The Monk: a Review

I don’t hate this book. I have to state that up front because at first I will sound like I hate this book, because I did kind of hate it until halfway through.

Matthew Lewis wrote The Monk: a Romance as a teenager, and it shows. The book feels young and immature, in both bad ways and good. As far as gothic novels in general go, this one came out in 1796. That’s 32 years after Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and 2 years after Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho. Udolpho was Radcliffe’s fourth novel and her brand of female-centered atmospheric gothic was hugely popular when Lewis’s novel came out. It was pretty much the opposite of everything Radcliffe was doing, and The Monk started a bit of a “terror vs horror” feud in gothic writing, with Radcliffe and her crew focusing on characters’ emotions and Lewis’s side preferring graphic horror scenes.

Compared to Radcliffe’s work, Lewis’s book feels clunky and immature and really, really focused on shock value, but it’s also more exciting and unflinching about the dark side of life and the real consequences of people’s actions. With Radcliffe, innocent people pretty much always come out okay, but with Lewis (and in real life) that’s not always the case. Radcliffe wrote her final novel, The Italian, as a sort of response to and correction of The Monk, and I have to say it’s really good. But it’s also way more tightly and darkly written than Udolpho, so as much as Radcliffe criticized Lewis’s style, it may have given her some new ideas. But enough about context. Let’s get to the actual book, shall we?

First, The Monk’s pacing is really off. Lewis will spend pages and pages on a minor plot point and then rush through a major one way too fast. He’ll bring you to some really tense point in the monk’s story, then suddenly spend three chapters catching you up on someone else’s life. Or he’ll switch from the present moment to months in the past and then back again in a jarring way. Some of this is because he’s trying to weave together several storylines into one dramatic ending, which is hard to balance even for an experienced novelist, and he just doesn’t do a great job at it.

His pacing wasn’t the only thing hard to deal with. Lewis tends to switch from humor to horror and back in really sudden and odd ways. The book actually starts off this way. All the fashionable people of Madrid, including several main characters, are gathering to hear a sermon from the celebrated Ambrosio (the monk in the title) and the scene is described in a light-hearted and funny way. One of our heroes, Lorenzo, stays in the chapel as the sermon ends and night falls, feeling a bit romantic and melancholy, and dozes off. Suddenly he’s having a terrible nightmare (which gives away huge plot points, by the way), we’re plunged into terror, and then he wakes up and the tone changes completely again. There’s no blending of comedy and horror, no real transition, it’s not black humor, he just randomly interrupts his comedy with horror and randomly interrupts his horror with comedy sometimes. It’s annoying.

The Monk also seems really anti-Catholic. Honestly, a lot of the original gothic novelists, being British protestants, thought Catholics were a bit silly and superstitious and looked down on saints and relics as a form of idol worship, but while Ann Radcliffe or Horace Walpole would use a Catholic country as an exotic and magical backdrop or use the Inquisition as a terror element, Lewis takes this feeling a lot farther. He makes pointed jokes and speeches about Catholic superstition and pictures convents and monasteries as hotbeds of sin ruled over by hypocritical tyrants, while implying that anyone sensible in the book is almost a secret Anglican. This is actually really weird because Lewis will make fun of a character’s silly belief in ghosts and demons, then tell us ghosts and demons are definitely real. It feels immature and too mean, and it pulled me out of the atmosphere several times.

So far it seems like I hate this book. I warned you it would. But I had to start with that because the things I loved about this novel are also kind of immature and clunky. For the first half, maybe two thirds of this book I was kind of bored and annoyed at this third rate gothic romance, and then suddenly it became a straight up horror novel. Murders, kidnap and torture, literal deals with the devil, most of it told in enough graphic detail to satisfy even a modern horror reader. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a teenager trying to think up the scariest, most shocking horror they could, and it’s great stuff.

In this part, all that slow build up and long description we expect from old novels just draws out the horror and suspense in the most delicious way. Lewis will take three pages to describe someone’s murder or even longer to reveal a tragic prisoner’s location. It’s a bit overdone, but in a campy b-movie way that’s really fun, and occasionally it went deeper than that and was truly sad and horrific. I don’t want to spoil the ending, even for a book this old, so I’ll just say that as dramatic and depraved as Ambrosio’s part in this is, poor Agnes from the convent next door is the real attraction. Her story is far more suspenseful and scary and tragic than Ambrosio’s, and the novel is worth reading just for her.

Without Agnes this book would only merit one or two Haunted Houses, but Agnes earns it a third House all by herself.

With this, I’ve read nine of the top ten books on my list, but I’m actually skipping to number 11 now. Near Christmas I like to read ghost stories, and Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black looks like a perfect choice. It promises to be a quick read, too, so I hope to tell you all about it soon.

 

Bustles and Hoop Skirts

It’s my youngest kid’s job to empty the kitchen trash all month and put in new bags. She’s taken to puffing the clean bags up with air and using them as bustles, so I hopped on YouTube to show her the real thing. Bustles and hoop skirts are the kind of thing I really admire but just can’t stand to wear. Too fussy for me, but I admire people willing to put up with them for the perfect dramatic look. I admire even more the people who learn how to custom make these kinds of heavily engineered hoops and crinolines and gowns. 🙂

 

 

Lore

Kids went back to school on Tuesday, and since then I’ve been binging on Lore. Finally watched the episodes on Amazon, catching up on the podcast as I get some exercise and get the house back in shape.

I’m a sucker for urban legends and historical ghost stories, which is good and bad in this case. Good because Lore is right up my alley, bad because a lot of the stories are familiar already. I like hearing his dramatic tellings, though, with the spooky background music and (in the Amazon version) occasionally gruesome visuals.

My favorite of the Amazon episodes was Echoes, mostly about Walter Freeman, who popularized the lobotomy in the United States. I actually knew a lot of the story from reading Great and Desperate Cures a few years ago, so I was prepared for the shocking images and stories, but I didn’t know much about Freeman himself. It was fascinating and sad seeing his life and work dramatized like that.

The Lore podcast has been around for a while, so you’re hopefully familiar with that already. If you haven’t seen the Amazon series it’s definitely worth a look. It’s very much like the podcast, but with surprisingly well-acted reenactments of the stories he tells.

Book: Working Stiff

I just finished Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner, by Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell. Melinek is the Medical Examiner, Mitchell is her husband who knows how to write. 🙂 I loved the book, but parts were hard to read. You can imagine a medical examiner’s job is hard sometimes, and Melinek doesn’t hold much back. This book is great, but not for everyone.

I’m up for almost any true story and most fictional ones, no matter how sad or weird or gruesome. Believe it or not, it’s not a morbid streak. It’s more that I think all stories should be told, even the dark and sad ones. Every true story should have witnesses, and we can listen and learn from everything. Many people, even darkly inclined people, shy away from stuff like this, and I’ve always had a weird compulsion to make up for that by looking even more at the dark and the sad and the weird and trying harder to learn something from it, to understand the world better and be a better person because of it.

Which is how I end up reading about autopsies. In vivid detail. Not everyone wants to read about this stuff, so I won’t go into specifics, but if you’re good with bodies and decay and hearing about traumatic death this is a fascinating book. Melinek shares her forensic expertise without losing (in my opinion) her compassion for the dead and for the living they leave behind. She’s honest about her personal feelings and about sometimes being jaded or tired or judgmental, as well as having a real respect for the forensic process and the people she deals with at one of the worst times in their lives.

This book didn’t really give me deep thoughts about life and death. Instead it made me think of all the people who deal with death every day so that you and I don’t have to, and how important and thankless that work can be.

Most of the book, and most of Melinek’s job, was ordinary death. Illness, medical complications, accidents, suicide, drug overdose. There are so many ways to die, and each body tells a story if you know how to read it. These stories were sometimes gross (decomposition doesn’t sound pretty), once or twice funny, and always full of interesting medical facts. For most of the book I was able to put myself in the doctor’s shoes and read about strap muscles and vital reaction with a scientist’s detached interest. There were moments, though, when the sad stories behind those clinical details were hard to read, just as they seemed hard for the doctor to put aside as she did her work.

The hardest parts to read were near the end. A couple of the murders she described really tugged at my heartstrings, but Melinek’s description of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and her office’s exhausting efforts to identify remains and give families some certainty about their loved ones had me bawling. I was states away during the attacks and didn’t know anyone personally involved, and though I followed the news like everyone else it didn’t really cover the awful details people like Melinek had to process every day for weeks. It brought back memories while really bringing home sorrows I’d never even thought of. With more recent European terrorism and U.S. disasters in mind, it made for some tough reading and dark thoughts.

Like I said, this kind of reading is not for everyone. That kind of job is not for everyone. But I’m glad there are people who can do it, speaking for the dead and doing what they can to help the living cope with death. I hope this book inspires a few others to continue the work, and I hope understanding the detailed human cost of violence, all the pain it causes for everyone involved, helps push humanity toward more peace and compassion.

 

Reading about Death: Two Books

First Book: Smoke Gets in your Eyes, by Caitlin Doughty

I liked Ask a Mortician so much I read Caitlin’s book. It’s an easy read as long as you’re not too squeamish about dead bodies. If you are squeamish about dead bodies it’s a harder read, but still worth it. It’s not just a sensational memoir. There are a lot of ‘work stories’ about cremation and embalming, interspersed with historical and philosophical thoughts about death and our relationship to it.

Her basic point is that Americans (and probably many other Western nations) have hidden away and sanitized the death process too much and have sort of lost our way because of it. She wants people to be prepared for death and thoughtful about it instead of terrified or in denial, and I think the detailed stories of body pick-ups, cremations, and enbalmings work for that purpose. Some people could see them as sensational or disrespectful, but I saw them as demystifying death and dead bodies. I appreciated the honesty.

I enjoyed the historical stories and appreciate her philosophy on “the good death,” one planned for and done with dignity. I didn’t agree with her on every detail, but I came away from the book with a lot to think about and a hope that Caitlin’s work will get more people to think about death in a new light.

Second Book: Dead Mountain: the Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident, by Donnie Eichar

I’ve always been interested in creepy historical stuff–unsolved mysteries, unexplained events, legends of ghosts and monsters–so I’d read about Dyatlov Pass before. to put it super briefly, in 1959 a group of hikers/mountaineers attempted a difficult winter trip and died. It was obvious from the start that they left their tent without proper clothing and died of exposure, but no one could figure out why they left their tent without proper clothing. It’s all very mysterious.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Donnie jumps back and forth between the hikers’ journey, the investigation of their deaths, and his own trips to Russia to see the mountain pass for himself and meet people involved in the case. The suspense builds nicely and I got both a good sense of the Dyatlov group and a taste of Soviet society at the time. There’s a lot of detail about the Incident and its aftermath and a solid discussion of various theories put forth over the years, but the whole book still feels like an interesting story about people instead of a catalog of facts. It’s very well done.

I’m being purposely vague about the details because I don’t want to ruin the fun of the book, but Donnie ends with the most satisfying theory I’ve yet heard about the Incident. It’s unproven but testable, and I hope someone gets the money and time to do it one day.

Bone Records

Someday, when I have more money to spend, I would love to collect Roentgenizden, or bone records.

For quite a while after World War II, the Soviet Union had a black market record trade. A whole host of songs and musicians, even homegrown Soviet songs and musicians, were banned for various reasons, so people had to pass the music among themselves. Record players could be put together at home, but vinyl for pressing records was much harder to come by, so creative music lovers used x-ray plates instead. They called them bone records, or ribs, or Roentgenizden (after Wilhelm Roentgen, who discovered x-rays), and they’re beautiful. I love the haunting images x-rays produce, and I love the history and the dedication to music behind bone records.

Unfortunately, after all this time they’re also a bit rare and expensive. You can find them on eBay but they’ll cost you quite a bit. I doubt they’ll get any cheaper, since there’s now a book (available used) on bone records and a documentary going around the international film festivals as we speak.

 

I just got the book in the mail but I haven’t sat down to read it yet. It’s part coffee table book and part history of bone records. I’m excited to get into it.

How about all of you? Is there something you’d love to collect that you just can’t afford? Would you buy a bone record if you could? I have an x-ray of my kid’s broken arm but I think she’d be mad if I turned it into art. It’s not her fondest memory.

Ghostland

Thanks to Septicemia’s post, I’ve been watching Ask a Mortician all afternoon. When I got to the episode on Open Eye Wakes and Body Farms, she plugged a friend’s book and I realized that Hot Damn I Read That One! We’re kindred spirits!

I read Ghostland: an American History in Haunted Places last October, before I started this blog, so I didn’t think to write about it. I loved it, though, so I’m writing about it now. A lot of “haunted America” type books are just story collections, and while I like that, I loved that this book was so much more. It discusses what kinds of ghost stories we tell and why we tell them. It’s less ‘history of ghosts’ and more ‘how we use ghosts stories to deal with our history.’

It’s not a dry-but-thorough examination of American hauntings, but more a series of musings about famously haunted places and what the stories tell us about their history. It was a relaxing pre-Halloween read, and especially good for those who like a spooky atmosphere without too much blood and gore. Be warned, though, that it does have some discussion of slavery, and slavery is always hard to stomach.

If you know and like U.S. history and culture at all, this book is a fresh and interesting way of looking at it. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get beyond the stories and look at why we tell them in the first place.

Day 23: My Lucky Bracelet

A couple years ago my friend Tammy went on a Mediterranean cruise and was nice enough to bring me some souvenirs, including this bracelet from Turkey. It’s supposed to protect me from the Evil Eye. I’ve had reasonably decent luck since then so it must be working, right?

You’ll notice it has a little elephant charm, which my mom would consider bonus good luck. She always had a small collection of lucky elephants, all with their trunks pointed up “so the luck won’t run out.”

I don’t much believe in lucky talismans but I am lucky to have good friends who bring me pretty things.

The Poe Toaster

E. A. Poe, public domain via Wikipedia

Edgar Allan Poe is sort of the quintessential goth author. Not only did he write dark, romantic poetry and horror that holds up even today, but he also had a dark and tragic life and mysterious death. Talk about the whole gothic package.  Of course, some of his dark reputation is total slander, and some of his works have not worn well. (He may be the grandfather of sci fi, but his child has grown way beyond him.) But his writing style and his sheer inventiveness have left their mark not just on goths the world over, but on more general literary history as well.

I’ve read (more than) my fair share of Poe, but growing up it never occurred to me to carry him around for “goth points” or anything like that. I partly grew up about 20 minutes outside of Baltimore, a city so into Poe that we named our football team the Ravens. And dressed them in purple and black uniforms, because spooky. Where I grew up, it was weird if you didn’t read Poe for fun at least on Halloween.

Edgar Allan Poe isn’t really from Baltimore, but he died and was buried there so the city claims the hell out of him. He’s kind of got two headstones actually, both in the same churchyard. Poe’s grave was originally unmarked and not well tended, and eventually that sadness was kind of overcorrected–there’s a proper headstone at his grave and also a rather large monument stone at the corner of the churchyard.

Poe Toaster, from Life Magazine. I think. 

The corner memorial was partly paid for by schoolchildren collecting pennies, and people still throw pennies in memory. But the more famous tradition is the Poe Toaster, who used to visit the grave on Poe’s birthday every year, toasting him with cognac and leaving three roses and the cognac’s remains in salute to the author. The original Toaster remains a mystery, and he (or his son–the tradition lasted a good 75 years) quit coming in 2010, but the Maryland Historical Society has recently started a sort of annual Poe Toaster reenactment.

I’ve been to Poe’s grave exactly once, ages ago, when my sister was sick in the hospital across the street. Appropriately sad circumstances for paying Poe a visit. My sister still lives near there and I’m planning to visit in June, so it might be time to once again pay my respects.

Public Domain, Andrew Horne via Wikipedia

Day 13: an Outfit I Wish I Had

I secretly want to be a Southern Belle. But like, also a vampire. That dress is wicked expensive though, so for now I only dream.