You're being watched: new in bookstores

demonologist coverWhen a copy of Andrew Pyper's novel "The Demonologist" (Simon & Schuster) arrived in the mail last week, I took a quick glance and inhaled sharply at the plot description--a menacing demonic mystery, a scholar of John Milton, and a lost girl--and then I muttered two simple words: I'm in.

Pyper's publisher has a fantastic novel on its hands to promote this month and during the spring. But, just in case the plot elements aren't enough to grab readers, the publisher has prepared a two-piece cover design that's just as arresting as the plot.

It's a riff on that creepiest of old horror tropes--the eye at the keyhole.

When you strip the jacket off the book, you discover who this spy is:  On the front cover, a young girl's face looks out from between two dark, molten-red images of the fallen rebel angels entering the infernal palace of Pandemonium.

interior-Demonologist-coverI won't blow the connection between the story's narrator and this young girl. Instead, I'll just point out that English majors aren't the only fans of Milton's "Paradise Lost" -- some of the diabolic creatures described by the poet also happen to be fans who "share a passion for words" with the story's narrator, Miltonic scholar David Ullman.

Ullman knows Milton's work well--so well, in fact, that he's hired by an enigmatic woman for a job (he doesn't know what kind, only that his expertise is perfect) that requires traveling to Venice, which is fine with him. He needs an escape. His marriage is crumbling. His life is a mess. And he forgets all about it after a terrifying encounter that begins with an insane Venetian gentleman--or is he demonically possessed? Why else would he be strapped to a chair?

It's only the beginning.

Soon, Professor Ullman is on a desperate search that's also painfully personal, and he confronts an entity known only as the Unnamed that mocks him with Milton's poetry--"live while ye may, yet happy pair," it says in one chilling scene--even though it also needs his help as a messenger.

That's enough. You'll have to read the book for more.

Horror and gothic suspense are categories that publishers can count on, and that's why there's a steady stream of both each season.  But there's so much of it that some books, like Pyper's (or another devilish favorite of mine from a few year's ago, "The Testament of Gideon Mack" by James Robertson), may not get as much attention as they deserve.

Which is why I applaud the cover design--and Pyper's story. He gives readers an engaging thriller that invites us into the depths of arcane subjects with an ease and authority that few writers possess. Pyper, happily, is one of these.

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What to bring with you when you join Bilbo & Company: new in bookstores

The dragon Smaug circles the Lonely Mountain; illustration by J.R.R. Tolkien Followers of J.R.R. Tolkien know what "The Hobbit" is: It's a prelude. A delicious dish, but not the main course. The adventures are wonderful, but the story plays out on a much smaller canvas than "The Lord of the Rings" -- though you wouldn't know it from watching the first installment of Peter Jackson's "Hobbit" trilogy. (That, by the way, is not a complaint: Jackson's version is amazing -- it's just not the same story).

If Jackson's movie has inspired you to take down your old thumbed copy of the tale and get reacquainted, several new books will also serve as sturdy companions as you join up with Bilbo, the dwarves and Gandalf the wizard on the journey to the Lonely Mountain and Smaug's hoard.

A few years ago, John D. Rateliff brought out an extraordinary edition of "The History of 'The Hobbit' " (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) -- which features "The Hobbit" along with two annotated volumes of early drafts in a beautiful slipcase. At a price of $95, it is well worth every penny -- I especially love Rateliff's discussions of the Necromancer (Sauron) and Bladorthin/Gandalf, who evolves from a little firework-wielding old man into "one of the five Istari, bearer of the Ring of Fire..."

A pleasurable, insightful collection that easily steals an hour (or six) if you're not careful.

More agreeable with the wallet might be  "Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Hobbit' " by Corey Olson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), an English professor at Washington College in Maryland who provides a flowing, accessible presentation of the narrative that will please newcomers and old visitors to Middle-earth in equal measure.

For me, however, the real treat this Hobbity season is "The Art of 'The Hobbit' " edited by Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Tolkien was a gifted amateur artist who expressed his mighty vision in paintings and sketches, and this book collects these images (some of these have never been seen before). He gives us, for instance, a quaint, bucolic portrait of life in the Shire in the painting of "Hobbiton-across-the-water"; he also creates detailed paintings of Rivendell, the Misty Mountains, and Smaug in his hall.

One of my favorites is this map of Mirkwood, which is a haunted, tainted place:

An imagined world that seems real: Tolkien's Mirkwood and the Lonely Mountain.

Tolkien's efforts to bring this story into being took so many forms -- invented languages, paintings, maps, songs and poems. I appreciate how this collection of art demonstrates the lengths to which a great artist will go in order to give his world tangibility -- and heft -- in ours.

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Etc.: early Saramago, plus Frank Herbert's 'Dune' meets poet Ted Hughes

raised-from-the-groundJOSE VS. THE MAN: Back in 1980, 18 years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jose Saramago was a newspaper deputy editor who got canned from his job (nobody treats deputy editors right, do they?). He penned a big, fat novel that lets us know exactly how he was feeling, "Raised from the Ground: A Novel" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.

Here we meet the Mau Tempo family -- poor peasants -- and follow them in their travails and misfortunes against the privileged> We hear that wry, mischievous narrator's voice that Saramago went on to perfect in a novel like "Baltasar and Blimunda"; and we relish the prose: "Ah, but life is a game too, a playful exercise, playing is a very serious, grave, even philosophical act..."

Classic Saramago, and to think: This was only the beginning for him.

***

poet-ted-hughesFRANK HERBERT'S "DUNE" MEETS TED HUGHES?: Someone pointed me in the direction of a long letter that's very uplifting and inspiring in spite of the circumstances surrounding it.

A recent post on Letters of Note, a worthy site maintained by Shaun Usher, offers in a letter the inspirational insights of Ted Hughes to his son, Nicholas.

You should check it out.

What unexpectedly resonated for me -- beyond the power and unique metaphors of Hughes' insights -- was something quite science fictiony and unexpected ...

Suddenly, I was thinking of Frank Herbert's novel "God Emperor of Dune" which I decided to reread this holiday season (I can't even explain what made me pick it up again - did Santa make me think of sandworms?).

Near the end of Hughes' letter, he alludes to an ancient bit of wisdom: "And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you."  That, I realized, is exactly what the man-turned-Worm Leto II experiences -- all the voices of House Atreides speaking through him.

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Etc.: Tolkien's names, Pullman's grimly good

Tolkien's monogram, and Tolkien Estate trademark WHAT'S IN A NAME: Just some trivia for the end of the weekend about J.R.R. Tolkien's interest in the late, great storyteller Snorri Sturluson.

Nancy Marie Brown's new book on the Viking chronicler (featured in a previous post at Call of the Siren) who gave us stories of Odin, Thor & Company also recalled her shock as she flipped through the pages of Snorri's Prose Edda.

Brown couldn't believe her eyes: There, on the page, was a listing of the names of Gandalf as well as that courageous, merry band of dwarves that traveled far and wide in order to battle the dragon Smaug. The list was written more than seven centuries before Tolkien penned "The Hobbit."

Here's that passage from Snorri:

Then all the powerful gods went

to their thrones of fate,

the most sacred gods, and

decided among themselves

that a troop of dwarves

should be created...

Nyi, Nidi,

Nordri, Sudri,

Austri, Vestri,

Althjolf, Dvalin,

Nar, Nain,

Niping, Dain,

Bifur, Bafur,

Bombor, Nori,

Ori, Onar,

Oin, Modvitnir,

Vig and Gandalf,

Vindalf, Thorin,

Fili, Kili....

(taken from Penguin Classics' edition of the Prose Edda, translated by Jesse Byock)

So, the great Tolkien wasn't smart enough to invent names on his own?

If you've read any of the great Tolkien scholars, like Tom Shippey, you know the answer: The great inventor of Middle Earth (Midgard, in Snorri's epic) wanted to root his saga in older Western traditions. It increased his cycle's mythic reality. Instead of being an isolated, separate invention, his tales would belong to the great web of historical legend ... and live forever. He wasn't unoriginal -- he was aiming for immortality.

GRIMLY GOOD: Philip Pullman, the epic storyteller behind "The Golden Compass" and the rest of the "His Dark Materials" stories, has retold the stories of the Brothers Grimm in a new edition. A friend, Mindy Farabee, has written a review of the book for the Los Angeles Times that's definitely worth checking out.

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The 13th century's Stieg Larsson: new in bookstores

My geography is a bit off -- Stieg Larsson, the late author of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," was from Sweden; the early epic chronicler Snorri Sturluson, who wrote in the 13th century, hailed from Iceland.

Still, I think the comparison works. Both authors have created enormous public curiosity about the way people live in the windswept, icy lands of Scandinavia.

Larsson gave us the incredible, unforgettable heroine Lisbeth Salander; Sturluson gave us her fierce, warhammer-wielding ancestors (that must be where Lisbeth gets her skills with a broken chair leg -see Book #2).

In "Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths" (Palgrave Macmillan), Nancy Marie Brown chronicles his life and times, along with our continuing infatuation (and Brown's) of all things Norse. This is perfect reading for anytime of year, but especially now, on one of our (rare) chilly days in Southern California.

An open bottle of stout by your side, cigar smoldering in a dish ... you are ready.

Brown gives us Snorri's life -- the best that we can know it -- and it was an extraordinary one. He was a chieftain and a "lawspeaker," a rich man with a taste for beautiful women, as well as a poet who pieced together stories of his people's gods into a brilliant mosaic. He picked up a raven-feather quill and wrote down what he knew -- and added a few stories of his own invention. Even though Thor was popular in the Norse pantheon, for instance, Brown says Snorri was more interested in one-eyed Odin, and devoted much of his attention to him.

Brown's book is fascinating, especially as it shows how the "odd love lives and dysfunctional families" of the 13th century world were reflected in The Prose Edda, which is Snorri's synthesis of Norse myth. Loki's mischief, broken oaths, secret alliances, greed and lust -- it's all there, in the Icelandic world, and Snorri was brought down by it, too. Assassinated in 1241, Snorri was not only an important epic chronicler: His life could have belonged to the epic, too.

Brown describes the almost-magical influence of Snorri's work on many artists -- like William Morris and J.R.R. Tolkien -- and, in the process, I found an answer (at least one answer) for why the Scandinavian world interests so many of us and leads to the enormous bestselling success of authors like Stieg Larsson.

What is it?

Our concerns sometimes seem so ridiculous and unreasonable: We gripe about traffic congestion or a long line in the grocery store. The people of that region  had far more important things to worry about:

"Earth fire--lava--was just something Icelanders lived with," Brown writes, "like the glacial rivers that burst in raging floods, the sea ice that clogged the island's shores, the constant whining wind, and the winter's darkness."

The Norse were (are) an elemental people. And Snorri captured their essence, thank goodness, with ink and a raven-feather quill.

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