Over at that messageboard where I occasionally contribute hillbilly political commentary (but mostly BS), a friend and I got bored with the WV primary coverage--especially since it was called for Senator Clinton within two minutes of the polls closing--Anyway Moonstone, who is interested in astronomy, posted a picture of a lunar halo, which got me riffing on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "The Wreck of the Hesperus" which has a line about a lunar halo: "Last night the moon had a golden ring--"

Which set me off on a Web search for Longfellow's poems--specifically my favorite, "The Cross of Snow."

Longfellow (1807-1882) is best known for such poems as "Paul Revere's Ride," with its familiar opening

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere
On the eighteenth of April in 'seventy-five
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year. . .

the booklength "Song of Hiawatha":

On the shores of Gitchee Gumee
by the shining Big Sea Water

with its relentlessly percussive rhythm

and the wistful Acadian legend "Evangeline":

THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?

My favorite Longfellow poem, though, is "The Cross of Snow", quite possibly the most personal of all his works.

Longfellow's first wife died in October 1835 following a stillbirth, and he would write poems in her memory, but "The Cross of Snow" deals with the death in 1861 of his second wife, Frances Appleton. He had courted the spirited Fanny for seven years before she agreed to marry him, and she gave him six children. On July 9, 1861, Fanny was fatally burned when her dress caught fire; she died the next morning. Longfellow, who was severely burned trying to save her, was unable to attend her funeral. It is said that he grew a beard to cover the scars.

Longfellow never remarried. He devoted himself to poetry and to raising their five surviving children. In 1879, a photograph depicting the Rocky Mountains inspired him to write "The Cross of Snow" in Fanny's memory, in sonnet form.

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face--the face of one long dead--
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died, and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

The sonnet form has been used for many subjects in its long history: erotic love, travel, the transitory nature of fame--but never has it been used more effectively to describe grief than by Longfellow.

Morbid on this rainy day? No doubt. But its melancholy music fits today very well.

If anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.

Hey, y'all. I discover now, after not writing about books awhile, that I still have things to say about books after all. So I'm back--like your cure for insomnia.

One of my favorite writers of the past few years is Charlaine Harris. She writes series of mysteries, my favorite of which is the Southern Vampire Series.



I had read a couple of Harris's books from her Aurora Teagarden series. I can vividly remember the day I ran across the first books in the vampire series: in the sci-fi/fantasy section of a Bookland (sort of like a Books a Million). Those two were DEAD UNTIL DARK and LIVING DEAD IN DALLAS. They are about a world where vampires are--out of the coffin, so to speak, with nearly equal rights to humans, and other supernatural creatures, such as maenads, shapeshifters, witches, and fairies show up.

The stories are set in the fictional northern Louisiana town of Bon Temps. The first person narrator of the stories is Sookie Stackhouse, a barmaid in her mid-twenties who happens to be able to read minds. Since her "disability" makes it almost impossible to date human men (she can always tell what they're thinking), she is intrigued when a vampire named Bill Compton shows up in the bar where she works; SHE CANNOT READ HIS MIND.

Through her relationship with Bill (and yes, vampires can have "real" sex {at least these vamps can}, although they can't reproduce) Sookie becomes entangled in various investigations of crime--the first being the murder of her grandmother--in which she uses her mindreading skills to gather information. She also becomes a target of the Fellowship of the Sun, a group that wants to annihilate vampires.

I have to say that neither Sookie nor Bill are my favorite characters in the books; my favorite is Eric, the owner of a vampire bar in Shreveport who is also Bill's superior in the vampire hierarchy. Eric was a Viking when he was alive, which probably has something to do with why I prefer him to Bill; I've always had a weakness for Vikings, even though they were not cute or cuddly as humans and aren't any better as vampires. After Sookie and Bill break up, she and Eric are lovers for awhile, but Eric is afflicted with amnesia at the time and cannot remember a bit of it.

The books are funny, especially the first two, as Sookie learns to deal with "supes" and to harness her mindreading abilities so that she can "tune in" when she needs to pick up information and "tune out" when she needs to rest.

Other main characters include Sookie's brother, Jason; Sam, her boss at the bar, who is himself a shapeshifter; Pam, Eric's second in command in his various business dealings; and in the most recent books in the series, Quinn, Sookie's new boyfriend, himself a weretiger; and Amelia, a New Orleans witch who comes to be Sookie's roommate when a spell she works gets her into trouble with her coven. The books seldom mention events in the wider world, although Sookie does talk about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Harris also has provided a tongue in cheek explanation for the tabloid accounts of Elvis sightings: Elvis is now a vampire, but a bit slow-witted, the drugs in his system having interfered in the process of "bringing him across." He turns up in several of the books, doing work for other vamps and very occasionally singing.

The newest book in the series, FROM DEAD TO WORSE, comes out in hardback this month. I'm hoping it comes out in paperback REALLY soon!!

And if anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.

Call me shallow, but one of my criteria for a good read is whether the text has a good opening line.

For example, my alltime favorite is the laconic "Call me Ishmael" that opens Herman Melville's immortal MOBY DICK. Despite the novel's long discursions into whaling lore, it is a cracking good yarn--fact-based, and in the character of Captain Ahab gave us the most enduring object lesson on the dangers of obsession, which leads Ahab and the crew of the Pequod to watery graves, with the whale they pursued still living and Ishmael like Job's servants: ". . .and I only am escaped alone to tell thee" (Job 1:15-19).

Then there's Charles Dickens's flat declaration "Marley was dead, to begin with" which opens A CHRISTMAS CAROL. He goes on to let us know "this must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate" or words to that effect. He does have a point. That endless opening from A TALE OF TWO CITIES, often hailed as Dickens's best, frankly put me to sleep.

And then there is this gem, from Daphne du Maurier's classic REBECCA: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

Du Maurier was the granddaughter of George du Maurier, who created one of the most sinister characters in all of English literature, the Hungarian hypnotist Svengali, in his novel TRILBY. His granddaughter followed suit in REBECCA's Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper at Manderley, whose devotion to Rebecca de Winter has such dire consequences.

The plot is quite simple, although some of the conceits and conventions used in the story are not: Maxim de Winter, the widowed master of the great Cornish estate of Manderley, is staying in Monte Carlo when he meets and marries a much younger woman, hitherto the paid companion of a thoroughly repulsive American called Mrs. Van Hopper. This second wife, whose Christian name is never given and who is the narrator of the story that follows, finds that his beloved Manderley is haunted by memories of Maxim's previous wife, Rebecca, who is presumed to have drowned when the boat she was sailing capsized; much is made in the early part of the book that Maxim actually identified a body found up the coast as that of Rebecca.

As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that everyone at Manderley was affected by Rebecca in unhealthy ways. Us hillbillies would say that Rebecca was no better than she should have been and not near as good as she ought have been; she was charming, cold, and above all promiscuous. Mrs. Danvers aided and abetted her in her infidelities; Maxim ignored them as best he could until Rebecca throws it up in his face that she is pregnant, probably by one of her lovers, and that he will raise the child as his own to avoid scandal. In this respect, du Maurier harks back to the Victorian ideal; but Maxim's response to the news is not Victorian at all. He shoots Rebecca through the heart and sinks her boat to hide his crime.

The second Mrs. de Winter, all this time, is terrorized by Mrs. Danvers--who actually tries to get her to commit suicide--and intimidated by the notion that Maxim is still madly in love with the dead Rebecca. Her reaction, when all is revealed, is also less than Victorian; she confesses herself relieved when she learns that Maxim hated his first wife.

Maxim is exonerated from a possible charge of murder when a gynecologist whom Rebecca had consulted--using Mrs. Danvers's name and without telling anyone else--reveals that Rebecca had been suffering from an inoperable cancer and would not have lived above six months, thus making suicide a more likely alternative explanation for her death than murder. This revelation does not prevent the final castastrophe though; Mrs. Danvers, apprised of the news by a former lover of Rebecca's, sets Manderley afire and disappears.

But all of those Gothic elements--a mysterious death, a haunted atmosphere--are encapsulated in that lovely opening line. Mrs. de Winter dreams not of the haunted Manderley she knew, but of the shell left by the fire; of the encroaching woods that crept back over the lawns and gardens once the estate was abandoned. She and Maxim are living in a little hotel in Switzerland and, in du Maurier's version, are content to be together, even though they cannot return to his beloved Manderley. Later "sequels" written by lesser writers than du Maurier posit just that, with one going so far as to send them back, Maxim to commit suicide out of guilt.

Still gives me the same chills I got the first time I read that line, and read it again, whispering it out loud: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

If anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.

Among the treasures in my library of (hold your groans till the end, please) ghost tales is this 1947 volume by James Reynolds.

I have been unable to find any biographical information about Reynolds; the publication data page in my copy of GHOSTS IN IRISH HOUSES gives his birth year as 1891, but nothing else. From hints he drops in his books, I suspect he probably was American by birth. He collected stories from Ireland to the United States to continental Europe, and in the hardback originals did his own painted or charcoal illustrations.

Most of the stories predate the year 1900 and take no account of the history of "The Troubles"--the struggles that went on for centuries against what the native Irish regarded as English invaders and culminated in the formation of the Republic of Ireland in 1921. Of the twenty-three stories in the book, only one--"The Four Terrors," a story of spectral revenge against a brother who committed murder for the sake of an inheritance--takes place in the six counties of Northern Ireland; it is set in County Antrim. One wonders if, even in the years when he was collecting stories, Reynolds avoided the violent north; would he do more collecting nowadays, in a relatively settled country?

One of the fun things--for me, perversely educated brat that I am--about reading "true" ghost stories is seeing how closely the story comes to matching its historical era. Reynolds, unfortunately, plays pretty fast and loose with dates. One such instance would be the iconic Battle of Clontarf, which took place on Good Friday in the year 1014 and at which the most famous of all Irish kings, Brian Boru, was killed. This great battle, which crushed Viking attempts to control Ireland once and for all, figures in two of the stories. In one story, Reynolds dates the story to 1115 and refers to this as "the year after Clontarf": in another story he gives the date of Clontarf as 1100.

The stories are basically worthless as history, but fun reads. Some are of deathless love: "The Bridal Barge of Aran Roe," about a bridegroom killed on his way to his wedding and how his barge still sails off the coast of County Donegal, is my favorite of this genre. "Mickey Filler and the Tansey Wreath" is about the grandson of a famous Irish healer and historical character named Biddy Early.

My favorites, though, are of course the ones of revenge, some bloody Grand Guignol affairs, others psychological. "The Four Terrors" I have already mentioned. "The Headless Rider of Castle Sheela" is another; it is about an adulterer whose horse brought his master's headless body home, and whose hooves were heard on the castle stairs for many years. Of them all, though, my favorite is "The Bloody Stones of Kerrigan's Keep," which brings together a lot of Irish themes: war, revenge, parties, and one truly bizarre haunting, in which skeletons buried under the Keep rise up and pelt anyone who disturbs their mass grave with stones.

I have never been able to find independent verification of any of these stories, sad to say. The parapsychologist Hans Holzer once tried to track down the location of "Shallardstown and the Orloff Whip," only to learn that the local people had never heard of such a place.

Which begs the question: Was James Reynolds collecting genuine Irish ghost stories, or did he make these up from the whole cloth?

As for the facetious question I asked earlier, he affirmatively was not a storyteller, a seanchai (pronounced SHAN-ah-hee) in the traditional sense. He writes in a very literary style that tries a lot too hard to SOUND Irish, totally at odds with the colloquialism of say a James Joyce or Sean O'Casey.

For myself, I have my suspicions about how "true" these stories are, and the style can get annoying at times. But they're good reads all the same, for people who like ghost stories.

And I'm one of them. If anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.

To be frank, I have done very little research into the phenomenon of the 1960s Gothic novel, although I can tell you that A) they were in a long and formerly honorable tradition--one that includes such revered literature as FRANKENSTEIN, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, JANE EYRE, and the most Grand Guignol of them all, DRACULA; B) that they came into vogue yet again in such works from the 1930s as Daphne du Maurier's REBECCA, and C) I read a good number of them as a precocious preteen in the late sixties and early seventies. The plots followed a fairly standardized pattern: deadly secrets, beautiful damsel in distress, handsome dominant hero, hissing villain, sinister secondary characters who turn out to be good guys, highly improbable methods of murder, damsel rescued from death (or that cliched fate worse than) by the wounded but valiant hero, and they live happily ever after with the cloud lifted from them. Some--like those of Dame Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, Dorothy Eden and Victoria Holt (aka Jean Plaidy, among other noms de plumes)--were surprisingly well written; others were merely lurid, as evinced by a subgenre in which the villains were all devil worshippers or madmen seeking to attain eternal life without actually dying and were therefore on the prowl for virgins to sacrifice.

And then, in a Reader's Digest Condensed Book, I ran across my first Barbara Michaels novel: AMMIE, COME HOME (1968), which combined the stock plots with my beloved ghost stories. (I can hear someone grumbling: doesn't this damned woman ever read ANYTHING but ghost stories? Yes, I do. Once in awhile. Remind me to blog sometime about Vicki Lewis Thompson's Nerd series.)

Barbara Michaels is one of two pseudonyms used by the professional Egyptologist Barbara Mertz, who uses her real name only for works on her archaeological discipline. She had written two previous Gothic thrillers (THE MASTER OF BLACKTOWER in 1966 and SONS OF THE WOLF in 1967), both set in Victorian England and stuffily conventional. With AMMIE, COME HOME she broke out of this mold altogether. Set in 1960s Georgetown, now a suburb of Washington, DC but originally George Town, a pre-Revolutionary war settlement named for George III, it tells the story of an 1830s-era house haunted by a tragedy that occurred in 1780, in an earlier house on the site.

Even with the truncations imposed by a condensation, the story was compelling: Ruth Bennett, a longtime Georgetown resident, inherits a house from an elderly cousin, and moves into it with her niece, Sara, a Georgetown University student. The juxtaposition of young Sara, her student boyfriend Bruce, and their anthropology professor, Pat McDougall, somehow taps into events from 1780. In that time, it's revealed over the course of the book, the builder of the first house on the site, the Tory Douglas Campbell, his daughter Amanda (Ammie), and her lover, Captain Anthony Doyle of the Continental Army, formed a deadly triangle; the incestuous Douglas ended by murdering his daughter and her lover. The haunting begins when Sara is overshadowed by Amanda during a seance, and plays out until Douglas's angry hateful spirit is finally exorcized, while Ammie and Doyle's bodies are located, removed from the cellar, and given Christian burial.

Barbara Mertz is an excellent writer, good with atmosphere; her descriptions of the old Federal-style mansions of Georgetown, its restaurants and shops, are masterful. To a critical eye, once the supernatural manifestations begin, they come a bit too thick and fast. The most affecting manifestations are the smell of lilacs, as they would have smelled in April 1780 (the story is set in October and November in roughly 1967), and the sound of a voice that moans, "Ammie, come home"--the only manifestation of Anthony Doyle. The more conventionally melodramatic flourishes are from the wicked Douglas Campbell, who shows himself as a column of smoke and an unnatural cold in one area of the living room--coincidentally, immediately over the pathetic graves of Ammie and Doyle.

In later books published under the Michaels name, Mertz made the supernatural occurrences fewer and more subtle, and her characters edgier and less cardboard gothic stock. Her best in my estimation is VANISH WITH THE ROSE (1992), with the most memorable ghostly event being the disembodied tinkling of an antique music box.

Ruth Bennett and Pat MacDougall, a middleaged couple who, like Sara and Bruce, end up with the conventional happily-ever-after, also appear in two other Michaels novels, SHATTERED SILK (1986), which dispenses with the supernatural altogether but repeats AMMIE's incest subplot; and STITCHES IN TIME (1995), in which the haunting results from a cursed quilt made by a slave girl in the pre-Civil War era.

Gotta say, though, probably because it was the first of her novels I ever read, AMMIE, COME HOME is still my favorite Barbara Michaels.

In fact, I'm reading it for the umpteenth time and am still overwhelmed by the scent of lilacs and the desolate wail "Ammie, come home."

Yeah, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.