The New Snowy Gothic

Wendy Webb, The Stroke of Winter: A Novel

Amethyst “Tess” Bell spent summers growing up in bucolic Wharton, overlooking Lake Superior, but this is her first winter in the tourist town. She’s just inherited her grandparents’ ornate mansion, beautiful but too huge for one divorced empty-nester. The house is part of Wharton’s legend, where her eccentric grandfather, Sebastian Bell, created the oil paintings that made him, and Wharton, famous. Tess wants to renovate, which means unlocking parts of the building sealed for decades.

Wendy Webb’s eighth novel continues themes introduced in Webb’s previous works: massive mansions, family secrets, and semirural settings overlooking Lake Superior. Webb is conscious of herself writing in the Gothic tradition, and revives storytelling elements previously pioneered by Horace Walpole and the Brontë sisters. This means her plot outline won’t much surprise seasoned readers, focusing on dark family secrets, surprise twists, and houses bigger on the inside. But surprise isn’t Webb’s point, it’s the journey.

Tess’s grandiose plans to renovate the family mansion probably exceed her skills. Especially when a winter snowstorm socks Wharton in, forcing her to shelter with a stray white dog, a massive Malamute that appoints itself her protector. Trapped inside, she’s awakened nightly by strange shadows and unexplained sounds coming from behind a door her grandmother nailed shut decades earlier, after her grandfather passed. Has vermin gotten into the house? Or is it something far worse?

Webb’s storytelling requires some willing suspension of disbelief. Consider first Tess’s astonishment that winters on Lake Superior are harsh, despite knowing the town mostly empties every October. I spent a couple of childhood years on the UP, overlooking “the big lake they call Gitchee Gumee,” so I knew about bitter winds and Lake Effect snow. Seems that Tess, like Heathcliffe and Catherine, should’ve simply anticipated violent weather and isolation as the background of her tale.

Laying that and similar quibbles aside, Webb does a remarkable job creating atmospherics. Tess spends December discovering the intricate structure of the house and town she only previously knew as a seasonal visitor. Wharton definitely has its romantic side, and Webb describes its downtown in pastoral terms familiar from countless Hallmark Christmas romances. But the more Tess probes the community’s history, the more she discovers secrets buried back before White people settled on Ojibwe land.

Wendy Webb

Tess hires a local handyman to open the mansion’s locked chambers. Wyatt proves well-connected to Wharton’s people and history, and quickly assembles a local crew. But when the long-hidden chambers prove to contain nothing that could’ve created the sounds and shadows keeping Tess awake, Wyatt basically adopts her, making her mission his. Deep within her artist grandfather’s studio, Tess finds evidence potentially worth millions, but which could submarine her family’s artistic and philanthropic legacy forever.

Thus commences a narrative of twists and circumstances, bolstered by seemingly supernatural occurrences. Evidence rearranges itself inside locked rooms. Lights and shadows ignore laws of cause and effect. It’s almost like Tess’s mansion, and eventually the town itself, want Tess and Wyatt to uncover secrets buried before they were born. But evidence emerges only by increments, and our protagonists often operate blind. We know, because we’ve read similar books, that first conclusions are often unreliable.

Webb’s storytelling is definitely plot-driven. Our protagonists coax clues from the usual suspects: the half-dotty grandfather, the police chief, local business owners. This coaxing often means characters must re-explain information they’ve already discovered elsewhere. (I began skimming these scenes.) Meanwhile, Tess and Wyatt fall into a comfy relationship that’s half romantic, half trauma-bonding. They’ve forgotten a secret I discovered returning to my parents’ hometown as an adult: you don’t always know who’s related to you.

This plot-driven approach means Webb’s voice is sometimes wordy. On multiple occasions, Tess, a former executive chef, cooks dinner, a process which Webb describes with the loving detail of a food blogger. Again, I started skimming. This requirement also sometimes strains plausibility: middle-aged divorced men don’t just have goat cheese on hand, especially in semi-rural tourist towns during the off-season. Webb frequently describes a lush, low-friction world she wishes she lived in. Me too, sister.

Briefly, Webb writes for audiences more interested in plot than character. Her protagonists journey into the core of the mansion’s secrets, but aren’t personally introspective. This isn’t necessarily bad: Webb’s intricate narrative isn’t pathbreaking, but it’s fun, and we enjoy following the journey alongside our protagonists. But it does require reading with some selective judgment. Audiences reared on a certain kind of character-driven narrative will have to adjust themselves to Webb’s fast but plot-centric style.

Some Incomplete Thoughts on Elon Musk

Elon Musk

Elon Musk has reportedly completed his hostile takeover of Twitter. This joins companies like PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX that he has burrowed into, tick-like, to nourish himself off the product other people have previously built. But Twitter has a distinct character, an identity that makes it different than those other companies. Twitter doesn’t just provide a product or service; Twitter is a platform. Which opens very different implications.

PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX need customers to do business. If customers withhold their business, the business dwindles—though, admittedly, it’s rare for large businesses to dwindle to zero. Twitter doesn’t need customers; it needs content. Without users constantly creating content, and the lucrative controversy that content often provides, there’s no business, regardless of how many advertisers and daily viewers the site retains.

Social media networks essentially exist to resell user-created content to other users. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok all exist to the exact extent that somebody keeps creating content, and if content creators start withholding their words and images, the business model dries up. Recall, advertisers kept pumping money into Friendster, Bebo, and MySpace for some time, but the business models all collapsed because ordinary people stopped creating content.

However, that content isn’t neutral. Musk has garnered right-wing support for his high-profile buyout by championing “free speech,” a coded term for loosening Twitter’s anti-hate speech rules. Likely beneficiaries of such loosening include Donald Trump, who used Twitter to incite violence; Jordan Peterson, who persists in aggressively deadnaming transgendered public figures; Alex Jones, who peddles lies for profit; and David Duke, banned for being David Duke.

As a free speech absolutist myself, I realize why being absolute is conditional. In my hometown, a bar owner needed to ban a handful of people for their language. They used hate speech, including the N-word, quite loudly, and picked needless arguments regarding politics. Any business owner knows that, if you don’t ban Klansmen and fascists early, other customers start avoiding your store; before long, you find yourself running a store for Klansmen and fascists.

Mark Zuckerberg

The same underlying principle drives social networks. Twitter and Facebook banned Donald Trump, not because his words were hateful and incited violence, but because they knew that if they didn’t, other users would leave. Content creators won’t create content if their content rubs elbows with Trumpist bullshit. And again, no matter how many code-writers or advertisers the parent company has, without content, there’s no company.

Serial entrepreneurs Alex Moazed and Nicholas Johnson describe Twitter, and similar businesses like Facebook and Etsy, as platform businesses. That is, these businesses don’t sell anything specific; they sell platforms users can utilize to tell stories, connect with friends, or simply air opinions. Moazed and Johnson regard these businesses as cash cows because they aren’t limited by warehouses or shelf space; given sufficient server storage, they’re hypothetically infinite.

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Moazed and Johnson’s description sounds remarkably naïve. Even beyond knowing that social networks profit by selling customers’ metadata, and customer contacts’ metadata, the hypothetically infinite business isn’t infinite. Without people posting thoughts, pictures, and petty quarrels, social media has no business model. This gives users greater authority than standard business models—though that authority often isn’t readily visible.

Other business models favor gigantism and consolidation. Five publishing conglomerates now control the book industry, except they don’t really, because all five do fully half their business through one vendor, Amazon. That’s why boycotts seldom work, because they require such massive commitment by millions of people over vast amounts of time that they usually stall faster than a Model A. It’s hard to fight monopolies of that magnitude.

The same doesn’t apply to social media. Sure, there’s a similar monopolist impulse; Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has bought out so many other social properties, including Instagram and WhatsApp. But it’s much easier for smaller numbers of customers, working concertedly, to submarine the business model. It took only two years of Rupert Murdoch’s total mismanagement to transform MySpace from Earth’s biggest website, into the Mary Celeste of the whole internet.

Therefore, I contend, Elon Musk will reverse his entire course within weeks. The very “free speech” he purportedly supports, will become economically toxic if not subjected to certain minimum restraints. Sure, Twitter is sometimes morally toxic, encouraging petty squabbles and polarization, but Elon cares more about economic toxicity. The minute content creators start jumping ship to avoid being contaminated by fascist twaddle, he’ll become as authoritarian as anybody.

Because rules exist for a reason, even for the rich.

The Monster at the End of Every Book

Pete Mesling, Fool’s Fire

A learned German physician apprentices himself to a mad scientist in a castle, only to reveal his madness is far more ambitious. The last free-minded neuroscientist on Earth must face the apocalypse of blandness his research has unleashed. A mother fleeing an abusive relationship is trapped in a military bunker with two soldiers, and must determine which of them is lying. A failed Dickensian actor realizes that suicide doesn’t necessarily end all opportunities.

Reviewing horror stories is innately subjective, because not everyone finds the same elements scary. Slasher movie aficionados often find Lovecraftian dread sluggish and unengaging, for instance. So saying whether I personally found Pete Mesling’s short stories frightening doesn’t say much. But I can unequivocally say that it appears Mesling would rather be writing novels, because his stories often read like good beginnings which end abruptly.

This collection lacks a through-line, beyond the author’s effort to cause fear. Mesling samples generously from established subgenres, and adjacent stories carom wildly in style. His opening story, “Imposter Syndrome,” reflects Hollywood’s love of the half-seen monster, in movies like The Descent and Cloverfield. The fear comes from our inability to know the monster, or whether the character describing the monster in grim, portentous terms is trustworthy.

Mesling careens from this directly into “The Private Ambitions of Arthur Hemming,” a deliberate pastiche of classic Universal black-and-white horror films. He plays this one with tongue planted firmly in cheek, giving this story a playful, Young Frankenstein-like flavor. I really enjoyed this one, and felt like Mesling was going somewhere. But then he abruptly ended, with the first-person narrator declaring tomorrow is the big experiment, so he’s sticking this narrative in the trunk for posterity.

Sadly, this pattern repeats itself consistently. Mesling starts several good stories, builds some level of tension, then stops mid-action. I remember, as an apprentice writer, hearing the critique “This story ends just where it should be beginning.” Not until an undergraduate writing workshop did I understand what that meant: your manuscript provides thoughtful, incisive exposition. But your “resolution” should be the inciting action; what you’ve written is simply preamble.

Pete Mesling

One of this collection’s best stories, “Caught In a Trap,” features an unhappily married woman whose angst manifests itself in unanticipated psychic powers. She accidentally makes contact with another psychic, a grandiose personality who promises to tutor her expanding powers. But the person she ultimately meets proves to be a self-important incel. This really felt like the prologue to a supernatural battle between two forms of late-capitalist ennui.

Except Mesling literally ends by having one character muttering: “You’ve won this one, but I’ll be back.” Really? That’s the resolution? This could’ve incited a defining battle for the ages, like Batman and the Joker, except driven by pop apathy rather than self-righteousness. Time and again, Mesling repeats this pattern, laying the groundwork for something epic, then deciding he’s done enough.

I find this frustrating because Mesling is a remarkably good writer. His characters have distinct voices, his stories have their own tones, and the conflicts he establishes are brimming with possibilities. His storytelling choices are clearly influenced by cinema, to the point where one of his stories features a lost classic by Hollywood icon Fritz Lang. But that’s not a knock against Mesling. In today’s image-driven milieu, Mesling makes these Hollywood stories his own.

Until the moment he doesn’t. In “The Dragon’s Tooth,” Fritz Lang realizes the movie he’s just completed couldn’t possibly exist, that it defies the values and mores of post-WWII Hollywood. I’m reminded of Shadow of the Vampire, a Willem Dafoe vehicle fictionalizing the making of the first vampire movie. That movie built dread around the gulf between image and reality, between expectation and disappointment. Mesling’s Lang simply realizes, and the story’s over.

Since we’re discussing films anyway, I realize today’s horror cinema seldom resolves. Today’s movie monsters aren’t beaten, and stories often end with protagonists resigned to fate. That’s a choice. But first, those movies guide us through the protagonists’ struggles, forcing them to resist fate multiple ways before realizing, with the Greek tragedians, that doom is inevitable. They don’t start with characters already resigned.

Mesling reveals, in his preface, that this is probably his last short story collection for now. He’s recently commenced a well-received novel series, which he promises will monopolize his attention. I suggest the novel-writing process already owns his mind. Because time after time, his stories present the promising first chapter of a complex and terrifying novel which he just hasn’t written yet.

Living in the Shadow of a Garbage Society

My mother loves telling this story: one Sunday when I was perhaps four or five, the pastor asked the assembled children what jobs they wanted when they grew up. I reportedly announced into a live microphone: “I want to be a garbageman!” Once the laughter subsided, the pastor asked why I’d aspire to such a job. “I want a job that helps people,” I supposedly said,” and garbagemen help people by removing their trash!”

It’s easy, from an adult perspective, to laugh at the childlike logic implicit in that statement. Lord knows I do. But revisiting that child’s reasoning, I really appreciate the underlying reasoning. It reflects the precepts of mutualism, responsibility, and trust which underlie a working society: when somebody has a problem, and I have the capacity to alleviate that burden, I arguably have a moral responsibility to do so.

That responsibility underlies traditional moral paradigms like The Good Samaritan. It isn’t enough to feel sympathy for that broken body lying beside the road; the Samaritan must lift the bloodied man onto his donkey, transport him to safety, and purchase the care that man requires. I must solve another’s burden by taking it onto myself physically. I must throw others’ garbage into the truck before it can be removed.

Considering this raises another question, though: does that really help? When faced with an acute situation, I can assume the other’s burdens temporarily, sure. I can remove their accumulated store of garbage. How many times can I do this, though, before finally looking into why their household produces so much trash? Eventually I must acknowledge that removing and landfilling their garbage permits them to keep producing trash, and that’s a problem.

Don’t misunderstand me. I know and appreciate the helping motivation. Though I never became a garbageman, I stuck with teaching despite the dismal pay and no advancement opportunities because I believed I was doing good. But I remember, multiple times, walking students through the academic process and realizing I could do nothing for them, because they’d been abandoned by parents, academia, capitalism, and modern society years earlier.

A Sunday School illustration of the
Good Samaritan. Click to enlarge.

Most people probably don’t produce massive quantities of household garbage from malice or negligence. But they’re pressed for time, lacking resources, and have material needs. I doubt most people would purchase the things they’re most likely to throw away—flimsy clothing, food packaging, and countless stacks of paper—if they didn’t have an unjust system requiring them to buy food, clothes, and everything else at unequal terms.

It’s tempting to believe we can take others’ suffering away without taking it on ourselves. And sometimes, certainly, we can; it’s possible, sometimes, to simply remove and discard others’ suffering, But not very often. The garbageman, in removing others’ refuse, must first lift and throw it himself, and even when the waste is removed and landfilled, the reek of garbage, literal and metaphorical, never entirely washes off.

Please forgive the overextended garbage metaphor. My point remains: I can help people by assuming their burdens, by removing the detritus that life forces them to produce, and by trying, however ham-handedly, to heal their wounds. Or I can help by finding the reasons why they’re forced to be wasteful, hurting, and generally disadvantaged. I can fix their problems when they’re acute, or before they even become problems.

Unfortunately, we’ve accepted that only helping individuals when their problem is acute actually counts as helping. Addressing the injustice that creates acute problems is routinely dismissed as “political,” disdained as partisan interference. Recall the Brazilian archbishop Dom Helder Camara’s famous quote: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

The conditions that filled people’s lives with garbage, however, weren’t apolitical. Our economics, shared values, and hierarchies didn’t just happen, despite the libertarian myth; these conditions are created and reinforced by legal systems. As conservatives like reminding us whenever America’s southern border returns to mass consciousness, “we’re a society of laws.” That doesn’t just mean to shut up and obey, it means laws, written and unwritten, create society.

So yes, in short, I could help people by removing the trash their modern lives force them to accumulate. I could martyr myself by accepting the moral judgment and pervasive physical reek that come with being a garbageman. Or I can rise up against a system that encourages people to hoard things and create waste. The latter is more disdained, but much more effective.

Doctor Who and the Myth of Time

Various writers and artists, Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension (two volumes)

Time itself is coming apart; but when isn’t it, when the Doctor is around? A massive, terrifying vortex of pure white light is traveling the universe, eating everything it encounters. We first witness it swallowing Captain Jack Harkness off a distant planet. But this monster isn’t satisfied with one planet, or even one timestream; it’s consuming the universe in reverse order. And it’s apparently started consuming the Doctor’s past selves.

Why can’t fans let prior iterations of the Doctor end? This two-volume collection from Titan Comics includes appearances by every canonical version of the character through 2018. They appear unchanged, unaged, from their onscreen appearance—a pointed fact with the Fourth and Eighth Doctors, who changed markedly between their first and last appearances. Franchise fans, and content creators who appeal to them, won’t let old forms of the character go.

In his 1972 article “The Myth of Superman,” Umberto Eco claims the archetypal hero is everyman, is universal. But in being universal, the hero is finite. Every time Superman punches villains, his mythic justice is extended, but he himself is consumed. Which sounds great when talking about past mythic heroes, like Odysseus or Charlemagne. The problem is, Superman isn’t used up; he’s continually recreated, and therefore, on paper, continually young.

Comic book characters don’t have to age. Superman, with his broad shoulders and iconic spit-curl, remains largely unchanged since 1938. The problem, as I’ve noted previously, happens when characters are depicted onscreen. Superman remains constant, outlasting George Reeves’ suicide, Christover Reeve’s quadriplegia, and the all-around disappointment of Brandon Routh. Artists continually recreate Superman, but human actors inevitably get old and die.

Something similar happens with the Doctor. The BBC writers’ room invented the narrative contrivance of Regeneration in 1966 when William Hartnell, “The First Doctor,” became too stricken with atherosclerosis to continue acting. Writers and fans continued recreating the mythological character, leaving Hartnell, a mortal, behind. The Doctor’s human aspect is transitory; his character remains present and part of audiences’ lives.

Where possible, official productions keep original actors involved: Big Finish Productions, for instance, put the Fourth and Tenth Doctors together in 2020. Tom Baker hasn’t played the Fourth Doctor onscreen since 1981 (not directly anyway) and is pushing ninety, yet he remains altogether synonymous with the role, and able to continue playing it. If original actors aren’t available, alternatives suffice: voice actors Frazier Hines and Tim Treolar currently play the Second and Third Doctors, respectively.

This recreation isn’t dependent on official BBC imprimatur, either. Fan culture, including fanfiction writers, cosplayers, and others, participate in recreating the Doctor. The BBC nominally “owns” the Doctor, yet the character is most alive and fertile in fans’ imaginations. Like all copyrighted productions, the Doctor will eventually pass into public domain, but morally, he already lives there. Every “official” franchise relies upon backstory existing in fans’ imaginations.

Titan Comics, however, tacitly acknowledges something fans already know: because the Doctor remains living, the character needs new adventures. As Umberto Eco writes, Hercules, King Arthur, and other mythic heroes are dead; writers may rewrite existing stories and apply new psychological insights, but seldom add actual new events to the mythology. Superman or the Doctor, however, always require new adventures. The narrative canon is always expanding.

Therefore Titan invents stories like this, which transcend time and bring the Doctor’s multiple incarnations together. Though this story highlights the four (male) iterations from the revived TV show, it incorporates every onscreen version to date, always looking exactly like they appeared back then. Human actors age and die, but on paper, the Second Doctor is always fortyish, the Fourth Doctor is always dark-haired and energetic.

Always the same, yet different.

Audiences yearn for new adventures starring the Doctor, but only as he/they appeared onscreen. Casting David Bradley as the First Doctor is a satisfactory workaround, one time. But audiences probably wouldn’t accept that substitution permanently. Just as Timothy Dalton’s James Bond isn’t Sean Connery’s, each regeneration of the Doctor becomes a new being, but also doesn’t. Because the Doctor moves on, but we, the audience, carry the old mythology with us.

Fundamentally, the BBC “owns” Doctor Who on paper, and licenses companies like Titan Comics or Big Finish Audio to invent new adventures, but that’s a legal fiction. The mythology has taken root in audiences’ imaginations in ways that, say, Quatermass just hasn’t. New adventures rely upon, not licensed canon, but the audiences’ living imagination. Old versions of the Doctor remain because they live and have new adventures inside us.

Notice To Vacate

I spent last week in a one-bedroom cabin overlooking Lake Waconda, a man-made reservoir just west of Glen Elder, Kansas. Lake Waconda is a popular destination for hunters, fishers, and other outdoorsy types, frequently busy with flat-bottomed boats and family RVs. I did none of these things; I simply took six days and five nights to stand with my feet in the water and listen to the rhythms of nature around me.

Americans, as a society, have accepted the idea that human worth derives from our ability to produce economic value. From chattel slavery to industrial peonage to yuppie consumerism, our economic structures have always taught us that life has meaning strictly according to the ability to generate wealth. Money, the way American society is organized, isn’t only a tool to fill needs and measure desires; it’s the yardstick of life.

Perhaps that’s why, unique among wealthy nations, Americans don’t enjoy a guaranteed annual vacation. The economic liberty necessary to occasionally “vacate” your social station belongs exclusively to those who can afford it. Paid time off becomes a form of bribery: my annual PTO ration doubled when I moved into an office position, because my writing skills are valuable, and the company bribed me to not withhold them.

That’s no kind of life. Human worth far exceeds our ability to make things for employers who would replace us in moments. We know this, too: vacation is a form of economic rebellion, a scheduled inversion of the demand for constant dollar-value productivity. The activities we undertake on vacation—hunting, traveling, or in my case, standing with my feet in the waves—are measured on days, not dollars.

And on vacation, days have meaning. At work, days are often demarcations of disappointment: the proverbial hatred for Mondays, thanking God for Fridays. On vacation, I spent days walking prairie hills, reading books for reading’s sake, and spending time with friends, while making and sharing good food. I seldom checked my watch, because my only deadline was sundown. These experiences, not their dollar value, make life worthwhile.

Standing with my feet in the
waters of Lake Waconda

Much modern life exists in constant tension: we yearn to rebel against a system we know is innately dehumanizing. But we also yearn for shelter and groceries, which means making an arrangement with the existing system. The monetary system we rebel against also subsidizes our rebellion. No wonder some working-class people start thinking it’s somehow virtuous to work weekends and never take days off.

Temporarily vacating from this system is countercultural, and countereconomic. By spending time in activities that cannot be monetized, by eating when I’m hungry and sleeping when I’m tired, I show respect to my body and soul, something a dollar cannot do. Leaving the economic grind, even for one week, means listening to myself, respecting my internal clock, and giving preference to the one thing I definitely own: myself.

What might a society look like, organized around empowered persons listening to themselves? If people could make economic decisions not from fear of starvation, but from owning a shared goal? Historically, economies have revolved around goals handed to the masses by people in dominion, whether corporate bureaucrats or state apparatchiks. But imagine a society where people could know their own rhythms, and set their own goals.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Employment is necessarily unequal, but I don’t oppose work. Even under utopian conditions, remunerative work remains necessary. It also remains desirable: after a week spent performing no writing (including this blog), I was eager to resume work. The difference is that, having spent time listening to my internal rhythms, I have a better understanding of what makes work meaningful, and what conditions I’m willing to accept for employment.

Vacating my economic station gives me the opportunity to evaluate my goals, and decide what steps I’m willing to take to pursue them. It lets me price my skills, tools, and time, rather than accepting the price provided to me by the bureaucracy. Most important, it lets me decide whether employment—that is, the conditions under which the economy makes work remunerative work available—satisfies my internal need for work.

No wonder Americans aren’t accorded vacation time. Despite our rhetoric of liberty, our economic structure, founded on systems of slavery, peonage, and debt, is fundamentally un-free. Time spent listening to ourselves, time spent nourishing our souls, threatens that structure. I found fresh air, clean water, and tall grass on the shores of Lake Waconda. I also found the economic conditions that could, with time, make me free.

Spiraling Toward Armageddon

J. Todd Scott, The Flock: A Thriller

One snowy late-fall morning in rural Colorado, three armed intruders invade Sarah Brannen’s home, shoot her husband, and kidnap her daughter. But Sarah Brannen isn’t Sarah Brannen; she’s really Sybilla “Billie” Laure, the only survivor of a Branch Davidian-style cult mass suicide. And the intruders are True Believers, convinced Billie and her daughter are the Messiah. Now Billie must travel across the country before desperate cultists literally crucify her daughter.

Former federal agent J. Todd Scott’s fifth novel reminds me of Neal Stephenson, particularly his star-making novel, Snow Crash. Like Stephenson, Scott brings together an unusual number of threads in a baroque symphony of near-future paranoia. Like Stephenson, Scott’s book runs over 400 pages of tightly paced twists and revelations. And like Stephenson, Scott cannot possibly resolve every thread he’s introduced, ensuring readers are both thrilled and ultimately confused.

Born amid an atmosphere of cultist paranoia, Billie has spent her life preparing for Apocalyptic confrontations; now her preparation pays off. She collects old debts to get the tools and weapons she needs to chase her daughter’s kidnappers. Meanwhile, small-town police chief Elise Blue, unprepared for multiple murders on her patch, draws the wrong conclusions and begins chasing Billie herself, walking straight into a trap ten years in the making.

In flashbacks, we reconstruct Billie’s childhood at the Ark of Lazarus, a cult that channels the worst of the Branch Davidians, NXIVM, and Heaven’s Gate. These similarities aren’t incidental, as Scott name-checks most of them. But a decade after the Ark died in a literal firestorm of True Belief and bureaucratic incompetence, it’s been resurrected online, accumulating new followers on Chan boards. Like QAnon, the New Lazarians are willing to die for their beliefs.

Scott’s many expository flashbacks might make this novel somewhat tough sledding for casual readers. We rediscover the Ark’s history not in sequence, but in the nonlinear form that matters most to Scott’s increasingly large ensemble. More important, the “facts” we discover in retrospect aren’t always reliable, because then and now, these characters lie. Even with a child’s life in jeopardy, they continue lying to protect their fragile self-images.

J. Todd Scott

While Billie’s front-burner narrative boils, subplots simmer in the background. Scott’s story unfolds against a background of economic stagnation, public health crisis, and environmental devastation. No wonder, Scott implies, that paranoid netizens look to the resurrection prophecies of a disgraced doomsday cult for guidance. Because it’s difficult for rational people to face a literally burning, storm-ravaged physical world that increasingly appears to have no future.

But all religion is both global and local. The New Lazarians prophesy a literal resurrection impending when Billie and her daughter are sacrificed. Believers seek a world cleansed of unrighteousness, but they also want meaning in their own lives. They seek escape from modernity irredeemably tainted by environmental rot and human sin. Peeling the onion layers of Billie’s lies, we discover, sometimes painfully, that these prophecies aren’t necessarily wrong.

Again, that’s a lot. Scott’s book, like Stephenson’s, runs over 400 pages, features a cast of thousands, and progresses out of sequence. Casual readers dipping in and out before bedtime might find Scott’s narrative impenetrable. Scott also does something many thriller novelists find distasteful: he spends time ruminating over how his massively convoluted plot traumatizes his characters. Even if his protagonists win, they can’t return to their old lives.

It bears repeating that Scott introduces so many plot elements that he cannot possibly resolve every one. Some plot elements, like a massive invasive plague, get briefly mentioned before they’re forgotten. I understand why Scott introduces so many threads, reflecting his audience’s persistent awareness of economic injustice, constant wildfires and end-of-days hurricanes, and Covid. Because today’s reality is a constant barrage of things that plan to kill you.

Perhaps, in that regard, Scott’s novel is a “thriller” because it reflects the roller coaster we’re all trapped on. Where Tom Clancy or John le Carré wrote thrillers about worst-case scenarios for the Cold War, Scott writes about the directionless world Americans find themselves trapped within today. We aren’t speeding toward nuclear conflagration anymore; like Billie, our world is just spiraling, and nobody appears to be at the controls.

Scott writes with a relentless pace that doesn’t let readers pause for breath. His chapters are short, several under one page, and nearly all end with cliffhangers or revelations so shocking, you can practically hear the soap-opera organ music. But even that feels remarkably familiar. Because under his law enforcement bluster and pacing, Scott is ultimately writing about us.

The Good Samaritan and the Blessing of Uncertainty

A Sunday School illustration of the
Good Samaritan. Click to enlarge.

I remember countless pastel-colored Sunday School pamphlets in my childhood containing depictions of the Good Samaritan parable, from Luke’s Gospel. They always contained a fair-skinned man lying beside the road, usually with remarkably little blood, despite the injuries he sustained at the hands of robbers. They usually also contained images of a priest and Levite in silken robes, ostentatiously looking anywhere other than that wounded man.

These pamphlets usually moralistically proclaimed how the priest and Levite had the forms of religion, without the spirit. Good people, these lessons intoned, would never walk past a wounded person without stopping for help. And maybe that’s true. But the older I get, the less comfortable I become with considering that the final word. Because, in choosing a Samaritan as the model “neighbor,” I believe Jesus touched on something deeper.

As Obery M. Hendricks writes, the temple priesthood was deputized to perform actual governance in Roman Judea. While the largest number of Jews were an occupied people, taxed and beholden to Roman military might, priests had greater autonomy, because they professed loyalty to ha-Shem, but obedience to Rome. Thus, like many of today’s megachurch pastors, priests cosplayed at piety, but showed first love to the occupying authority.

Therefore, their lives had a nominal level of certainty. Unlike Mary and Joseph, the priests probably wouldn’t find themselves uprooted for tax purposes. They probably wouldn’t have their lands expropriated to repay somebody else’s debts. If they traveled that storied road from Jerusalem to Jericho, they probably didn’t travel alone, despite what Sunday School pamphlets depicted; they probably had a retinue of bodyguards and functionaries at all times.

The priest and Levite weren’t just religious leaders; they were political and economic leaders too. They were the middle class of Roman Judea, the people who weren’t really free, but had the trappings of prosperity because they complied with an imposed social order. They bought into the system, and the system rewarded them by letting them feel superior to those who didn’t buy in. Their power was transient, but it was theirs.

Unfortunately, then as now, that level of socioeconomic certainty wasn’t permanent. One bad choice, one show of weakness, could yank it away. Dr. King himself called the road from Jerusalem to Jericho “a winding, meandering road….really conducive for ambushing.” Perhaps the bandits who left that nameless Jew bleeding beside the highway were still there. Maybe they deliberately left that man as bait for the tenderhearted.

For anybody wanting to live, leaving that man there isn’t an unreasonable action. The priest and Levite had economic security in an insecure time. They had power among an occupied nation. Why risk squandering it because this fool went, unaccompanied, along a road famous for being dangerous? The priest and Levite had too much to live for. Leaving that unfortunate wreck was a fair price for continued certainty.

That Samaritan, however, had no such certainty, simply by being a Samaritan. If Jews were occupied and oppressed by Rome, then Samaritans were occupied and oppressed by Jews. Throughout the Gospels, the word “Samaritan” is synonymous with somebody who has nothing left to lose: the Woman at the Well, the one leper among ten. Because modern Christians encounter the word “Samaritan” coupled with the word “Good,” we’ve forgotten its origins.

“Samaritan” is the N-word of ancient Judea.

While the priest and Levite kept walking, lest something unplanned interrupt their socioeconomic certainty, the Samaritan, in his uncertainty, stopped. He had no further guarantee than anyone else that those bandits wouldn’t reemerge, intent for second helpings. But his uncertainty, his lack of absolute worldly foundations, gave him authority enough to overcome whatever fears might’ve possessed him, and do right.

Many White Christians today think faith alone protects them. We saw this recently, when many thought Jesus would protect them from COVID-19. But Christians have no such certainty. Doing right by the powerless has cost numerous Christians their lives: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, and innumerable less-famous Christians have met their fates because they chose uncertainty over power. That Samaritan loved enough to overcome his limited worldly comforts.

This judgment covers me, too. I know I use my house, books, and job as justifications to avoid sticking my neck out. I love the limited amount of certainty the world extends me, as compensation for being White, male, and willing to comply. This tells me I need a new, countercultural prayer: I need God to offer me the strength to be uncertain, and in my uncertainty, to act.

The Poor are Coming to Save Christians

Miguel A. De La Torre, Liberation Theology for Armchair Theologians

Jesus Christ began His ministry by standing up in congregation and proclaiming “good news to the poor,” quoting the prophet Isaiah. So why does Christianity, as an institution, spend comparatively little time and energy on the poor? Beginning mostly in the late 1960s, a growing body of parish priests and ordained pastors began shifting focus off heavenly topics, and onto saving bodies. This focus became known as “liberation theology.”

Iliff theologian Miguel De La Torre, himself a late contributor to liberation theology, offers a thumbnail summary of the movement’s beliefs and history. This isn’t always easy. Liberation theology arose from a specific historical circumstance, the peak of the Cold War, when rich nations used poor nations as chess pieces. Liberation theology sought to emphasize that poor people existed separate from American or Soviet influence, but as human beings with souls.

De La Torre’s overview therefore begins with politics. This will irritate some Christians, who think religion is somehow apolitical. De La Torre can’t survey liberation theology without talking about America’s proxy wars in Latin America, the geographical space where this movement was most public. He sometimes goes entire pages without once mentioning religion, God, or transcendence. I can already imagine the stuffed-shirt responses likely to emerge from this angle.

However, that’s the very message liberation theology conveys. Those invested in this world’s power structures must, of necessity, overlook the poor, the hungry, the dispossessed—those Jesus called “the least of these.” Telling poor indigenous people, driven off their lands by imperial ambition, to “be of good cheer” because they’ll go to heaven when they die, denies those people’s innate humanity. It tells them their struggles only matter on another plane.

Liberation theology, by contrast, doesn’t begin with right belief. It doesn’t tell people to understand esoteric concepts correctly, and everything else will follow. Instead, it starts with people’s real needs, where they live right now. As De La Torre puts it, Jesus doesn’t favor the poor and the oppressed because they’re better or more holy people; Jesus favors the poor and oppressed because they’re poor and oppressed. By extension, we should too.

Miguel A. De La Torre

Liberative theologies begin by assuming religion gives us, not an abstracted goal regarding a disembodied God, but a mission to live in this life. Jesus became embodied and walked among Jews, an occupied people and aliens in their own land, because we’re supposed to do likewise. This means resisting oppressive governments, economies, and racial hierarchies. Christians, this precept holds, are supposed to get dirty with the rest of humanity.

This book’s largest space deals with Latin American liberation theology. This is, after all, where the movement took shape, and the place where it had the largest and most cohesive identity. De La Torre, a Cuban exile and adult convert, discusses the social forces that forced liberation theologians, mostly (but not exclusively) Catholic priests, to reject theology based on “right belief,” and focus instead on how we live this life.

But De La Torre also spends time discussing other theologies from other regions. In North America, Black Liberation theology deals with ways Christians stand in solidarity against White supremacy, while feminist theology stands similarly against patriarchy. And womanist theology (a term I’ve previously misunderstood) overlaps the two, emphasizing that Black women have distinct Christian needs different from either Black men or White women.

Finally, De La Torre addresses liberative “theologies” from other religions. Sufi Islam, for instance, has a long history of opposing kings and potentates, and Gandhi’s liberative politics were informed by his Hindu beliefs, as well as the goulash of other religions he encountered walking India’s streets. Even humanist philosophies have what De La Torre considers “theologies” connecting work among the oppressed with truths that transcend human scale.

Not everyone will appreciate liberation theology. Christians who consider religion to important and pure for grubby old politics have historically disliked this approach; post-Vatican II, the Catholic Church, with its anti-communist commitments, actively silenced liberation theologians. As a Lutheran myself, I anticipate cries of “works righteousness,” my tradition’s leading wail, for a theology which insists that Christians have a responsibility to do, not just to believe.

But De La Torre’s introduction provides persuasive evidence that Christians have a God-given responsibility, not only to have a right heart, but to express that right heart through how we treat those who can do nothing for us. De La Torre not only provides a short (150 pages) introduction to why we should think this way, but also provides an extensive reading list for other sources that go into greater depth. Because if we believe, but don’t act, what do we really believe?

The Law vs. Black Children and Families

Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

When “Defund the Police” became a political catchphrase, many advocates suggested state social services agencies to partly replace the police’s role. University of Pennsylvania law professor Dorothy Roberts balks at this substitution. To Roberts, the police and most child protective services agencies suffer the same problems: profound power in Black communities, scanty oversight, and only one violent tool to solve every problem.

Operating under the premise of preserving youth from dysfunctional homes, Roberts writes, child services agencies have broad authority to enter private homes, vet parents’ choices, and make decisions about families’ future. Their evaluation criteria are subjective, which leaves them vulnerable to abuse. In many jurisdictions, they have only one recourse for effecting change: taking children from their families and putting them in foster care.

Roberts calls these agencies “family policing,” and claims they’re part of the same prison-industrial complex we’ve heard so much about. She doesn’t make this claim frivolously. Like uniformed police, family police have a cloak of benign motivation, and use language of peacekeeping and community. But like the police, family services disproportionately target Black, poor, and Indigenous communities, regularly breaking up families.

We’re taught early that child protective agencies rescue children from violent or sexually exploitive circumstances. Yet, as Roberts demonstrates, family police agencies regularly miss these cases. The preponderance of children removed from homes are justified behind “neglect,” which usually means insufficient food or clothing. Yet agencies seldom have authority or resources to provide families with housing, healthcare, or cash. Their first, and often only, recourse, is seizing children.

Reading Roberts’ descriptions, a pattern emerges: family policing agencies see non-White parents as adversaries, not only to state agencies, but to children. Because social workers often travel accompanied by police, they often answer even nominal resistance with arrest and trial. Because these supposedly neglectful parents often just need assistance, the result is that they treat cash-strapped parents as literal criminals.

Moreover, the criteria that family police use to identify neglectful families are remarkably targeted. House too small? Cupboards too bare? Can’t afford childcare while parents are working? These all supposedly indicate unfit parents. Coupled with a tendency to overpolice poor and BIPOC communities, these criteria mean Black and Indigenous children enter the system in wildly disproportionate numbers.

Dorothy Roberts

This racialized outcome isn’t incidental. Child protective laws are often written to target things people of color do: for instance, sharing childrearing among a network of grandparents, cousins, and other kin is common in Black and Indigenous communities. But in many jurisdictions, that’s a designated neglect criterion. That’s just one example Roberts cites of how family policing sees Blackness as inherently damaged, and damaging.

Nor is this tendency new. Family policing became widespread only after other racial regulations were repealed. Black children were frequently “apprenticed,” against their parents’ will, to former slaveholders, while Native American children were sent to boarding schools that explicitly aimed to expunge their Indigenous traditions. Forced family separations only preserve the tendencies these overpowered state agencies have always used in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.

The consequences remain universally disastrous. Scholars have done only limited research into long-term effects of family separation (perhaps because scholars rely on state agencies for funding), but what research they’ve conducted indicates that children moved into foster care suffer PTSD, oppositional-defiant behaviors, and nightmares. They’re also more likely to wind up subject to human trafficking. This applies even when home environments are quantifiably bad.

I have friends working in child-related social services, so I anticipate their objections. How will we ensure that legitimately unfit parents don’t repeat generational abuse? Roberts answers that, in terms too nuanced to repeat here, but the salient point is: when circumstances have forced family police agencies to stand down, community and kinship networks have stepped up. Abuse reports have, not surprisingly, gone down.

Many people enter child protection careers with benevolent motivations. They want to improve the communities where they work; Roberts quotes many such great souls. But before long, social workers, like schoolteachers and police officers, discover they can’t fight a system that devalues non-White lives. Most of Roberts’ sources either quit, or find themselves forced to adapt their ethics to suit the institution.

Dorothy Roberts identifies largely the same problems with family policing that Alex Vitale finds in regular policing: they’re more cause than solution. The problems both agencies create could be ameliorated by fighting poverty and lifting racial barriers. But in both cases, that’s unlikely to happen, because powerful people profit from them. Maybe, if we ordinary people care more and act accordingly, we can reverse the damages.