Y'all know how scholars are: they like to keep facts and fantasies categorized according to type. They've even taken folklore and reduced it to a series of what they call motifs--a central idea that can have endless variations.

Well, one of my favorite motifs in folklore is the King of the Cats, which may have had its origins in the medieval period. The basic tale is usually told like this:

A man is walking home from his work one night when he comes up on the strangest sight he's ever seen. He tells his wife about it when he gets home. He had come up on what appeared to be a cat funeral. There was one large cat marching in front, walking on its hind legs, followed by twelve cats, six on each side, also walking on their hind legs, who are carrying a board on which lies the body of a dead cat. When they see him, the leader gives an imperious gesture which stops the other cats in their tracks. And then the leader SPEAKS to him, in screechy but recognizable human speech: "You!! Go tell Dildrum, Doldrum's dead!"

When the man reaches that part of his story, their old house cat, who has been lying drowsing by the fire, leaps up, shouts, "Then I'M the King of the Cats!" and vanishes up the chimney, never to be seen again.

Like all folklore motifs, this one has myriad variants. One such can be found in C.B. Colby's 1988 book WORLD'S BEST "TRUE" GHOST STORIES; the story is recounted under the title of "The Witch Cat of the Catskills" as it's supposed to have taken place in New York's Catskill Mountains. Instead of a royal funeral, there are two cats dragging the body of a third between them; they lay their burden down long enough for one of them to tell the human protagonist to go home and tell Molly Myers that she can come home now because Old Man Hawkins is dead. When he recounts this at home, the housecat, without a word, goes up the chimney and is never seen again, the implication being that she is Molly Myers.

My favorite variant though is a short story by the American writer Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943). Best known for his variant on the deal with the devil motif "The Devil and Daniel Webster", Benet wrote his story "The King of the Cats" in 1929 for HARPER'S BAZAAR. In his story, the mysterious M. Thibault (the French version of Tybalt, Prince of Cats), a disturbingly feline orchestra conductor who actually has a tail, has taken Manhattan by storm, even managing to woo away the girlfriend of a young Manhattanite. The young suitor goes to great lengths trying to find out how to break M. Thibault's spell over his girl, until finally he and a friend hatch a plot to tell the story of the king of the cats at a fancy dinner party, with predictable results.

Benet tells the story with great panache and wit. The young suitor's bumbling over the story is masterful, and it does bring about the desired effect; M. Thibault vanishes with a French-accented shout of "Then I'M the King of the Cats!" and the young lovers are eventually reunited.



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

In the past couple of days we've had two short sharp afternoon showers of rain, totaling more than we've had in weeks. This morning I woke to a leaden sky. Hmmm--that looked promising. Good day to settle down with a good book. Preferably an old favorite--familiar characters, familiar situation. And in my case--and yes, I'm not exactly like other people--maybe a ghost or two.

So I piled up with Barbara Michaels's 1971 novel THE CRYING CHILD. It begins with a sad, sad premise: a woman who has lost a child to miscarriage. However, on the tiny island in Maine's Casco Bay where the story is set, her loss stirs up the spirits of a mother and child who died in 1846.

Very conventional story: the hauntings, the Gothic trappings, the lovers in danger. There's a huge fancy mansion built by a seafaring man for his legitimate family, with a wing added on for a mistress and illegitimate child whom he smuggled in under the guise of an adoptee and his nurse; there's a spooky old family graveyard whose most conspicuous features are a truly hideous New England Gothic revival mausoleum and a tombstone outside the fence that bear only the name "Miss Smith" and a date; and there are the ghosts. The more insidious of the two is a mere sound--of a small child crying in the distance; the other is a full-fledged materialization of a woman in a cape.

And--this being a Michaels book--there are cats. Mostly Maine coons, those magnificent furballs that look like pintsize lions with great plumy tails, they are almost as major characters as the humans.

In 1996 THE CRYING CHILD was a made for TV movie, with Mariel Hemingway as the mother who miscarried her child and Finola Hughes in the role of her concerned sister. Billed as "based on the novel by Barbara Michaels", it was based on the novel in only the loosest sense; characters added, characters subtracted, and a contrived explosion and fire at the end.

The book's better.



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

To a girl from the red clay knobs, the bayous of Louisiana seem a strange and wonderful place, as harshly beautiful in their watery way as the high desert. They are also the home of the Cajuns, the French immigrants driven out of what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia (then called Acadia; Cajun is a corruption of Acadian). The Cajuns made a world for themselves in the bayous: a way of speech that harks back to their French roots, a cuisine that makes use of what they can fish and hunt and raise from the land, and tales that still carry the savor of their original home in France. (A great introduction to those tales is HAUNTED BAYOU AND OTHER CAJUN GHOST STORIES by the storyteller J.J. Reneaux.)

One of the most fearsome creatures in French folklore is the loup-garou, the dreaded werewolf, who can change from human to wolf under certain conditions. In France, in a werewolf panic that began around 1520 and lasted over a century, some thirty thousand people were tried and burned as werewolves, accused (among other things) of killing humans and eating their flesh while in their wolf form.

The werewolf legend lies at the heart of Carolyn Haines's 2007 novel FEVER MOON, which I just finished reading this morning. Set in a nameless town in New Iberia parish (the setting also for James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels) in 1944, the story begins with a murder: the death of Henri Bastion, the richest, most politically powerful, and most corrupt man in the parish, found ripped to pieces with a small blood-covered woman named Adele Hebert standing over him. The people of the swamps, egged on by Adele's sister Bernadette, a troublemaking associate of Bastion's named Praytor Bless, and their knowledge of the legends of their fathers about the loup-garou, erupt in a frenzy, a frenzy only heightened when a child disappears in the night.

The one person who doesn't believe in the legend is a sheriff's deputy named Raymond Thibodeaux, a veteran still carrying the shrapnel that nearly killed him in the still-raging Second World War; he has seen the evil men can do and knows they need no help from a legend to commit the most depraved acts against each other. He is certain that Adele was not the murderer of Henri Bastion, and the bulk of the story is devoted to his efforts to prove her innocence.

It takes a lot for a book to give me the shivers. This one did: the mix of folklore, the descriptions of the dark and foreboding Bayou Teche, and the characters living out the fears of their ancestors, is one I'll not easily forget.

Stephen King once cheerfully admitted that his criteria were simple in his writing: if he could not terrify, he would horrify, and if he could not horrify, he's not too proud to go for the grossout. Haines doesn't have to go for the grossout; she simply stands your hair on end with a dense haunting prose that brings to life our atavistic fear of what might lurk in the dark--a fear common to all cultures.

If you can find this one, it's worth a read.

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

Janet Evanovich has over the past couple of years joined Barbara Mertz (aka Barbara Michaels and Elizabeth Peters), Martha Grimes and the late Georgette Heyer as one of my favorite writers of mysteries, for lack of a better term. Michaels/Peters specializes in touches of the supernatural and the incomparable Egyptological Amelia Peabody tales; Grimes has some of the most vivid characters in the genre in Richard Jury, Melrose Plant and their frenemies; and Heyer's "cozies" portray an England between the wars that was murderous, genteely spiteful and often comical.

None of them has created a series character as sidesplittingly funny, however, as Evanovich's bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum, the terror of Trenton, New Jersey. Beginning in 1994 with ONE FOR THE MONEY and most recently including the aforenamed FEARLESS FOURTEEN, Steph, her cop/lover Joe Morelli,her family (Evanovich says she wants to be exactly like Grandma Mazur when she grows up), her friend and coworker Lula, and the mysterious Ranger have rolled from crisis to crisis and sold millions of books in the process.

The newest Steph adventure begins with Morelli's cousin Dom getting out of prison, where he served nine years of a fifteen year sentence for bank robbery. The money was never located, and three of the four men who were in on the robbery seem to think it's hidden under the floor of Morelli's basement, which he has concreted since Dom went to prison. Dom, meanwhile, KNOWS that there is a key piece of the puzzle at Morelli's, and is threatening to kill Morelli for A) conning Aunt Rose into leaving the house to him instead of Dom and B) for, according to Dom, fathering his sister Loretta's son, a morose teen who goes by the name Zook.

Steph has more problems than that, as always; Ranger, the devastatingly sexy head of his own security firm and man of mystery, has hired her to help him provide security for an aging entertainer who uses the single name Brenda and who is only appearing in Trenton because, as her assistant points out, they no longer want her in New York. Meanwhile Lula, the retired 'ho who has become Steph's sidekick in the skip business, has pulled a fast one and gotten herself engaged to Tank, Ranger's second in command. A good part of the fun stems from her attempts to plan a wedding.

Things get really hairy when Loretta disappears, apparently kidnapped by the other three bank robbers, and two of those three turn up dead.
Fun fun fun and the occasional scare, an exploding dye pack that leaves Steph, Lula and Brenda--who takes on a gig as the host of a local Crimestoppers show--looking like Smurfette's triplets, and a van that blows up, make this one rollicking read.

I think Evanovich, like me, prefers Ranger to the relatively settled Joe Morelli; her descriptions of Ranger are more detailed and sexy. When Steph first joins him at Brenda's hotel, she says that in his black suit, shirt and tie (he always wears black), he'd make the cover if GQ were to do a feature on contract killers; later, when he shows up in a black-on-black tux, she remarks to herself that Ranger in a tux is almost as good as Ranger naked (which she first saw back in HARD EIGHT).

Steph, in comparing Morelli, her main squeeze, and Ranger, says that Morelli is husband and father material and Ranger--isn't. Now there's nothing wrong with guys who are husband and father material; after all, some of the sexiest men alive are husbands and fathers. But it's pretty plain that Steph finds Ranger's aura of danger more than slightly attractive.

So do we. Or at least, me.

Can't wait for the next one. Until then, if anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.