, he accomplished this by committing ritual suicide after attempting—with little hope of success, which he must have realized—to inspire the military to overthrow the Japanese government.

Now, it should go without saying, but this is the internet, so I will say it: Ruined Chapel does not endorse these activities. The fact that I admire Mishima’s writing should not be confused with support of all his actions. Suicide is never the answer, and as for his subversive activities, well, while I am not terribly familiar with the politics of mid 20th-century Japan, (or any other period Japan, for that matter) I do have some general comments on the concept.

Do you know why popular opinion holds that the American Revolution was awesome, but the French Revolution was super creepy? Part of the reason might be that America is a global superpower that spreads its own version of history everywhere, but I think another part of it is that the Americans didn’t insist on destroying the British monarchy. A lot of the revolutionaries probably would have if they could have, but because of the Atlantic Ocean, they couldn’t. So, they were forced to settle for making a new government somewhere else.

Which is actually the much cooler thing to do. If you try to take over the existing government, then even if you succeed, you’re just taking on their problems. It’s like the Statutory Duel in The Grand Duke: “The winner must adopt / The loser’s poor relations / Discharge his debts, / Pay all his bets, / And take his obligations.” After their revolution, the new French government had the same problems as the old one. Even the most obsessive, hyper-focused, and determined administrative nerd of the age couldn’t fix the country’s fundamental problems. Much better to start anew someplace else.

So, in summary, I approve of Mishima’s ideas on the relationship of body and mind, of the inadequacy of words to express certain feelings. I do not approve of his ideas regarding ritual death and leading futile coup attempts. Now that that’s cleared up, we can focus on the important point: how all this relates to the problem of slop I noted earlier.

As the last several posts have discussed, we live in an increasingly technological, mechanical, and fundamentally anti-biological epoch. Our shelter from the harsh realities of the natural world means that our primary emotional experiences come in the form of transmitted images, produced artificially for our passive entertainment.

Now, a lot of people have started to notice this, and they are bothered by it. For example, I cannot tell you how many articles and videos I’ve read and watched about how movies nowadays seem so fake and lifeless. This is a valid critique, but it also does not go far enough.  It’s true that Lawrence of Arabia looks more realistic than Marvel Spandex Brigade #7000, but that makes it easy to forget that Lawrence of Arabia is also fake. Sir David Lean was standing behind the camera, capturing the perfect shot, which he and Anne V. Coates then edited for our consumption. Everything nowadays is so fake that the artisanal, meticulously-crafted fakes of yesteryear seem real to us.

(This, by the way, is why Boorstin is so valuable. He was writing in an era that people of my generation look back on as comparatively brimming with genuine reality—and it was—but that Boorstin already saw as thoroughly laced with the seeds of the fake and the simulated.)

This is where Mishima comes in. Reality is not in images or even words, much as it pained a wordsmith like Mishima to admit. Reality is muscle, it is sweat, it is the “runner’s high” that comes once you are thoroughly exhausted from physical exercise.

Most important, of course, is that reality is not always a pretty picture. Rather it is chiaroscuro of both pleasant and unpleasant things, and the true experience of reality must contain elements that are not strictly pleasurable, at least as the term is normally understood. Physical exercise is the perfect distillation of this concept, because it is an activity that can feel great and hurt like hell at the same time.

Understanding this strange duality, accepting that pain is a part of experiencing actual life, as opposed to consooming slop, is the philosophical insight at the core of Mishima’s writing and his aesthetic sensibility. It is also, in my opinion, the key to experiencing life after Kingsnorth’s “Machine.”

Note that I chose my words there very carefully. I did not say “resist” or “fight” or “destroy” the Machine. As Kingsnorth documented exhaustively, and then somehow himself failed to understand, people have been going against the Machine for over 4,000 years, and they have made no progress on getting rid of it. Despite some of the more occult takes that I’ve entertained, I ultimately don’t think the Machine is a supernatural force. It is just a thing. It does some good things and it does some bad things. Trying to fight it is like trying to fight the existence of atmospheric pressure.

Rather, what we are seeking is a way to survive in the absence of the Machine, just in case it stops. A way to find meaning in life separate from anything Machine-related, whether good or bad. Mishima’s philosophy is the philosophy of someone who has set himself apart from the world of the Machine, and learned to accustom his mind to the harshness of physical reality. Clearly, not everything he found there was idyllic, and to live in reality is by no means synonymous with living happily. It is only a start, not a final goal to be achieved. And as the old saying goes, the best time to start was 30 years ago. The second-best time to start is now.

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Ah, my friends; my loyal, loyal readers! We review a lot of strange books on this blog, don’t we? Old books, forgotten books, books possibly no one else has even read.

And yet I daresay this might be the strangest one we’ve ever done. Is it fiction? Is it philosophy? Is it from Heaven or is it from Hell? Well, maybe a bit of both. Let us, as my unwanted AI assistant is fond of saying, “dive in” and “discover” and “explore” this exceedingly bizarre volume together.

So first off, you might ask, “what is CCRU? Is it an acronym?” Well, yes and no. It might stand for “Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.” The “About the Author” listing on Amazon for this book states:

Cybernetic Culture Research Unit was a name on a door in the Philosophy Department of Warwick University, UK, during the late 1990s. It was a rogue unit, blurring the borders between traditional scholarship, cyberpunk sci-fi, and music journalism. Its frenzied interdisciplinary activity, including the Virtual Futures and Virotechnology conferences and the journal Abstract Culture, disturbed Warwick’s Philosophy Department, resulting in the termination of the unit.

On the other hand, one of the… well, let’s call them “stories” in the book itself alleges that CCRU is not an acronym at all, but the name of a Polynesian Demon of Apocalypse. But since this appears to be entirely made up by the authors of the text, there is no reason to assume this is the case.

Finally, the text on the back of the book states that “CCRU does not, has not, and will never exist.”

So, no one will acknowledge what the title of the book means or who wrote it. If this seems confusing and strange to you, just wait.

The contents of the book are organized into chapters, some of which read like prose poems in what can only be described as a techno-Lovecraftian mode. There are many references to worms, fish, ancient gods and the like, but in conjunction with turn-of-the-millennium computer jargon.

Perhaps most notable are the repeated references to lemurs. “Lemur” being a word both for the ring-tailed primates native to Madagascar as well as a derivation from the Latin word for ghost, lemurēs. In the context of the CCRU, the word seems to mean both at once, since lemurs are understood to be transcendent beings, pursuing some sort of unknown objective across vast gulfs of space and especially time. This is explained (using a very loose definition of the word “explained”) in the section “Lemurian Time War,” which describes how a man named William S. Burroughs wrote a book called Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar.

William S. Burroughs was real, and did write a book about lemurs in Madagascar, although it was called Ghost of Chance. The text described by the CCRU is supposedly sent backward from the future in order to allow it to be written.

Which brings me to the first of several notable concepts introduced in the CCRU’s corpus: the concept of hyperstition.

An amalgam of “hype” and “superstition”, a hyperstition is an idea which brings itself into being. A famous example of this is Roko’s Basilisk, a thought-experiment which suggests that if a super-intelligent AI exists in the future, it may punish those who tried to prevent its creation. Therefore, it is wise to do everything in one’s power to help create the super-intelligent AI.

You see the diabolical logic? By believing in this theory of a super-intelligent AI, we make it more likely that it will exist. Thus, with a lot of literary license, it can be seen as a type of time-travel; the AI reaching back from the future to instill beliefs that will lead to the creation of itself.

This is, in my opinion, interesting. Admittedly, it might be viewed as just a variant on Pascal’s Wager, but it’s an intriguing concept nonetheless.

It’s also a good illustration of CCRU’s cavalier approach to fiction vs. what we plebs call “reality.” As far as CCRU is concerned, there is no difference. If a fictional idea “exists”, what’s to say it’s less real than something that’s actually, you know, real?

Which is why, in addition to the references to the works of William S. Burroughs which are only loosely connected to the actual man by that name, we get references to writings by people like “Echidna Stillwell” and “Peter Vysparov”, who exchange letters on various cosmic horror abominations which they are assiduously researching. None of this stuff is “real” in the sense you or I understand the term, but it contributes to the overall CCRU philosophy.

What is the overall CCRU philosophy, you wonder?  Well, we’re getting there. It’s not really a thing that lends itself to easy summary, but rather emerges slowly, almost like an organic or chemical process, from the sulfurous stew of bizarre technogothery that foams and bubbles incoherently across the different chapters.

Basically, the picture that gradually emerges is not that different, in broad outlines, from the one painted by Paul Kingsnorth in the book I reviewed last week. Capitalism, far from being a mere system of economics, can be viewed as a kind of inhuman xeno-intelligence which operates according to its own logic, quite apart from anything the humans who make it run intend. Artificial Intelligence is simply the most evolved form of this fundamentally alien entity.

And like Kingsnorth, the CCRU views the thing in apocalyptic metaphysical terms. In this view, AI is not being developed by humans. Rather, it is a force coming from somewhere entirely separate from the everyday realm of human perception—a place sometimes ominously referred to, in the fine Lovecraftian tradition, as “The Outside.”

What is The Outside, and how do things get in from it? Well, Kingsnorth used the metaphor of the internet as a worldwide Ouija board, and this intuitively seems like an analogy of which the CCRU would approve. But they have an even more bizarre and esoteric method for consorting with the dark powers, called the Numogram.

The Numogram, which is the odd diagram you see on the cover, is CCRU’s qabbalistic calling card. It’s impossible to understand the philosophy of Lemurian Time-Sorcery without understanding the Numogram. Unfortunately, (or perhaps fortunately) it is also impossible to understand the Numogram. Quoting directly from Part 8, “Pandemonium”:

“The Numogram, or decimal labyrinth, is composed of ten zones (numbered 0-9) and their interconnections. These zones are grouped into five pairs (syzygies) by nine-sum twinning (zygonovism). The arithmetical difference of each syzygy defines a current (or connection to a tractor zone). Currents constitute the primary flows of the Numogram.”

This is the part of the story where I’m most inclined to wonder if the whole thing is just an Andy Kaufman routine for eccentric philosophers. You can never be sure that the entirety of CCRU’s output is not some elaborate academic practical joke which is not terribly funny.

Except of course for one stark fact: viz., that to the extent anything can be gleaned from the CCRU writings, it is a prediction that AI will relentlessly conquer the world. And indeed, this prediction appears to be coming true. After all, AI is ubiquitous in cyberspace. Just in the course of writing this blog post, I keep getting irritating pop-ups telling me how I could write it “better”. I thought these were merely repetitive and annoying, but perhaps the CCRU is correct, and they are in fact intrusions from dark spiritual forces that lurk in the heart of internet, buried deep in the undersea cables that connect the Earth like monstrous worms. “Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”

Again and again, Kingsnorth and the CCRU align in ironic ways. Where Kingsnorth says “let ‘the West’ die”, CCRU writes cryptically, “America is nothing but the West, and that’s the Land of the Dead.” (“Going west” is archaic slang for dying, presumably because the sun “dies” in that direction at the end of every day.)

The one point on which CCRU differs significantly from Kingsnorth is that their view seems to be that the replacement of humanity by demonic machine intelligence is a good thing. Since I reviewed Kingsnorth’s book, it’s only right to consider the counter-point. We here at Ruined Chapel still follow the Fairness Doctrine, after all. And according to CCRU, humans are basically just an evolutionary mistake. There’s a whole section in here dedicated to explaining why bipeds are an aberration, and your really S-tier lifeforms should be quadrupeds, or better still, cephalopods.

I docked points from Kingsnorth’s book for failing to provide an adequate solution to what he persuasively described as a great spiritual void at the heart of modernity. Well, CCRU claims the void has already been filled—not by anything human, but by dread monsters that haunt the blackness between the stars. Where Kingsnorth would say we should try to remedy this, CCRU favors accelerationism: continuing the process of shredding all trappings of humanity in favor of becoming something else.

It all sounds a bit crazy. But, perhaps the craziest part is that it sounds a little less crazy now than it did at the turn of the millennium. Implausible, yes, but not wholly impossible…

Speaking of the turn of the millennium, Y2K has immense spiritual significance in the CCRU philosophy. Besides the infamous glitch being a kind of “digital hyperstition”, it also marks the dawn of a new era.

Of all the weird vignettes in this book, none stuck with me as much as “The Excruciation of Hummpa-Taddum”. “Hummpa-Taddum” being supposedly some union of mythic gods that gave birth to the Age of Pisces, and even more supposedly, thinly disguised by Lewis Carroll as “Humpty Dumpty”. (To be clear, I can find no evidence that anything called “Hummpa-Taddum” exists in any folklore outside of this volume. Again, the casual mixing of fact and fiction till the lines blur beyond all recognizability is a CCRU specialty.)

The AOE [Architectonic Order of the Eschaton. Don’t ask.–B.G.]  focuses upon a single problem—acknowledging no other: how to reproduce magical power across discontinuity. As Hummpa-Taddum gets smashed on New Year’s Eve, substitute powers await their chance and their destiny, sober, patient, totally ruthless…

The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master—that is all.

As longtime readers know, the aesthetic of “millennial weirdness” is a favorite hobby-horse of mine, and the CCRU Writings have it in spades.  And indeed, perhaps it is more than just an aesthetic found in the world of cyberpunk video games and Art Bell’s radio programs. It does feel, doesn’t it, as if something did change about a quarter-century ago. As if, to quote Lovecraft again, “the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods and forces which were unknown.”

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that Kingsnorth is right: there is some malevolent metaphysical aspect to the rise of what he calls “The Machine.” If so, his plan of setting limits on screen time and not communing with the demonic presences “unless you really have to” is woefully inadequate. The CCRU actually provides a much more plausible roadmap to dealing with such forces, if they do indeed exist. The only issue, of course, is that their handbook provides instructions on how to summon the unholy powers.

As any good Lovecraft reader knows, the Necronomicon is a double-edged sword. You can use it to send the eldritch abominations back whence they came, if you know what you’re doing. And if we are truly in a spiritual war, we’ll need to have a grimoire or two in our toolkit.

But what exactly would this mean? Can we banish AI back into the Shadow Realm just by turning the Numogram upside-down? (It’s not like it would make any less sense.) Well, you could try it, I guess, but again, remember Kingsnorth’s warning about the internet-as-Ouija-board. More to the point, recall the words of the unnaturally long-lived 18th-century necromancer Joseph Curwen in Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward:

I say to you againe, doe not call upp Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you.

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Are you tired of hearing how AI can revolutionize how you work, play, shop, eat, sleep, drink, etc.? Are you sick to death of hearing about how you can leverage social media to earn crypto to buy NFTs? Do you miss the days when you could just walk around the corner without worrying about a self-driving car running you over while influencers record it with their drones to get likes on Tik-Tok?

Well, Paul Kingsnorth is and does. And he’s written a book about it. Not merely about our current state of affairs, but about how we got here, where we are going, and why we are in this handbasket.

He starts off slowly, explaining how “The Machine”, as he calls it, was built. By “The Machine”, he doesn’t just mean computer technology—though that certainly seems to be the endgame—but all of the quantitative, precise, “rational”, scientific, and “left-brained” modes of interacting with the world. An example from James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is instructive: the Germans chopped down all their messy, organic trees and replaced them with nice, evenly-spaced ones. It was orderly, symmetrical—and disastrous for the ecosystem.

The same thing, more or less, has been happening to everything for the last 400 years in Kingsnorth’s view. It’s become harder to ignore lately, but as he explains, artists, poets, writers and other such people have been complaining about the phenomenon for centuries. To take one notable example, consider the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, who mused at the end of World War II, “Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter–leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines.”

Of course, World War II was hardly “the first War of the Machines.” World War I featured tanks, airplanes, machine guns, etc. I’m not sure when “the first” War of the Machines was. Maybe when they introduced the siege engine?

But this just goes to prove Kingsnorth’s point: that this is an ancient problem that has been evolving over the course of world history. The petty political squabbles of this or any other day pale in comparison to this steady, monotonic trend toward a fully-mechanized planet.

Where will it all end? In gray goo? In Kingsnorth’s view, even that might be more merciful than what’s in store for us.

Because, as he takes some pains to elaborate, the danger of technology may be something more than just mass unemployment and the gradual loss of our ability to do anything other than stare at screens. Kingsnorth, a Christian, sees something darker, more metaphysical and spiritual at work here:

“Silicon Valley mavens, from Mark Zuckerberg with his metaverse to Ray Kurzweil with his singularity, regularly talk… about where the technium—The Machine—is taking us. Our job, they seem to imply, is simply to service it as it rolls forward under its own steam, remaking everything in its own image, rebuilding the world, turning us, if we are lucky, into little gods. They never consider where this story has been heard before… that ‘AI’, on the right lips, can sound like just another way of saying ‘Antichrist’.

Humor me. Imagine for a moment that some force is active in the world which is beyond us. Perhaps we have created it. Perhaps it is independent of us. Perhaps it created itself and uses us for its ends… Perhaps it has always been there, watching, and now is seizing its moment.”

This sounds pretty dramatic. On the other hand, there are weird things in the history of technology. As Kingsnorth observes, an apple with a bite out of it has rather major significance in Western theology, and not as a good thing. And then you find out the original price of the Apple I…

Still, this could all easily be dismissed as the human tendency to look for patterns where none exist. (For example, when I typed “exist” just there, it was the 666th word of the post. Does this mean anything? Probably not.)

What is clear, whether you believe in dark supernatural forces at work or not, is that technology is having a significant effect on our ability to relate to one another as human beings. I don’t know if talking to an AI chatbot really is summoning demons, but there’s no doubt that they are capable of producing immensely destructive results.

In example after example, Kingsnorth hammers home the devastating effect that technology is having on people, ruining bodies and minds, destroying relationships, uprooting communities, and in general, “turning man against his brother / till man exists no more.”

All right, I admit that’s leading the witness a bit. Kingsnorth doesn’t necessarily expect us to believe that The Machine is the antichrist, although reading between the lines and listening to some of his interviews, it’s pretty clear to me that in his heart of hearts, that’s exactly what he believes. Which might explain some other things about the way the book ends up.

Because after documenting, in great detail and at some length, all the ways in which The Machine is ruining everything that is good and beautiful, we come to the part where we reasonably might expect him to offer us some kind of solution to this problem.

And what he offers is, essentially, nothing. Oh, he says some fine-sounding words about “setting limits” and “drawing lines.” For example, he himself has resolved to never use an AI chatbot, before almost immediately conceding that it’s possible he might have already unknowingly used one when calling a customer service number. He says he’ll never have a smartphone, but agrees that this makes life in the modern world exceedingly difficult.

Yeah, I’m sure that limiting ourselves to only 4 hours of screen time per day will stop the autonomous weapons systems right in their tracks. “Mr. Dent, have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?”

Kingsnorth is clearly a very intelligent man, and he must know his proposed solutions are woefully inadequate. And frankly, I think that he really believes that trying to fight it is a lost cause. As a Christian, he presumably believes that this has all been foretold, and that his victory will be attained not in this world but in the next, by holding true to his faith through the suffering that is to come.

Which is all well and good, I guess. Although if so, why even bother to write the book? And charge $13.99 plus tax for it on Kindle? This seems like it’s starting the resistance to techno-capitalism off on the wrong foot.

I’m not really accusing Kingnorth of hypocrisy. He is guilty, and he freely admits it. But then, so am I. I’m here writing in sympathy with his anti-machine manifesto on a blog on the internet. If The Machine really is some kind of malevolent xeno-intelligence, this is the part where we cut to it sitting in its lair, cackling maniacally at the pathetic ineptitude of its foes.

All this is a long way of saying that I agree with the general substance of Kingsnorth’s case. And I also agree with his observation that many, many other people throughout history have made the same observation. And all of them have proven largely correct at each step.

And it has never once mattered.  The Machine remains the undefeated champion. It should be clear enough by now that simply writing “The Machine is bad”, however eloquently, is simply not an effective form of resistance. Neither are any of the other obvious forms which have been tried over the centuries, from the Luddites to the Green Party.

If anyone wants to do anything about this, it seems to me it will have to be something that has never been tried before.  They will have to approach the problem in an entirely new way, because all other methods have failed.

Either that or take the Kingsnorth route, and try to live the best life they can while praying for deliverance in The Final Conflict with The Enemy. Well, who can say? The early Christians took over the greatest empire the world had seen to that point with a strategy of pacifism and martyrdom.

But that didn’t stop the advance of The Machine, either.

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The great comic actor Danny Kaye once said of his Gilbert & Sullivan parodies: “You know, I like Gilbert and Sullivan; I love singing it. I always wanted to make some records of some of them. Then I start in all good faith to sing it properly and then something goes haywire inside me; I go haywire–and the words go haywire.”

Something similar happened to me once: I wanted to write a classic 1940s noir-style detective story. Like Kaye, I started in good faith to do it, but it went haywire. That is to say, it turned into one of my typical action stories, with too many shootouts and too much technology. So I gave up on it.

What’s this got to do with C. Litka’s latest short story? Well, unlike me, when he tries to write a noir story, it doesn’t go haywire. On the contrary, he captures the vibe perfectly, despite the fact that as usual, the setting is not Earth, but his own cleverly constructed sci-fi world.

Nevertheless, he nails the essence of the noir tale. I could practically imagine the main characters as Bogie and Bacall, bantering back and forth as they tail their quarry through snowy streets on a dark evening.

Now, although I say the story is noir, it’s not jet noir. Part of the charm of Litka’s stories is the fact that, unlike so much modern fiction, they aren’t gratuitously violent or debauched. Well, hey, many of the classic noir films had to follow the Hays Code, too, and yet they turned out all right.

Enough of this! You want details, right? Well, sadly, I can’t give too many, because this is a short story, and to say much at all would give away the fun. It’s another Redinal Hu story, set a few months after the first one. Hu is once again drawn into an intrigue among the rival Great Houses. And as in the first story, what I enjoyed most about this is how he uses his wits, rather than violence, to effect a solution.

Admittedly, the same can’t quite be said of his dog, who gets involved in the action quite unexpectedly. Dogs are not known for handling matters with subtlety and discretion, which makes for an entertaining twist in what feels like an espionage caper.

All told, another highly enjoyable entry in Litka’s series-within-a-series that is the life of Redinal Hu.

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I saw that this book was voted as the #1 best Halloween book in a Goodreads list. So I decided to take a chance on it, even though I don’t like the only other Bradbury book I’ve ever read, Fahrenheit 451. (I never reviewed it, but my thoughts align with H.R.R. Gorman’s.)

Well, I’m happy to say The Halloween Tree is much better. It starts off with a group of costumed boys gathering to go trick-or-treating on Halloween night. But the leader of the group, a lad named Pipkin, is late. They go to find him, and discover the normally energetic and happy boy is looking unwell. Indeed, he is whisked away in the very claws of Death itself before their eyes.

But a strange figure named Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud appears from the land on which grows the titular tree, and offers the boys a chance to pursue Pipkin’s spirit, in hopes of saving him from an early demise. Mr. Moundshroud then leads them back into the darkest days of pre-history, explaining how early humans feared the death of the sun in the winter, and from there leads them on a tour of proto-Halloween rites throughout western history, from Egypt to Greece and Rome, into Europe and finally to the Americas. At each step they find, and then lose again, some manifestation of Pipkin’s spirit.

It’s a good overview of festivals of the dead throughout history, and Bradbury doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects, like sacrifices. The one thing I don’t quite understand is why he devotes a whole chapter to gargoyles and grotesques. These never struck me as particularly scary. Maybe it’s because my great aunt had a replica of one of the Notre Dame grotesques in her living room, so I always associated them with the decorative sensibilities of older ladies. But I guess it’s all part of the Halloween tradition.

The thing I liked best about the story, (well, apart from, you know, HALLOWEEN!!!) is that it teaches an important lesson about having to pay a price to get something you want. You want Pipkin back? Well, you’re going to have to give up something to get him. It’s a critical thing for kids to learn.

Now, while this may be blasphemous to many in the reading community, I don’t love Bradbury’s prose. He’s a good writer, but he seems self-indulgent, opting for elaborate, florid descriptions when something simple would serve just as well. (Maybe this also explains his love of the overly-ornamented style of architecture such as one finds in cathedrals.)

On the other hand, his character names are fantastic. Besides the aforementioned Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud and Pipkin, we’ve got Tom Skelton, who dresses as a skeleton, and another boy named Hackles Nibley. The image of a tree with jack-‘o-lanterns growing on it is also a memorable one.

Would I rate this as the #1 Halloween book? No. I’d probably give that honor to A Night in the Lonesome October. And if we include not only stories set at Halloween, but scary stories generally, the list gets longer.

But, it’s still a charming seasonal story, and as an overview of Halloween lore for children around the age of 10 or so, it’s an excellent starting point. So if you know any young people who are of an age to catch the All Hallows’ Fever, this book is just the thing for them. Whatever my issues with Bradbury, I’m happy to put them aside in recognition of his services to Halloween.

And with that, I am off to carve some pumpkins. Happy Halloween everybody!

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It’s been a long time since I read an Agatha Christie book. I read a few Poirot stories as a teenager and liked them, though I found them distinctly inferior to Sherlock Holmes. But this is, as the title suggests, a Halloween story, and so of course I had to read it.

It starts out at an English country house, where Mrs. Rowena Drake is throwing a traditional children’s Halloween party, very much in line with those described in this handbook. Among the adult attendees is Ariadne Oliver, a mystery writer and friend of the great Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot.

All is going well until one of the young attendees is found drowned in the tub used for apple-bobbing. Making this even more suspicious is the fact that earlier in the evening, the young girl had proclaimed to everyone at the party that she had once witnessed a murder, though she refused to disclose details.

Ms. Oliver at once contacts her mustachioed friend, and he sets to work on interviewing the attendees at the party. As he does so, more mysterious intrigues begin to emerge about life in the seemingly quiet little village—he dredges up past murders that might fit the bill for what the poor child might have witnessed, as well as a complicated scheme of apparent forgery committed by a now-missing au pair girl. (Yeah, I had to look it up, too.)

The middle of the story dragged a bit, as it seemed like it was just Poirot going around talking to one person after another who laments that crime is worse nowadays because the justice system is always making excuses for criminals, looking for reasons to let them go only to have them kill again. “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, etc.” There really is nothing new under the sun. If there was one thing that surprised me about this book is how very modern it felt. I think of Agatha Christie as writing a more genteel sort of mystery, but parts of this were surprisingly direct. Strange that so dark a book could be dedicated to P.G. Wodehouse!

In the later stages, our elderly detective ties the threads together and works out who must be responsible for the crimes. Simultaneously, however, another murder is about to take place, under sinister, vaguely ritualistic circumstances, and it’s a frantic rush to stop the lethal hand in time.

Is it a great book? No, I don’t think so. Parts of it were a drag. On the other hand, other parts were quite interesting and, as I said, felt surprisingly relevant. They say the most enduring books are about human nature, which makes them timeless. That certainly would be the case here. If you want a good mystery to read at Halloween, about the darkness which lurks under the benign veneer of English country estates… well, read Hound of the Baskervilles. But if you want a second one to read after that, Hallowe’en Party is a good choice.

Now, I said above that the story is timeless, and so it could be adapted, like Shakespeare, into a different setting. And no doubt this is what the great Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh had in mind when he decided to adapt it to the setting of post-World War II Venice in his 2023 film, A Haunting in Venice, starring himself as Hercule Poirot and Tina Fey as Ariadne Oliver.

I like Kenneth Branagh. He’s a great actor (who can forget his St. Crispin’s Day speech?) and he directed one of the few Marvel superhero movies that I have both seen and enjoyed. I also like Tina Fey. (“How could I not? I’m entranced by those mud-colored eyes… that splay-footed walk… and that whole situation right there…”) Seriously, though, I like both leads and of course the whole thing is set at Halloween. What could go wrong?

Well… a lot.

First of all, it’s not really accurate to say A Haunting in Venice is “based on” or “adapted from” Hallowe’en Party. You can’t even really say that Hallowe’en Party “inspired” A Haunting in Venice, even though the cover of my edition of the book does say that. I think it might be correct to say that A Haunting in Venice was “suggested by an incident in” Hallowe’en Party. Even better might be to do as W.S. Gilbert did with his play The Princess, which he called a “a respectful operatic perversion” of a poem by Tennyson. “A cinematic perversion of Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party” pretty much fits—no need, I think, for the “respectful.”

In the Branagh Version (not to be confused with The Browning Version) Poirot has retired to Venice, disillusioned with life, humanity, and God. Until one day Ariadne Oliver shows up and asks him to join her at a children’s Halloween Party being held at the palazzo of a wealthy diva whose daughter recently drowned by falling into the canal. But, to quote Richard and Linda Thompson, “did she jump or was she pushed“?

So, to cheer herself up, the grieving mother has decided to hold a party that features a shadow puppet show about the vengeful spirits of dead children as entertainment, followed by a séance to communicate with her dead daughter’s spirit. Make it make sense, I dare you.

Poirot quickly finds proof that the medium conducting the séance is a fraud. Even so, it does appear there is something ghostly and mysterious happening in the creepy palazzo. For example, the medium has Poirot put on her cloak and mask, after which he goes to bob for apples and has his head shoved under the water, but survives. The medium appears to be a slight, thin woman. How would her cloak even fit the portly Poirot? She may be a medium, but he’s definitely a large! Ba-dum tss. I’ll be here all week, folks.

But the medium won’t, because she gets mysteriously murdered while Poirot was being nearly drowned. This prompts Poirot to lock everyone in the palazzo, since they are all now suspects. Except not Ariadne, because she’s Poirot’s friend, so he enlists her help to solve the case. And they’ve got a tall task before them, because you see, it turns out that they are operating in a universe where nothing makes sense and normal rules of logic do not apply. It is the detective fiction equivalent of Calvinball.

In the end, Poirot figures out what really happened, which is more than I can say for myself. All I know is it’s a sordid tale of murder, revenge, betrayal, and ends up showing that you can never really trust anyone. Naturally, this helps Poirot rediscover his passion for work and apparently restores his faith in humanity???

And the stupidest part is, I sort of enjoyed it. The story may make absolutely no sense whatsoever, but the acting is good, and the aesthetics are absolutely top-notch. The vibe of being in a haunted palazzo during a storm on Halloween night is carried off beautifully, so much so that it takes a while before you notice how inane everything is. It’s like eating all your Halloween candy in one night: in the moment, it’s delicious, and it’s only afterward that you feel sick with the consequences. 

A Haunting in Venice is the epitome of style over substance. It looks amazing, and maybe if it were just a generic thriller, that would be enough to go on. But the whole appeal of detective fiction is the pleasure of seeing how all the pieces fit together in a logical chain. You can have a weird, supernatural story where tons of things are left unexplained. Some of my favorite stories are like that. Or you can have the denouement where the genius investigator explains how all the seemingly-unrelated events are actually part of a coherent whole. But ya can’t have both! 

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Book cover for 'The Sorcery of White Rats' by Adam Bertocci, featuring a silhouette of a girl against a vibrant, magical background with decorative elements.

How many books have you read involving prophecies about magical young people destined to save the world? I know, I know; it sounds like the tiredest trope in the world. Seemed like every work of YA fiction in the early 2000s had a premise like that.

Yet Mr. Bertocci, whom long-time readers will know from his slice-of-millennial-life short stories, takes this well-worn premise and makes it his own. I admit, when I read the synopsis of his debut novel, I was concerned he might have abandoned his own unique voice in favor of something clichéd but marketable.

I needn’t have worried. After only a few pages, it was clear that this would be no ordinary magical adventure. Bertocci has not forgotten the things that make his short stories powerful, but has instead fleshed out his typical themes into fuller form.

The story follows two young women, Bristol and Monroe, who are in the awkward mid-twenty years and still trying to figure life out. That is hard enough, but when Monroe awakens one day speaking in a strange voice and relating a terrifying vision of the end of the world, well, it really harshes their mellow, as people used to say.

Bristol takes Monroe to see her former friend, Xochitl, a neuroscientist who answers with scientific rationalism which is probably correct and deeply unsatisfying. Still not knowing whether to expect the end of the world or not, they are unsure what to do with themselves. Actually, they already were. But, you know, now it’s more so.

Bertocci has a way of writing that’s unlike anything else I’ve ever read. His conversations don’t read like scripts; but evolve organically, hopping from topic to topic, and making unexpected callbacks to earlier subjects. Like real people talking, in other words.

Interwoven throughout the action of the story are interviews with the three leads, commenting on what they did in the moment and how it all culminates in the surreal rooftop finale. 

And what exactly was the rooftop finale? Well, I’ll give you a hint: shades of Majora’s Mask. Earlier this year, I reviewed a book about a man plotting to destroy the sun to escape the dreariness of his life. The Sorcery of White Rats is an inversion of that, in more ways than one. Just as the ancients regarded the sun and moon as somehow opposite, so Awful, Ohio by Jeff Neal and this novel are similarly opposed. And yet, like the yin and yang, each contains a drop of the other, and their apparent opposition is in fact a system in perfect, harmonious cosmic balance.

More than that, I cannot say. Let’s just say that Bertocci does a great job of making it all feel real. I’ll leave it to you to discover how  far his commitment to the bit goes.

Now if you’re like me, you’re probably asking: “is this a book I can read during the Halloween season?” After all, October 31st is right around the corner, and one naturally hesitates to read, watch, or do anything that distracts from the Halloween spirit for even a single minute of this most excellent season. (At least I do. Everyone else does that too, right?)

Well, I’m glad to say that the author of that great Halloween short story Samantha, 25, on October 31 did not disappoint.  It is not a Halloween story per se, but it is certainly weird and magical enough to fit the mood of the season. So, hesitate no longer! Get thee to your preferred purveyor of fine literature and nab thyself a copy of The Sorcery of White Rats.

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Longtime readers might remember that a few years ago I did a retrospective series on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and various adaptations of it. Had I known about this book at that time, I would have included it, because it’s another fine riff on the classic tale.

Our protagonist is Josie Penninger, a young woman cursed with the ability to see spirits. She lives in present-day Sleepy Hollow and makes a living working in her mother’s coffee shop and communicating with ghosts in her spare time.

But one day, a stranger comes to town, taking an interest in the prize of her mother’s collection of Sleepy Hollow paraphernalia: a copy of A History of New England Witchcraft said to have belonged to Ichabod Crane himself. The controversy over whether or not Ichabod Crane existed does nothing to diminish the value of the book.

From there, things get wild. Josie finds herself caught up in an inter-dimensional war in the spirit realm, involving the ghostly guardians of the town, a wise-cracking ghost hunter, and of course, the headless Hessian himself.

The plot is rather complicated, as it involves time-travel and all the mind-bending complexities that go along with such a story. But the dialogue is fast-paced and fun, and the action is like something out of an ’80s movie. The creative decision that ghosts can be shot makes for some easy-to-follow battles.

Nothing better summarizes this book than this simple fact: there is a scene where the Headless Horseman wields an M134 minigun. If this doesn’t tell you what kind of story this is, I don’t know what will. And, most delightfully, this scene is illustrated, so we get the full visual of an 18th century mercenary decked out in ammo belts.

That’s what this book is: classic folklore wedded to the sensibility of a Schwarzenegger movie. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, check it out.