If You Can't Be With the Kids You Love . . .

. . . scare the ones you're with. I really enjoyed the trick-or-treaters who visited me last night. I answered the door in a witch hat and asked, “May I help you?” and they’d look surprised, then yell “Trick or Treat!” or “It’s Halloween!” as if to say, are you demented? One tiny boy toddled forward, saying “Treat! Treat!” He wasn’t having any of this "trick" stuff. A bitsy bumblebee named Sophie was particularly adorable; she asked me my name and told me hers. “That’s one of my very favorite names,” I said.

That was a nice break but I’m right back working on my ninety papers. I’ve only graded about a third for a number of reasons – some technological but mostly because these papers require a heap o’ correcting.

Had a lot of fun learning about the Penny Dreadfuls (or Penny Bloods, as they were actually known to all but their critics) – 8-page-for-a penny weekly publications aimed at the literate working poor. Sweeney Todd, the demon barber, was born in the Penny Bloods, as was Varney the Vampire (1845). Every week for two years, Varney preyed on innocent young women in their boudoirs until he (and undoubtedly his creator) tired of his bloodthirsty life, and he threw himself into Mount Vesuvius. I had said I would read Varney but after five chapters of this –


With a sudden rush that could not be foreseen -- with a strange howling cry that was enough to awaken terror in every breast, the figure seized the long tresses of her hair, and twining them round his bony hands he held her to the bed. Then she screamed -- Heaven granted her then power to scream. Shriek followed shriek in rapid succession. The bed-clothes fell in a heap by the side of the bed -- she was dragged by her long silken hair completely on to it again. Her beautifully rounded limbs quivered with the agony of her soul. The glassy, horrible eyes of the figure ran over that angelic form with a hideous satisfaction -- horrible profanation. He drags her head to the bed's edge. He forces it back by the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth -- a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast!

-- I told Dr. Fenstermaker I wasn’t reading 800 pages of this stuff and he couldn’t make me.

I feel I’ve gotten a good handle on the origins of Gothic fiction and its transitions and transformations into the mid-19th century. I’m putting together a timeline of major events in science and technology, religion and philosophy, and social-political issues to compare to publishing dates of the significant supernatural novels, in the hopes of seeing some connection between those events and the changing face of supernatural fiction as it evolved throughout the century.

And the best news: ALL the girls and grandgirls are coming up here for Thanksgiving! Between this news and the coming of the cool weather, I’m a happy camper.