Erica Jurus's Blog

The Wandering Companies shall know of your journey, and those that have power for good shall be on the watch. I name you Elf-friend; and may the stars shine upon the end of your road!

Tolkien, J. R. R.. The Lord of the Rings

The literary world has taken a beating during the last year or so. Famous ‘memoirs’ have proven to be bogus. Fan faves have proven to be largely AI-generated. Many of our greatest stories have been banned in some places.

While this could all be very depressing, there’s still lots of fantastic literature out there. As a writer, I love this era in many ways. There are so many innovative, genuine authors out there, combining genres, inventing/highlighting new ones, self-publishing rather than either waiting to find an agent or just publishing what they want to write without interference.

Spicy romance/romantasy is an enormous market that’s become mainstream. I remember the days when the Romance section of a bookstore was thought to be just for bored housewives, but now authors at those conventions tend to sell out their entire stock.

BIPOC, LGBTQ+, children’s literature, monster romance/sex – whatever your interest, it’s out there and earning respect. This gives we authors a lot of freedom to explore all kinds of ideas that might have been rejected by traditional publishers in the past, and the popularity of these types of stories shows that they definitely have an audience.

This is “Get Caught Reading Month”, and in addition to having such a great writing landscape, neurological studies have shown how good reading is for us on many physical and mental levels.

Do you remember how engaged you were as a child when you read a great story? How much you didn’t want it to end? How it stayed with you for years, or even the rest of your life?

When I first read The Lord of the Rings, it captured me in a way no other book has done since. Not that there haven’t been great books, but my first experience with adult fantasy and the world of Middle Earth was utterly magical. I’ve reread it many times, and even visited ‘Hobbiton’ in New Zealand. It was like stepping into the book for a little while.

Notice on Bilbo Baggins’ front gate leading up to the birthday party, taken on the Hobbiton film set, New Zealand – photo by author, all rights reserved

Pilgrimages to book locales happen all the time now since The Bridges of Madison County made that a thing to do. Fans of Jane Austen can immerse themselves in her world at the very popular annual Jane Austen Festival in Bath, England. The Paris of The DaVinci Code, Italy Under the Tuscan Sun – there are so many great stories that have inspired people to travel to where they took place. A visit to Dublin took us into the world of Dracula, where one of the most famous tales in history was written.

Part of the scenery at the now-closed Dracula Experience in Dublin, Ireland – photo by author, all rights reserved

Reading a book demands our entire attention. Daily life fades, and we escape into the story. When we read about the adventures of the characters, we live them alongside. We enter that world.

We enter an altered state of consciousness. Not only is it pleasurable, it strengthens our neural pathways.

We build understanding and empathy. We learn what it means to walk in someone else’s shoes. Even readers of horror end up bolstering their own resilience as they watch the characters doing amazing things to try and survive.

Brain imaging has shown that these benefits can persist for days. A study in 2023 showed that people who read regularly had a significantly lower risk of depression. A 12-year study of adults in the 50-plus age bracket who read often had a 20-percent lower risk of dying in the years that followed.

Reading results in a lowered heart rate, reduced muscle tension (don’t we all need that!), and decreased  levels of the stress hormone cortisol. We even sleep better, as we leave the complexities of the day behind and go on a virtual journey.

I mean, if those aren’t great reasons to keep on, or to resume, reading, I don’t know what are.

So this month, and all the other months ahead, GET CAUGHT READING!

It was the bookstore of my dreams – literally. White shelves zigzagging in and out along the walls, on a raised perimeter just a couple of steps above the central space. A treasure trove of wonderful books of all kinds, from fiction to historical. Tables in the centre with delightful companion merchandise. Wherever I was in the dream, I’d make a beeline for the shop like a thirsty traveller searching for water.

I grew up with libraries. When I was a child, there simply weren’t any bookstores in the small city I lived in, so the library was the only source of books to feed my growing habit. It was a beautiful Neo-classical edifice funded by Andrew Carnegie, with a large rotunda that housed the circulation desk, and books on two levels between tall windows. Just the sort of place you might write into a cozy mystery or a children’s book or a bookish adventure.

A library card was a precious thing, but the books were only temporary pleasures. When we did finally get a bookstore, I found that I wanted to buy books and keep them. In effect, I began to establish my own personal library.

I read voraciously. An ex-boyfriend introduced me to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which completely hooked me on epic fantasy. I bought The Exorcist as a teen and couldn’t sleep for a week after I read it. During times of stress, books were my escape route.

Dreams of my phantom bookstore began to arrive after I’d read a wonderful book I’d picked up by chance in a market-front shop in Los Angeles. The book was The Eight, by Katherine Neville, and it blew my mind. A fantastic adventure like nothing I’d ever read before, it centred around a magnificently-jewelled but cursed chess set gifted to Emperor Charlemagne. As soon as I finished it I wanted to read more of the same, but couldn’t find any.

So, I guess my dream mind decided to create a really cool store that had shelves and shelves of such books, and many others too – splendid archeological and historical books, antique tomes, you name it – all just waiting for me to take them home to dive into. I don’t know why it fashioned that particular interior configuration, but in dream-time I spent hours browsing those shelves.

The dream continued for decades, the store appearing in different locations but always easy to reach. It had the mystical allure of the Holy Grail, I suppose because I could only find it when I was asleep, and because reading has been such a piece of my soul ever since I learned how.

One night several years ago, I had a dream that the store was closing. I no longer needed it, it seemed, with so many great writers now populating real and online bookshelves. I’ve never been able to find it again, but…

…a great gift of being a writer is that you can create anything you like. As soon as I began mapping out my strange little town of Llithfaen for my novels (my homage to the town of Collinsport in the Dark Shadows TV series), I knew that my bookstore could live once more.

It became Archimedes Books, run by charming Leonidas Diakos and his daughter Calliope, with the assistance of a crazy cat named Tisiphone.

If you read my Chaos Roads trilogy, you’ll be walking the floors of my dream bookstore many times. I hope you enjoy visiting it. Have you had any recurring dreams of such power?

May is Get Caught Reading Month, and if you’ve let the reading habit slip, this is the perfect time to find that perfect bookstore and reacquaint yourself with the delights of great stories.

“Bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places.” – Jen Campbell, author

When I was growing up, we had a lilac shrub in the back yard, and each spring my mother would clip panicles of the lavender flowers and bring them inside. Sitting in a vase in the living room, they would fill the house with scent.

The smell of things is a powerful mood and memory trigger for us. From ancient times, we learned to recognize good smells vs. bad/dangerous odours. But beyond that, when we inhale an aroma, the  molecules bypass the thalamus, which processes input from our other senses, and go directly to our brain’s core for emotion and memory-making.

I recall being in a Mandarin restaurant buffet perhaps a couple of years after my hubby and I had travelled to Asia, and as I inhaled the aroma of one particular dish, for a few seconds I was no longer in that restaurant – I was back on the other side of the world, remembering where I’d first eaten it.

So yesterday, the weather was fine, if windy, and I took a break from writing to drive around and visit a few of our lovely local public gardens.

Fruit trees on farms have blossomed early, as all the trees have burst into leaf. It’s as if everything is celebrating the end of a long, cold winter.

Along the Niagara Parkway, we have a beautiful stretch of ornamental pink cherry trees, and they were fluttering in their spring finery.

Our gorgeous cherry blossoms – photo by author, all rights reserved

The next garden I stopped at was the Centennial Lilac Garden. Only about a third of the shrubs there have bloomed, but enough to wander through and take in their heady scent. Several cars pulled in just after I did, but I was busy taking photos and sniffing the aroma of the different varieties – some are delightfully scented, some little, but they’re all lovely signs of Spring.

I passed one shrub where a woman was holding a cell phone camera and barking at her husband, “Stand there!” I imagined my hubby’s reaction if I ever tried that with him, as I strolled onward to look at a pretty pink azalea in the far corner.

By the time I reached the front of the garden again, perhaps ten minutes had gone by. Apart from a couple who I’d passed sitting on a bench up on the hill, every other visitor had left. Kind of a fly-by shooting.

It struck me how much the tourists had missed the point of the lilac garden: the scent! Lilacs are charming in their quiet way, but we really enjoy them for their wonderful, nostalgic odour. It’s not just me – their unique scent is widely tied to feelings of spring, and childhood. The fragrance had been described as “heavenly”, and has a calming effect, helping to both reduce anxiety and bring a sense of well-being. It’s often used in aromatherapy.

In ancient Celtic lore, the scent of lilacs was believed to transport humans to fairyland.

That’s music to a writer’s ear. We thrive on not only the shape of a lilac’s florets, but its history, and its associations. I’m also a photographer and a trained naturalist, so I’m noticing everything when I’m walking around. (Come on a forest walk with me some time and you’ll see what I mean.)

Tulips in the spring sunlight – photo by author, all rights reserved.

In a café, on a street, in a mall or an airport, I’m absorbing sights, sounds, and human behaviour. Yes, if I’ve been in your vicinity, I’ll have noted how you look and dress – how you present yourself to the world – and what you’re doing. Are you snuggling on a bench with a paramour? Are you behaving like a brat? Are you on your phone completely ignoring the person you’re with? Are you pleasant, or bitchy?

Writers notice a lot. It’s how we paint pictures for our readers. Whether it’s fog creeping across the moors, or taking a romantic walk through a garden, I need to get the details right for your reading mind to feel like it’s right there in the action.

Isn’t that a good way to go through life, though? We’re living in not just a moment, but many moments, fully immersed in wherever we are. By doing so – by taking the time to do it – amazing things can happen.

A couple of years ago I took a friend to see the cherry blossoms at the Royal Botanic Gardens Arboretum in Hamilton. We’d stopped under one of the heavily-laden trees, which was showering little white petals all around us, so that she could take some photos, and I noticed a sound. It seemed to me like a soft buzzing, barely perceptible, and I asked if she could hear it. She could, and we looked for the source. What we saw, when we really looked closely, was hundreds of tiny bees moving through the blossoms over our heads, humming gently as they worked. It was most magical, and we felt so privileged to be part of it that we stayed there for several minutes.

Yesterday I had all kinds of delightful moments – the sunlight glowing through a bed of tulips, bright daffodils nodding their heads in the wind, a big bumblebee collecting nectar from a little hyacinth. Bees require patience to photograph, while you wait for a moment when they’re almost stationary.

Busy bumblebee – photo by author, all rights reserved.

My final stop was at the two big creamy magnolia trees across from the parking area. All the flowers are gorgeous, but I was trying to take a photo of one that was low enough and angled forward enough to get a shot of the cluster of stamens in the centre of the blossom. Meanwhile, the wind was busily shifting the branches all over the place, and aimed the flower straight toward my face just as I was clicking the shutter. I did manage another photo of it resting quietly, the wind having said its piece.

Magnolia blossom just before it smacked me in the face – photo by author, all rights reserved

I could write any of these scenes into a novel, but first – and foremost – I had the great pleasure of experiencing them myself.

It’s easy to spend days glued to a laptop; it takes commitment to go out and enjoy the world around us. But it’s so worth it. Make sure you stop and smell the lilacs.

I busted a mirror and got seven years bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five. Steven Wright

Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody…

How do you feel about mirrors? Are they annoying…weird…creepy?

We’re in the final week of Halfoween. It’s also Folk Horror Week, something celebrated on social media with lists of fave books to read and movies to watch, and the approach to two conflicting vintage celebrations: the pagan Festival of Beltane on April 30th, where bonfires are lit, offerings made for a good growing season, and fertility rituals often result in babies – contrasted with Walpurgisnacht on May 1, when bonfires are lit to drive out witches and evil spirits in honour of St. Walpurga, a missionary in the 700s who founded a monastery and was famous for her ability to repel witchcraft.

Folk Horror is a subgenre of horror that illustrates, basically, what happens when creepy small towns and ancient local legends come to a head. I grew up in a small, isolated community, and while I wasn’t aware of any occult activities, some definitely weird things went on. I assume that’s why Folk Horror resonates so well with me.

If you need samples, read Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery. It was a classic when I was in high school because of its power in illustrating what happens when a small town conducts an inescapable annual ritual during harvest time to ‘drive out bad omens’.

Theatrical release poster; By May be found at the following website: IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=992951

For movies, I like M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 The Village. It focuses on a dreary 17th c. village in Pennsylvania that’s isolated from the outside world by its surrounding forest, which holds monsters. These creatures, known only as “Those We Do Not Speak Of”, will keep away from the town under certain strict rules: no one must enter the woods, or wear the colour red (a repeating theme in Shyamalan’s movies). But when a villager dies, one man decides to brave the woods to bring in supplies of medicine for another town.

Source: Wikipedia. By Self image capture from Murdoch Mysteries: Season One, Acorn Media ISBN 5496181859 {{isbn}}: Check isbn value: checksum (help) (disc 1), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23571881

There’s also a delightfully creepy episode of Murdoch Mysteries, Murdoch and the Cursed Caves, S13.E5, where Julia, William, Henry Higgins and Ruth Newsome decide to go on a ‘pleasant’ camping trip, but encounter a hostile village that talks warns them of an ancient beast stalking the surrounding woods, the Ekarenniondi, or ‘Head-Piercer’. At their campsite they find the torn tent of two murdered men, and take refuge in an old abandoned cabin, where Henry gets himself in to additional trouble by eating hallucinogenic mushrooms from the bases of some of the trees. Another great ending with a twist.

This is a great week to wrap up Halfoween with a bang!

On the theme of folk horror, a couple of weeks ago I found a wonderful decorating site with great Halloween ideas. I spent a couple of hours just browsing through the images.

Some of the bedroom-decoration designs showed how to spook-up your mirrors. Fun to look at but not, I confess, something that I’d want to do in the room where I sleep.

Source: https://homesthetics.net/halloween-bedroom-decorations/

But it got me thinking about the pervasive concept of haunted mirrors, which are a staple in folk horror.

Interestingly, when I was at a weekend retreat a couple of years ago to take promotional photographs, during  one of the discussion sessions, several attendees disclosed that they won’t look in a mirror. Ever.

It was a deeply personal subject for them, bothering them so much that they wouldn’t say why they had such an aversion.

Who doesn’t have a dark place somewhere inside him that comes out sometimes when he’s looking in a mirror? Dark and light, we are all made out of shadows like the shapes on a motion-picture screen. A lot of people think that the function of the projector is to throw light on the screen, just as the function of the story-teller is to stop fooling around and simply tell what happened, but the dark places must be there too, because without the dark places there would be no image and the figure on the screen would not exist.

MacDonald Harris (pseudonym for Donald Heiney, an author, academic, and sailor from South Pasadena, California)

But there’s actually a condition called eisoptrophobia: an ‘unhealthy fear of mirrors’. It can be caused by various factors – issues with self-image, a distaste for the way that mirrors can distort the way an object looks, or emotional trauma from a past incident. Cultural beliefs can also be part of it. Many cultures believe that the souls of deceased loved ones travel through mirrors, or get trapped in them. In these cultures, when a family is in mourning, mirrors are covered or turned away towards the wall.

I read a humorous article on Medium titled 10 Warnings About Looking into a Mirror. The writer suggested alternative reasons for avoiding mirrors, including point in your life when your mirror begins to show your parent’s face back to you, and the horror of shop mirrors that are…less than flattering.

Eisoptrophobia manifests in more than one way:

Atelophobia: One could have a fear of imperfection, or, sadly,Cacophobia: a fear of ugliness. There’s alsoChromophobia: a fear of colours. Never heard of this, but like the vampire my hubby thinks I am, I dislike very bright colours.Koinoniphobia: Fear of rooms. I suppose one would then avoid seeing rooms reflected.Obesophobia: Fear of gaining weight – don’t we all have that to some extent? (no disrespect to those who suffer from such a genuine phobia)Sanguivoriphobia: Fear of vampires, who, according to folklore, have no reflection in mirrors. Predicated on actually believing in them. Personally, if I suspected someone of being one, I’d want to know the truth. (And yes, I do have a reflection.)Thanatophobia: Fear of death. What does this have to do with mirrors? Well, there is an old superstition that young women attempting a divination ritual to see their future husband in a mirror (by walking up a flight of stairs backward in a darkened house) might instead see a skull or the face of the Grim Reaper. That would be a sign that they wouldn’t live long enough to get married.

There are so many legends about mirrors – what could be behind it? A simple piece of glass with a thin reflective layer – aluminum or silver – applied to the back. Yet suddenly the glass is transformed into a portal to other dimensions. Lewis Carroll made great use of that one for his story Through the Looking-glass. Or, if you put two mirrors facing each other, you open up a Vortex, a portal to evil spirits.

Some folklore suggests that mirrors can trap souls, usually at the moment of death. From this, the custom arose of covering mirrors after a person’s death to prevent both their soul becoming trapped inside AND to prevent a loved one’s soul from being pulled in after them. Yikes.

Mirrors are also considered “thin places” that serve as gateways between the living world and the spirit realm. In this way, they might allow demons or ghosts to enter the world of the living. Brrr.

In addition, a really creepy part of Chinese folklore suggests that our reflections are actually a separate species that mimics humans, waiting for the right moment to come out and take our places. Crap!

As if that’s not enough, the Stone Tape theory claims that ghosts and hauntings happen when traumatic events are imprinted on objects, like mirrors or even just a piece of stone, and are then replayed. Think of  an earlier technology where magnetized tapes could record voices and music. Even Charles Babbage, the inventor of the rudimentary computer, believed in this possibility.

It’s also believed that intelligent entities could anchor themselves to an object that held importance for them, surviving their departure from life. Folklore also suggests that mirrors, or the spaces beside them, are places where “shadow people” live. 

And we can’t forget those who use occult practices to intentionally imbue objects with negative spirits, using various evil rituals.

Mirrors are said to have evolved around 6000 BCE from seeing reflections in polished natural stone, but I imagine we were initially quite startled to see our reflections in the much clearer water of prehistoric streams.

I’m right-handed, whereas the fellow in my mirror is left-handed. I start shaving from the left; he starts from the right. Differences only in perception, but religious wars have been fought over such. Robert Breault

The earliest mirrors were manufactured in Çatalhöyük, Turkey from polished obsidian (volcanic glass. Two to three thousand years later, the Mesopotamians and Egyptians used polished copper and bronze. The first clear glass mirrors, made by applying a metal backing of lead or gold leaf,  have been found from around the 1st Century AD. Eventually someone discovered that you could play with mirror properties to alter what they reflect – like convex mirrors that can cover blind spots, or funhouse mirrors that will distort your body’s shape into weird alternate forms.

It was only natural, then, that twisted horror writers began to imagine what strange things could be done with mirrors. But I return you back to par. 11, and the people who are afraid to look into an ordinary, non-haunted mirror.

Nevertheless, the lore and mythology of mirror-magic/madness is vast. There are theories that if you hang two mirrors facing each other in a darkened room, you’ll create what’s known as a “Vortex”, which can allow evil entities to come through.

Almost any mirror can serve as a portal to some types of evil, like the “Bloody Mary” legend. Bloody Mary is a  phantom who may be summoned to reveal the future by saying her name three times in a mirror. Apparently a bathroom mirror produces the best results. The problem with Bloody Mary is that she may not play nice when she appears.

There’s a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror. The brain behind that face never heard of razors, prayers, or the logic of the universe. You turn the mirror sideways and see your face reflected with a sinister left-hand twist, half mad and half sane. Stephen King

And if you break a mirror, well… Best clothe yourself in bubble wrap for the next seven years until the bad luck you caused has dissipated.

As I was writing this post, it occurred to me that, growing up in a remote part of northern Ontario, I have enough background material to write my own Folk Horror novel some day. I think I must add that to my Magic in My Bones canon.

After all, there’s a haunted old place on the outskirts of Llithfaen that was once called Hobgoblin Farm. It’s due for a renovation…

Fog: “a weather condition in which very small drops of water come together to form a thick cloud close to the land or sea, making it difficult to see” Cambridge Dictionary

Not long after I graduated from university, I worked on a funded project at a horticultural research station that happened to be located not far from a lake. One day I had to go over to the experimental building to check on something I can’t recall other than that it required a wrench. The quickest way to get there was through the rose garden. A thick fog had rolled in, so here I was, trudging through the rose paths and swinging a heavy wrench.

I was thoroughly enjoying the walk, and for some reason it reminded me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, one scene in particular. So I found myself tolling the wrench like a medieval bell and crying, “Bring out your dead, bring out your dead,” in a British accent.

Luckily the fog was so dense that it obscured the sound, and no one ever noticed my few minutes of atmospheric silliness, although I still snicker about it years later

The point is that fog lends itself to flights of the imagination. It shrouds the world in mystery, hiding a criminal’s dark doings, or ghostly pirates, or slithering monsters. It’s a gift not only to Halloween party planners but also to writers and countless film-makers.

And it just looks really cool.

Except when you’re trying to drive through it and can’t see past a few yards. During that same work term, I ran into a heavy bank of it on the morning highway, and narrowly avoided a 44-car pileup. I was one of only a handful of employees who made it in to work that day.

Fog obscures reality. It stretches the boundaries of what’s outside our window – there could be anything out there that we don’t know about.

Fog on a road trip one autumn; photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

Did you know that fog is basically a cloud down along the ground? While it’s composed of condensed water vapor, it will only form when the air contains pollutants like dust. The vapour then forms tiny droplets around these minute solid particles. Sea fog forms when vapour condenses around bits of salt, for example.

The air must be very humid for fog to form, so it’s a natural around lakes and oceans. But why did my hubby and I drive into a wide blanket of it on top of the Niagara Escarpment the other day? It was glorious, to be sure, and not so bad that we couldn’t see the road, but it seemed so odd when we’d climbed around six hundred feet above all the large lakes in the area. However, there’d been a lot of rain in previous days, and it was still strewn across most of the fields in vast puddles. A temperature inversion could have gathered up the humidity and played with it.

Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland is the foggiest place in the world. There the warm Gulf Stream from the Atlantic Ocean collides with the cold Labrador Current, creating almost daily dense fog. Watch this video by Andrew Perry, “Fog rolling over Long Range Mountains in Lark Harbour Newfoundland”, (click on the screenshot below) for a scene that looks like it climbed straight out of a Stephen King novel.

Fog rolling over Long Range Mountains in Lark Harbour Newfoundland, posted oh YouTube by Andrew Perry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhndDBfMAg0

When a writer or a film-maker injects fog into a story, it usually means that something creepy is afoot. I’ve used it myself, since I write paranormal thrillers. In fact, whenever a Gate to one of the metaphysical Roads in my novels activates, it generates mist as the environments outside and inside the Gate’s event horizon meet.

Fog works really well to create a sense of unease. It tends to isolate people into their own small pocket of visibility. It deadens sound. And it obscures whatever may be beyond. All of these factors can create disorientation, distrust, fright. It’s perfect for horror movies.

Fog has a respectable pedigree in films. In quite a few, it’s a major character in its own right. Stephen King’s horror novella The Mist features a strange fog enveloping a small town, trapping quite a few residents inside a grocery store as it descends. Any who try to escape vanish screaming. King plays out an interesting scenario as the residents panic and a religious zealot tries to convince them that the mist is God’s vengeance for their sins – requiring a sacrifice. The movie version is eerily effective as the fog rolls in, slowly and ominously.

Theatrical release poster   By IMP Awards / 2007 Movie Poster Gallery / The Mist Poster (#1 of 4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12530561

Another movie that made great use of fog as a harbinger of doom was John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980). In it, a mysterious, glowing fog creeps in from the sea to take over another small town. The movie was a relatively low-budget production, but used dark settings and the desolation of the town to great effect.

Theatrical release poster   By Avco Embassy Pictures/ Debra Hill – This image can be obtained anywhere online or directly from the film’s initial distributors. This particular image was taken from the internet, at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080749/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48724378

A much earlier British film called The City of the Dead (Horror Hotel in the United States) shrouded a small Massachusetts town (it’s always the small towns that disappear into the fog, isn’t it) as a young college student comes to research witchcraft on the advice of her professor, played by the almost-always sinister Christopher Lee. The fog conceals the town’s sins, as the student discovers during her investigations.

Screenshot of one of the movie stills from City of the Dead on IMDB (source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053719/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_2_tt_4_nm_4_in_0_q_city%20of%20the%20dead)

And of course, there’s The Haunted Palace. , the film made by Roger Corman of H.P. Lovecraft’s novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. With Vincent Price and another creepy seaside Massachusetts village that exudes fog, how can anything but disaster befall? (See my previous blog post, The Lovecraft Legacy, for more info about author Lovecraft’s enduring influence on books and film.)

My hubby and I love visiting haunted attractions in October (well, mostly me), and of course they all use fog for effect. It’s one of the easiest ways to create a spooky atmosphere throughout a large area. Several years ago we arrived at Busch Gardens in Virginia mid-afternoon to walk around and get our bearings, but we were really there for the fantastic evening event, Howl-o-Scream. We had a delicious dinner, and as dusk fell fog began to arise from behind bushes, until the place resembled a horror movie. Lanterns glowed eerily as we wandered through the mists to enjoy the night’s haunted entertainments. So much fun!

Busch Gardens, Virginia, filled with fog on an October night. Photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved.

I definitely recommend Howl-o-Scream for an autumn visit some time. It’s more edgy than Disney, but still fun enough for kids, and, at least when we were there, there was only a single, reasonable ticket price for the entire day. (At the present time the theme park hasn’t posted 2026 info.)

During this time of Halfoween, as we approach the exact opposite point on the calendar (known as Walpurgis Nacht, the night of the year when it was believed that witches celebrated a sabbath and evil powers were at their strongest), I’ve provided you with more ideas on how to ward off the evil by the light of your reading lamp or your television Make some tea or hot chocolate, pull up a chair, and get to it!

And no, I’m not going to tell you what’s in the fog. You must find out for yourself.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. E. L. Doctorow

“If I could speak the language of rabbits, they would be amazed, and I would be their king. I would be kind to my rabbit subjects. At first.” Rajesh Koothrappali, Big Bang Theory

Have you ever played a Simulator game? One where you create a community, placing homes, stores, a hospital, a flower shop, and so on, wherever you feel they should go?

If you have, if you’ve enjoyed your god-like powers to shape your community in whatever way pleases you, you’ll understand a little of what it’s like being a fiction writer. Especially someone who writes fantasy or paranormal stories.

Many authors create a ‘community’ that our protagonist lives in, and where the action takes place.  Cabot Cove in the Murder She Wrote television series (a ‘cozy’ town that I certainly wouldn’t want to live in, because everybody gets murdered!), or Kembleford in the Father Brown television series, are classic examples.

Father Brown’s church in Kembleford, better known as St. Peter and St. Paul in the real town of Blockley; source: By DeFacto – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55884080

I’ve done the same with my town of Llithfaen. It was interesting to make up a town that sits on three ley lines and is prone to hauntings and other weird things, together with a small college where courses in esoteric subjects are taught and there’s a library with a restricted floor that houses a collection of amazing ancient artifacts.

My imaginary town has to follow some rules, though. It must have streets and homes, and shops and services that sustain its residents, such as a hospital where the physicians are used to some very strange cases. There’s a library with an unusual window with an Egyptian motif, a carousel that could fill your nightmares, and a bookstore that I quite literally dreamt about for years and finally brought to life in my novels. (More about that in another post!)

Atmosphere is critical in paranormal and horror novels, of course. My town of Llithfaen was founded by Brother Domitian, a travelling monk from Wales who’d had something of a classical education. His legacy appears in many of the later place names, such as Hermes Square, Demeter Street, and Aenon Cemetery. And because he grew up in medieval Wales, there are numerous stone-walled passageways around the rabbit-warren of streets in the centre of town.

All places evolve, even small towns. Later additions to the town, such as the railroad tracks and train station, added an industrial flavour, along with the Winchester Tile Factory. After the trains no longer traversed such a remote community and the factory shut down, it transformed into a modern condo building that Rad Enkara, the college’s archeology professor, lives in. Several retired train cars were repurposed as the Hobo Lounge restaurant out in the woods east of Grey Marsh.

The surrounding waters add a murky marine atmosphere, especially the Marsh, where nothing lives except the nasty green Wraiths. The marina on the Acheron River adjacent to Chimera Park is a bustling place on warm spring and summer days, but the old Carrigan Boatworks on the other side of the bridge have been closed up ever since a destructive attack by a mysterious monster decades ago.

It’s not as easy as you might think to fashion an entire town, but it is fun.

I created an informal map in PowerPoint, which I’m very familiar with, so that I could lay out everything that had to fit within the parameters of that little pocket of weirdness. It allowed me to be consistent in my novels, and also to plot the action in various scenes that move around the town.

And when my beta readers asked for the map of the town, and of the college campus, to be included in the books, I was gratified that they were so interested in the details of what I’d created.

All writers have influences, and I mentioned one of my largest last week: H.P. Lovecraft. The alternate version of New England that he wrote was so powerful that, like the Sherlock Holmes stories, many readers became convinced that it was real. I think that’s what every writer hopes for, to have that kind of impact.

Lovecraft created his own weird town, Arkham, and even sketched out a map for reference. Thirty years later, my single greatest influence, heavily impacted in its own turn by Lovecraft’s writing, was the first supernatural soap opera, Dark Shadows, set in the eerie town of Collinsport. To this day, I have a thing for the ambience of  towns and villages near water.

H. P. Lovecraft’s personal map of Arkham, Massachusetts. Source: By H. P. Lovecraft – https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:927157/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110340050

If you’ve only ever seen Tim Burton’s movie version, for the love of all that’s unholy, don’t go by that – it doesn’t represent the original series well at all. (Sorry Tim, but I’m afraid the comedic approach didn’t work.)

I still remember the first day my brother and I came across Dark Shadows on the telly, and the intro of dark crashing waves and eerie theme music began to play, segueing into an image of the Collinwood Mansion shrouded in fog. Whenever we watched each episode, that intro catapulted us into the strange world of the soap as we waited impatiently to find out what was going to happen next.

Dark Shadows intro – click on image to see the video on YouTube

Dark Shadows aired weekdays on the ABC network from June 27, 1966, to April 2, 1971. The show centred around the lives and tribulations of the wealthy but rather cursed Collins family of a town in Maine named after them. It was originally supposed to be a largely gothic family saga, but wasn’t doing well enough in the ratings, so the writers began introducing a few supernatural elements, and that transmuted the entire show into something dark, dangerous and exciting.

The tortured family vampire, 175-year-old Barnabas Collins, who was accidentally released from his coffin partway into the first season, made the show a cult hit for the ages. Barnabas was played by a little-known Canadian actor, Jonathan Frid, who, although not conventionally good-looking, captured his character’s angst and menace so well that he became the unlikely romantic hero of the show.

Photo of Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins from the daytime drama Dark Shadows. By ABC Television – eBay itemphoto frontphoto back, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22444685

The supernatural focus then became the main driver of the plots on the show, exploring ghosts, werewolves, witches and warlocks, time travel and many other ideas cribbed from classic horror stories.

The town of Collinsport provided so much atmosphere for the series. Every great story has an intensely evocative setting, and it was certainly so on Dark Shadows.

It all begins with Victoria Winters, an orphan who journeys by train to the mysterious town of Collinsport, Maine, to unravel the mysteries of her past. Her employer is Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (played by veteran actress Joan Bennett with great gravitas), who lives in an enormous gothic mansion overlooking the sea. Elizabeth’s brother, Roger Collins, a widower, also lives in the house with his troubled son David, as well as Elizabeth’s headstrong daughter Carolyn Stoddard, and a rather grim-looking housekeeper.

Julia Hoffman is the local doctor who earnestly but annoyingly meddles in everything. Willie Loomis is the hapless groundskeeper who, searching for treasure, lets ancestor Barnabas Collins out of his coffin to terrorize Collinsport. Many other characters make regular appearances in their places of business or as victims of the curse that seems to afflict both the Collins family and their town.

Collinwood Mansion is the main setting. The huge Carey Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island was used for the intro, as Collinwood contains over 40 rooms, although, like the gothic novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, many of them are closed off in more modern times. As in any good gothic mansion, there are also secret passageways, rooms that alter depending on who enters them, and a time-traveling stairway.

Because of all the rumours about the mansion, most of Collinsport’s residents are afraid to even drive by it.

Collinwood, as represented in the original show by Seaview Terrace (later known as Carey Mansion) in Newport, Rhode Island; source: By Jim McCullars MccullarsJ – Own work (Original text: self-made), CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40042966

Although most of the action takes place in the large foyer, where an imposing portrait of Barnabas Collins hangs, its grand staircase, and the sitting room with big windows, a massive fireplace and a dry bar with crystal decanters so that everyone can pop back much-needed liquors after all the peculiar things that happen, the rest of the mansion is fully fleshed out. We also see the garden terrace and various parts of the grounds where people are usually running in fear, as well as the original mansion on the estate, into which Barnabas, now posing as his own descendant newly arrived from the U.K., moves into.

I think Dark Shadows was unique not only in its premise but also in how much it spread the plots not only through the weird mansion but also to many parts of the town.  

The Collinsport Inn is a three-story inn located on the main street. A tavern called the Blue Whale is a regular haunt for the town, and for Carolyn Stoddard when she’s feeling rebellious. It’s famous for some of the very best seafood in the area. Braithwaite & Sons are the local jewelers and silversmiths, one of whom was portrayed by a pre-Barney Miller Abe Vigoda. In fact, quite a few early actors in this series went on to achieve later fame, so it’s fun to pick them out while watching.

There’s a department store, general store, hospital, Eagle Hill Cemetery (where Barnabas was entombed), a beach called Lookout Point, fog-filled alleyways where Barnabas attacks his victims, and so much more.

One shop that became my favourite place in the series is a cozy antique store owned by Philip and Megan Todd. In the ‘Leviathans’ plot line, which embroiled many of the residents of Collinwood and Collinsport in a scenario inspired directly by H.P. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods mythos, the baby monster is taken in by the Todds and housed in a locked room above the shop, where it goes through increasingly older iterations until finally the adult creature manifests as the dangerously attractive Jeb Hawkes. Jeb becomes obsessed with beautiful Carolyn as soon as he lays eyes on her, and decides to change the rules so that he can have her. We never see Jeb’s true form as the Leviathan, only hear its terrifying breathing behind the old wooden door in the antique shop.

I’ve read that the Leviathan plot line wasn’t very popular, but my brother, mother (she got hooked on the show as well) and I loved it – so twisty and romantic.

Dark Shadows was filmed live, so there were no retakes if the props malfunctioned or an actor fumbled their lines (which happened quite often, although they were all adept at covering their slip-ups). The special effects of ghostly manifestations, witchy powers, horrifying dreams and the like look very dated now, but the show was powerfully effective at the time and has a dedicated fan base to this day.

In many ways, the town of Llithfaen is my equivalent to Collinsport, with the Wychwood estate subbing in for Collinwood. It’s been a pure delight to pay homage to my beloved old TV series, which gave me so much joy when I was younger so that I could pass that along to all of my readers.

I chose to avoid the gothic or Victorian clichés for my creepy mansion, Wychwood. On one of our road trips I came across a mansion in Ontario that was white in colour but just had a certain ‘look’ to it, which I described in book one of the trilogy. I’m not going to reveal where it is, so that the owners never get any fans trying to see it personally.

My hubby and I visited one of the Dark Shadows locations, from one of the companion movies. The estate is called Lyndhurst, in the Hudson River Valley in NY State. We couldn’t take photos inside, but I here’s an external shot for you. Some day I’d love to go to the Carey Mansion, even just to see the outside, which was so iconic in the original series.

Lyndhurst Mansion, Tarrytown, NY – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

For those of you who’ve finished the Chaos Roads trilogy, there will be more to come about uncanny Llithfaen this fall in my next novel, The Summer Door, wherein another resident of Llithfaen becomes involved in a dark and baleful romance of her own.

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“…he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.”

The Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft

We’re going to begin April/Halfoween with a creeping whisper rather than a bang.

There are authors who’ve created such an mesmerizing world that it grabs hold of our collective conscious and won’t let go. We have J.R.R. Tolkien and Lewis Carroll and A.A. Milne, who wrote what we’d now call ‘cozy’ fantasies, and then we have H.P. Lovecraft, who produced from his tortured imagination a mythos of ancient, dreadful cosmic gods that contemporary and later authors felt compelled to add on to long before that became a ‘thing’.

The “Great Old Ones” are gods from space who’ve existed since Earth began, having the ability to travel between planets, and once ruled ours. Since then, they’ve fallen into in a deathlike sleep, but they’re not truly dead, and have the ability to influence our minds and dreams. They’re said to know everything happening in the universe.

[image error]An artist’s visual representation of Cthulhu; By Dominique Signoret (signodom.club.fr), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1003104

They exist outside of normal space-time, and live inside the Earth, deep in the sea, and in other dimensions. Although they attract and are worshipped by crazed cults, anyone who sees their natural form is driven incurably mad.

Then there are the lesser gods, the “Great Ones” (not actually very great), who once lived on the world’s mountain peaks, but were driven off by the spread of humanity and had to leave Earth entirely.

This is a fairly dry-ish listing that doesn’t evoke the subtle, insidious horror of Lovecraft’s writing. He places the extraordinary among the ordinary, so that we can imagine ourselves in the shoes of the troubled protagonists/victims, trying desperately to survive.

Lovecraft’s own background could have been the basis for a horror story. Both of his parents ended up institutionalized, which perhaps gave him the idea of cosmic-induced insanity. As a child he also suffered from night terrors and vivid dreams involving shadowy creatures he called “Night Gaunts”.

Fortunately, his grandfather liked to tell him stories, and his childhood home had a large library that contained classical literature, scientific works, and early ‘weird fiction’. That’s not just a descriptor – it’s a subgenre of speculative fiction that originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author China Miéville defines it as “usually, roughly, conceived of as a rather breathless and generically slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic (‘horror’ plus ‘fantasy’) often featuring nontraditional alien monsters (thus plus ‘science fiction’)”.

Later on, Lovecraft cited Edgar Allan Poe as the first author of weird fiction, as in a type of supernatural fiction different from traditional Gothic literature, and Poe was himself a major source of inspiration for Lovecraft.

I think the appeal of weird fiction is how far it colours outside the lines. Lovecraft imagined a universe populated by vast monsters that would happily squash us like bugs, unless they could manipulate us into worshipping them in horrendously twisted ways. And that was the only way to survive knowledge of these alien gods without, or perhaps because of, losing one’s mind. Each story featured mysterious happenings and forbidden knowledge, always an intriguing combination.  

He created a recurrently eerie setting: a warped version of New England, centering around the strange town of Arkham in Massachusetts, somewhere north of Boston, and its…unconventional educational institution, MIskatonic University. The countryside was populated with eerie towns like Dunwich and Innsmouth that reflected his own views of New England as a grim place with mysterious backwoods and abandoned farmhouses. To visit any of these places was to court doom, either from the abnormal inhabitants or the monsters they invited.

[image error]Pays de Lovecraft — Wikipédia; Carte détaillée des lieux associés au pays de Lovecraft, à la fois réels et imaginaires, sur la côte du comté d’Essex au Massachusetts. Par Hoodinski — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15255916

On top of that, Miskatonic U’s library was known for its collection of occult books (of course). It also housed one of the few genuine copies of the Necronomicon, a forbidden textbook of magic that contained an account of the Old Ones (the alien god-monsters), their history, and the means for summoning them. And there were plenty of people who wanted to get their hands on it.

Lovecraft said that the title came to him in a dream, and it was a creation that so captured the imagination that a lot of people thought the book wasn’t fictional. He felt guilty when he heard of fans searching libraries for copies of it (the Vatican regularly gets requests from people who believe it has a copy). He always felt that a well-written weird story should be believable in its own way, and wrote about the Necronomicon in several stories as ‘first-hand testimonials’. He also allowed other authors to build on the universe he created with additional stories and references to the book, creating “a background of evil verisimilitude”.

The verisimilitude clearly worked, as many contemporary writers of his, such as August Derleth, and succeeding creators, from writers to filmmakers, have either produced his novels as movies (live and animated), or homages to them.

I’m not certain when I began reading Lovecraft’s works, but I certainly noticed his influence in my favourite television show ever, the original Dark Shadows. His imprint was all over the cursed Collins family and the spooky coastal fishing town they founded, Collinsport. The descendants of Isaac Collins all lived in a magnificently creepy mansion, a forty-room edifice built in 1795 near Widows’ Hill. Collinsport was a fully-realized town in the series, with places like the Blue Whale tavern and Todds’ Antique Shop. The antique shop became the centrepiece of a storyline about the Leviathans, a race of beings who ruled the Earth before mankind came into existence, with hideous and inhuman true forms. Sound familiar? Creator Dan Curtis produced something remarkable for the era, the first horror TV series. He took inspiration from all legends and stories – vampires, werewolves, witches, Jekyll & Hyde – but for me the Leviathan cycle was the best of all.

I have the complete original series on dvd, and yes, it comes in a coffin-shaped box. Screenshot from Amazon.ca.

You’ll be familiar with some very well-known modern artists who cite Lovecraft as inspiration – writers Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, filmmakers John Carpenter, Roger Corman and Guillermo del Toro.

H.P. Lovecraft has many detractors for his sometimes virulent personal and political views, with deep prejudices against non-white races. But there was just something so potent about his stories that fans, while wrestling with his persona, continue to enjoy the universe he created.

If you’re already a fan, then you’re likely aware of the many tributes to his work, from movies to board games.

If you need an introduction, I can recommend a terrific vintage horror movie I was delighted to stumble across a couple of weeks ago, The Haunted Palace. Directed by Roger Corman in 1963, as a matter of fact.

The Haunted Palace movie poster; By The poster art can or could be obtained from American International Pictures., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11400468

It’s a marvellously eerie movie set in the seaside town of Arkham, filled with mists and cobblestones. We first see it in 1765, when the inhabitants believe that a grand “palace” overlooking the town is owned by Joseph Curwen (played by the wonderful Vincent Price), is a warlock who’s responsible for young maidens disappearing. They capture and burn him at the stake, but he curses the town and vows revenge. 110 years later, Curwen’s great-great-grandson, Charles Dexter Ward, and his wife Anne, have inherited the palace. When they arrive in Arkham, they find a town full of deformed people who are very hostile. When they finally arrive at the palace, Charles is surprised by struck by his strong resemblance to his ancestor, via a portrait on the wall, and how well he seems to know the palace despite never having been there.

I won’t spoil anything for you. The movie is based on Lovecraft’s story titled The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

There are far too many Lovecraft-referenced works to mention here. But I’ll give you a few fun ones.

In 1991 a movie called Cast a Deadly Spell featured a hard-boiled detective named Lovecraft who lives in an alternate reality where magic is accepted and practiced openly. Lovecraft has, for reasons of his own which we discover to the follow-up movie Witch Hunt, given up using magic, but still must navigate a dastardly plot to find and use – you may have guessed it – the Necronomicon. The movies are both campy fun if you want to watch a pair of light horror movies.

[image error]

In the popular vein of piggybacking on existing stories/characters, author James Lovegrove has written a series of books called The Cthulhu Casebooks, in which he pits Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson against the world of Lovecraft’s monsters. The first in the series is called Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows. They’re an entertaining addition to the enduring alternate world that H.P. Lovecraft created a century ago, and there are other completely separate novels as well.

There are a variety of board games set in the Lovecraft universe. I’ve obtained a copy of one called Elder Sign for myself.

The Elder Sign board/card game, waiting for me to try it out – photo by author, all rights reserved

It’s promoted as a good introductory game, although I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to actually play it yet (or give you a review). The maker’s description sounds like fun, though:

It is 1926, and the museum’s extensive collection of exotic curios and occult artifacts poses a threat to the barriers between our world and the elder evils lurking between dimensions. Gates to the beyond begin to leak open, and terrifying creatures of increasing strength steal through them. Animals, the mad, and those of more susceptible minds are driven to desperation by the supernatural forces the portals unleash. Only a handful of investigators race against time to locate the eldritch symbols necessary to seal the portals forever. Only they can stop the Ancient One beyond from finding its way to Earth and reducing humanity to cinders.

I do also have the Monopoly: Cthulhu game. It sounded promising, and I played it with friends who were familiar with the Lovecraft world, but we petered out after a while. Interestingly, it no longer appears to be available on Amazon. The Boardgame Geek website gives it a 5.5 rating out of 10.

Well, I’ve offered you a number of ways to dive into the Lovecraft canon, if you’d like to see what all the fuss is about. Let me know which ideas you try out, and if you’re already a fan, I’d love to hear your thoughts about any of this, because you’ll find the same influence throughout my Chaos Roads Trilogy.

Happy start to Halfoween month!

Why are you looking at a graphic of Halloween stuff above?

Because I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of the world at the moment!

It’s finally Spring, and I want to have some fun after a long and stressful winter.

April is “Halfway to Halloween” month – also known as Halfoween. Thanks to the legions of fans of our coolest October holiday, this pre-celebration six months ahead of time is steadily growing in popularity. I follow someone on Instagram who lives in a town I’d like to live in, Sleepy Hollow, NY, and it’s probably no surprise that the town goes all out for Halfoween. Wish hubby and I could drive down there and join them, but we can’t due to some of the craziness I’m trying to ignore for the coming month.

Sleepy Hollow town clock in autumn – photo by author, all rights reserved

I’ve been a fan of Halloween from childhood. October 31 was the best night of the year, for several reasons.

Dressing up as someone from the movies! My mom who was happy to help me make costumes, rejigged from a trunk of old clothing and what few props we could buy at the time.Going out after dark without your parents. This gave a certain edge to the night, because there were a few houses in the neighbourhood whose owner we didn’t know, and that looked a little creepy lit only by streetlight.To this day, I still feel there’s nothing better than walking under the stars from one jack o’lantern-lit porch to another, with a chill in the air and leaves underfoot.Bringing home sacks of candy, and we were allowed to eat as much as we wanted. There was even one house that gave out big popcorn balls, and a hair salon that handed out candy apples. I mean, how much better could things get?

As I grew older, I began holding Halloween parties instead, and those were almost as much fun. In fact, most of my fondest memories from childhood revolve around the Halloween season. I love the classic colour combo of orange and black, and all variations thereof. I love the creepy music. I love vintage horror movies. Halloween decorations (not gory, just fun) always bring a smile to my face.

So Halfoween is right up my alley!

How does one celebrate it in the absence of pumpkins and Halloween candies? Oh, many, many ways. Halfoween is considered a kind of Halloween-‘light’ affair, although of course you can pull out the super-frightening stuff if you wish. But generally, think of a cozier ambience – a Halloween lap blanket, pumpkin pies and cupcakes, hot chocolate with black sprinkles, you get the idea. Make a mug of tea and catch up on your paranormal reading, or watch some of the many vintage horror movies that are more about ambience than blood and guts. Some of my favourite lighter modern movies include:

Hocus Pocus (of course) Halloweentown (and sequels) Girl Vs Monster The Boy Who Cried Werewolf

A Halfoween party would be an option! If I weren’t so busy working on my horror novel, I’d consider it! Supplies are all around if you know where to look. Most bakeries now offer pumpkin pie year-round, although baking your own is easy, fun and therapeutic. I even found orange-frosted cupcakes in the bakery section of a local grocery store the other day, and, although I didn’t ask, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were willing to custom-bake a Halloween-themed cake.

Boutique stores are popping up all over with esoteric offerings, if you need or want some decor. And while fresh pumpkins are still out of season, it wouldn’t be difficult to put together an autumnal flower arrangement in a vase – there are plenty of orange and purple-coloured flowers around, even in grocery stores. I bought a spring planter today for our front porch that has some glorious orange and burgundy pansies in it.

Spring planter in fall colours – photo by author, all rights reserved

So that’s my choice of sheer fun for April. I’ve already pulled out a few Halloween decorations, and no doubt plenty of pumpkin-flavoured baked treats will begin making an appearance as well. More ideas in my April newsletter – sign up via the pop-up box on this website (it’s the double opt-in box, make sure you’ve selected the right one).

What would you like to do for fun for the month? Think way outside the box – what’s something you might not ordinarily consider? This is a mental vacation from global stress, so make it good. And let me know what you come up with – perhaps you’ll inspire others to do the same.

‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ said Alice. ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here.’ Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Do you also feel as if we’ve all tumbled down a rabbit-hole into a strange world where nothing makes sense?

When I was previewing selected themes for my social posts this month, ‘March Madness’ up, but it didn’t resonate with me. This week, however, I feel like the entire world’s caught on, and I’m left scratching my head in bewilderment.

Comics publisher Fantagraphics just announced on their Facebook feed that a ship carrying copies of one of their new publications, an anthology by cartoonist Roberta Gregory, was struck by a missile in the Persian Gulf. I haven’t been able to determine why this particular cargo was in the middle of the current war, since Fantagraphics appears to be a U.S. publisher. The good news is that the ship and its crew made it safely out of there, but the book’s launch has had to be postponed. And to top things off, Fantagraphics has noted that insurance for the shipment doesn’t cover acts of war.

Source: Fantagraphics public Facebook page

For some reason, the humble little book keeps getting embroiled in contentiousness.

The war on book banning in the U.S. rages on. This week, a library director in Rutherford County, Tennessee, officially refused to comply with her board’s order to move more than 100 books, many with LGBTQ+ content, from “children’s” and “teen” to the adult section because they were deemed “age-inappropriate”, even though they were specifically written for those age groups. It’s seen as a way to censor knowledge of the differences among us. A children’s book author I know told me that she has to jump through all kinds of hoops to get her books approved, so the books in question wouldn’t have made it onto the shelves lightly. The director may lose her job over this, but she’s taken a stand, and has the support of a number of organizations that advocate for free expression and writers’ rights.

In the never-ending saga of the author of The Salt Path, a new controversy has come to light. In 2019, Raynor Winn was awarded the £10,000 Christopher Bland Prize for debut novelists for her breakout novel about walking the coastal path of England after she and her husband Moth lost their home and he was diagnosed with a terminal disease. Having already being outed about the legitimacy of that book and even Wynn’s diagnosis, it’s now come out that she won the £10,000 prize under false pretenses: it wasn’t the first book she’d written. A previous novel had been published under the alias Izzy Wyn-Thomas through a company she and her hubby briefly owned. Read more about the original story in my blog post The salty path of veracity.

Hoaxes and frauds involving books are nothing new at all. There are many notorious instances over several centuries. In the 9th century someone, or more than one person, forged a set of papal and council decrees supposedly collected by Saint Isidore of Sevilla. Called The False Decretals, they were falsifications of church law, in a determined attempt to separate Church and State. Deciding that their end goal would never be achieved legitimately, the forgers came up with the idea of writing fake rulings by long-dead popes and kings. Unlike later forgeries, they were generally accepted as authentic for several centuries and had considerable influence. Even though they were definitively refuted in the 17th century, they’d done their job.

The medieval forgers’ purpose was to foment a revolution in church law, but for more recent writers, I can imagine the motivation: fame, recognition, probably piles of money. It’s something most, if not all, writers would like. We work hard, put ourselves out there on the printed page, and hope for some validation. But what if that validation isn’t earned?

In 1970, novelist Clifford Irving decided to create a bogus ‘autobiography’ of eccentric business magnate Howard Hughes. Ironically, Irving had written a biography of a Hungarian art forger named Elmyr de Hory in 1969. Perhaps he drew inspiration from de Hory’s story, because he proceeded to do some forging of his own. Irving claimed that he and Hughes had been corresponding by mail, and proffered Hughes ‘hand-written’ notes. He received a $765,000 advance from publisher McGraw-Hill, Inc., and hoped to slide the book under recluse Hughes’ radar. However, Hughes eventually did come forward, quite publicly. Irving went on to serve 17 months in prison for fraud. His story was featured in Orson Welles’s final film F for Fake!

James Frey published a searing ‘memoir’ in 2003 of his struggles with alcohol and drug addiction called A Million Little Pieces. It went on to become a huge bestseller just two years later when Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club. But the following year everything collapsed like a house of cards, after much of it was exposed as balderdash. It was a massive literary scandal.

Readers expect that what they read, especially if it’s a memoir, but even with fiction novels, is authentic/authentically written. And now we come to a story that’s been breaking all over the place: a novel partially produced by AI. It’s a sad tale, and I’m not sure why it’s being blasted around so much, but it’s a cautionary tale on all sides.

In 2025, indie author Mia Ballard self-published her novel “Shy Girl,” a ‘femgore’ (a very popular subgenre these days) revenge story of a young woman who’s held hostage by a man she met online and forced to live as his pet before she begins to release her rage. The book was a hit, and achieved every writer’s dream: it was picked up by a major publisher, Hachette in the U.K.

Source: public listing of the Hachette version of novel Shy Girl on Amazon.ca

But problems soon arose. I haven’t read the book – in fact I wasn’t aware of it at all until it began popping up in my literary news feeds – but here’s what I’ve gleaned from the media:

Ballard cribbed a copyrighted artwork of a dog from the internet for her cover. It was a painting called Dreamer by Whyn Lewis. There was then an ‘anonymous’ post on a literary forum wherein the writer of Shy Girl admitted that they’d used an already-manipulated image of the painting and couldn’t trace the original artist. They assumed that hardly anyone would read the book, but later regretted not doing their due-diligence. They’d been contacted by the artist, who asked that they disclose all royalties earned from the book due to the infringement, and take down any remaining use of her artwork.When the book began to gain popularity and rave reviews, big publisher Hachette became interested. Oddly, they chose to use a similar image on their version of the cover. The book was released in the U.K., and then people began to post their belief that AI had been used to write it. Apparently there are some ‘tells’ that give AI away: repeated words, gaps in logic, an inconsistent ‘voice’ (a characteristic  feel to an author’s writing), overuse of melodramatic adjectives and too much use of the rule of three (a long-standing writing principle that grouping things like characters or examples in threes is more satisfying and effective).

Now, let me just say that a lot of this could have occurred naturally. Authors often fall back on their favourite words and repeat them throughout their first draft; I always do a word search on my first edit to weed those out and improve the writing. Melodramatic adjectives are nothing new either – they’re usually just a sign of bad writing. And some authors may have read about the Rule of Three and decided they should use it.

However, Max Spero, founder of Pangram, heard about Shy Girl and decided to run the full text through his A.I. detection software. It indicated that the book was 78 percent A.I. generated. Readers began to react strongly, and the phrase “AI slop” came up.

Mia Ballard is a black author, and there have been allegations of racism in the intense furor that’s since landed her in the hospital with stress. It’s certainly not unheard of. She maintains that she wrote the original story, but then gave it to a friend to edit, and that’s where the AI crept in. However, editors aren’t supposed to rewrite the text, just guide the author toward a better book.

In situations like this, the responsibility falls on the author, together with the publisher, to make sure they’re putting out something authentic. The Salt Path seemed to show that doing a long walk in the fresh air could reverse a terminal disease. It offered hope to a lot of people in the same boat, and they felt betrayed when the truth came out.

Publishers and authors are struggling to maintain their credence in the face of the AI storm. In the U.K., the Society of Authors has launched a ’Human Authored’ scheme. Authors can register their books and download a “Human Authored” logo to put on their back cover.

With so much misuse of AI to scrape material from legit books without authors’ permissions or reimbursement, and the lack of adequate legislation, writers now feel we have to formally state that we’ve actually written our own book. From what I understand, quite a few book reviewers and influencers endorsed Shy Girl, so this massive kerfuffle leaves them pretty gun-shy.

You know, there will always be people who abuse a situation or a technology. As I commented to one influencer, all any of us can do is act in good faith under the best circumstances we have available.

So I will continue to write my novels, from scratch (and design my own covers using copyright-free fonts and graphics), and edited without the use of any AI whatsoever. I prefer to be an authentic creator, human and as real as it gets. It’s what readers want, and I believe there are many of us prepared to try and restore some sanity to our topsy-turvy world.

When I turned the final page of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I wanted to crawl back inside. While the books are overly-descriptive for some people, I found the details of Middle Earth so fascinating that I couldn’t get enough of them. I wanted to visit Middle Earth, follow the Road of adventure as Bilbo sang about it:

The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

This song inspired me so much that eventually I became a traveller myself – sadly without wizards, trolls, Ents, dragons, or any other of the wonderful and sometimes terrifying creatures in Tolkien’s books. And three years ago I published the first book in my Chaos Roads urban fantasy series, also about Roads that can take you to exciting places.

My hubby and I often do road trips, whether at home in North America or in far-flung countries. If you’re up to the driving, sometimes on the other side of the road, it’s really the best way to see most places. You can plan your own route, see things that aren’t on standard tour itineraries, spend as much time as you want in interesting locations without having to adhere to a pre-defined schedule.

A few years ago we even did a road trip in New Zealand, and of course one of the places we visited was the film set of Hobbiton, which luckily has been preserved by the family who owns the land and turned into the most popular attraction in the entire country.

But today’s about St. Patrick’s Day, and travel to Ireland. I think I may surprise you with my inspiration for some of the sightseeing we did there. Although we did enjoy the Dracula’s Castle illusion show (sadly, no longer available), and see Oscar Wilde’s statue in Dublin, among other literary things, the series of novels that immersed me in the Irish landscape and culture was the Fever series by Karen Marie Moning.

Hubby walking the Burren – photo by author, all rights reserved

Now, you may see them listed under the Romance category, but they’re really brilliantly-written Urban Fantasy – funny, gut-wrenching, sexy, frightening. When I first picked up the starting book, Darkfever, my initial reaction was: oh, another book about the Fae and a human with special abilities, blah, blah, blah. But I gave it a try anyway, and found the writing so engaging and the mythology so inventive that it’s become my favourite urban fantasy series.

Here’s the general beginning of the story: MacKayla Lane, a happy, carefree young woman in Georgia, is devastated to learn one day that her beloved sister, who’s been attending university in Dublin, Ireland, has been brutally murdered. MacKayla (Mac) and her parents can’t get satisfaction from the Irish police from our side of the Pond, so Mac decides to go to Dublin and do some investigating herself, much against her parents’ wishes.

Once she arrives, she begins to have strange experiences, and, without giving too much away, learns that she is descended from a long line of Sidhe-Seers – those who can see the not-very-nice Sidhe (aka Fae) who typically wander through humanity invisibly preying on us in various forms. Of course, this gets her into a lot of trouble, but, finding herself lost one day in an eerie, deserted section of Dublin whose existence everyone seems to have forgotten, she meets a man named Jericho Barrons. He offers his protection, for a price: he’s searching for a dreadful ancient artifact and wants to use her special abilities to find it.

That’s all I’m going to say – I’ll let you have the fun of experiencing this magical, thrilling series for yourself. When we visited Ireland in person, of course we spent some time in Dublin, especially Temple Bar, which features in the books quite a bit, but I had a long list of things to see once we picked up our rental car. Most of them weren’t in the Fever novels, but one place that was, and that had really taken up residence in my head, was a strange piece of geology on Ireland’s west coast called The Burren.

Closeup of the Burren’s eerie landscape – photo by the author, all rights reserved

In the books, at one point Mac is kidnapped and trapped beneath the layers of the Burren’s rocks, where she’s tortured for a time. The locale sounded so interesting, AND there’s a famous portal tomb there, Poulnabrone, that we killed two birds with one stone, as it were, and braved an extremely narrow, one-lane road, to find it.

God bless my patient hubby, who had to navigate Irish roads. If another car had come along in the opposite direction while we were partway to Poulnabrone, one of us would have had to back up for over a mile. Madness, but it was worth it.

Road to Poulnabrone – photo by the author, all rights reserved

The Burren is a geological formation largely in County Clare, although it even extends out into Galway Bay. Its boundaries are loosely defined, and it ranges anywhere from around 250 to over 500 square kilometres, depending on who you talk to. It has a bed of limestone up to 800 metres (2,624 feet) thick in places, and while I’m not claustrophobic, author Moning’s description of Mac’s sensations being captive under all of that rock is vivid.

photo by the author, all rights reserved

The Burren’s landscape looks like something not-of-this-earth. It’s called “glacio-karst: glaciers around 16,000 years ago scraped down the limestone rock, and fissures called ‘grikes’ formed as rainwater then dissolved thin veins within the rock. It’s so strange to walk on, like a crazed netting of cracks and holes, through which small, scrubby vegetation has taken hold.

We were there on a chilly, grey day, blending the real world with something imaginary. You can’t miss the Poulnabrone Dolmen – it sits like a weird stone house not far from the parking lot.

Poulnabrone portal tomb – photo by the author, all rights reserved

Poulnabrone is a phonetic transcription from the Irish Poll na Brón – meaning”Hole (or Pool) of the Quernstone, or, “Hole of Sorrows”.

Dolmens, or portal tombs, are essentially two massive upright pieces of stone, forming the ‘portal’, and covered with an even larger capstone. The two ends are open to the air. These tombs are believed to have ritual purposes, to send the deceased onward to their deserved afterlife. Remnants of bodies have been found beneath them, and they’re not unique to Ireland by a long shot. Strolling around it, you can’t help but wonder why this particular design, and how on earth the builders managed to get the incredibly heavy pieces of rock into place.

It was a fantastically eerie place to visit, with only a handful of other people around, treading carefully in the chill breeze. And years later, when I began featuring strange portals to other places in my novels, I look back on these photos with special fondness.

I’m not sure how long we spent there, but on the way out there was a very wizardly-looking fellow selling handmade Celtic-style jewellery, from whom I bought a lovely pendant. By that point, we needed two things: a bathroom, and some hot tea. Luckily, just down the road we found a farm that had both. There’s nothing like a stiff cup of Irish tea (they make it much stronger than we do in Canada) and some pastries to raise your flagging energy levels. Then we were off on the next leg of the trip, but our sojourn at the Burren was unforgettable.

The jewellery maker outside Poulnabrone – photo by the author, all rights reservedWhere we stopped for tea – photo by the author, all rights reservedTea at Caherconnell Farm – photo by the author, all rights reserved

The area isn’t on most preplanned tours of Ireland that I’ve seen, although we did spy the odd narrow bus testing itself on the slender roads. (Seriously, on some of them I could have stuck my hand out my window and touched the stone walls along the periphery. There’s no shoulder to speak of, ever.) If you’re lucky enough to find such a tour, don’t miss the opportunity – an incredible opportunity to visit a very ancient part of the country. Otherwise, you’ll have to rent a vehicle, steel yourself for some nerve-wracking driving, and pray for the luck of the Irish!