You Mean Toads in England Really Don't Drive Cars?

For a large portion of my weird little childhood, my mother would take my sister and me on an annual trip to Florida. The first year we went was 1989, just weeks after hurricane Hugo had swamped the place. I can still picture the Days Inn Hotel with the doors to all their rooms open to be aired out. We went through three rooms or so before they put us in one where the damp carpet wouldn’t likely cause mold to grow in our lungs.

Other than that though, I can barely remember the hotel or the rooms or anything else about these trips to Florida. As with most families taking small children to this southern state of oranges and old people, there is really only one reason to travel. Disneyworld.

I love Disneyworld. Even as an adult, I still love it, like a dirty, ice cream-faced, five-year-old. You can imagine then, how my curiosity was piqued when my former co-worker presented me with a most interesting memoir, titled “Cast Member Confidential.” The author, a sports photographer named Chris Mitchell, was no one I’d ever heard of, and if you know me at all, you know that the word ‘sports’ might as well be synonymous with ‘painful childhood memories.’ “I’ve heard this is good,” my coworker told me. “It’s about people who play the characters at Disneyworld.” Say no more, bookstore employee friend! You’ve made a sale!

Anyone who has been a member of a school or community theater group can imagine the sort of individuals they hire to play the numerous Disney characters prancing about their parks. Even aside from that though, the subculture that exists behind the ‘Cast Members Only’ doors is both bizarre and fascinating. That’s what they call them after all, ‘cast members,’ and not just the ladies dressed up as Cinderella, but every single employee out amongst the guests. The photographers. The greeters. The janitors. That woman ladling jambalaya into your bread bowl outside the Haunted Mansion is not a lunch lady. She is a cast member, and she has to keep smiling at you no matter what.

Young Chris Mitchell was having a bit of a life crisis when he fled Los Angeles to find gainful employment within the artificially beautiful walls of the Walt Disneyworld Resort. Instantly, his skills as a photographer set him apart from the crowd. Unfortunately, so did his rebellious and sarcastic attitude. The memoir follows Mitchell both in his quest to face the issues that sent him to Florida, but also in his desire to fit in amongst the Disney magic and those that worship at its shrine. Mitchell gives you a short rundown to his previous job, photographing seemingly heathenish skateboarders who think nothing of graffiti and using cemeteries as skate parks. While his Disney coworkers were certainly not all saints, they all possess a curious sense of purpose and ability to find joy in everything. Or so it seems at first.

Add on to that, the endless rules that accompany the job of cast member, and you’ll never look at the guy snapping your photo with Winnie the Pooh the same way again. Heck, you’ll never look at Winnie the Pooh the same way again. “Cast Member Confidential” is the sort of trivia laden book that will have you stopping every five minutes to shout at the nearest person, “Did you know they don’t sell gum at Disneyworld?” and various other useless but fascinating bits of knowledge. I got a kick out of how Mitchell fell into the habit of describing everyone he met in terms of what character they could play according to their height. Every character performer has to be a specific height, within the range of two inches. Otherwise, some observant tot might notice if the Mickey who left for a cheese break is slightly taller or shorter than the one who returned. If there is anything you learn from this book, it’s the lengths Disneyworld goes to maintain the magic, for better or worse.

In the end, the book is more about a man struggling with his own sense of self than a Disney tell-all, which is exactly the way it should be in my opinion. Honestly, as much as I like to stick it to the Man, Disney is one Man I’d rather leave alone. Who wants to rip apart their own childhood dreams and fantasies? Not me. And if you don’t believe me, come with me next Christmas to Disneyland, and watch me cry at the fake snow.

If You Had Magic Powers, You Know You'd Do It Too

Today, my merry little blogflowers, we are going to discuss that most irritating literary occurrence: the crappy ending. You know the feeling, when you’ve spent two hours watching a movie, and then you find out it was allllll a dream. Or a split personality. Or an identical twin. In other words, some lame concept, because by that point the screenwriter was either an idiot, lazy, or dying from malnourishment, and couldn’t come up with anything better.

In a book, it’s even worse, because you haven’t just spent an hour or two, but sometimes days or weeks, depending on the speed in which you consume the written word. I’m not talking about the sort of rubbish that you can tell from page one how painful it will be to mentally consume. No, no. At least those books are honest about what they are. This particular brand of Steinho ire is reserved for the book that pulls you in, offers up a slew of diverse and developed characters, then at the peak of excitement, the main character will suddenly get knocked unconscious, or fall down a well, or turn out to be crazy, and every bit of excitement was alllllll in his head. I will never forgive you, “Shutter Island.” Never.

A horrible ending is always worse when the other 95% of the book is pure gold. One example is Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians.” That’s Lev Grossman, not to be confused with the obnoxious Tom Cruise character, Les Grossman, from the movie “Tropic Thunder.”

“The Magicians” started out so promising. To describe it as simply as possible, it‘s, “Harry Potter and The Drunken College Years.” And if it wasn’t enough to draw upon one lovable kids fantasy series, it also pays homage to C. S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia.” What really happens when after years of sneaking off to a magical land of talking animals, called Fillory in this book, one simply grows up to be boring and old? How would that twist one’s mind? Team Narnia, mature as they are, willingly accept their fate. In “The Magicians,” one of the wee tots, (instead of the Pevensies, we have the Chatwins) grows so miserable at being ejected from his fancy through-the-portal lifestyle, that he goes insane, turns evil, and magically eats a few people along the way.

So the novel had a great villain, lots of dark magic and danger. It also had it’s share of salacious college party life. For example, while turned into a goose, our broody and charming main character, Quentin, is instinctively inspired to get busy with one of his similarly transformed classmates. It sort of put me in mind to T.H White’s “The Once and Future King.” If you don’t get the reference, think back to Disney’s version of “The Sword in the Stone,” where to teach young Arthur about life, Merlin turns him into a fish, a squirrel and a bird. Teach him about life indeed!

Sprawling, vine-covered university of weirdo professors. Check. Danger at the hands of an enraged, supernatural, wannabe Edmund Pevensie. Check. Some hot goose-on-goose action. Double check. What could be bad about this book?

Well, nothing, until the ending. Pardon the spoiler alert, but when the young Quentin and his team of wizard over-achievers finally make it to Fillory, nothing happens. They walk around. They learn how the land of Fillory has been on the decline ever since those darling Chatwins left. Then, after a few minor skirmishes, they end up in a cave. Blah blah blah, the villain flat out explains his evil schemes, blah blah blah, some of Quentin’s friends get dismembered, bladdy blah blah, Quentin gets knocked out, and wakes up in a centaur hospital, without knowing exactly what happened, what became of his friends, or what to do next. Eventually he returns home, and gets an office job at a magical corporation. An office job.

Perhaps Grossman was trying to make a statement on how when we are young, we dream of whimsical adventures, flying on dragons, sailing with pirates. When you grow up, you realize that like everything else, even magic would be mundane, tedious, and probably involve a lot of bureaucracy. You’d probably have to get a license for your dragon, and think of the amount of money you’d spend to feed it.

Or maybe, Grossman was just tired. Fortunately, he got his act together for the last two paragraphs, where he literally had the remains of Quentin’s posse smash in, Batman style, through the window of his office building, and insult our hero into giving up his day job, and getting back into the magic game. Hopefully for the sequel, Grossman will listen to his own advice.

Less paperwork. More goose sex.

Gooble Gobble! Gooble Gobble! Read This Book! Read This Book!

Ahh, the holidays! The time each year when we are subjected to the various horrifying whims of our extended family. Smelly babies. Old people asking us hypothetical questions about why teenagers today listen to that ‘rap music’ and act like whores. I don’t know, Great Aunt Mildred. I’m twenty-seven, and have poor social skills. Even as a young person myself, I had no idea what was going on.

Well, it could be worse. Instead of having a family full of freaks, you could be a family of actual freaks, like with extra or missing limbs, maybe some animal parts, extraneous hair, possibly a penchant for shoving flaming or pointy objects down your gullet.

That is exactly the sort of family imagined in Katherine Dunn’s novel “Geek Love.” I really wonder how many people in the past couple years have picked up her book and thought, “Yippee! Nerd romance!” Not quite, termite. Here’s a little etymology lesson for you. The original meaning of the word geek, according to Merriam Webster, is a carnival performer, usually billed as a wild man, whose act was to bite the head off of a live chicken or snake. Perhaps Katherine Dunn was worried readers would get the wrong idea if they saw a book titled “Freak Love” and therefore dredged up this antiquated term to fill in the blank. Because freaks, after all, are what this book is about. Freaks in love with other freaks, living normal freaky lives, despite looking positively freakish.

Dunn need not have worried. This was one of those books where someone simply tells me the premise and I buy it. What’s that you say? A book about circus freaks? I’m there! I think every reader has that list of certain words, that when they see it on a book dust jacket, their interest is instantly piqued. Well, circus is one of my words. Pair that with ‘haunted’ or ‘evil’ or ‘necromancer’ and not only have I bought the book, but I’ve read half of it in line already on the way to the cashier. I admit, it’s not a fool proof plan, a point never made more clearly than with Jonathan L. Howard’s “Johannes Cabal: Necromancer.” Never have I read a book with necromancer in the title so utterly devoid of necromancy. For shame, Mr. Howard. For shame.

As I mentioned before, “Geek Love” is a simple story about a family, with the same boring hopes and dreams as everybody else. The story starts with a loving couple; he the inheritor of a rundown traveling show, she the resident geek girl. Yup, the chicken head biting kind. They fall in love, and like every young couple in love, they purposely expose her pregnant belly to toxic chemicals in the hopes of producing better acts for their circus. And it works! A couple years later, they’ve got a megalomaniac flipper boy, a sassy and musically gifted pair of conjoined twins, and Olympia, a moody, angst-filled bald girl with a hunchback. Oh, and a perfectly lovely blond boy with telekinetic powers. He has an inferiority complex because he’s the most adorable and flawless looking child ever birthed.

I’m worried this sounds like a bad review. It’s a bizarre read, to be sure, but I really, really loved it. I consumed it in its entirety on a four hour plane ride, so that has to count for something. Those folks who recall the short-lived HBO show “Carnival” will likely enjoy its diverse and intriguing cast of characters. It might also put you in mind of the 1932 film “Freaks,” only not quite as visually horrifying.

What I loved most about “Geek Love” was how the family of freaks, especially Olympia, who is considered too boring by her parents to be put in any act, deals with the same issues as any regular, traditional looking family. At times, they were so normal in their arguments, their emotional blow ups, their backstabbing and scheming,. Then they’d start in on the telekinetic powers and cult religions and journey off down some tangential road that would zap me back to fantasyland.

I can safely say, “Geek Love” is a book the likes of which you have probably not seen. Unless you’re also in the habit of finding the weirdest book in the store and reading it forthwith. In that case, we should hang out.

Because That Chocolate Factory Money Didn't Last Forever

As a teenager, Roald Dahl studied at Repton School in Derbyshire. When I was fourteen, I traveled to Repton with the Flint Youth Symphony. Later in life, I was nearly caught lying about pretending to be British, by a British person. I was saved by mentioning that I had studied at Repton. Apparently knowing the name of an obscure British prep school is acceptable proof of nationality. Thank you, youth symphony and thank you, Roald Dahl.

What do we normally know Roald Dahl for, other than saving me from humiliating myself in front of his compatriots? “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is probably one of his most well known kids‘ books. Most of the wee lads and lasses I grew up with had read at least a few of his other works, too. “The Witches,” “Matilda,” and “The BFG,” come to mind. They’re often dark and strange children‘s book, full of imagination and often violence. Still, they’re children’s books, and most often, Dahl is thought of as a children‘s author.

But what about Roald Dahl, purveyor of sexy fiction?

I say to you what I said to my mother upon learning that Sherlock Holmes had a brother named Mycroft.

Whaaaaaaaaaat?

Yes, many do not know that Roald Dahl wrote adult books, let alone books that may or may not be considered of an erotic nature. His first published work was a short story detailing his life as a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force. Another short story, “The Smoker,” was later adapted into the fourth section of the film “Four Rooms.” For those of you who’ve seen it, it’s the one with Quentin Tarantino, where a guy gets his finger whacked off in a bet.

Well, with Tarantino involved, it now may not seem so strange that Dahl wrote not just one, but several erotic novels, such as “Stitch Bitch.” His book, “Dirty Beasts,” however, is ironically meant for kids.

The title of his other titillating tome is “My Uncle Oswald,” and let me just say that it’s simply delightful. By today’s supersexed teenage pregnancy standards, it’s not even that dirty. I mean, we’re not talking about Lewis Carroll here, so get your mind out of that filthy 2010s gutter and wallow in this charming, old, 1930s romp! Dahl sets up “My Uncle Oswald” as a collection of passages from the narrator’s uncle’s diary, detailing his exploits and schemes, some of a financial nature, others with a more sensual motivation. Good old Uncle Oswald appeared multiple times in Dahl’s writing career, with these so called diary excerpts being published in magazines from The New Yorker to Playboy. That’s right! Playboy! I’ll give you a moment to fall out of your chair with shock. Hang on, it’s going to get even more outrageous!

In, “My Uncle Oswald,” a young Oswald learns of a Sudanese blister beetle, that when ground up and ingested, makes Viagra look like one of those comically large mallets that knock cartoon characters unconscious. The drug is cleverly marketed as a potency pill. That’s the brilliance of a book like this. We all know what he’s talking about, but there‘s just something about British people using a whole lot of ridiculous euphemisms for sexual encounters that makes me titter with joy. At first the crafty junior entrepreneur, Oswald, makes a small fortune selling this wonder pill to Britain’s oldest fornicators. Yet, like all ridiculous plots, Oswald is not content with his meager earnings. That’s where Yasmin Howcomely comes in.

That name alone is enough to send me into a fit of giggles. You thought Ian Fleming was clever with Pussy Galore? As if! Miss Howcomely has an important, um, position, to play in Oswald’s business proposal. With the aid of Oswald’s potency pill, and Yasmin’s charms, the pair set out to trick the world’s greatest thinkers, artists, politicians, plus a few royals, into unknowingly donating a, shall we say, specimen, to sell to wealthy women who would like to be the mothers of great thinkers, artists, etc. We’re all adults here. You can put pieces together exactly how Yasmin Howcomely helps in this process. Oddly, Dahl uses the same sort of silly, ridiculous humor in “My Uncle Oswald,” that he does in his children’s books. Only instead of describing how Charlie was chased by an evil vermicious knid, he discusses how Yasmin was chased around the room by a half naked Bernard Shaw! If that isn’t whimsical, I don’t know what is.

Stop Talking About Christmas and Pass Me the Opium

With a weird name like Wilkie Collins, he sounds like a young hooligan from a Dickens novel, perhaps as a grimy compatriot to the Artful Dodger or the scheming school chum to Pip Pirrup. Thank goodness, young Master Wilkie was born to wealthy parents, and was therefore spared a life of poverty and such traumatizing though serendipitous coincidences that plagued the lives of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.

For the sake of my own amusement, I will break with standard grammar of referring to authors by their last name, and address this week’s writer in question by his delightful first name. Wilkie. If I feel so inclined, I might even throw in a ‘dear Wilkie,’ or ‘that silly Mr. Wilkie,’ because Wilkie Collins is no longer alive, and will never read my blog, and can’t yell at me for mocking his name.

Up until about a year ago, I had never heard the name Wilkie Collins, writer of “The Moonstone,” and “The Woman in White.” Oh, University of Michigan English professors, how I have failed you! My first introduction came while reading a non-fiction book, “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher,” the history of Jonathan Whicher, a real life Scotland Yard detective from the late 1800s. It was Whicher’s famous skills of observation and deduction that inspired a certain knighted writer to create a character whose name rhymes with Shmerlock Sholmes. He also inspired an equally weirdly named author to write what is known as the earliest forms of detective or mystery novels. That weirdly named author was none other than our previous Wilkiekins.

Really though, I have only good things to say about our sweet little Wilkie. Every once in awhile, I like to read a classic to remind myself how much smarter I am than everyone else. On this occasion, the source of my literary superiority was one of Wilkie’s later works, titled “The Moonstone.” The book follows the scandal surrounding the theft of an allegedly cursed Indian diamond, which was originally stolen from a Hindu temple during the British conquest! Scandal indeed!

Sure enough, Wilkie’s writing made me remember why classics are considered classics. It’s not just because they’re old and our teachers make us read them. Most of them actually are light years better than the shlock clogging the shelves of Barnes and Noble these days.

On top of his immense writing prowess, his royal Wilkiness was also a gentleman of great intrigue and curiosity. I can just imagine the whispering behind fans that occurred whenever dear Wilkie entered a ballroom or tea parlor! Let me enlighten you to a few delectable morsels from our precious Wilkie’s life history. His first job was working for a bunch of tea merchants. Tea merchants! Just think of the sort of mischief he got into under their employment. Next he made friends with Charles Dickens (speaking of serendipitous coincidences!) and they took turns editing and publishing each other’s work while they’re younger siblings got married. Later, he grew a gigantic bushy beard, and from the years 1870 to his death in 1889, he was getting it on with two different women. He married neither.

If nothing else can be said of this grand wordsmith of yore, Wilkie Collins was a professional. The dear old chap included an introduction into “The Moonstone,” where he describes the unfortunate affliction of rheumatic gout that struck him just as his mother was dying of some other horrible British malady. Anyway, this came somewhere in the middle of writing “The Moonstone,” but instead of trying to get some rest, or taking time to mourn the passing of his mother dearest, Wilkie refused to stop working out of loyalty to his fans. He continued to write, dictating to an assistant as he laid suffering in his bed. Kinda makes me feel bad for slacking off on my blog just because I’m on vacation.

“The Moonstone” is the sort of novel that makes me wish I had been born in the Victorian era. I mean they really had every sort of spazzmoid and hilarious character back then. Like Betteredge, the wacky old butler obsessed with Robinson Crusoe, or the spinster cousin who tries to hide religious paraphernalia in her dying aunt’s bathroom, just in case she would like to read about saving her soul while on the toilet. There’s Rosanna Spearman, the hunchbacked, former thief turned second housemaid, who flings her crippled body into quicksand after falling in love with a man above her station. She actually drowns in quicksand! How tragic! How sensational! Add onto that a team of mad Colonels, villainous foreigners with weirdly speckled hair, engagements made and broken, not to mention the amount of opium consumed, and you’ve got more intrigue than a Jason Bourne movie. No, they did not need the antics of teen celebridiots to entertain them in the 1800s. They had dear Wilkie to amuse them.

Aron Ralston: Hero? Saint? Chuck Norris' Long Lost Son?

At any given moment, I could recite to you about ten things that are currently making me anxious. Paying the bills. Finding an awesome new job. Possibly dying of some disease I don‘t yet know I have. Though my doctor sister has assured me of the improbability of my having throat cancer, I remain terrified.

It is far too easy to focus on the negative, on everything that can possibly go wrong. This is another one of those downsides to having an overactive imagination. As children, we create imaginary friends and monsters. As adults, I create imaginary tumors in my larynx and futures where I’m forced to live under a bridge and eat grilled cheese crusts I find in bins around Santa Monica. Needless to say, inspirational posters featuring fluffy, adorable baby animals are usually lost on me.

What does inspire me is when horrible things happen to people, and through the sheer power of their will and mind, they come out all right. Cue Aron Ralston, the famous mountain climber who had to amputate his own arm with a utility tool to free himself from a canyon in Utah. Has anyone ever asked you, if you had to be stranded on a deserted island with one person, who would you want to labor away under the blistering tropical sun with? Seeing as Jacques Cousteau is dead, I’ll take Aron Ralston. I apologize to his wife and newborn son for kidnapping their husband/father, but this is my hypothetical, and I want to live, damn it! I want to live!

A few years ago, I was putzing around the non-fiction section of Borders, and I came across Ralston’s book, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” Never has there been a more literal interpretation of that metaphor.

My God, what a book. What a story. You think you have problems? You think your life is hard? Well, you don’t and it’s not, because you are not currently pinned under a boulder in Utah, dying of starvation and possibly septic shock. If this were a game of who has been through more, and you are not a child in a war-torn, third-world country, or Aron Ralston, then you lose. Do you have both your arms? Lose. Haven’t drank your own urine yet? Lose. Tired after spending a whole day on your feet? What a good day to be a loser. Ralston was unable to lay down and rest his legs for almost a week.

Yes, Ralston’s book is absolutely horrifying to read at times, especially if you’re squeamish. He doesn’t hold back with anything, not with the emotional turmoil, not concerning the terrifying transformation as his body began to wither, his damaged right hand actually starting to fester though still attached to his arm.

The most graphic part, of course, is the amputation itself. Reading it made me wince and cry and gasp. I repeat, just reading about it. Imagine actually performing the act yourself. I can’t. The description in the book lasts a couple pages. The actual ordeal took forty minutes. Forty minutes of pausing, cautiously cutting, prodding and examining the wound, and cutting more. Without anesthetics. It was cut your arm off or die, and Ralston chose not to die.

Some may criticize Ralston for having made stupid mistakes that got him into this situation. I myself posted a blog not too long ago, mocking that idiot kid from “Into the Wild” for getting his silly self killed back in Alaska. What was different about Ralston? He made a near fatal mistake of telling no one where he was planning to hike. He himself discusses in the book, the sort of hubris he suffered from that pushed him into these dangerous situations. So what makes him different from the other shmucks who froze to death, or starved to death or got eaten by bears or pygmies or rabid baboons? Is it that he lived to be humbled? Perhaps. All I can say is that after reading the book, I liked Aron Ralston. I admired him, and I felt that if he could have the courage and determination to saw through his own flesh and snap the bones in his own forearm, if it meant living a little longer, than surely I can accept life’s minute frustrations and trials. Perspective, dear friends. It’s all about perspective. More moving even than the detailed descriptions of his physical suffering, were his reflections on family, on friends, on mistakes and regrets, and in the end, what he had left to stay alive for. I also loved the little anecdotes at the end, where Ralston’s sense of humor helps him to adapt to life with only one hand. There’s a particularly hysterical bit concerning a high five gone awry.

These pathetic words cannot convey how Aron Ralston has affected me. I’ve never met him, though I’d like to, for no other reason than to thank him for giving the world something good to think about and reminding me that extraordinary things can happen out of the darkest moments.

Slap that on a motivational poster!

Now, if you happen to live in a big city, or possess a career that allows you to globe trot to international film festivals, you may have seen the film based off of Ralston’s horrific incident, “127 Hours.” Starring the every dreamy James Franco, this is easily the most intense film I have ever watched. Remember those few pages I mentioned? While director Danny Boyle manages to condense Ralston’s forty minutes of self-surgery down to a five minute scene, they were five minutes of movie viewing I will not soon forget.

Let me close with this. Whenever I’m whining about something, my father always asks me, “Are you dying?” To date, I have yet to answer yes. I hope to not answer yes for a long, long time. In other words, I have nothing to whine about. Aron Ralston was dying, and then he turned around, and punched dying in the face with his own amputated arm. Aron Ralston wins.

I Was Murdered By Bandits! P.S. Craig Likes Lisa

Mary Roach likes to write about dead people And sex. And also space. All interesting topics, though some more pleasant than others.

Mary Roach is a woman with an enviable writing career and very lovely reddish-blond hair. As she says on her website, she’s not a scientist, but she is smart enough to harass scientists into teaching her what she wants to know. Having dated several scientists, this is a definite skill.

Her first book, “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” follows the various mischief your corpse can get into post-breathing, should you opt for something less than the traditional pine box or tiny urn on your loved one’s fireplace mantel. Such activities include testing everything from weapons to the safety of automobiles, aiding med students in honing their scalpel skills, or showing forensic specialists exactly what a body would look like if it were abandoned in a forest on a warm summer’s day for five to seven hours. Messy work for both the living and the dead, but valuable all the same.

Informative and disgusting, “Stiff” is not a book to bring up while at a dinner party, hosted by your future in-laws who you’ve just met. Unless your in-laws are weirdos. In that case, let the grossing-out commence. And did you really want to marry that stuck-up jerk/bimbo who questioned your reading taste anyway? I say, you’re better off.

Fantastic! Now that you’ve thrown away all hope of marital bliss, you’ll have plenty of time to read the rest of Madame Roach’s books. Despite having only four in publication so far, the topics discussed run a wide enough gamut that there is a Roach paperback for every curious mind. After “Stiff” came “Spook,” a scientific search for the human soul/spirit, followed by “Bonk,” a biological and physiological study on sex. If you’ve ever wondered, what does Viagra have to do with pandas, then “Bonk” is the book for you. This past October, Roach published her fourth piece, titled “Packing for Mars.” I haven’t read it yet, but it promises to teach me more about ejecting bodily fluids in zero gravity than I ever wanted to know. I can’t wait.

As October drew to a close, I thought I’d take one last crack at Halloween related reading material. With such chapter titles as ‘Soul in a Dunce Cap‘ and ‘Chaffin vs. The Dead Guy in the Overcoat,’ “Spook” seemed an appropriate and intriguing choice. Roach starts the book out with a vow to remain as open-minded as possible while questing for the human soul. A skeptic and non-believer by nature, she seems to want nothing more than to be proven wrong through real, hard evidence of life after death. Of course, even before I read the first page, I knew her search would be fruitless. Considering this book came out five years ago, and barring a world-wide government conspiracy, I think it likely we would have all seen the Barbara Walters special by now if Roach really had communicated with those in the great beyond.

Still, no one can deny, just as with all her other books, she flung herself mercilessly into this project. Mary Roach is the sort of researcher that college professors have sexy dreams about. She interviewed doctors testing cardiac patients for out of body experiences. She poured over 19th century journals on the various ridiculous attempts to measure the soul, including the infamous study of dying patients claiming we all lose 21 grams of body weight upon the moment of expiration. To better understand the subtle art of psychic mediums, she attended an actual class on it, subjecting herself to all sorts of scorn and hilarity at the hands of her fellow pupils. I honestly know the feeling. At childhood slumber parties, deranged though my imagination was, I simply could not believe that some spirit would take the time to painstakingly spell out the names of all the cute boys in our fourth grade class on a Ouija board. What I would always feel was not disbelief, but disappointment. My gut told me that spirits were real, but they likely had better things to do than hang around a pack of tweens.

Maybe it’s because I’d like to believe all those weirdos from the 1920s really were shooting ectoplasm out of their mouth during seances and not just soggy cheesecloth, but I admit to feeling that same disappointment while reading certain chapters of “Spook.” Mary Roach chose to focus on a lot of nutty characters in her attempt to find proof of life after death. Does that mean the idea itself is nutty? Perhaps. Or perhaps all the ghosts were too busy hanging around slumber parties to tell Madame Roach what she wanted to know. Therefore, if we never successfully prove the existence of an afterlife, we know who to blame.

Teenage girls.