This review was originally posted, in a slightly different form, on Goodreads in June 2025.
This book is a capable history of New Thought in the Christian church, particularly in America. The author first sketches how she grew up around a lot of New Thought and mistook it for Christianity. Then, she sketches how after she realized many of these beliefs were wrong, for some years she was calling them New Age because that’s what everyone else called them. She discusses how she learned of the term New Thought and how it differs from the New Age.
Both belief systems partake of Gnostic/Hermetic cosmology and theory of human nature. However, New Age embraces neopaganism and the occult, whereas New Thought instead tries to cast these Hermetic ideas in “Christianese” and read them back into the New Testament. This is made easier because many New Testament writers were talking directly back to Gnostics, and even re-purposing their terms.
Melissa unpacks the Gnostic/Hermetic assumptions behind such common “Christian” practices as the Prosperity Gospel, visualization, affirmations, “I am” statements, and the like. But instead of just dismissing these practices as “ppf, that’s pagan,” she actually shows where they originated and how they differ from orthodox Christianity.
This book does not dive deeply into the pagan side of Gnosticism and Hermeticism. It doesn’t discuss these philosophies’ relationship to Western mysticism, Eastern mysticism, Kabbalism, or German philosophers like Hegel. It doesn’t discuss the attempts in the early centuries after Christianity to integrate Gnosticism with Christianity. The history of these philosophies is a huge topic that could take up a lifetime of study.
Melissa’s book is not meant to be an intimidating doorstop of a book that covers all of this. She’s zooming in on one little twig on this big, ugly tree: New Thought and its influence on American Christianity. Her book gives well-meaning Christians the tools and vocabulary to recognize this kind of thought and to talk about it. I have bought copies to give to all the women in my family. New Thought can be difficult to talk about because it portrays itself as “what Jesus actually taught.” If you know someone who is into New Thought, you cannot just dismiss it as “No, that’s Gnostic.” Even though you are right, to them it will sound like you’re just brushing them off. This book might be useful in such a situation.
If you want to find out how Hermeticism gave birth to Marxism through Hegel and Marx, there is a fantastic series of lectures about it on YouTube by James Lindsay. I also recommend Melissa’s YouTube channel and the YouTube channel Cultish.
Looking at the situation with twenty-twenty hindsight, one sees that there was something out of the ordinary going on along the New England coast beginning in 1968. The Cape Cod and Long Island area had been hit by unusual spotted fever rickettsia cases that couldn’t be detected by conventional tests … In short, there were multiple, virulent, uncommon diseases in a small area, all transmitted by ticks.
You Don’t Own Me, by Mary Higgins Clark but actually by Alafair Burke, 2018
I reached for a Mary Higgins Clark because it’s autumn and I wanted me some New York City. I would never want to live there, mind, but a certain version of NYC gives autumn vibes that can’t be beat. I wanted wet leaves, Burberry plaid, private schools, brownstones, Italian restaurants, snobbery, and houses in the Hamptons. (Don’t even know where the Hamptons are, but I know they come with the package.) This book delivered those vibes adequately. It even had me turning to DuckDuckGo to look up some hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the art district that has been a NYC fixture for years apparently. Or I don’t know if New Yorkers would consider it a hole in the wall. The pictures make it look like one, to my West-of-the-Mississippi eyes, where everything is spread out from everything else.
Anyway. This was very New York-y. The protagonist’s dad is a retired NYC cop. There are Italian restaurants. There are nannies. The fiance has a live-in butler. The couple spend most of the book looking for an apartment that has to be in a certain part of the city. In fact, their realtor was so pushy that I started to wonder whether she would turn out to be in on the crime-spiracy. For NYC vibes, it was second only to a Mary Higgins Clark that I read years ago, where the protag’s mother was in the fashion industry and was killed in Central Park by being strangled with a high-fashion scarf.
As with every Mary Higgins Clark, the plotting is very good, very intricate, and the dialogue not so much. Every person who talks is very smooth, articulate, and sounds like a news anchor or else like the narrator. Oh well. I didn’t come here for Chaucer. This book went down easy.
Sweetgirl, by Travis Mulhauser, 2016
This is a Michigan gothic, which is like a Southern gothic, but with blizzards and rude people instead of polite people.
It veers very close to being a horror story, but my overwhelming impression is that of heartbreaking sorrow, but sorrow with a lot of human sweetness in it too.
The very first line sets up the whole plot by outlining the problem and introducing the principle characters in one fell swoop:
Nine days after Mama disappeared I heard she was throwing down with Shelton Potter.
Percy James is a sixteen-year-old girl who is an adult before her time. She has quit school and taken a job so that she can support herself and her druggie mother. Shelton Potter is sort of the opposite: he’s twenty-five, but his mental life is more like that of an immature teen.
The chapters alternate between Percy’s point of view, told in the first person, and Shelton’s, told in limited third. Although Percy goes through a lot of horrible stuff, which I won’t share because of spoilers, the parts that really broke my heart were Shelton’s internal monologue. Although Shelton spends the entire book high–making one horrible decision after another–a danger to himself and others–he still has thoughts and feelings. Quite a lot of feelings, actually. Mulhauser does an amazing job making us follow Shelton’s train of thought, feel his sorrow, and see his naive good intentions. Shelton really does have a good heart. It’s just that he doesn’t have any self-control or common sense. Oh, and he’s high all the time. Many books will give us an antagonist who’s a drug dealer/addict, may be violent and touchy, and may not be too bright, and often at or near the end of the book we get a tiny, poignant glimpse into this person’s sad back story. It’s a rare book that has us in that person’s mind from the very beginning, sympathizing with him to a degree but also hoping something stops him before he does major damage.
One more thing I will say in praise of this book: the prose is top shelf. To take just one example, the last paragraph of the book has Percy going through a variety of complex, poignant emotions. It does not have a single sentence telling us what Percy was thinking or feeling. Instead, every sentence in that paragraph describes something she can hear from where she’s standing. It’s all entirely concrete, and it will rip your heart out. That, my friends, is showing-not-telling. I learn at Travis Mulhauser’s feet.
[My mother’s] first bout of Lyme disease was diagnosed at the Bethesda Naval Hospital when a physician discovered three large bull’s-eye rashes on her behind. The physician was so excited at this classic presentation of Lyme that he called in several other handsome young navy doctors for a viewing. (My mother, somewhat of a flirt, loved telling this story.)
my review of The Penitent by C. David Belt, posted on GoodReads on July 31
I’ve been enjoying these Mormon vampire stories by C. David Belt. This one is the second in the trilogy. In the first book, The Unwilling, a Mormon man named Carl accidentally became a vampire while investigating what he believed was a cult that had seduced his sister. He took the vows you need to take to become a vampire, but didn’t mean them or think they were real. Hence, he is the first “unwilling” vampire in history. Whether or not you think that taking vows while holding mental reservations about them actually lets a person off the hook, for the purposes of this series, it does. The first book is written in the first person, present tense, from Carl’s point of view.
This second book is written in the first person, present tense, from the point of view of Carl’s vampire wife, Moira. (How that came about is a long story, told in the first book.) Moira is a Scottish lass who, more than two hundred years ago, became a vampire intentionally in order to get revenge on the British. But she has since repented and has managed to spend her life without killing any mortals. Hence, she is “The Penitent.” Through a long and convoluted chain of events, Carl and Moira are both somehow vampires and also faithful Mormons who were married in the Temple in Salt Lake City, and who call people to repent and turn to Christ whenever they get a chance.
The worldbuilding in these books is detailed and consistent, in terms of scientific explanations for why vampires are freakishly strong, why they can fly, what can and cannot kill them, and so forth. Oh, and how they can be Christians. The main antagonist is Lilith, “Mother of Night.” The lore around Lilith seems to be a little different in the Mormon world than elsewhere. I had heard that the legend was that Lilith was Adam’s first wife, created before Eve, but in one passage, the characters in this book refer to her as being “three generations down from Adam.”
The theology behind this book is Mormon, which is to say it sounds about 90% Christian, but isn’t quite there. For example, in one scene, Moira is telling a wretched, extremely bitter woman that instead of self-terminating, she should repent and turn to Christ. So far so good. But then Moira tells her that she can be saved if she “turns to Christ and lives a righteous life.” Meanwhile, this poor woman is obviously totally unable to live a righteous life. That’s her whole problem. Mormon theology doesn’t have a really deep grasp of sin nature. I really like the author of this series, C. David Belt, and I sincerely hope that he soon comes to grips with this problem and realizes that people are truly helpless sinners who need something more than what moralism can offer.
The language in this book is pretty good. I don’t personally prefer books written in the present tense, but Belt’s books include a lot of action and also vision/dream sequences that lend themselves to the present tense. Moira tells her story in a slightly Scottish dialect (for example, she consistently uses “nae” instead of “not”), and it’s fun to hear Carl, a former fighter pilot, revert to “pilot speak” when the vampires are flying on a military-like mission.
Based on the plot, worldbuilding, and language, I give this book 5 out of 5 stars for the genre, and in fact it may be the only series of its kind in this genre.
me and C. David Belt at a RenFaire a few years ago. I was dressed as a cartoon cave woman, and he was dressed as a medieval Scot.
“No name. I refuse. You should too. … So long as you answer to a name people can make you do things. You write your name down on a piece of paper and suddenly you have obligations. They say Prism go here, Prism go there, and you have to, because you answer to your name.”
His slaves carried his litter behind him, acting as a bodyguard, but he was not afraid of Pompeii after dark. He knew every stone of the town, every hump and hollow in the road, every storefront, every drain. The vast full moon and the occasional streetlight–another of his innovations–showed him the way home clearly enough. But it was not just Pompeii’s buildings he knew. It was its people, and the mysterious workings of its soul, especially at elections…
I am sorry. I am sorry that I left your book, Pompeii, moldering on my bedside bookshelf for … I don’t know … several years after I got it … I don’t know … from my husband’s trucker friend, from the library sale shelf, somewhere like that. I should have picked it up and read it immediately. I thought it was going to be demanding and … you know … educational. I didn’t know it was going to be educational. Or gripping. Or The Perfect Historical Novel.
Spoiler: Vesuvius Blows
I don’t know, reader, whether you would pick up a novel about Pompeii. Perhaps you would worry that the tension would be somewhat lacking, given how everyone knows that the mountain explodes and buries the town. It would be, you might think, sort of like reading a novel called John Dies at the End.
Harris, of course, uses the volcanic eruption’s very fame to his advantage. The people in Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and in the other towns around the bay of Neapolis, don’t know what is about to happen to them. This gives the opportunity for an infinite number of ironic quotes and thematic moments, such as the line, “I ought to die and come back to life more often,” when a narrow escape from death causes a character to be met with newfound respect. You spend much of the book wondering which, if any, of these people are going to survive.
The Historical Background
No, I am not going to sketch all the historical background here. I’ll just tell you that an awful lot is known about Roman society of this period, both general things about the culture, diet, and technology, and specific things about individuals like Pliny the Elder. (And Nero. Nero had a favorite moray eel, did you know that?) Harris makes excellent use of all this research to build a story that grows organically out of the who the characters are and what they value.
At the beginning of the book is a nice clear map of the Bay of Neapolis and surrounding regions, which is critical to visualizing the action of the book. Special attention is given to the Aqua Agusta, an aqueduct which runs from the Apenine Mountains, past all the towns in the region, with spurs providing water to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and so on, until it terminates at the naval base of Misenum, in a reservoir called the Piscina Mirabilis, “Miracle Pool.” When you see how close the Aqua Agusta runs to Vesuvius, you can see that an imminent eruption might well cause problems for the region’s water system.
The Hero
Marcus Attilius, the “aquarius,” comes from a family of men who build and maintain the empire’s aqueducts (which, by the way, like the Aqua Agusta, are often not elevated but rather are underground pipes). He was sent from Rome to Misenum two weeks ago after his predecessor, Exomnius, mysteriously disappeared. When the water running into Misenum first turns sulfurous and then starts to lose pressure, everyone is ready to blame Attilius for not having foreseen or prevented this.
Attilius, realizing the gravity of the situation, orders the city’s water supply to be shut off. There is enough in the Piscina Mirabilis to last Misenum two days with rationing. Attilius, based on which towns have lost water and which haven’t, thinks he knows approximately where the break in the aqueduct is. By pressing very hard, he hopes in two days to sail to Pompeii, send a team inland to find the exact source of the leak, send another team to re-direct the water farther upstream, buy supplies, and work through the night with a team of slaves to fix the blockage. In this way, he hopes to prevent riots and death in the towns without water. The reader knows that Attilius is also racing against time to find the reason the aqueduct broke.
We learn a lot about the Romans’ amazing aqueduct system. All the cities had, essentially, free water as a gift from the Empire. The underground pipe was six feet in diameter, with a three-foot thickness on either side made of the famous Roman cement, made with seawater, which could dry underwater and which got harder with time. There are maintenance manholes at regular intervals, and water sinks along the route which allow the water to drop rocks and silt it’s been carrying. These are then used for gravel.
The great Roman roads went crashing through nature in a straight line, brooking no opposition. But the aqueducts, which had to drop the width of a finger every hundred yards–any more and the flow would rupture the walls; any less and the water would lie stagnant–they were obliged to follow the contours of the ground. Their greatest glories, such as the triple-tiered bridge in southern Gaul, the highest in the world, that carried the aqueduct of Nemausus, were frequently far from human view.
page 181
The Villain
Ampliatus is a former slave. His master, who used him as a toy (yes, the Romans were horrible people), set him free in his will at the age of twenty. Ampliatus, by this time a ruthless social climber, began to amass wealth by buying real estate around Pompeii. Several years before the book opens, the city suffered an earthquake. Most of the aristocrats fled, but Ampliatus is unendingly proud of himself because he stayed, bought up a bunch of buildings on the cheap, fixed them up, and became the nouveau riche. By the time the book opens, he has bought his former master’s estate. His bedroom is the one where he used to be molested. He has gotten his former master’s son in debt to him, and is persuading him to marry Ampliatus’s daughter. He is building an ambitious bathhouse in the middle of the city. As Ampliatus says to the aquarius when he’s trying to corrupt him, water is key to civilization.
As a former slave, Ampliatus outdoes the aristocrats he imitates in both cruelty and ostentatiousness. There is a memorable scene of a feast Ampliatus gives, of the kind that historians would probably call sumptuous. It’s held in Ampliatus’ triclinium (dining room) on a swelteringly hot August night, and no one but Ampliatus wants to be there.
And the food! Did Ampliatus not understand that hot weather called for simple, cold dishes … then had come lobster, sea urchins, and, finally, mice rolled in honey and poppy seeds. … Sow’s udder stuffed with kidneys, with the sow’s vulva served as a side dish … Roast wild boar filled with live thrushes that flapped helplessly across the table as the belly was carved open … Then the delicacies: the tongues of storks and flamingoes (not too bad), but the tongue of a talking parrot had always looked to Popidius like nothing so much as a maggot. Then a stew of nightingales’ livers …
pp. 146 – 147
Reader, I have spared you the most disgusting parts of this dinner.
Ampliatus has commissioned a positive prophecy about the city of Pompeii from a sybil–an older female seer–and is keeping it in readiness for the next time he needs to get the people all excited … probably in order to ensure the election to public office of an aristocrat he has in his pocket. And here is what the sybil has said: Pompeii is going to be famous all over the world. Long after the Caesars’ power has faded, people from all over the world will walk Pompeii’s streets and marvel at its buildings. Ampliatus takes this as a very good sign.
The Scholar
Pliny the Elder, an actual historical person, makes an appearance as a prominent side character. Pliny was stationed as a peacetime admiral at Misenum. When Vesuvius started erupting, it was clearly visible across the bay. Pliny, who had written a whole encyclopedia about the natural world, received a message from an older female aristocrat in Herculaneum, begging him to come and save her library. (In Pompeii, this message is delivered by Attilius.) Pliny launched the navy without imperial permission, intending to save the library and also evacuate the towns near the eruption. But pumice falling from the sky, floating on the water, and clogging the bay prevented the ships from approaching the coast. Pliny and his crew were forced to take refuge belowdecks, and their ship was driven across the bay to Stabiae, where they took refuge overnight. Eventually, they had to evacuate on foot, but Pliny, who was fat and was perhaps suffering from congestive heart failure, chose to stay, and ended up dying in the gaseous cloud that swept along the coast.
The remarkable thing is that during this entire time, Pliny had his scribe with him, and he was dictating his observations about the “manifestation.” His notes were saved. It occurs to me that the stereotype of the British absentminded professor who is never rattled by anything, and always keeps his cool and approaches everything with perfect manners and scientific curiosity (and is an incurable snob), may have roots deeper than England itself.
Go read this book right now!
Despite the large amount of detail in this review, I assure you that I have merely scratched the surface and that this review contains very few spoilers for the novel. I really can’t say anything better about it than that it is, in my estimation, the perfect historical novel. Please go read it if you have any interest at all in the genre.
The book is called Everything Has a Shape. This particular book is book-shaped. It is a proof copy of a draft written by my brother-in-law, Andrew McKeeth. It’s nicely formatted and readable, but still needs an editor. The main remaining issue is malapropisms and homophones.
Everything Has a Shape is similar to Alice in Wonderland, except that it makes a lot more sense. Alice falls into a world of nonsense, whereas the protagonist of this book, Prism, the daughter of a geometer, is invited into a world where everything makes its own kind of sense.
Everything Has a Shape also reminded me of The Phantom Tollbooth. If you were a kid who loved to read, you probably stumbled across The Phantom Tollbooth and loved it. In that book, Milo travels through a world where everything is a physical manifestation of language. For example, you can see a huge crowd of adjectives thundering over a hill.
Everything Has a Shape is sort of the mirror image of The Phantom Tollbooth, because in the world Prism must navigate, the primary mental unit is not words, but shapes. In fact, the denizens of this new place tell Prism that they did not have language at all until humans started coming into their world.
And what is it called, this strange place that Prism visits? It’s called Place.
“We come from Place. Oh, sorry. Of course this probably doesn’t make any sense either. The place where I live is called Place. It really is a terrible name, I know, but it fit so well that nobody had the heart to change it. It used to be all Space before we called it Place. Anyway, we want to ask you about Nothing. You see in Place, where I come from, there is always something. You humans, however, do believe in Nothing. You think that there is such a thing as void and vacuum. In Place everything has a shape. Even Space, which might seem empty, is really just an undefined shape.”
“If there isn’t Nothing in Place,” [asked Prism], “why are you coming to ask about it?”
“Well, as far as we know there has never been Nothing in Place, but we are beginning to think that there might be a little bit of Nothing now. What is Nothing? Can you measure Nothing? I mean, if there is Nothing, how could you know it?”
Everything Has a Shape, p. 15
The book is full of conversations like this, and they only get worse, which is to say, more confusing but ultimately more insightful as well. I will post quotes from this book in a few weeks, because they are so thought-provoking.
Place, once Prism gets there, is understandably hard to describe, but the author does a fair job of it. It is a world folded over on itself, with a parallel ground above it, called Oversky. Think of it as looking like the center of the earth. Place is populated with strange creatures and paradoxical landscapes that look like an M.C. Escher drawing. There is also a population of humans whose ancestors got into Place years ago and have been living there ever since. Prism’s journey will, of course, take her all throughout this world. She often has to use mental tricks in order to be able to navigate Place’s physical reality. These are similar to the mental tricks we might have to use here on earth, such as occupying ourselves to make time go faster, or closing our eyes to navigate an illusion room, but Prism’s experience in Place is more intense.
Prism ultimately has to face The Twister, an entity that is introducing chaos into Place by convincing the creatures to deform their own shapes. The Twister makes a strong argument that nobody has an inherent shape of their own, that having an unchangeable shape is a kind of prison, and that by helping creatures to destroy their shapes, he is setting them free. Creatures who have encountered the Twister leave broken.
Prism’s time in the Twister’s tower is confusing and poignant, especially when she encounters the Likeness, a girl who looks exactly like Prism but claims to be a better version.
“Did you used to have a shape of your own?” Prism asked.
“You mean before I became a Likeness? Yes, I used to believe that lie, but then I realized the truth that there is no shape. It is better this way. I can be whatever I like. You can only be you.”
“As I said before,” Prism said, “if I could be everything, I would stop being anything. It’s true that I am stuck with my shape, but I’m the only one who can be me.”
“You’re wrong. I am you right now.”
“You’re a copy. You are ‘like’ me, true. You can be like anything you want but you can never be yourself.”
“You don’t know what you’re passing up.”
“I would rather be me than be nobody.”
The Likeness grew angry and the real Prism wondered if she really looked that way when she got mad.
ibid, p. 166
As you can see, Everything Has a Shape is an insightful and compelling read. I hope it can be published someday so it can be enjoyed by more people. Furthermore, I would love to see an illustrated version. The scenes in this book would lend themselves to some amazing surrealist art. At the very least, it needs a beautifully done cover.
What do you think? Would you read Everything Has a Shape if it were available?
Another funny and poignant book by Tana French, set in the Irish village of Ardnakelty.
The humor comes from the way the residents, especially a certain older man named Mart, use the language. Mart is a talker. He and his friends at the pub love to roast each other, and especially Cal, the American ex-cop who has lived there two years now. For example, when they hear Cal is getting married, they try to convince him that there’s a local custom that the prospective bridegroom needs to carry a torch from his house, through the village, around his intended’s house, and then back to his own house … in his underwear.
The poignancy comes from the plot, which I won’t reveal, but suffice it to say that there is plenty of human tragedy.
French has done an amazing job of portraying a close-knit, gossipy, stifling, eccentric small community where communication is indirect, and becomes even more indirect when the stakes become high. Cal is pretty good at reading, and engaging in, this kind of 4D chess that’s played at one remove, but it gets to even him after a while. “The amount of subtlety around here was pretty near to giving him hives.” I have always wanted to write a story set in such a community, but have been unable to because I am woefully literal minded and don’t pick up on cues. I would never survive in Ardnakelty.
There is a small amount of preaching about climate change, but it’s only mentioned directly once that I remember and does not overwhelm the story. This tale takes place during an unusually hot and dry summer in Ardnakelty, which puts everyone on edge. In this way, the weather contributes to the theme and even drives the plot a little bit.
Finally, one thing I forgot to mention on my GoodReads review is that French deserves props for being able to capture the way men think and talk. Cal is the main POV character, and he’s just the quintessential male, both in the way he thinks, how he handles and solves things, and how he banters with the people in the village and deflect questions and comments and barbs when he needs to. This book kind of reminds me of She’s Come Undone, which was the opposite in that it was a well-written book with a female POV character, written by a man.
