New Book: The Ceremonies

To be quite frank, I can never remember T.E.D. Klein vs Ted Deker. One is famously Christian writer who is rather prolific, and the other is better known as the long running editor of The Twilight Zone magazine. My only real exposure to him before starting this book was reading "Growing Things" in Al Sorrento's excellent 999 anthology, the book which brought me back to horror literature after a long absence.

I got this book through an eBay auction for a box of several 80s paper horror paperbacks, which included some stuff by Schow, Simmons, Etchinson's California Gothic (from the 90s), Rice's Interview with the Vampire, and a few other books which I can't quite recall.

I knew of The Ceremonies through reputation, as Thomas F Montelone included an essay as his submission to Jones and Newman's 100 Best Horror (which is an excellent list to work from if anyone is looking to give themselves a bit of an education on the subject), but did no real reading on it beyond this endorsement.

I'm about a tenth of the way through it, but I'm suitably impressed with the novel so far. In a prologue we are introduced to The Bad Place trope in the form of a tree in a grove which is inhabited by an Other. The historical passage which opens the book presents a few different facets of the legend of how The Bad Place came to be so the reader can just use whichever one strikes their fancy should they so choose.

We're introduced to a religious sect which has shades of the Mennonites in the close community, but our protagonists introduction to this sect is done through a pair of college educated individuals who chose the life rather than being born into the sect and experiencing that way of life exclusively.

Internet friends Doug, Kevin and Nick lamented the state of mainstream horror in a recent podcast (an assessment I don't wholly agree with) and in the segment it's mentioned that there's an abnormal amount of horror books who have writers as their protagonists.

That trend continues with our protagonist Jeremy Freirs, who is a graduate student looking for time away from New York to get over a girl and possibly bang out the beginning of his thesis, which will be on Gothic Literature. Haven't spent enough time to really form an opinion on him.

A lot of care has been crafted to really explore the setting and try to communicate small town life to someone whose only experience has been New York City with a particular emphasis of the strangeness of Nature.

Reading up on TED Klein lead me to read that this book is an expansion (unofficially, of course) on Arthur Machen's The White People. Machen is one of my favorite horror authors. He's known most for The Bowmen, the tale in which the Angels of Mons appeared to protect the English soldiers at the start of WWI. A story which took a life on its own and became a modern fantastical legend whose popularity reached critical mass in beleagured Britain. The White People is the tale of witchcraft told from the perspective of a young girl. He also famously wrote The Great God Pan, which in its reading you can see was a huge influence on Lovecraft.

If you want a good place to start with Machen, you could certainly do worse than the three volumes edited by ST Joshi for Chasoim.