Profile in courage

Dan Brown Inferno coverDante Alighieri is a fascinating figure, and hopefully I'll be able to tell you what really fascinates me about that poor, exiled figure at some point in the near future when my work on a book about him is done. Keep your fingers crossed for me, beloved friends. In the meantime, I feel like I should at least present the cover image of Dan Brown's forthcoming book "Inferno," which is being published by Random House in May, for your viewing pleasure. The publisher sent out images of the cover yesterday. This will be the fourth action novel featuring renowned symbologist Robert Langdon.

I have to admit, it's a little disappointing to see Dante's profile, that familiar, angular chin and nose, clouded over by a bunch of thriller imagery, but thankfully it still shows through -- like a mountain peak through a bank of fog.

That red band running down the cover and merging with the red of Dante's cap and robes -- is that like the Rose Line of "The Da Vinci Code" or is it just a little design element?  Brown's book jackets are always packed with symbolism, so I'd guess that there's more to it. We will see in May.

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Vague horrors on Halloween

Henry James couldn't write a ghost story (all you Jamesians out there, my apologies - I can't help saying that), but another James could. Not William. Not Alice. I'm talking about Montague Rhodes -- neither kith nor kin to the other three.

James was the fellow who impressed H.P. Lovecraft - an old Etonian, bachelor and textual scholar who never strayed very far from the world of King's College Cambridge. He straddled the old and new centuries - born in 1862, dying in 1936. He's one of many included in the fine new edition, just in time for Halloween, "The Big Book of Ghost Stories" edited by Otto Penzler (Black Lizard/Random House). Penzler includes an anthology staple, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" - a story that finely illustates the following rule: "If you  ever discover an artifact in a pile of ruins, you'd best leave it where you found it."

Why, you ask? Simple: Somebody will want it back.

Still, there are so many other James stories that are even finer than that one - "Casting the Runes" (which gives us a fictional encounter with Aleister Crowley) and "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas," which is a better tale of an ancient riddle than Dan Brown could ever write.

Ok, so, just a final word, before you set off in search of a collection of his stories (easily and inexpensively gotten in paperback editions from Penguin Classics) - James is a master of vague horror. He trafficked in the kinds of words that a writing teacher circles with a red pen: "thing," "something," "seemed," "appeared." Uncertainty isn't appreciated in most writing workshops; for M.R. James, however, it was a key to his art.

Here's a chilling moment from the above-mentioned story in the Penzler anthology, in which Parkins, the main character - who has absconded from a seaside ruin with a strange, little whistle - sees something coming behind him:

"...now there began to be seen, far up the shore, a little flicker of something light-coloured and moving to and fro with great swiftness and irregularity. Rapidly growing larger, it, too, declared itself as a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined. There was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters. It would stop, raise arms, bow itself toward the sand, then run stooping across the beach to the water-edge and back again..."

I love the fact that, no matter how many times we read this, we can't get a clear picture of what this menacing figure is. That's exactly the point: Who likes a ghost story that's fully explained? Aren't the gaps in the explanation what we crave, especially on Halloween?

Or, as M.R. James himself once advised, in a short essay on the topic: "Ghosts - Treat them Gently!"