Author: crbernard

I have never been married and have no children. For my demographic (38, if you’re wondering), this puts me in the minority, although more Americans than ever before have made the same choice, and our ranks continue to grow. Having no kids definitely shapes one’s view of their behavior, making one an outsider to a lot of the dynamics of boundary-testing and youthful misadventure. I’m old enough that much of my experience from my youth doesn’t apply to the dynamics of today. While my family were extremely early adopters of the internet, social media didn’t exist when I was a teenager and connection speeds were still so slow that the internet was a clumsy, geeky thing for the most part. Cell phones were a new technology, clunky and owned by relatively few people. Some things, however, have not changed and may never change: for example, teenagers will always need a place to party.

I started reading Stephen King novels when I was a young adult (read: child), and I have never stopped. I started with Through the Eyes of the Dragon, a YA book, but moved on to Carrie and Cujo in short order. I read him through junior high and into high school. I read King’s horror, his dark fantasy, and his short stories. One day, Lucifer willing, I will write something lengthy about his oeuvre. , because I think his body of work worth giving serious consideration. As I’ve read King’s output over the last two decades of my life, King’s material has evolved in interesting ways. Good old Stephen has maintained an almost self-satirically prolific level of output. From his eyrie in Maine and from various vacation properties, he has cranked out 61 novels, 11 collections, 5 nonfiction books, and 19 screenplays, and that isn’t even the entirety of it. He has sold about 350 million books, give or take, and has a net worth of roughly half a billion dollars (USD 500m, or $500,000,000).

When the outrages of the past five years are calculated by historians, it will be difficult to establish a hierarchy of malice. The rising tide of hate – and, make no mistake, it is still rising, although temporarily stemmed – has washed over so many vulnerable lives and lain so much wreckage on the shores of our social contract that an accurate appraisal of the damage is going to take decades. Even so, among the many atrocities perpetuated by the failed fascist still (for a little while, at least) at the helm of the United States’ executive branch, the special sadistic attention paid to refugees and asylum seekers has been the worst cruelty of them all.

It’s no picnic being a member of a minority religious community in the United States.

More than most countries, the US extends an enormous amount of privilege to Christians (especially White Evangelical ones). On the best of days, this ensures a level of political and legal insulation for Christians that is perpetually denied to Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, and members of the eclectic and scattered communities of witches, pagans, heathens, and other freethinkers.  This despite repeated malfeasance on the part of majority faiths and structures of hierarchy; this, despite the fact that the fear that attaches itself to “the other” in America so often blinds people to the wolves in their midst.

Despite the infinite variety of human experience and the limitless potential of the imagination, it is remarkably difficult to have a truly original idea. Many creatives thus operate as alchemists, combining the base elements of previously-worked-out tropes in hope of transmuting them into gold. In horror, this can involve the distillation of esoteric ingredients like obscure mythology or the rediscovery of old monsters in a new light; it can even throw any pretense of “originality” to the wayside, if it does so with enough arch self-aware humor (thus the success of The Cabin in the Woods).