Tag: cognitive science

My Experience with The Back Rooms

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

Disclaimer about the Intended Audience

I’m posting this review in the spooky month of October, a long time after the movie came out. People who are big Backrooms fans have already seen the movie, watched or listened to reviews, and written or uploaded their own reviews. This essay is not for them. It’s for readers of my blog, who, unless I miss my guess, are not familiar with Backrooms lore and perhaps have not seen the movie.

Teens, and Liminal Spaces

The Backrooms was an independent horror movie made by a young director, but the director did not originate the idea of the backrooms (which I will now stop capitalizing). I happen to know a little bit about where the backrooms originally arose as a mythology. The reason is that I am a mother of teenagers.

Well before the movie came out, my teens had acquainted me with backrooms images and lore. Apparently, the phenomenon began with Internet accounts such as Creepypasta posting images of liminal spaces.

Liminal spaces, which always figure big in mythology, are “in between” spaces. They may be the beach (neither sea nor land), the threshold of a doorway, the wilderness between the borders of kingdoms, or the like. There are also liminal times–dawn and dusk. Humans have long had the uneasy feeling that liminal spaces and times are where we are vulnerable to encountering entities that we do not meet in everyday life. It’s when you go over the moors in the mist that you meet the fairies.

The Internet liminal spaces were generally of two kinds. One, indoor spaces that are actually liminal, such as hallways and stairwells. They are part of a building, but only marginally. They are not the areas where people live or work, but rather passages to get to those areas. Often, their very design makes them disorienting, like a hotel hallway with low light and an endless succession of identical doors. Typically, these spaces do not have windows whereby the viewer might be able to tell the time of day or where the building is located.

The second kind of Internet liminal space is an indoor space, usually for public use, that has been abandoned. This includes empty malls, empty hospitals, empty parking garages, and the like.

After a number of these images had been posted, the young people of the Internet collectively decided that they constituted a realm or dimension of their own, dubbed “the backrooms.” Commenters began to make up their own lore about the backrooms. You could “no-clip” into them by accidentally falling into the backrooms dimension. (No-clipping is something that happens in a video game when your avatar falls out of the useable area of the game.) People began to make up stories about teams that would go into the backrooms with a backpack of snacks and try to film and map them. The backrooms developed different “levels,” each more unsettling than the last. One level was nothing but an endless succession of hotel pools.

The deeper a person went into the backrooms, the more dangerous they became. The realm became less and less picky about adhering to the laws of physics. Also, although ostensibly empty, explorers would begin to glimpse movements and shadows out of the corners of their eyes. Eventually, the lore developed elusive monsters that inhabit the backrooms.

Given all this, you can imagine that my sons, particularly my youngest, were pretty excited when they heard a Backrooms movie was coming out. There was enough lore by this time to having the makings of a paranormal mystery/thriller.

Not Everyone Can See The Backrooms

One day, my youngest and I were in nearby Big City with enough time and money on our hands that we could see a movie. I was a little bit interested in Disclosure Day, but I was flexible to watch something else too. We drove through the movie theater parking lot and glanced at the posters. There were three or four posters for current movies, including Disclosure Day, and one poster frame that was just filled with brown paper. So, Disclosure Day it was! We parked, and approached the theater.

Whereupon we found that the “brown paper” was actually a poster for The Backrooms. It was patterned like the dingy yellow wallpaper that features in many of the backrooms hallways. It did have the title and so forth, but everything was in such low contrast and we hadn’t been able to see it from afar.

Naturally, we changed our plans and watched The Backrooms instead.

Quick Spoilery Summary

The plot of the movie was not at all what my son expected based on the lore, nor was it what the first five or so minutes of the movie lead you to expect. However, it has been praised as being well-crafted and character-driven, and not without reason.

After an intro in which we see people in hazmat suits exploring the backrooms and coming to grief, we meet the man who is going to be the main character, Clark. You can see him in the image at the top of this post, wearing on his face the look that all people wear when they first get into the backrooms.

In an important early scene, Clark is sitting in the small office of his therapist, Mary. As you can see from the image above, Mary’s office–and in fact all the “real life” scenes in the movie–are decorated in a sort of late 70s/early 80s style that is heavy on fabrics and abstract patterns. People’s clothing is the same way, so that even the “normal” scenes in the movie are slightly suffocating.

Mary, who is a self-help guru, walks Clark through the last argument he had with his wife, right before his wife kicked him out of the house. They role-play, and soon Clark is fully re-living the fight, yelling at “his wife” that she is lazy, that he is working his butt off for her, and so forth.

Right in the middle of this, Mary says quietly, “What are you feeling right now?”

Clark, confused, says, “Are you being yourself — or –?”

“I’m asking you. What are you feeling?”

Clark is unable to give an answer — at least, an honest answer, because what he is feeling is selfish rage. Mary, for her part, though she has just uncovered an ugly, sinful attitude from Clark toward his wife, does not have any other tool in her toolbox than “You’ve got to feel your feelings.” She is not equipped, for example, to call him to repent or point him to Christ.

Clark, since his wife kicked him out (“of my house!”), is living in his place of work, which is a furniture warehouse. He sleeps on the showroom bed and watches the showroom TV. His whole life is in a liminal space.

To advertise his furniture, Clark has his two twentysomething employees film him in the character of a pirate with a peg leg. He hobbles around the furniture showroom, trips over something, and cusses them out as they film him.

The electricity in the furniture showroom keeps glitching. This necessitates Clark going down to the lower level of the furniture store, which is even more backrooms-like, to the fuse box. Eventually, on the blank wall next to the fuse box which should lead to nothing, he sees the lighted outline of a door. He steps through this “door” and finds himself in a large, featureless, yellow room with fluorescent lighting and a large pile of furniture that resembles his furniture in the middle of the floor, with some of it merging into the floor. He has found the backrooms.

The next time Clark goes back to Mary’s office, he tries to tell her about these rooms he has found. He shows her the map he has started drawing. He’s very excited, and somewhat incoherent, and Mary assumes he has been drinking again.

Clark then bribes his two part-time employees to go into the scary realm with him, bringing an old hand-held video camera. Things don’t go well, and he returns without them.

Weeks later, Mary notices that Clark has disappeared. She drives over to the furniture warehouse, where she finds mail piled up at the front door. She lets herself in. There is the furniture, there is a cardboard cutout of Pirate Clark, but the lights are low and the place seems abandoned. She wanders down into the basement and discovers the door to the backrooms.

In the backrooms, she finds a large, disturbing graffito on the wall that shows a pirate monster eating people. She wanders on, gets herself into a dead end, and hears the approach of something large. Just when she is starting to panic, Clark appears. He says that he will save her. Instead, he chokes her until she passes out.

Mary wakes up in a small, dark backrooms facsimile of a kitchen, tied to a chair. Clark is sitting across the table from her. Also in the room are three other entities. They are human-looking figures similar to mannequins, but with their faces distorted as if from a blurred photograph. One of them is a facsimile of Clark’s wife.

Clark is eager to tell Mary all that he has discovered about the backrooms. His theory is that the realm produces imperfect copies of things that exist in real life, both places and people. He says he prefers the mannequins to real people, and demonstrates that he can stab one with a kitchen knife and there are no bad consequences. He says he likes the backrooms better than the outside world, feels that he belongs here, and intends to stay.

“That’s fine,” says Mary, “but could you please let me out?”

She asks what he wants. He says he wants to hear her say that he was right.

“Oh, you were so right, Clark, about this realm existing. I was so wrong! I didn’t believe you.”

“No, not like this,” says Clark. “I want to do the role-play.”

Clark takes the wig off wife-mannequin’s head and puts it on Mary. Now he wants to re-enact the fight scene, with Mary saying what he wishes his wife had said.

Mary tries, but she can’t bring herself to do it. Eventually, she starts telling Clark what she really thinks.

“You know why your wife left you? It wasn’t the drinking. It wasn’t the fighting. It was the whining! It was the self-pity!”

“I don’t want to change,” says Clark.

“Then don’t!” says Mary. At this point, she has given up on helping Clark through therapy and has admitted, despite her best-selling book and seminars, “I can’t help anybody.”

“I want to stay here.”

“Then stay! Just let me go home … please?”

Clark unties one of Mary’s wrists. Then a sound is heard approaching that causes the mannequins to startle in fear. The wife-mannequin runs to an acute corner of the kitchen and seems to be trying to climb out.

In through the narrow door squeezes a monster. It’s an 8-foot version of Pirate Clark, with a real peg leg and a distorted face with big teeth.

Clark greets the pirate. “This is my therapist,” he says. “She says we don’t have to change!”
The pirate picks up Clark and takes a big, gory bite of his neck.

While the pirate is killing Clark, Mary has untied her other wrist. She squeezes past the horror, through the very narrow passage, and out into the rest of the backrooms. Soon, the pirate is following her, dragging the body of Clark behind him.

Mary runs and runs, totally lost. At one point, she thinks she has escaped into Clark’s furniture showroom, but it’s just the backrooms version. The pirate catches her and is about to maul her, but Mary spots on the floor an item that represents what might be her only happy childhood memory. It’s a chunk of cement into which she and her mother once pressed their handprints. Mary picks up the memory and bludgeons the pirate’s face with it until he is temporarily incapacitated.

My Son’s Worldview Analysis of the Movie

The drive home from Big City was forty-five minutes, and it was not enough time for my son and me to settle all of our questions about The Backrooms. For example, we agreed in a general way that Clark’s mind and the backrooms got into a sort of feedback loop where it manifested his thoughts and desires. But there were hints of Pirate Clark earlier in the sequence of events, before Clark moved into the backrooms. What is the relationship between Captain Clark and the other monsters of backrooms lore? The jury is still out. I couldn’t quite follow some of the metaphysical distinctions my son was making.

What we did agree on was this. The role the backrooms play in Clark’s life are a picture of the progression of sin. At first, he’s scared to go in. He’s very cautious. Then, he tries to bring some other people into it (the employees), which results in their destruction. But eventually, he realizes the backrooms offer him a way to live however he wants, be in control of things, and escape consequences. When he finally admits to someone else that he doesn’t want to repent, and they give him “permission” not to, that’s when the sin shows up in full strength and eats him. After that, there is no Clark left, only his big, ugly sin.

My son came to these insights so quickly that I was really proud of him. It appears that several years of training in theology, literature, and worldview analysis from his classical Christian school have not been wasted.

The Lingering Effects of The Backrooms

The end of the movie is ambiguous about whether Mary ever gets out. She is “rescued’ by a team of people in hazmat suits. This is the team from the original lore. A man interviews her in a room that looks like a police interrogation room. It becomes obvious in a few minutes of conversation that he doesn’t know much about the backrooms either, and in fact he’s rather incoherent when he tries to explain to Mary what his organization even wants. The implication in the interview is that the “rescuers” are never going to let Mary go back to the real world, because she has seen too much. It’s also not clear whether their facility is located inside of, or outside of, the backrooms. It’s like when we “wake up” from a dream only to find ourselves in a second dream about waking up.

Though my son was somewhat disappointed by The Backrooms, he says that in the weeks since we’ve seen it, it has been growing on him. It was actually kind of a powerful story, and “it generates a lot of good memes.”

Would You Go?

Now that I have spoiled the major parts, would you see this movie? I did leave out a lot of important, tense, and horrifying details, so you could still get good and scared if you wanted to.

Quote: Not for the Faint of Heart

On By Jennifer Mugrage1 Comment

The pursuit of truth and justice is not for the faint of heart. Whether it involves a personal conflict, an ecclesiastical conflict, or a civil conflict, there are many points where the temptation to cave in or retreat is significant. It takes real courage to fight for justice. No good deed goes unpunished. Parents, pastors, and judges can be, and often are, cowards in the face of conflict. The pursuit of justice can be costly.

-A Justice Primer, 3rd ed., by Wilson & Booth, p. 202

Ride, Sally, Ride: A Book Review

On By Jennifer Mugrage13 Comments

O.K., I’ll just say it. Douglas Wilson is a great theologian/expositional preacher, he seems to be a highly competent counselor, and he is an excellent polemical writer. He is not an excellent novelist.

He is just an okay novelist. I will explain.

Ride, Sally, Ride was published in 2020, which means it was being written in the 20-teens, pre-Covid and pre-George Floyd riots (though not pre-Ferguson and a lot of other riots). It is set in the late 2030s, in a somewhat dystopian setting.

A Little Bit of Orwell

In this setting, the United States is not officially fragmented, but almost. On the Left Coast and the East Coast, you have blue states, which is what we Americans call politically leftist states, with increasingly draconian laws outlawing hate speech and enforcing the rainbow. In the middle of the country, you have red states, which is what we Americans call politically conservative states, also known as “free states.” The free states have been able to survive economically, despite not having access to the East and West Coasts, because they have really developed their natural gas, oil, and grain production, and they still have the Mississippi River. They are able to ship their products down this and out into the Gulf of Mexico (as I still call it). So, in Ride Sally, these United States are not quite separate “states” (read: countries) yet, but they are in the middle of a slo-mo breakup.

Wilson didn’t foresee the Covid debacle, but his characters make frequent references to “the Troubles of 2024,” which seem to have been widespread unrest leading to widespread legal changes.

Most of the action in Ride Sally takes place in Colorado. It (but not Wyoming) is part of the blue, Diversity Gestapo bloc that also includes Washington, Oregon, and California. Americans will recognize this as plausible. Not only have gay marriage, polyamory, and porn been legalized and widely promoted in these states, but so has the sale of “sex bots.” You can order them online for a few thousand dollars, and they can be programmed to say whatever you want.

A Little Bit of Old Testament

Our hero, Ace (short for Asahel) is a twentysomething living with his parents while he attends university. His parents are Christians, but they are sort of cowardly and compromised, as is their church, which is the only reason they have been able to go on living in Colorado. Ace, on the other hand, has been reading Puritan theology (outlawed as hate speech) on the dark web, and has grown into a fine young man. Their last name is Hartwick.

As our story opens, the Hartwicks have a new neighbor. Their new neighbor has a wife, “Sally.” Sally is a sex bot.

The new neighbor introduces Sally as if it were a real person. The Hartwicks are maneuvered into inviting the “couple” over for dinner, at which the neighbor speaks to the bot as if it were a person and eats off its plate to make it appear that Sally has finished her meal. It’s creepy, though it could have been creepier if this were a horror story, which it’s not.

The next day, neighbor asks Ace to go “look in on Sally” while neighbor goes to pick up a package (which turns out to be another bot). He tells Ace this would be “the right thing” to do. Ace, also determined to do the right thing, but in a different way, goes over to the neighbor’s house and sees Sally posed seductively, in an obvious setup. He helpfully puts a t-shirt on the doll, takes it over to the recycling center where he works, and crushes it in the trash compactor. All of this takes place in the first chapter. The rest of the book deals with Ace being put on trial for the “murder” of the neighbor’s “wife.”

And a Little Bit of Wodehouse

The trial unfolds through a series of zany, madcap events. There are slimy lawyers. There are conniving governors. There are riots, conversions, and assassination attempts. There is a refugee from an Amish community. There are crossed wires and mixed signals galore.

Many of the plot points turn on one of the Team Sanity characters causing mayhem at strategic moments. Example: a slimy lawyer is about to hold a press conference where he will trot out a false accusation of rape against Ace from a would-be influencer who knew him slightly in high school. The press conference is totally derailed when another woman, watching in the crowd, yells out, “Then why did you molest me, Dwight?” as soon he says “believe all women.”

In short, this book, besides being a dystopia, also sort of wants to be a P.G. Wodehouse comic adventure.

So, Douglas Wilson, you have tried to combine 1984 with P.G. Wodehouse, with a little bit of Stepping Heavenward. How did it go?

This reader’s verdict is that it was mixed. The absurdity of the Diversity Gestapo laws certainly do lend themselves to Wodehouse-like hijinks on the part of Team Sanity. When the establishment has no category for objective truth, this creates a quite a few loopholes. For example, at one point Ace’s defense attorney makes a motion that the jury have at least three sex bots on it. They cannot be programmed to vote guilty or innocent, of course, as that would constitute jury tampering. This is a stroke of brilliance worthy of Jeeves near the end of one of the Jeeves and Bertie books.

However, one of the things that makes the Jeeves and Bertie books so fun is that the stakes are always so low. Will Bertie’s uncle to get to purchase the coveted antique that he’s had his eye on? Will Anatole, Bertie’s aunt’s temperamental but genius cook, quit, leaving the family without good food to eat? Will Bertie be forced to marry the soppy and naive Madeline Bassett, or will she end up with the man who really loves her, i.e. Augustus Fink-Nottle? Whenever Bertie or one of his friends are in danger of being jailed, it’s not for murder, it’s for something like “stealing a policeman’s helmet.”

The stakes are a lot higher in Ride, Sally, Ride, which makes things a little less funny. Yes, it is possible to write about life-or-death situations in a comedy, but we must not be seriously concerned that disaster will befall the protagonists. Whereas in a dystopia, we should. Furthermore, the stakes in Ride, Sally don’t only involve whether Ace will be unjustly jailed by the state of Colorado. There are quite a number of potentially heartbreaking, messed-up family situations also on the line. These are resolved, in this book, in the same way that interpersonal misunderstandings are resolved in a Bertie and Jeeves novel, which is just frankly weird. It gives the reader the feeling, as Bertie would say, “that you get when you step on the top step and it isn’t there.” If we were reading 1984, we would not expect Wilson and Julia to hash out their mutual betrayal in one heart-to-heart talk.

Douglas Wilson Can’t Write Dialogue

I’m sorry, but he just can’t. His narrative is brilliant. It’s funny, satirical, and extremely quotable. He does sometimes get a little bit lost in the satire at the expense of moving the story, which is not something that usually happens with Wodehouse. He also sometimes neglects to inform the reader, at the beginning of a scene, where this scene is taking place, or what the protagonists look like. For example, we have to wait until the end of the book to find out that the defense lawyer’s wife is a ginger with hazel eyes, tall, and with a full figure. It would have been nice to know that the first time we met her. But this is a flaw for which I have criticized many other authors.

But anyway, back to the dialogue. It stinks. All of the characters talk, to greater or lesser extents, just like the narrative voice. The only exceptions are the woke characters, when they are spouting boilerplate woke stuff. They do that pretty well. And, I’m not saying the dialogue is consistently bad. There are certainly moments when a character says something, and it sounds like a real American person talking. The last line, for example, is great. But for the most part, the characters speak in sentences that are way too complete and way too complex. They sound like they were composed, not blurted. And this is true even in moments of great emotion. When they do get off a funny, half the time it’s British sounding, like the original P.G. Wodehouse.

Look, Bertie is a British character, so he can sound British, even when he is being a dip. But if you want to write an American dip, they should sound like one. Ace’s false accuser is portrayed as being not very bright … but you wouldn’t know it from her speech patterns. Another character, Sarah, left her Amish community just about a month ago, but she says to another woman, “You, my dear, are gorgeous.” Amish people don’t say stuff like that. This is not difficult. I mean, it would not have been difficult to research just a little bit. Go talk to an Amish person, or even just a Mennonite, or even just somebody with German heritage, and take a few notes on their speech patterns.

But that wasn’t Wilson’s priority. He has a lot of irons in the fire, and my impression is that he wasn’t trying to write a book with good dialogue. He wanted to write a rip-roaring satire with a quick-paced plot, and he did. He probably wasn’t going for Great Literature. (And to be fair, P.G. Wodehouse is Great Literature, in his own special way. So maybe it’s not fair to expect Wilson to write fiction as well as Wodehouse.)

Perhaps this inconsistent-dialogue thing would not bother some readers, but in addition to writing fiction, I read a lot of it, and as for this reader, it drove me crazy. I did finish the book, but that problem nearly ruined it for me.

Characters. Should. Talk. Like. Real. People! The end.

The Stepford Wives, and some Spoilers

Brian pointed out in the comments that creepy-sexbot-as-horror-story has been much better done by the original Stepford Wives. He is right. In fact, these two pieces of literature (?) are using the same trope to critique two different things. The Stepford Wives was asserting that having a middle-class, two-parent family living in suburbia is dehumanizing to women, and Ride Sally is asserting the same thing, but about the every-kind-of-sexual-desire-is-sacred value system.

Although Ride Sally is a worse-written book, I think it makes a better case. Here are some spoilers. Near the end of the book, it turns out that Neighbor is a serial sex-bot buyer. Every few months, he finds something that his “wife” has done wrong. He then destroys her and replaces her, because she was a “bad wife.” From this point of view, it becomes clear why Neighbor set up Ace to avail himself of Neighbor’s “wife.” He was also setting up Sally. He had already ordered another “wife,” and his plan was to come home, find Sally “committing adultery,” and get rid of her.

To be honest, I find this portrayal more realistic than in Stepford, where the “wives” live with their husbands for years, just like a regular wife. Men who do not have their impulses directed to something godly, the kind of men who would buy a sexbot, are unlikely to be content with the same Sally year after year. Because what they want is not really a wife.

At one point in Wilson’s novel, a researcher reveals that the sexbot companies keep data about all the units they sell. The average bot has been used a total of only three times. I know this is fiction, but that fictional stat rings depressingly true. Because whatever users are doing with a bot, it cannot be called having sex. That requires two actual people. So users are bound be disappointed.

The psychology is solid. But the development and execution of all these different plotlines is lacking. It’s a shame. It makes me wish that someone else had written this book.

Talk Out Loud

On By Jennifer Mugrage8 Comments

Yes, I talk to myself.

I say, “O.K., we’re going to put in a load of laundry, then we’re going to water the garden, write blog post, start supper.” The purpose of this should be obvious. It helps me organize the twenty things I want to do, triage them, and make the winners my official Next Activity. This is hard to do without saying stuff out loud (at least, for me). My thoughts don’t do well when they are left inside my head unsupervised.

Notice that I call myself “we” for purposes of decision making. This may be a side effect of having raised three children.

But I also talk to other entities that are not visible to the naked eye. I talk to God, of course. “I’m sorry, Lord, I was trying to promote myself just now instead of Your glory.” “I’m scared, God.” “Help!” I talk to people I haven’t seen in years, apologizing out loud for that one thing I did back in university. I tell my potted plants, “You guys sit tight there. I’ll be right back.” I’ll never forget the first time I accidentally said “I love you” to the chickens.

I won’t put down what I say to web sites that make it difficult to do things.

I know it’s not just me. You are busted, Reader! I’ll bet you, too, talk to … I don’t know, spoons. Trees. Whatever. It turns out, people need something to talk to. Evidence:

“Elves always wanted to talk to things,” says Treebeard, when speaking of the Elves first “waking up the trees.”

The Tom Hanks character, in Castaway, famously saves his sanity by talking constantly to a volleyball named “Wilson.” When Wilson is washed away, near the end of the movie, he really grieves him. And it turns out that, by getting into daily “conflicts” with the volleyball, he has become better at relating to actual people when he is near them again. This points up how humans are able to anthropomorphize anything. Robots, for example, or rocks.

I have not done this myself, but I’ve heard that many people talk to their dead loved ones… either at their grave, or just throughout the day.

In C.S. Lewis’s novel Perelandra, philologist Ransom finds himself alone on Mars after he had been kidnapped by fellow academics. (In the story, Mars has air and water that are consumable by humans.) Ransom is very alone, very scared, in a very strange situation. As he wanders through the Martian forests, he begins to talk to himself. Not just in the sense of speaking out loud. He actually feels as though “Ransom” is a second person beside him, whom he must comfort, reassure, and consult with. “Don’t worry, Ransom,” he says. “We’ll make it.” It’s actually a creepy scene as we realize how on the edge he is, and even feel our stability slipping with his.

This might be Lewis’s interpretation of the intriguing and spooky Third Man Phenomenon. This is an experience that some people have in survival situations, such as mountain climbing, where they sense another person with them in the situation. It can happen to people who are alone in the wilderness, or in a group. This sense of another person with them is persistent, and so vivid that they may hear a voice. Psychologists, of course, tend to explain this as a hallucination brought on by things like sleep and oxygen deprivation, and/or a coping mechanism comparable to Stockholm Syndrome. (The sleep deprivation theory does raise the question, Why doesn’t this happen to new mothers? At least, not that I know of.) I don’t know what to make of the Third Man, but I will say that he does make me think of the fourth man in the furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Lewis has another instance of the Third Man phenomenon in his book Pilgrim’s Regress. The narrator, who has been traveling all over the world to find the place he considers paradise, ends up on a perilous cliff, at night, and debates going back to the last house he stopped at, which is definitely not the place he has spent his whole life looking for, but at least it’s safe. At this point a mysterious man appears, prevents him from going back the way he came, and forces him to go on until he is “cliffed out,” at which point the stranger leads him over the perilous part.

“Men go crazy in congregations, but they only come back one by one,” sings Sting. While I like Sting, and while I recognize that cults do exist, as a generalization this line from his song is the inverse of the truth. People really, really need something or someone to talk to. We always want to talk to things.

So, if you’re comfortable sharing, what do you talk to?

And that’s Catharsis

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

… in all those parts there is no rite in the year that moves and holds the people like the death of the King. So solemn is the day, he said, that if anyone who watches has grief or fear or trouble of his own, it is all purged out of him by pity and terror; he comes away calmed, and falls into a sleep.

-The King Must Die, p. 67

This is Taking a Toll.

On By Jennifer Mugrage5 Comments

Hello, fellow readers. I just don’t know.

This is an unplanned post. But, after all, a blog is a “web-log,” no? As in, a record of how we are doing day to day. And book blogs are records of how our reading affects us.

And whoof. Reading Greco-fiction is proving costlier than I anticipated.

First, there was Circe, with its depressing picture of Odysseus slipping into OCD paranoia after his return to Ithaca.

Then, I read Till We Have Faces, which is sort of like having the Holy Spirit do open heart surgery on you, if you really pore over it.

Now, I’m sitting here trying to work, but I’m having to take a break because reading The King Must Die has made my stomach hurt. That is not an exaggeration; I am experiencing psychologically caused stomach pain from reading this book.

I had some time to myself this morning, before leaving for the office. I thought I’d just get caught up on my reading of The King Must Die. Plus, it is hard to put down. I enjoyed reading about the earthquake that brought down the palace of Knossos. I relished when the Greek ship passed the island of Kalliste, the source of the earthquake, and the watery crater where the island used to lie. (This is the eruption of Thera, a well-documented event that took place about 1500 B.C.) Theseus is bringing with him Princess Ariadne of Crete. He is in love with her, and he has promised her father Minos that he will marry her and protect her.

The party lands on the Isle of Dia. I knew what was coming, but I kept reading. I remember this from university.

The people on the Isle of Dia are about to have a festival to Dionysius. Terrible things happen at such times, but everyone is in an altered state. A sacrificial man is torn apart by the wild women, the Maenads. I mean with their bare hands, teeth, etc.

Ariadne participates in this ceremony. When Theseus finds her, sleeping the wine off peacefully, all covered in someone else’s blood and still holding a body part, he vomits. He knew the king must die, but he didn’t anticipate exactly how it would happen. And he’s only eighteen years old.

I knew what would happen, but for some reason, it affected me worse this time. Perhaps because this time, I have children the ages of Theseus, Ariadne (16), and the “King” (also 16) whom she murdered.

At the same time, I can’t just dismiss it as follows: “Well, of course. It’s paganism. It’s all horrible and worthless, not worth caring about these people, not worth my time.” The reason these stories still intrigue us is because there is some very deep stuff going on there. And The King Must Die is filled, almost on every page, with Biblical easter eggs, both as direct quotes and as symbolic allusions. Even the Dionysian ceremony has them. Though I don’t doubt those wild women would indeed have to be possessed, and not in a good way, to do what they did.

Anyway, I’ll get to how I found Christ in The King Must Die in a later post, when I have gathered myself. I just wanted to report that it sort of ruined my day.

Have you ever had a physical reaction to a book? And did you still like the book after?

Behold, Three Books

On By Jennifer Mugrage3 Comments

Hunting Time, a Colter Shaw Novel, by Jeffery Deaver.

By the way, it’s “hunting TIME,” not “HUNTing time.” The sense is not “time to hunt,” but “we don’t just save time, we hunt it down.”

This is a very professional modern thriller and the author has tons of blurbs on the back from other modern thriller writers. The plot was intricate, the pacing tense, and the characters were distinctive enough to keep them straight and give some emotional momentum to the story. There was also at least one major twist that I did not see coming, and that I really thought was clever.

Possibly the best-drawn “character” is the Midwestern city of Ferrington, the picture of urban blight but without the glamour of a big coastal city. Ferrington used to be an industrial capital, but then many industries left the city, leaving people out of work. Now the place seems to be nothing but drugs, crime, and despair. There are lot of chain-link-fence-surrounded empty lots filled with trash, long streets full of abandoned warehouses, and there is a badly polluted river. The ugliness of the scenes described rises to the level of beauty. The cops are corrupt in some cases and spread too thin in others. I think the name Ferrington is supposed to remind us of Ferguson, Missouri, and this is where we start to get into the book’s flaws.

Though Deaver mostly sticks to the story, when laying his scenes he makes sure to get in occasional digs at the reader. Bigots are everywhere. Trans is good, gay is good. We capitalize Black but not white. Stuff like that. Oh, and of course, capitalists are the one who ruined Ferrington in the first place.

My other issue with this book is the female characters. They’re not terrible, but … but … well. They are just missing a certain je-ne-sais-quois. For example, one of the point of view characters is a woman, Allison Parker. Deaver uses third person limited with her and with Colter Shaw, the sleuth. When we are inside Allison’s point of view, he frequently calls her Parker. That is just a bit confusing. It makes it sound like there is another person in the room. I am pretty sure that most women don’t think of themselves by their last name. Although maybe men do. Which is really the problem: All Deaver’s “female” characters (he has three main ones in this book) think more like men. Allison Parker is an engineering genius, very organized, very no-nonsense. Her daughter Hannah is a math genius, also no-nonsense. Sonja Nilsson is a former military operative (you guessed it, no-nonsense!) who is willing to sleep with Shaw after having known him for a day or two.

This is not a problem with Deaver alone. Many, many female authors write “male” characters who think and talk like women. It’s just awfully difficult to get into the head of the opposite sex.

Finally, there are occasional little things that made me scratch my head. “Seahorses can be sensuous.” (They can?) “Five-high.” (It’s high-five.) Nilsson lost forty pounds, and kept it off, in order to go into witness protection. (Oh, I didn’t realize it was that easy. Especially since she left the military at the same time! But, as we all know, the only thing keeping fat people from losing weight is the want-to. Eye roll)

Due to all these little flaws, and because the reveal of the villain was less satisfying than I had hoped, I give this book three out of five stars.

Tomb of the Golden Bird, by Elizabeth Peters

This was pure fun.

The Emersons are a family of British Egyptologists. Emerson, “Father of Curses,” the paterfamilias, is married to Amelia Peabody, whom he calls “Peabody.” This hot couple began their Egyptian adventures back in the Victorian era, but now it is 1922. Their grown son, nicknamed Ramses, is married and has children, and the Emersons have a large, motley household of employees, longtime family friends, relatives, and adoptees, both Egyptian and British. They have returned to Luxor, Egypt, for yet another season of digging. Of course, there are going to be capers, skullduggery, and so forth, and all the Emersons will be involved up to their elbows. Will they be deceived by Emerson’s half-brother Sethos? Will they foil an international plot? Most importantly, will they ever get a peek into the intact tomb that was discovered–technically, by Emerson–and is now being opened by the odious Carter?

This series is exquisitely researched. About 60% of the story is told in the first person by Amelia Peabody, in near-perfect late Victorian/Edwardian language. Scattered everywhere are gems like this one:

… I identified several other [party] guests as journalists. I can always spot them by the bulges in their coat pockets which indicate the presence of notebooks, and by their predatory looks. Messieurs Bradstreet of the New York Times and Bancroft of the Daily Mail were known to me personally (through no fault of mine).

p. 241

The other 40% of the story is told in third person from the point of view of Ramses, who is a quieter character than his colorful parents, but it also includes gems:

He had thought of several innocent explanations for David’s behavior, including the one he had given. It was understandable that [David] might feel the need to be alone; the family en masse or individually could be wearing.

p. 254

I originally came to this series hoping for ancient Egyptian mystical mysteries. It’s not that. It’s more of a romp. Much of this book felt like following the Keystone Cops, but eventually there did turn out to be some twists that gave the whole plot shape and direction. Four out of five stars.

Matchingmaking for Psychopaths, by Tasha Coryell

I picked this up off the New Books shelf at the library. Perhaps I should have left it there, based on the title, but I had read the first few pages and found them engaging. Alas, I returned the book without finishing it. I would have liked there to be at least one main character who I was sure wasn’t a psychopath. A little psychopathology goes a long way.

When I returned the book, the librarian giggled and said, “Oh, that one was silly.” It was indeed silly. But silly and serial murder don’t mix well. At least not for me.

Quote: Indirect Communication III

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

Everyone here [in the pub] has stuff to tell him and ask him, and stuff they want to tell each other about him. Not a one of these things will be said in so many words; lack of clarity is this place’s go-to, a kind of all-purpose multi-tool comprising both offensive and defensive weapons as well as broad-spectrum precautionary measures.

Tana French, The Hunter, p. 350

Unintentionally Serendipitous Book Haul

On By Jennifer Mugrage3 Comments

Thriving with Adult ADHD was suggested to me by Amazon when I was buying How to Keep House While Drowning. The price was under $10, so I added it to my cart. I thought it could help … myself and … others.

Something They Will Not Forget was given to me as assigned reading. I brought it home from work, intending to binge on it at home, and misplaced it. Today I found it again. I won’t draw the obvious connection here…

These books are also serendipitous in the way they match the newly purchased orange tablecloth. We are having Fall* here in America. Fall* is a retail season in which stores like Hobby Lobby try to convince us to buy all-new Fall-themed decorations. In the case of this tablecloth, I fell for it, and I have no regrets. It makes the room look so cozy.