Arthur Machen was a little nuts. He was a 19^th – 20^th century horror writer. He was disgusted by a lot of the world, including society’s shift away from spirituality. Not religion per se, but he thought people were getting too materialistic. This produced some of the best horror fiction I’ve read, though it’s weird as balls.

“The Great God Pan” is made of fucked up, let me tell you. A scientist wants to see if he can get one of the primary forces of nature to show up in a room on command, basically. He gets his future son-in-law to help out with the experiment, and uses his daughter as bait, because hell, you have to use women as bait, right? And where else is a widower gonna get a willing woman to lie down in a room and think of England?

That’s actually part of what’s weird as shit here. This story sexualizes nature. I don’t mean it paints nature as a hot lady with fig leaves (possibly angry about hair conditioner). Nature is still kind of nature: we never see it, we’re dealing with a personification of its forces. And it fucks a lady. In the vagina. Until a baby comes out.

Yes, that’s the story, and the important part. A child is born from this union of lady and, uh, everything else. And the baby is entirely evil and douchely. If you want to be serious for a second, it’s a story about crossing lines through miscegenation and the problems that causes. Racist? Yeah, probably. But hell, it’s a horror story, and Pan isn’t exactly [insert race here], so it’s still a pretty good story.

So I guess that’s the suggestion: yeah, you should definitely read it. There’s plot and counter-plot of the narrator trying to figure out what the woman in his town is doing – it turns out, of course, it’s the daughter of Pan. She’s evil partly because she can’t be good. I think because good is something human, and she’s just not all human all the time. Machen’s a pretty crazy dude, and he’s one of those horror writers from the turn of the 19^th – 20^th centuries who wrote a lot of evolutionary horror. Which is pretty good, overall. Also, de rigueur at this point. Evolutionary horror is a staple anymore.

So let’s get this straight: a scientist makes his daughter sleep with the nature god Pan, which drives her crazy. She gives birth to Pan’s daughter, who is crazy and also evil, because she’s not really human. And she proceeds to be all evil and stuff in a small town, luring people (mostly men, naturally) to their doom. Sounds good to me. It’s a fun iteration of gods impregnating mortal women, anyway. And you’ll notice the story even uses the Greek context.

But wait! Algernon Blackwood!

Blackwood is totally going to show up in our history more than once, but enjoy this taster of a slightly less known story of his.

“The Man Whom the Trees Loved” has an awkward title. Very awkward. And it’s not Evil Dead up in here, there’s no tree rapin’ goin’ on. Or trees raping men, I guess. Neither of those things are happening. There’s not a whole lot of sex in the story, honestly. Which, uh, might be part of the problem.

OK, so there’s this guy, Mr. Bittacy, and he loves trees. Park ranger style. He was a forester in India and is now retired. His wife, Mrs. Bittacy (surprise!), doesn’t  really like them, basically because they were forcing him to go into the wilderness in India instead of stay safe at home. Fair enough. Firemen’s (or women’s) SOs probably don’t like house fires much either.

After a friend visits and talks all mystical and new age and shit about trees, Mr. B. starts to notice that they affect him mentally. They draw him into the forest near where he lives. He starts to take care of them, except this time they’re letting him know when lightning has knocked one over or a creeper is strangling another. Y’know, like trees do.

Mrs. B. is suitably horrified that her husband is being taken away from her. She tries to fight back, but it doesn’t work. He wanders around more, doesn’t drink his tea, mutters in his sleep, and basically is getting taken over like a good little person with a space slug on his head. And that’s kinda it. Story over.

This story is way, way better than it sounds. And honestly, it sounds pretty decent. Mrs. B. tries to fight the trees like they’re evil – the narrator always reminds people that her father was a minister and she’s very traditionally Christian, which means she works in the line of good versus evil, not safe versus threatening. And the trees aren’t evil, since they’re not human. They do love Mr. B., they enfold him in themselves. But it’s not good for him, his human side. His human personality is nearly obliterated by this process. Normally anything that mind-controlled you and destroyed your personality we would think of as evil (y’know, like space slugs). But the trees aren’t, because they didn’t grow up (he he, puns) in the same moral context. They can’t take part in our good or our bad, it’s just not possible. And that’s a reminder that the world doesn’t take part in morality – what better symbol for nature than a tree? – it simply doesn’t care. Which makes for an awesome horror story.

I shouldn’t beat around the bush. I liked the article, but the thing I want to write about was the one problem in it. The author is very intelligent and clearly knows what he (I think he?) is doing. With one exception: based on this one article I think he doesn’t know much about science fiction theory. My reason for thinking that is he talks about the displacement of race away from zero world races onto the ghouls – the zombie-looking radiation victims who are immortal, gravel-voiced, and persecuted by a lot of non-ghouls. My reason isn’t that he talks about it – that would be the good thing – the problem I have is that he describes this as a “cop out” design decision, and comes out and says they should have included racial tension between the zero world ethnicities in the game.

The displacement he describes as a “cop out” is how SF works. A SF text creates something alien to the reader, and uses it as a tool to examine ideas, problems, or concepts that turn out to be not alien at all. Think of what I’ve already written about here: Dracula has a big, evil vampire, but uses him to examine issues of gender and race. Frankenstein has an abused and violent Creature but uses him to examine parent-child relations as well as God-worshipper relations. The displacement is what it’s all about, when it comes to the “big issues” in a SF text.

So, what about Fallout 3? Well, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t try to tackle race issues directly. That’s not really what it’s trying to be about. It’s about a post-apocalypse. Does that excuse it from race issues? Not exactly. But a text can’t really be blamed for something it didn’t try to do. Henry James allowed that every author or text needed to be allowed to do what it set out to do. He called that intention a “donnee.” He claimed you judge the work on whether it accomplished its donnee, not whether it did something you think it should have done instead. So, in fact, Fallout 3 talks about race more than it even needed to.

Here’s how. It’s not just the ghouls. Fallout in general, and the third game specifically, use a kind of understatement to talk about things. I know that seems weird. Here’s what I mean: there’s a mission you can find in a vault, basically trying to see what’s going on. Every enemy is labeled “insane survivor.” Except one. He’s simply labeled “survivor.” But he’s just as aggressive as the rest. If you hack into a computer you can find that the vault was experimenting with drugs in the air ducts. The survivor who wasn’t insane was locked in a lab, wearing a lab coat. That’s about all the information you get. But you know the story now. Hidden in the basement is a small tunnel bored out of rock rather than the typical vault walls. Near its entrance is a rack with a mini-nuke on it. Implication? The half-mad survivors were trying to blast their way out, but went crazy before they could. They also probably managed to irradiate themselves.

That’s Fallout 3’s method for telling much of the background in its setting. People talk about the  Chinese trying to invade, and actually invading Alaska, but to this day I have no idea where the Chinese platoon holing up in an abandoned factory came from. Are they the descendents of an advance group of soldiers? Are they from whatever’s left of China, come to see if resources remain here? I have no idea. But there are remarkably few Asian people in the Capital Wasteland. Given how many people default to murder and violence in it, I have a guess as to where they all went in the aftermath of the war.

Back to those ghouls, though. The author of the post I linked to points out how people hate the ghouls, and on a specific racial line – all ghouls are bad. Of course, this is a little complicated because of something he doesn’t mention – the actual crazy ghouls who act like movie monsters and attack everyone indiscriminately. Turns out when some people are dosed with the radiation they end up with no higher brain functions. As Three Dog says, “shoot as many as you damn well please.” So the overt message of the racial displacement is pretty old-fashioned – judge a ghoul by their actions, not their skin damage. What sort of commentary can we trace back through that displacement to the real world?

Well, one of the tag lines of the game is “War. War never changes.” The game is obviously about the difference between inherent and social conflict. It makes the claim a lot of post-apocalypse stories make, that our survival drive will make many people very aggressive, leading to the raiders taking from everyone – think of Mad Max. However, very good people will band together to resist them, leading to small pockets of community, looking very much like the medieval setting of a fantasy story – both sharing a dangerous “outside world” risked only by a few brave or foolhardy souls. This is a direct claim about human nature, that we do rely on violence but can overcome it through society. Not alone, but with a little help from our friends. New Vegas states this more directly through its companions – each one you meet gets his, her, or its own section during the ending cinematic to talk about what you did or didn’t do for them. I was pretty sad I’d forgotten to get Rex a new brain, because without it he just dies. I went back and got him one, he’s happy now. And aggressive. Dang guard dog brain.

So, again: what about the ghouls? In light of the reminder the game offers that sometimes people are just violent, it’s a refreshing one: sometimes people of a race are just violent. Any race. Any utopian attempt to describe one race as better than another falls apart and not just through the inherent racism, but because the supposed “superior” people suck just as much.

So what the hell do I mean with an intro like that? Patience. First, The Invisibles is a seven volume graphic novel (or comic, or funny book) about a group of rebels called, of course, “The Invisibles.” They fight the forces of evil, or order, or disorder, or something. This enemy doesn’t really have a name, they just suck. They get something from Lovecraftian mythology, but mostly it’s the humans who worship them that use such language. The entities themselves don’t care quite as much, though they do want to fix our reality. Free will is the problem, and the Invisibles love it. The main cast of our friendly neighborhood terrorists looks like this:

King Mob: a shaved bald, be-pierced, badass gunman and yoga master who used to write horror novels under the pen name “Morrison.”

Lord Fanny: a Brazilian transvestite sorceress who likes messing with

Jack Frost, or just Jack: the new guy, and our anchor character – you know, Luke Skywalker. The guy who needs everything explained so the text can explain it to us. Jack is ultraviolent, burning half his school down once and kicking his teacher’s head half-in and leaving him in the blaze. No one’s actually hurt, but Jack gets sent to a correctional facility for minors that’s a front for the aforementioned nameless villains.

Boy: an American black woman who used to be a cop and is still really good at martial arts.

Ragged Robin: a clown-faced time traveling telepath.

That main cast list ought to tell you plenty about the book right there. Along the way the characters question whether they’re doing the right thing, or anything at all – trans-dimensional philosophy and SF merge with magic, sex, and the breakdown of the comic panel itself. Morrison’s insane, and I love being along for the ride. Hell, a few issues are transcripts of the Gideon Stargrave stories “Morrison” – King Mob’s writer persona – came up with to protect himself from invasive torture, and Stargrave is a balls-to-the-wall Jerry Cornelius homage with mod clothes, great music, and a foxy sister he gets it on with.

I’ll be honest. I didn’t like The Invisibles as much as I’d expected. But expectations were, shall we say, high. I still loved the shit out of it. It’s Philip K. Dick meets Lovecraft meets Moorcock meets punk rock meets S&M meets hallucinogens. The Invisibles prep for missions to rescue the secret AIDS vaccine from a military base by getting high as fuck on a mesa and tripping out.

If you don’t already have a tab open to buy the first volume on Amazon, let me tell you about the rest of my teaser paragraph. The “terrorist” thing is explained by now, I think. But what about chaos magic?

Morrison is a chaos magician, which I have explained to people who look at me funny by saying, “it’s a way to use rituals to reprogram yourself.” And The Invisibles do this all the time. In fact, Morrison has said the comic itself is a vast ritual to reprogram both himself and the people who read it. Apparently he taught his readers chaos magic in the letters pages – and I really wish those were available in the collections. For anyone else who experimented with magic in their youth because they loved fantasy and the way it viewed the world, this is nearly the perfect set-up for bridging the fiction-reality barrier (something else Morrison loves and excels at – he shows up in the last issue of his run on Animal Man to explain to Buddy Baker that his entire life is an entertainment for crazy people who fuck their lives up so badly, they need to see someone else suffer more). The comic is about the magic that helped write the comic.

Morrison swears by his chaos magic for two reasons: one is that he says, in his experience, it’s simply worked. He has done things and then other things have happened. A -> B. But more importantly for most of us, I suppose, is the “reprogramming” thing I mentioned earlier. It allows us to use ritual and symbolism, the stuff that makes our beloved fantasy and SF what they are, to remake ourselves into what we want to be. The Invisibles regularly trade roles, drawing cards out of a hat. Sometimes King Mob’s the leader, sometimes it’s Ragged Robin. Sometimes Fanny is the emotional support character, sometimes it’s Jack (he promptly responds to this change by falling in love with someone). Now this is incredibly smart just in the way it plays with story structures – characters have to fill certain roles, that’s how fiction works – but they change roles every so often, just to liven things up. But it’s also a direct evocation of chaos magic. They become the different roles. After King Mob decides he doesn’t want to be the person the ultimate assassin has to be, he simply tosses his guns away. A person without a gun isn’t the same as a person with a gun – not because the gun changes the person, but because the person changes to suit the presence of the gun.

So The Invisibles isn’t just a great story, it’s the best damn self-help book you’ll ever read, since all the guidance it gives you is to do the stuff that makes you the person you want to be. Just figure out what it is you want, and then do the stuff that leads to that. Shit, it sounds simple when I put it like that.

I won’t lie. I dusted off my tarot cards after reading this comic.

Oh, and Morrison’s gone on record saying he envisioned The Invisibles as a sexy, cool Prisoner-like story about secret agents fighting monsters and drug-tripping wizards. He said it if was ever a TV show, it’s theme would be “Mogadishu” (youtube embed above).

I’m suffering from a strange ambivalence. I did enjoy it as I played. The combat is nice and actiony, and I like the mixture of weapon types it gives me. There’s a longsword, which is a typical enormous blade; there’re the daggers, twin-blade style action with the possibility of stealth kills; the staff, enchanted with some sort of extra damage, the first being fire; and a longbow. Gameplay footage often showcases rapid switching between some or all of these. I saw a character smash someone with a longsword and juggle them with arrows. There are more weapons available later, including, I think, a harpoon, for all our Scorpion-related dreams.

There are combos, which are always a mixed bag for me. But I always appreciate their presence, so long as the game doesn’t require me to get great at doing 40+ combos to progress (Christ, does anyone else remember Legend of Dragoon? That damn game…) There’s also a power-up system when you kill enough dudes that lets you quicktime event them to death.

The leveling system is simple but interesting. It looks a bit like it was influenced by Mass Effect, at least visually. One adds points by selecting fixed-width blocks on rows, each row being a different ability. There aren’t too many. Apart from what you’re already assuming they have, there’s both a physical and magical lockpicking ability (for different sorts of locks), alchemy, and “sagecraft.” The demo doesn’t explain what that is, or what the crystals related to it do. But I assume they provide buffs of some sort.

The setting is cool. It’s a little generic, but I learned recently that game developers still tend to avoid hiring writers, so what else would we expect? It uses western/northern European backgrounds mostly for characters and legends. The bad guys are the “Tuatha,” referencing the Tuatha de Danann of Celtic myth. The Well of Souls is the big Macguffin that brings the protagonist back from the dead — you start the game not alive — and that’s a reference to the magic cauldron of Celtic myth that brings people back from the dead. I even thought it was a little amusing that the main character never speaks — though the game gives you dialogue options, no one voices anything, not even “surprised sound #1″ — because the cauldron would take away the power of speech from anyone revived in it.

But despite all that I kinda don’t want to play any more. Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade fame have both talked about the combat. It is super-fun. But it feels like that’s the only part that’s been polished.

The writing, like I sorta hinted at before, is pretty bad. Not really much worse than other games in the genre, but its dialogue trees and combat remind me of what I played of Dragon Age II, and the writing was much better there. And I mean more than just the words themselves. The voice acting is pretty bad overall. Some characters were cool, but others wanted to make me kill them, not help them. And the dialogue trees are dull and pointless. It has a direct ripoff of the Mass Effect / Dragon Age II dialogue tree circle thingie, but the options are as fascinating as “we should go” versus “I’ll stay and fight.” Yay… Even the sarcastic options — when they’re even present — are limp and lame. “Are you drunk?” Really? This is the response to the legit fortune teller informing us that we technically don’t exist. If you want to sell disbelief, even sarcastic disbelief, “are you drunk” is pretty low-rent.

Related problem: the writers fucked up when you learn what. They refer to things you haven’t heard about yet, and then forget to actually introduce the information properly anyway. That fortune-teller guy is actually sort of an alcoholic, but you can’t get to that dialogue option until after the crack about drunken fate tapestry reading comes up. Uh, what?

I dislike most of the voice acting, like I said. And the writing is strained at best. But they come together, yes they do. That leads to me actively hating the NPCs I’m supposed to be helping — both as the world’s savior and as the person doing this quest to get one healing potion for an injured elf (or “fae,” as the game calls them — fair enough, whatever). They’re dumb and sometimes offensive, like the woman who talks about having to keep her house tidy and orderly for her husband to come home to, and that’s about it. Fascinating.

And the game’s just a little creepy. The main character never speaks. You’d think that’s fine, and I did at first, too, through most of the scripted first dungeon. But when you get to the over world, free play area, it’s weird. At least, that’s when it’s noticeable. Thekittymeister helped me figure this one out — it’s in third person, not first person. Oblivion, Half Life, they may have silent protagonists, but they’re also us. Third person silent people, like Link, still make some sounds. That, plus the way the models are animated, make the characters look and act more like dolls than people.

And there’s been no attention paid to detail. A self-professed coward who’s too afraid to ask the local fae for advice is the biggest single human male I ran into in the demo — he’s as big as Batman, and I mean Capullo Batman.

It’s that doll-like nature of the game that gets to me. The whole thing feels like an enormous doll house. Sure, it’s big, and there’s plenty to do — even in the demo, as it gives you 45 minutes to explore wherever you want, and it’s kind enough not to count pause screens or dialogue — but it’s like the biggest, bestest doll house you could imagine. Eventually, if you want your character to be more than the Barbie or the Ken with the most room to run around in, you’ll go with something else.

You might ask, though, “Why FFV?” I’m playing it, is all. After buying it nearly a year ago and just barely getting past meeting Faris, I got up to the queen of Karnak in a day. So I think I’m enjoying it. And the Final Fantasy series can tell us a lot about fantasy.

If you haven’t played this particular FF, it’s one of many fantasy games with a “get the crystals” motif. The wind crystal has been destroyed, turns out, and when your party of heroes (a shiftless vagabond, a princess, an amnesiac-but-awesome old man, and a pirate captain) gets there, the remains give them the powers to take on the “jobs” of ancient heroes. This introduces the job class system. It’s the first FF to have such a thing, and the reason I wanted to play the game to begin with. The job class system allows any character to be any class, and the classes level up along with the characters. So the main character could be level 20, but only a level 10 knight, with 5 levels of black mage or thief. You get the idea. It leads to a lot of grinding, since most of us want our characters to be as awesome as possible, which means they need abilities from every class. I don’t think it’ll be as bad as in Final Fantasy Tactics or X-2, just because it limits how many abilities they can keep on at once.

It’s still early days at WW, though, so I’ll refrain from talking too much about the system itself. I’m setting a precedent here, a precedent about fantasy itself. So how is this game fantasy?

Well, duh. There’s no question here, like there is about Frankenstein or some such. No way. It’s got dragons and knights and wizards and princesses and chocobos and magic crystals and women dressing as men and dirty old men who think they might be gay and… uh. Well, a lot of stuff, all right? It’s definitely fantasy. It has that mix of fantasy and SF elements that mark out FF games for us. The first didn’t do that so far as I saw, but the fourth did. And from FF7 on? C’mon. So what?

Well, SF is a kind of fantasy, but fantasy is not a kind of SF. Think of it: fantasy is just stuff that couldn’t happen in the real world, or the “zero world” as some people call it. Think of Earth Prime in DC Comics – Earth Prime is where Superman met his editor once. So it makes a sort of sense for fantasy texts to have SF elements. Often enough, fantasy novels are structured like SF novels – exploring a “what if” scenario, just using magic instead of technology. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell explored “what if” magic had been real in Europe – what effect would that have had on history? SF stories tend to naturalize their fantasy elements. People might be able to read minds and see the future in a SF story, but they’re not witches or seers, they’re “telepathic” and “precognitive.”

That’s a little digression, I suppose. What does all that mean to FFV? Well, it’s not too weird, I guess. That’s not surprising for a Squaresoft (now Square Enix) game. They’re usually pretty conservative. That’s odd for a series that started with the business version of a drunken bet: Squaresoft was about to go out of business and let an internal developer make the game he really wanted to make, and they named it “Final Fantasy” because it was the last game they would ever make. That game single-handedly pulled Square away from bankruptcy, and they’ve never changed the name, despite the sequels, because they wanted to guarantee buyers were getting the same product they enjoyed before. So, from revolutionary to conservative in one sequel, basically. Square tends to experiment with the game system, not the story. But today, at least, I’m more interested in the story. Probably more about the system later, when I’m farther in the game.

The setting features four magical crystals, each tied to a Platonic element – Wind, Water, Earth, and Fire. Old fashioned scientific explanations are very popular in fantasy, because they’re not science, but they were regular enough to exploit for systematic purposes. Indeed, as I’m writing, in Team Fortress 2 one of the most popular weapons is the Phlogistinator, a flame thrower. That comes from the long-debunked scientific hypothesis of phlogiston, an element that left things when they burned. Fire was, basically, phlogiston leaving the body. That’s why things weighed less after they burned, because the phlogiston left. Of course, the current models says fire is a chemical reaction, and the item burning is fuel for the reaction.

So old Platonic idea in fantasy novel. These elements were supposed to be the building blocks of all reality. And while there’s a villain I have yet to meet at this point, what keeps showing up as our heroes run from town to town is that people are using machines to pull more power from the crystals and they’re shattering because of the strain. So, in the end, a very conservative idea has been couched in more radical language: our technological and scientific hubris has put us at odds with the natural world – but more specifically, with the natural world it is our duty to preserve. This is an odd mélange of political patter. What are we supposed to get out of all this? Some people have said that fantasy almost inherently pushes some kind of moral, just because the entire world is sympathetic – that is, the author or authors conceived of a world where everything can be read the way a human character could, and so going against nature is the same as going against a specifically-good character. Whereas in the zero world, here, you can’t even go against nature, as it has no motives.

The characters are running around desperately trying to save the world, but in this game it’s for some pretty selfish reasons. The main character (you can change the names, so I have no idea if yours are the same as mine) is bitter about his father’s sacrifice to the crystals in the past, but protects them for his sake. The princess is trying to find her father. The old man is trying to protect the princess and find out who he is. The pirate is pursuing a lead that might reveal the pirate’s family origin. They’re being framed in a huge plot far bigger than them, and being framed by the inherently-good force that protects the world. They’re being manipulated. They don’t ask for the power of the crystals, and don’t even know what happened when they’re given them. Our heroes have to work out what the hell just happened after the first crystal’s fragments settle on them.

I see an interesting thought inside the game that I really hadn’t thought of before, at least not in the context of all fantasies: fantasy might imply that free will is an illusion, at least within the fantasy’s world. If the entire world has will just like the heroes, then how can the heroes have their own will when everything that has ever shaped or moved them had will as well? So instead of the traditional question of free will, within a fantasy there might be another: does the dog you raise from a puppy have free will in its biggest decisions? Or does your Pavlovian training, meted out to serve your will, control more of the puppy’s life? I don’t suggest there’s a definite answer, but fantasies might ask that question all the time.

A reminder: I haven’t finished this game. Be kind in the comments! No spoilers!

I am writing to you as a voter in your district. I urge you to vote “no” on cloture for S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act, on Jan. 24th. The PROTECT IP Act is dangerous, ineffective, and short-sighted. It does not deserve floor consideration. I urge my representative to vote “no” on SOPA, the corresponding House bill.

I want to write to you not only as a concerned citizen but an educator. I teach college English to freshmen and sophomores, and the most important thing I try to teach them is free and open communication coupled with the ability to question and understand what people say. Which means I have trained a great number of people to hear claims that SOPA/PIPA protect businesses and see the nearly $94 million certain industries have spent lobbying for this bill that gives power to circumvent due process — something the government should and cannot do — to businesses. This is wrong, and must be stopped.

It will also stifle and kill American businesses. If you have ever pledged to help America against a threat against it, this is one. We will fall far behind countries that allow their businesses to function in a free space where innovation can happen. If we pass SOPA/PIPA or any bill calling for unrestricted censoring of the internet without due process and reasonable trial appeal, we will be unable to compete with the innovators who will both flourish in other countries and, very likely, leave our own to be in a place where they can do what they need to do.

As my representative, I ask you to stop it. Oppose this legislation by voting “no” on cloture.

Dracula the novel is interesting because of its big cast of interesting characters. There’s Dracula, of course, and Mina Harker – along with her husband Jonathan – but there’s also Lucy Westenra, Quincy Morris, Seward, Arthur Holmwood, Van Helsing, and Renfield. That’s a lot of people. None of these people are side characters, though they don’t all get the chance to narrate.

Let’s start with the obvious one: Dracula. He’s got his name on the cover! He also never gets to narrate. The book is about him, but he never gets to speak. There are a lot of gender, social, and racial readings to that – tl;dr is that he’s foreign, queer, and Jewish, so he’s a threat that proper English people shouldn’t actually listen to. But he’s also pretty awesome, as villains go. He controls creatures of the forest, especially wolves. The first time you run into him in the book he’s disguised as a carriage driver. He picks Harker up to bring him to his castle, because, being undead and all, he can’t really hire a staff.

Jonathan’s kind of a goofy nitwit who really wants to get in good with his bosses. He mans up, to use a dreadful phrase, by novel’s end, but for most of the time he toddles around, swooning after Dracula a little in a totally not gay way (actually, pretty gay). There’s a famous line where Dracula warns off his harem of vampire ladies, saying they can have Harker later, but for now he’s the count’s. Then Harker wakes up in bed with all his clothes off. Nice transition, Stoker.

Mina’s accomplished, no-nonsense, and maybe in love with Dracula too, who knows? Seriously, that’s a bone of contention. She also collates the entire book together from everyone’s notes, and uses the psychic link Dracula planted in her to track him down for the hunters.

You know Van Helsing. You might not know he speaks comically broken English, despite knowing half a dozen languages, and that he breaks down and weeps all the time because Mina and Lucy are “so good.”

Lucy is, uh, not as nice as Mina. They’re friends, but the book makes Lucy out to be the sort of person who would be nice and polite and still have a tramp stamp – it would just be tasteful. For tramp stamps. She’s stringing three men along trying to see which would be better to marry, and eventually picks the fancy – and very rich – Arthur Holmwood. Quincy Morris is a crazy American, and Seward is the director of an insane asylum. These were her three choices. Then she dies, but not before all the men, at Van Helsing’s behest, perform a creepy blood transfusion that’s described in very sexual terms. I think I read one critic once talk about how they’re “pooling” their blood like semen before putting it in her. I dunno if that’s exactly how I read it, but yeah, the blood is basically semen. So Lucy is a bukkake star, is I guess where Bram Stoker was going. She turns into an evil witch woman vampire, luring men to their doom and eating children – because all evil women hate children, because they’re the inverse of everything good in women! Ugh…

Arthur kills her, like in Dracula, Dead and Loving It, and Dracula turns his attention to Mina.

But wait, there are more cast members!

You know Renfield well enough, but what some movies don’t go into is his actual insanity. He wants to “eat” life. Yes, he wants to be a vampire, though he doesn’t put it in those terms. So he feeds flies to spiders, spiders to birds, birds to a cat, and then eats the cat. Or tries to. Seward catches on eventually.

All right. There’s some weird shit in this book. And I don’t mean vampires eating people.

Vampires make other vampires by cutting open their man-boobs and making people suckle the blood.

Van Helsing keeps Lucy out of her tomb once she’s dead by making a dough from communion wafers and rolling it up along the door’s edge.

The book spends forever detailing all the ways to kill a vampire from folk tradition, and then the characters don’t even bother doing those things to Dracula. They do cut off his head, but there’s no burning, or garlic, or burying, or anything. This has led a lot of people (and authors) to presume Dracula’s still “alive.” For my money he’s probably dead – there’s a thing about “a look of eternal peace” that settles on vampires when you kill them. Dracula gets that look when they decapitate him. Which means the latest Fright Night is the best film version of Dracula I’ve seen. And no, I’m not fucking with you.

Why you should read Dracula: aside from the obvious (it’s Dracula!), it’s great. There’s a section near the beginning, after Harker’s journal ends for the first time, that’s slow, but it’s just a typical setup after an act one hook, so just get through that and you’ll be fine.

A lot of people complained, when it was published, about all the modern references in the novel. They thought a Gothic novel like Dracula (notice I’m not getting into the argument about whether it is, that’s just what they said about it) should be old-fashioned, and that meant not talking about shorthand, stenography, train tables, phonographs, and the like. But Dracula and the protagonists are surprisingly modern in many ways. Mina’s often pointed to as a modern woman. Dracula learns English all on his own with no one to practice with, and Harker as a realtor doesn’t actually have anything to change about Dracula’s plans and purchases. So what does it mean, for so many characters to be so modern and to deal with such an ancient threat? Well, that’s the point of the book. It is interesting that many of our similar novels now have old-fashioned people dealing with new, modern threats. Dracula isn’t killed by a stake, but a Bowie knife.

Now pine for it to be real! Pine!!

Do you know the story about the story? Frankenstein’s inception is a good story on its own. Mary Shelley and her husband, Percy, hung out with Lord Byron and his doctor, a guy named Polidori. They were hanging out in a cabin in the woods, hiking through the Alps, and started reading German ghost stories to one another. They all decided to write a story like those. Shelley is the only one who pulled it off, and it was Frankenstein she wrote. She said in one of the introductions to the book that she had a dream of the monster, and when she wrote it down it was nearly word-for-word the description of the creature peeping in on Victor in his bed. Polidori actually did get a short story out of the trip, called “The Vampyre.” It’s decent.

That classic story, man. So good. The lightning strike, the abnormal brain, the monster shambling around, failing to form words. It’s powerful.

It’s also not the novel Frankenstein. Oops. None of that’s in the novel. In fact, most people think “Frankenstein” is the creature’s name. That’s the scientist’s name: Victor Frankenstein. The creature never actually gets a name at all, though some people call him “Adam,” since the story of Adam’s creation by God is referenced several times, especially in allusions to Paradise Lost.

I’ve run into some people saying the book’s important but not that good. Aldiss, the guy I mentioned earlier, has even said, “Oh, how magnificent it would have been if she had had such an amazing idea and the talent to see it through.” Yeah, they’re full of crap. The book’s great.

First reason it’s great is the frame structure. There’s a story in a story in a story in a story up in here. The book’s narrated by a guy named Walton, who wants to explore the North Pole. He meets Victor Frankenstein, who’s hunting the creature up there. Victor tells Walton his story, which contains the creature’s story. The creature overheard conversations between the members of the De Lacy family, who listen to the son’s bride, Safie, tell them what happened to her and her fiancé. I think that’s all the stories. It’s like the layers of an onion, you know? Or any layered thing, with layers.

So what happened is that Victor got obsessed with overcoming death because his mom died. And she died because she was stupid. Her adopted daughter, Elizabeth, got scarlet fever, and pulled through. The doctor said, basically, “she will get better, but don’t go in there right now, she’s still contagious. Wait a few more days.” Frankenstein’s mom rushed in immediately, got sick, and then died. Awesome. Victor goes off to school, gets laughed at, shuts himself up and figures out the secret to life. The only details we get are that it has something to do with chemistry. No lightning, alas.

The creature is apparently beautiful, or Victor thinks so – until it comes to life. Then there’s something “wrong” that no one can describe that freaks Victor out. He runs off, abandoning the creature, who proceeds to be woefully misunderstood even as he teaches himself to read and reads some of the greatest classics of European literature (like Paradise Lost, mentioned earlier). The creature even ends up killing Victor’s younger brother. And then his wife – who was his adopted sister. There’s a lot of creepy stuff going on in this book other than stitching bodies together, trust me on this.

Why you should read it

It’s awesome. But more than that, it’s important. If you’re into the history of SF, it’s the first one – or a lot of people say so. Everyone knows about it but few have read it, so you’ll get to be that classy douche who can tell everyone they’re wrong. You know you wanna be that guy. I don’t want you to be that guy, but I can’t help what you want out of life.

It’s also just plain good. Victor is obviously messed and usually doesn’t know it. Authors rarely pull off that mix of someone being stupid and genuinely not getting what’s wrong in their lives. Usually they don’t get it because, if they did, the book would be really short.

It’s a science fiction novel, definitely, but not in the same way as an Asimov or Lem novel. It’s about the difference between life and death, and moreso about where our identities come from. Are they hardwired in us? Can we be inherently good or evil? Or do we learn more from how we’re brought up?

It’s pretty short, too. A final piece of advice: read the first edition, the 1818 version. The other common one is the 1831 version, which Shelley messed with after losing most of her children and her husband. It’s a lot firmer, more direct, and thus less entertaining. Where the first book asks the questions, the second version says, “we’re all fucked. Fate hates us and directs our every move.” The first version isn’t cheerful, but it’s nothing like the 1831. Jeez. You’d think a string of bad, poor-selling novels after her first would cheer her up.

No, wait.

He brought that love of old things to his few novels. He said, in his second introduction to The Castle of Otranto, that he wanted to blend together the realism of current literature with the interesting events of medieval romances. Romances weren’t liked too well by very serious people because they didn’t portray the world as it existed. Sound familiar? It’s a bad habit of the middle class hoity-toity to insist on realism in fiction. This is how we got Tom Jones. God may forgive them, but we cannot.

Walpole used that realism psychologically to show how people would realistically react to fantastic events. Sound familiar? Thus fantasy as we know it was born.

Of course… Walpole’s characters aren’t too realistic. They’re either hysterical all the time or just too angry or noble or bored or – honestly, female, that’s a trait for Walpole – to react to anything.

So our cast is Conrad, Manfred, Hippolita, Matilda, Isabella, and Theodore. There are also some goofy rustics that serve as a little comedy here and there. The novel starts with Conrad about to get married. Then a giant helmet falls from the sky and crushes him. No explanation, no anything. That just happens.

His father, Manfred, proceeds to freak the fuck out. Isabella is left waiting at the altar – she was about to marry Conrad, who is now dead, under a helmet – whose plume, throughout the novel, becomes a weird phallic symbol. It waves around in the air whenever Manfred broods about things.

Hippolita is Manfred’s wife and Conrad’s mother. Matilda is Manfred’s daughter. Don’t get Matilda and Isabella confused – it’s easy to do, so watch out.

Manfred’s the main character, actually. His perfectly rational and not at all batshit crazy idea is, now that his son can’t marry Isabella, he will! He needs to carry on his family line in some way, and Matilda just doesn’t have a penis, damn it. The book treats this like incest. I guess I get why it’s like incest, but whatever. Theodore shows up, won’t explain himself, gets imprisoned in the helmet by Manfred, escapes, falls in love with Isabella, and gets imprisoned in a regular room.

Meanwhile, this won’t have anything at all to do with the plot, but just in case you’re curious, Manfred’s family usurped Otranto and its surrounding land from another family. There’s a curse that says when the castle’s too small to hold its occupant, it’ll tumble around Manfred’s sneaky ears. Oh, also, Theodore looks just like a painting of the last rightful owner of the castle. This means nothing, look over here instead.

Manfred starts chasing Isabella around the castle. She’s in her underwear. Don’t get too excited – between the fact that this book was written in the 18th century and the fact that it’s set in the medieval period, her underwear is less revealing than you think. Manfred tells Hippolita they should get divorced, and she agrees, because, uh, she’s a woman, I guess, she does what he says. Seriously, that’s about all we get.

Isabella’s father shows up with an enormous sword – to match the enormous helmet. A gauntleted hand starts pushing its way out of rooms and grabbing at the servants.
There’s a lot of chasing people in various levels of dress; there’s a lot of moaning and whining; and there’s a lot of wanting to have sex. I won’t spoil the ending, though a lot of it’s pretty predictable. It’s interesting, though, so if you choose to read it you should have the ending to look forward to.

Why you should read it: it’s important historically. It’s the first Gothic novel. That makes it the first fantasy novel, at least according to some people. So if you want to know about the history of this genre we love, there you go. It’s also kinda hilarious. If you like watching bad movies that are still somehow good, like the old House on Haunted Hill, or, for that matter, anything with Vincent Price, you can read this book and have fun.

What makes this a fantasy novel? It’s a fair question, it doesn’t read like one in a lot of ways. Aside from the historical argument we already talked about, here are a few reasons.
Crazy ghosts and vengeance plots. Everyone loves a good vengeful ghost, right? It’s the reason you like Hamlet. C’mon, you know I’m right. The ghost sells it.

Crazy, giant, maybe phallic symbols waving around and threatening to put out someone’s eye. Plumes, swords, giant swords, thrusting hands, this book has it all.

A feeling of reality slowly slipping away from us. Contemporary fantasy may or may not do this, but you probably recognize it from horror stories – everything appears normal, and then slowly things get weirder and weirder. There’s no slowly for Otranto – page one, giant helmet. But honestly, it gets weirder than that. By the end doubles are confusing other doubles for one another, priests are smuggling women out of catacombs, and at the center of it all is this one man, so crazy and driven that it’s almost as though he’s warping the world around him. If you add his heritage to his own actions, that’s pretty much what is happening here.

Why you might not want to read it: it’s an eighteenth century novel. Dude, have you read one of those? The prose is terrible. Page one, about the wedding:

Manfred’s impatience for this ceremonial was remarked by his family and neighbours. The former, indeed, apprehending the severity of their Prince’s disposition, did not dare to utter their surmises on this precipitation. Hippolita, his wife, an amiable lady, did sometimes venture to represent the danger of marrying their only son so early, considering his great youth, and greater infirmities; but she never received any other answer than reflections on her own sterility, who had given him but one heir. His tenants and subjects were less cautious in their discourses. They attributed this hasty wedding to the Prince’s dread of seeing accomplished an ancient prophecy, which was said to have pronounced that the castle and lordship of Otranto “should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it.” It was difficult to make any sense of this prophecy; and still less easy to conceive what it had to do with the marriage in question. Yet these mysteries, or contradictions, did not make the populace adhere the less to their opinion.

I’m being up front with you here. It’s rough. So if you’re not used to dealing with terrible old prose, or you don’t want to learn to deal with it, don’t worry about this one. Sometimes it’s worth it. Sometimes… no.