In-print books at Scribd: A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage; Thaliad; The Foliate Head; and The Throne of Psyche. Please peek. (For reviews, see tabs above.)

Hodgepodge for All Hallows Eve

Orson Welles, Agnes Moorhead, and Dracula



Gorey Stoker: Here's a little addition to Dracula. Edward Gorey illustrates Bram Stoker's Dracula here. Hat tip to Rebecca Beatrice Miller.

And here's a little addition to the broken, monstrous, death-shadowed world we remember on All Hallows Eve from A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage: Pip in the broken world...

He wanted to veer and flounder away, lurching through the over-heated atmosphere.  But he could not leave Otto—what was left of him—under the white rectangle that could not protect a body from the prying bees and hummingbirds or the hands of strangers.  When he felt better, he would be able to sense whether his brother's ghost hovered in the air, rested in the dead arms, or was jailed and swooning in the perfume of the hedge.  Mr. Willie’s question came back to him as if in echo.

            Yes, he suspected someone.  Who would do such a thing.  Yes, he feared their guilt.  Could see it shining, cracked and loony, in eyes.  

            “Speak up, boy,” Mr. Willie said testily.  He swung around to hawk and spit, and Pip saw blotches of perspiration on his shirt. 
            Oh, for the day a day ago, with his gaze sliding over a man’s shoulder, resting on his nose like the metal bridge to a pair of glasses, lighting on a mole below a cheekbone.  Those hours were swallowed up.  From now on, he would have to look everywhere and always until he found out what he needed to know.  He would be scalded in the hog-barrels and boiling kettles of men’s eyes.  He would have to learn to read the terrible enigma of their masks.  It was difficult; its mystery might take a lifetime to master unless he already knew all that there was to know—for now, all he grasped was that men were confessing some guilty secret.  He could see it shining out of sweat-slick features, out of irises that crisped his skin.  They were each found wanting.  As the preacher had shouted to them on Sunday, “We are every last one fallen short of the glory of God.  Every one! All fallen away from that righteousness!”  They were lacking:  Mr. Jimmie, Mr. Sam, the man with the gun, the man’s companion, and the purely foolish one.  Somehow they were bound up with the killing of his brother; he was sure of it, as sure as if he had seen the act.  And now he knew that wherever he went for the rest of his life, he would see a kind of burning in the faces of men and that until the day he died, he would never be able to look away from their eyes or from their secret knowledge.

All Hallows Eve / All Saints Day

Behold an image that combines the over-the-top creepiness of All Hallows Eve with the hallowed nature of the day--St. Benedictus from Paul Koudounaris' book, Heavenly Bodies. 

All Hallows tumblr

Murnau and a little Halloween soup

Glass half empty, glass half full--

The good news...

67% of high school grads do read another book. And that's a hopeful thing.

58% of college grads do read at least one more book. Some read lots!

43% of books are finished. (Confession: I don't think that's so bad. The older I get, the more demanding I am. At 35, I threw away my first hardcover. In the garbage. Didn't want it to pollute another mind. I very frequently quit novels and books of poetry. Life is short. My wish for a good book is long. And no book is right for every reader, it seems.)

30% of U. S. adults have been inside a bookstore in the last five years. And that's a lot of people.

20% of families bought or read at least one book last year. Some bought many more than one!

And the last two lines stand blessedly unchanged.

When has it ever been that more than a minority of people wanted a life of books? Go back far enough and our ancestors didn't even have any, though no doubt they told stories. Everybody does, even now. Books seem to be an acquired passion. (We may do our best to pass on a love of them, but often it doesn't take, or we do it the wrong way, as when a school prevents boys from moving around and having recess and then plunks a book in their hands and drones on about it.)

Hat tip to Flyleaf Books of Chapel Hill, now on tumblr. Me too.

A fire was in my head--

Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for The Foliate Head, poetry from
UK: Stanza Press, 2012

Listening to Mike Scott and the Waterboys and An Appointment with Mr. Yeats after writing the opening chapter--the warning chapter--to a very odd story...

Looks as if it might be described as a cross between two very different forms, one being a novel and the other being . . . eh, later!

I didn't mean to start anything new in fiction until I had finished going over The Book of the Red King poems and fooled with my out-in-2015 novel a bit more. I had the idea of changing the ending, even though it has been on the publisher's desk for a long time. And I wanted to tinker with the children's novel that has been lying around for entirely too long.

And I certainly didn't want to begin anything in prose until after I visited classes at Wofford College in South Carolina and did a reading at Hub City in November.

But perhaps I have fallen into something new after all. Or perhaps it will wander away . . . And that's all I shall say because you know (if you don't know, see left column) I AM SECRET.

"Come away, come away!"