Two book reviews this time: one old short story collection, one new.
Dedication inside my copy of The Mammoth Book of Horror:
“Here’s something to keep you occupied on those cold and foggy S.F. nights when the wind(?) is howling through the cracks in the floorboards, and there’s no one to keep you company save the menacing strangers looming in the corners of your eyes.”
Names redacted for privacy.
I got inspired to do this post while browsing through the interesting list of recommended books on the #FolkloreThursday blog. As wonderful as the list is, I couldn’t help noticing that it feels a bit skewed towards Europe and the UK. Since the booklist is compiled from Twitter recommendations with the #FolkloreThursday hashtag, this skewness is a bit on folks like me, who have interests outside of Europe and the UK, for not tweeting the texts that we use and love. Hence, this blog post.
Obviously, my list is also skewed towards my own interests, and the limits of my time and resources. I compiled it from the reference sections of several of my blog posts, and by scouring my bookshelves and hard drive. Just for the sake of some structure, I limited and organized the list into dictionary-style references, handbooks, and mythic overviews: the kind of resources one might want when beginning to learn about the stories of a particular culture. Since these are all books I’ve used or at least looked through, I added some comments about them, as well. I alphabetized each sublist by title.
One thing I did notice is that I don’t have any good Filipino folk dictionaries or bestiaries. I’ve tried to remedy that, and I’ll add those books to the list when I get them.
John Bruno Hare, the founder of the Internet Sacred Text Archive, wrote that one focus of his archive was “remedying the underrepresentation of traditional cultures on the Internet.” I offer this list in somewhat the same spirit. I hope it’s helpful, and I encourage other people to post their favorite dictionaries, bestiaries, etc., too.
I discovered Glen Grant’s noirish Honolulu detective Arthur McDougal in Grant’s collection Obake: Ghost Stories in Hawaii. The two McDougal tales in Obake have supernatural villains, so one could say that McDougal in these stories is a (reluctant) occult detective. The other tales in Obake, which mostly focus on aspects of Japanese supernatural folklore that “migrated” to Hawaii, are also delightful.
The short stories in Honolulu Mysteries are different. Although the tales include various aspects of Hawaiian folklore and sometimes even feature a touch of Hawaiian supernatural phenomena, the bad guys are all definitely human — just as they ought to be, in McDougal’s view.
I adore Columbo; I got addicted to reruns of the original Seventies-era series when I was in graduate school, and it’s still one of my favorite TV shows. Columbo’s sharp eye for apparently trivial incongruities, his deceptively bumbling manner, his mythical wife who’s a fan of everything and everyone, his equally mythical Captain who just hates loose ends — I love it all.
Columbo‘s format is the so-called inverted mystery, where the viewer (or reader) knows whodunit, how, and even why. The real mystery is how the murderer will be caught. You could make an argument that inverted mysteries existed in literature at least as far back as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment ; I read somewhere that the creators of Columbo cite this novel as on influence on the Columbo format. That, and the “cozy English mystery” tradition of elaborately complicated murder amongst the upper classes (investigated by the not so upper class police). But the official original inverted mystery is R. Austin Freeman’s “The Case of Oscar Brodski” (1911). The story was popular enough that Freeman wrote four more and collected them with “Brodski” into The Singing Bone (1912).
Beyond the twist of presenting the crime before the investigation, Freeman’s stories are classic ratiocination stories. His protagonist, Dr. Thorndyke, is basically Sherlock Holmes, complete with a (portable) laboratory and a Dr. Watson (Dr. Jervis, in this case). Thorndyke notices things the police don’t, and awes them with his deductive prowess. As with most stories in the ratiocination genre, the detective and his extraordinary abilities are the center of the tales.
The stories in Roy Vickers’ The Department of Dead Ends (1949) are inverted mysteries of a different style. The Department of Dead Ends is a group within Scotland Yard whose sole purpose is to take “everything the other departments rejected:” clues that led nowhere, cases that can’t be closed (or that no one is interested in closing), puzzling but seemingly irrelevant information, lost items. The department solves cases (often cold cases) via this massive collection of minutia mostly by serendipity: someone happens to notice that a puzzling fact from one case, when put together with some irrelevant trivia from an apparently unrelated situation, becomes an observation neither puzzling nor irrelevant to either circumstance.
The second of two tales about the Chinese Weaver Goddess, Zhinu, the daughter of the master of Heaven, (the Jade Emperor). As the Weaver Goddess, she either weaves her father’s royal robes out of the clouds, or else weaves the clouds and the rainbows themselves (it seems to vary, depending on what you read). Her mother, the Celestial Queen Mother, created the Silver River (the Milky Way).
This is the story of Zhinu and her other mortal husband, Niulang.
The Weaver Maiden and the Cowherd
Niulang was a poor cowherd, with nothing in the world but an old, worndown Ox. Unbeknownst to Niulang, the Ox was a Celestial being, whom the gods exiled to Earth as punishment for… well, I don’t know what. On a day like any other day, as Niulang led his Ox to the fields, to his great surprise, the Ox turned and spoke to him!
“Let’s go down by the river,” the Ox said.
“Why?” said the Niulang — as soon as he got over his surprise at owning a talking Ox.
“You’ve been a good master. I want to repay you. Trust me,” the Ox said.
So down to the river they went. What the Ox knew — and Niulang didn’t — was that this particular bend of the river was a favorite bathing spot for the Jade Emperor’s seven daughters. As Niulang approached, he saw the sisters splashing in the water. He especially noticed the youngest one — Zhinu. The Ox noticed Niulang’s infatuated expression, and he helpfully pointed out the seven piles of clothing neatly stacked on shore.
“The robe the color of the sunset is Zhinu’s,” the Ox said.
So Niulang snuck to the shore as the sisters swam and splashed, and stole the robe that was the color of the setting sun. Eventually, the sisters finished their baths, scrambled to shore, put on their robes, and flew back up to the heavens. All except poor Zhinu.
The first of two tales about the Chinese Weaver Goddess, Zhinu. Zhinu is the daughter of the master of Heaven, the Jade Emperor. As the Weaver Goddess, she either weaves her father’s royal robes out of the clouds, or else weaves the clouds and the rainbows themselves (it seems to vary, depending on what you read). Her mother, the Celestial Queen Mother, created the Silver River (the Milky Way).
The Tale of Dong Yong
In the time of the Han dynasty, there lived a young man name Dong Yong. His mother had died when he was just a baby, and he lived with his father, a poor farmer who spent every penny he had to care for and educate his son. When Dong Yong was nineteen, his father died, leaving Dong Yong so penniless that he could not afford to pay for his father’s burial rites, or for his tombstone.
Well, this wouldn’t do. Dong Yong gave up his studies and sold himself into indentured servitude, at a price high enough to give his father a proper funeral and a fine tombstone. Dong Yong knew that he would have to serve his master many long years to repay the debt, but he regretted it not at all. It was the least he could do for his father.
After the funeral, Dong Yong packed up his meagre belongings and made his way to his master’s house. On the way, he met a beautiful young woman. She told him that her mother had died, and her father had remarried. Her new stepmother wanted to marry her off against her will, and so she ran away. Dong Yong suggested she marry him instead — since neither had family, they could care for each other in a world full of strangers. The girl agreed. Continue reading
Jim Booth at the blog The New Southern Gentlemen recently took issue with a Business Insider called “The most famous book that takes place in every state”. Mostly, he takes issue with BI‘s nomination for his own state of North Carolina.
I have no opinion one way or the other about Nicholas Sparks, and given that my reading tastes runs to both genre and short stories, I’m probably not the most qualified person to weigh in on which full-length book should represent which state. But of course I couldn’t resist checking what they picked for California. I don’t know what I was expecting to see — but it wasn’t what they chose:
East of Eden, by John Steinbeck.
Hmmmmmmm…….
Antonio de Trueba (1819-1889) was a Spanish reteller of folklore in the tradition of Gustavo Bécquer and Fernán Caballero (the pen name of Cecilia Francisca Josefa Böhl de Faber) — both of whom I’ve posted on before. Trueba combined the traditional stories of the Spanish campesinos with sophisticated literary style and humorous political and social commentary. I found this delightful tale in a back issue of the fairy tale studies journal Marvels & Tales, and it hooked me at the first paragraph:
There once was a king so avaricious that instead of spending his life making his subjects happy, he passed it running throughout his kingdom searching for mines of gold and silver, and leaving the devil in charge of the ship of State. A pox on such kings!
I have a feeling this one will speak to a lot of people.
I have an article up on the #FolkloreThursday blog! I write about the Pishtaco, a fat-stealing ghoul whose legend circulates among indigenous communities in the Andean highlands. I first heard about this legend on a visit to Peru — and it hit the news internationally as recently as 2009 (as you’ll read in the article)!
Known by many names, this legendary fat-stealer stalks indigenous communities in the rural Andean highlands.
In the Peruvian Andes, they say he wanders the roads at night. He may look like a gringo (someone not Hispanic or Latino): hairy and bearded, wearing boots, a hat, and leather jacket. He may be on horseback, or in more modern times, in a car. He may look like a priest, walking along the side of the road. With his long knife, he attacks solitary travelers and dismembers them for food and for their fat.
In the Bolivian Andes, he might be the stranger next to you on the bus; don’t fall asleep! And don’t walk alone on the roads, either. If you meet him on the path, he will put you into a deep sleep with his prayers, or with powdered human bones. As you sleep he extracts the brown, hard fat around your organs (cebo: tallow or suet) with his knife, or with a special machine. You awaken, feeling weak. You fall sick. In a few days, you die.
Read the rest of the article here.
Hope you enjoy it.
Image: The Andes, Ayacucho Region, Peru. Source: Wikimedia
As my readers know, I sometimes share public domain ghost stories and other interesting reading here on Multo, in particular my yearly series on winter tales. Mostly these files are hosted from WordPress, but for larger files and epubs I have been hosting them from Dropbox. Dropbox has just dropped support for their Public folders, and so a few of the links on my pages have gone dead.
I have regenerated appropriate links and updated all the appropriate posts, but it’s always possible that I’ve missed one. So if you come across a dead Dropbox link, please do let me know.
As always, I hope you enjoy the stories I share, and I plan to keep sharing more!
Men at work sign — Source: Wikimedia
