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.