Stages of Rot

 
 
Stages of Rot
by Linnea Sterte
Peow

2017, reprinted 2023
 
 
Stages of Rot is a deeply enigmatic comic that depicts the decomposition of a dead whale, not at the bottom of one of Earth's oceans, but on an alien world where all manner of sea life fly through the air instead, the undersea biome coexisting with and layered on top of the surface. And because the whalefall is on the surface, humans are now one of the scavengers that feasts on the giant carcass. 
 
Artist Linnea Sterte divides the process into chapters based on which human group is present and what they're doing, but we're only one small part of the process. Sterte shows us the fish, the fungus, the macroscopic single-celled organisms that arrive to play their own roles. You get a sense that you're seeing a series of close-ups on a larger picture, a whole functioning ecology that remains mostly out of focus and even out of sight. 
 
Successfully communicating that feeling, of watching one step in the functioning of a larger machine, without ever zooming out to show the whole, is no simple task, I suspect. Done incorrectly, and I think it would seem too simple, or else like chaos, with no sense that it's guided by an invisible order. Keeping you, as the reader, with that tip-of-your-tongue feeling in your mouth the whole time, without ever telling you the word or making you feel like you simply don't know it, is kind of an incredible accomplishment. Scavengers' Reign was rightly hailed for doing something similar, and it had the benefit of animation, being able to show its processes in motion.
 
We watch as the flesh-eaters come to collect blood and meat, and to slay the 'pilot' who we're told is a human-looking homunculus who lives in the whales heart and guides its flight. Fungus begins to cover the whale and form the heart of a forest. 
 
The bone-cutters arrive to collect their materials. One carves a diatom, which we're told live in the upper atmosphere where humans rarely see them, so that perhaps the statue represents a memory in the bone as much as in the mind of the carver. 
 
The barbarians are next; called to the whalefall by a vision or dream. For them the journey into the whale represents something hard to define, perhaps the passage into adulthood, though I might be wrong. The forest expands ever outward. 
 
The last humans to arrive, the entomologists, collect specimens of every kind of life that visits or emerges from the fallen whale. They catalog it all and fill a museum. They even resurrect the pilot, who lives in the museum for awhile, before flying away, to the highest part of the sky, to join with another living whale. The cycle is complete and begins again.
 
Sterte uses a limited color palette to give each chapter its own feeling, distinct from the others. The flesh-eaters and barbarians both have more pink and red, the bone-cutters and entomologists more yellow and green. The alternation feels like a cycle, like the turning of seasons, and feeds back into the sense of hidden order propelling the book. This is not an especially long comic, and it has very little dialogue, but it's very effective at communicating the mystery of the way bodies are reclaimed by the world after death. 

Shadowlands

 
 
Shadowlands
A Journey through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages

by Matthew Green

WW Norton & Company

2022 
 
 
In Shadowlands, author Matthew Green takes us to 8 sites around Great Britain where people used to live and now do not. These aren't small places that got absorbed by a bigger neighbor. A couple were replaced by public works, a couple were subsumed by the sea. The others were abandoned due to economic and social changes more so than to politics or climactic disasters. 
 
The chapters are arranged chronologically by the date of abandonment. The oldest site was an island village whose inhabitants left around the end of the Stone Age; the newest was a Welsh town that was evacuated and flooded in the 1960s to create a reservoir. Green tells us the history of each place - what it was like before, how its abandonment went, in a few cases how it was later rediscovered. He visits each site in person to tell us what they're like today. Perhaps because his head is so full of their history he tends to perceive them as haunted, unquiet places despite their stillness and solitude, the vivid past overlaid atop the muted present.
 
The quality of Green's writing makes this book especially interesting to read. His physical descriptions of place are evocative, with details that make it relatively easy to imagine what each place might've looked like in its heyday, and what it's like to visit now. His historical reconstruction is empathetic, but doesn't shy away from unflattering details. He lists all the ways the Marcher Lords, empowered by the English king to war with and conquer the Welsh, would've used the iron produced in Trellech, an ore mining and blacksmithing boomtown, the grievous injuries inflicted by weapons and implements of torture. He tells us of the piracy practiced by the port town Winchelsea, the ships burned and sailors drowned, and the toll of a famous, terrible naval battle fought off its coast. He tells us the toll of the Black Death in Wharram Percy, and the bloody bird hunts on St Kilda island, where sea birds and their eggs were the main source of food.
 
Some of the sites enjoyed a second life after an earlier disaster. Old Winchelsea relocated to the mainland as its island flooded. For a time, it was a major hub for wine merchants, until it was sacked as revenge for decades of piracy, with civilians killed inside the church where they sought sanctuary, and its harbor filled with silt, becoming too shallow for large ships to dock. Wharram Percy was devastated by plague, but it disappeared, alongside many medieval villages, because of economic changes. With fewer serfs available for farming, and peasants able to choose where to work and demand higher wages, swaths of farmland (along with the farming villages) were converted to pasture for grazing sheep.
 
Green also shows us the role that the loss (or rediscovery) of of inhabited places has had on British culture at various times. The city of Dunwich, built on a coastal cliff, progressively fell into the ocean over several hundred years as the shoreline kep moving inland, and its increasing ruin help inspire the first antiquarians to care about preserving Britain's historic sites, and served as a muse for generations of romantics and poets who wanted to contemplate their mortality. Philosophers traveled to St Kilda island during the Enlightenment because they thought its inhabitants existed in a 'natural state' and could resolve the ongoing dispute about whether humans are innately good or wicked. Later, Victorian tourists came en masse to gawk at the lives of 'primitives' living as the imagined their own ancestors might've. When we think about the past, we often use those thoughts to provide motivations or justifications for our actions in the present.
 
Shadowlands reminded me a bit of Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment. Both Flyn and Green visited places people no longer lived, though for different reasons, and they saw different things. Flyn's sites were mostly abandoned since World War II, often because industry or warfare made them uninhabitable, and she focused on the reintroduction of nature to those sites. The places Green visited are mostly older, and many are places people could still live, they just don't (and of those now unlivable, three are underwater). He's motivated by fears for the future, inspired by the covid pandemic and rising sea levels due to climate change, but at each site his focus remains on the past. I probably find these sorts of tours of lost places inherently fascinating, but I appreciate when they're thoughtful and written well.

All the Beauty in the World

 
All the Beauty in the World

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

by Patrick Bringley

Simon and Schuster

2023

 

 

 

All the Beauty in the World is a memoir by a man who spent a decade, from his mid-20s to his mid-30s, as a museum guard at the Met. Bringley initially takes the job as a way to process his grief over the death of his older brother. He spends his time in the museum in an almost meditative state, allowing himself to see the art, to be emotionally moved by it, while practicing not having any conscious verbal thoughts. Eventually, without quite noticing it happen, he begins to heal, to become friends with other guards, to have opinions and preferences again. With more time, he starts wanting more than guard work can offer, and eventually leaves the museum.
 
Bringley spent his teen years idolizing his brother, and his time in college worrying after he's diagnosed with cancer, then spends a long time in the hospital, then dies. After college, Bringley worked briefly at the New Yorker, and I suspect that the same skill at writing that got him the job there helped him convert a decade of experiences and memories into this rather slim volume. 
 
Grief weighs heavily on the first half of the memoir. When Bringley finally starts to open back up again in the second half, we learn that he's been married since before his brother died, which felt like a surprising revelation to me, like a thing I'd have expected him to mention earlier.
 
We learn about Bringley's first day on the job, about medieval Christian art, about how he mentally absents himself to experience the art in a kind of flow state, about his brother's illness and death. We learn a bit of history of the Met, and about the job of being a guard, the stations they occupy, the familiar types of patrons they see. We see Bringley moving from being the new kid to being experienced and starting to mentor others. He becomes a father. And finally he starts wanting to move on, to find a job where he can more actively talk to people instead of disappearing into his role.
 
Although the book is short, I did begin to feel a bit bored by the end, around the same time Bringley was getting bored with his job. Scattered throughout are sketchy pencil drawings Bringley made of some of his favorite artworks. They add a nice touch. 
 
Reading this also reminded me of Peter Bearman's Doormen, which is an ethnography of people who work as doormen at luxury apartment buildings in New York. They are also mostly working class, mostly men, and have a job that nominally provides security to a very wealthy people in an environment that, in truth, needs relatively little protecting. Bearman's book doesn't have the borrowed prestige of the Met, but because it's based on many observations and interviews, he's also able to paint a somewhat broader portrait than Bringley. 

Lost Letters

 
Lost Letters

by Jim Bishop

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger

Magnetic Press

2024 

 

 

 I feel quite torn about Lost Letters, because I really liked almost the entire book ... and really didn't like way it ended. Lost Letters is a French graphic novel that feels like it was inspired by manga and anime, and while this comparison gets tossed around a lot lately, I think that creator Jim Bishop has created something that's so influenced by Studio Ghibli that you could pretty easily imagine them adapting it for the screen. The book is marketed as being for a YA audience, and that's probably generally fine, but the ending is so dark, so sad, and because it's the ending and nothing comes after it, so un-processed, that I wouldn't really feel comfortable handing it to a teen unless I really trusted them to seek out someone to talk to afterward if they needed it.
 

Lost Letters takes place on a picturesque island with a Mediterranean climate and a population that is predominantly talking fish-people, with only a few humans around. From the start, we're following Iode (short for Iodine), a boy of 11 or 12 who lives alone with his pet pelican, and who's waiting for a letter from his mother. Iode's mother is a pilot, she and her husband are no longer together, and Iode is convinced that she's looking for a new island for the two of them to go live on, and that when she finds it, she'll send him a letter telling him to come move back in with her. In fact, he's really, super convinced that she already sent this letter, and that the only reason he hasn't received it yet is because it's gotten lost in the mail.
 
So let me say that it's obvious from the outset that this is going to be a sad book. No matter how lighthearted its adventures might appear, the audience knows, we know, that whatever the situation with Iode's mother is, it's definitely not what he thinks it is, and it's definitely not that the letter he's hoping for is just stuck somewhere else in the island's mail system, simply waiting for him to find it. And we may suspect that, on some level, Iode knows this too, and he's in denial. So we know that parts of this book are going to be sad, especially when Iode learns and finally confronts the truth about his mom, but we may also hope that he'll maybe make a new friend or two, or maybe reconcile with his father, in a way that lets him reach a point of acceptance. And things sort of go like you'd expect, right up until they suddenly don't.
 

A sample of Jim Bishop's art.
From the left: Sista, the goldfish cop, and Iode.

 

 
Iode takes the family car and drives into town on another part of the island, so he can go to the post office. On the way, he meets Sista, an older teen girl who's hitchhiking to get to town. Sista is involved in a bunch of hijinks, and basically all the action and excitement in the book emerges from her plotline. Sista is a courier for the mob, headed into town to deliver a mysterious briefcase. The mob boss is an octopus. Sista is also an undercover agent for the royal guard, who's infiltrating the mob by working her way up through the ranks as an errand girl. The royal guard is Sista's found family, filling a void in her life since she was abandoned as a child. Her handler's codename is Mom.
 
Iode assumes Sista will help him at the post office, which already has an hours-long line when they reach town. She immediately sneaks off to continue her covert operation. Iode, apparently unable to conceive of any other reason she wouldn't hang out with him, jumps to the conclusion that she was kidnapped, and calls the police. 
 
An incompetent goldfish cop (he has a humanoid robot body, but his head is just a goldfish swimming in a glass bowl, wearing a police cap) briefly takes on the case, but he's much too busy chasing glory to bother with kid stuff. Unfortunately, he does mention all this to a corrupt fish cop, who immediately tells the mafia that their secret courier is attracting too much attention, and just like that, Sista is burned, both from the mob and from the royal guards. 
 
There's a lot of moving parts between cause and effect here - including that the mob wouldn't have wanted Sista to hitchhike, or take the cablecar across town, she was supposed to walk the whole way - but to be clear, Iode made a silly, childish assumption and then called the police about it, which is a roll of the dice every time, and that resulted in Sista getting fired. In fact, without some timely help from Iode at the aquarium, that phone call likely would've led to Sista being shot, or drowned. Neither Iode nor Sista seems to realize the connection, and it's unclear to me how much responsibility, if any, Bishop assigns to the phone call, but there it is.
  
Anyway, there's a shoot-out, an aquarium collapse, a last minute rescue. Iode and Sista do start to become friends, and the next day, she joins him at the post office, and rides with him when he borrows a seaplane to chase down a mail flight, which circuitously leads to a final confrontation with the mob. It's all very exciting, even fun. Bishop's art is excellent, just the right blend of realistic and cartoony. His poses are dynamic, his faces expressive. You practically feel like you're already watching animation when you read it.
 
When none of Iode's attempts to find the letter go anywhere, Sista goes with him to see his estranged father, who tells her the truth his son won't accept. Iode's mom left five years earlier, because she had terminal cancer and wanted to enjoy one last flight before she died. She wrote a letter to explain all this before she left, and Iode received the letter. Sista takes Iode back to the beach house, where she finds the letter, right next to the mailbox, where he read it then refused to accept it and blocked it out. Sista gets Iode to face the truth, and he instantly ages five years, suddenly appearing 16 or 17. It's a powerful visual metaphor of how he was stuck, and how he's now achieved catharsis. It's sad, but acceptance is better, right?
 
And then there's the epilogue. It's one year later. The incompetent goldfish cop is now a janitor, and actually good at it. Iode is becoming a young man. He looks awkward, but time is passing for him again. And what about Sista? We see her commit suicide by walking into the ocean and drowning. Then Iode receives her suicide note as a letter. She explains that she's never recovered from the loss of her found family in the royal guard, and sees no future for herself without that job. 
 
And that's that, that's the end. We explicitly see the other characters able to accept things and move on. But Sista does not, and the way Bishop chooses to present it sees especially cruel. Her death is presented as a thing that happens to Iode, as one last chapter in what remains fundamentally his story. And as I said earlier, there's no more context, no more explanation. It's shocking, and then it's over. Why did her friendship save him, but his friendship didn't save her? I know that can happen in life, but this is fiction. Bishop didn't have to write it this way; he chose to. And his decision really soured me on a book that I otherwise really enjoyed up to that point, and made it hard for me to recommend despite how much there is to like in it.

Heavenly Bodies

 
Heavenly Bodies

Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs

by Paul Koudounaris

Thames & Hudson

2013

 

 

Heavenly Bodies is a nonfiction history of an all-but-forgotten Catholic tradition from the Counter Reformation, the exhuming, decorating, and displaying of 'catacomb saints' - skeletons from the Roman catacombs, elaborately decorated with precious metals and gemstones, housed as relics in churches and monasteries, primarily in Germany and Austria. Author and photographer Paul Koudounaris visited a number that once housed catacomb saints, and a few that still do, to learn their history, see them in their present condition, and document them with photographs. There are so many photos, this is practically an art book! The text too, could stand alone, but benefits greatly from being able to see the relics.
 
Catacomb saints are an invented tradition, an innovation by the Catholic Church in the late 1500s, a response to the Protestant Reformation generally, and more specifically, to the looting and destruction of relics from some Catholic churches that some Protestants carried out in the name of reform. If the early Protestants were iconoclasts, Catholic leaders hoped to win back lapsed believers and strengthen the resolve of their faithful by leaning into this contrast, and decorating their churches with impressive new icons. New catacomb saints were delivered to German churches mostly during the 1600s, but new deliveries continued into the 1800s, albeit at a slower pace.
 
Producing a mass supply of revered dead, all at once, a millennium and a half after the founding of their religion, confronted Catholic leaders with an interesting manufacturing problem. Plenty of new saints had been canonized over time, but they (and their remains) were all already accounted for. But the Roman catacombs might hold an untold number of early Christian corpses, and before the religion was legalized by Constantine in the early 300s, many of them might be martyrs. The catacombs would also contain the remains of Roman pagans and Jews, plus non-martyred Christians. So how could you tell which entombed remains were martyrs? And how could you be sure of finding enough martyrs to supply all the parishes in Germany that you wanted to decorate?
 
The answer of course is to use sloppy, ambiguous criteria that produce a lot of false positives, and to insist that every positive you produce is authentic and legitimate. You need both methods that lie, and to convince yourself that really, they're producing the truth. Sociologist Kai Erikson wrote about this in Wayward Puritans, how the early American religious communities kept counting more and more frivolous offenses as 'crimes' in order to continue punishing a consistent number of community members for misbehavior. But you see it wherever leaders set a quota and authorize those below them to meet it in whatever way they can justify. So you'll see it in police forces that use traffic tickets and civil asset forfeiture to collect revenue, in corporations that set profit targets that can't be met legally. You see it in the software Republican officials use to find voters to disenfranchise, in the guidelines Trump's immigration enforcers use to identify people with no criminal records as gang members who can be arrested and deported, in the AI software Netenyahu's army uses to label Palestinians as members of Hamas who can be targeted for execution by drone strike. You see it in the buggy equipment ghost hunters use to generate proof of hauntings, and the statistical tricks scientists can deploy to produce a significant but irreplicable finding. Anyway, with their process in place, Catholic relic-hunters in Rome found enough skeletons to meet the demand, and felt confident in labeling each of them as martyrs, calling them saints, assigning them names, even if the burial markers were unreadable. Insisting on better, more truthful criteria, even at the cost of not having enough, tends to be the domain of critics. In the case of the catacomb saints, the critics were easy to ignore at first, but were eventually persuasive enough to halt the practice.
 

 
Skeletons from Rome were 'articulated,' or wired into a posed whole, and decorated with embroidered cloth, beads and buttons, strings of pearls, mounted gemstones, and wires and settings of gold. They were shipped to the heart of Protestant country and seen as weapons for Catholicism. They're supposed to symbolize God's power and generosity, and the luxurious conditions that await all believers in heaven. To modern eyes, they look quite strange. They are at once macabre, morbid, shocking in the amount of wealth each one displays, and also almost unbelievably gaudy and tacky. This is the Catholic faith at its most glamorous, it's most goth. It's not surprising worshipers felt awed by them. There is one contemporary motif I'm aware of that resembles catacomb saints though - the flower bedecked skull illustrations associated with the Mexican Day of the Dead. The idea of claiming dead people, who possibly belonged to other faiths, and recruiting them into present-day religious practice also reminds me a bit of the posthumous baptisms carried out by the Mormon Church.
 
Once decorated, the skeletons would be displayed in churches across Germany, usually very prominently, and it seems they were successful in invigorating worshipers, including attracting pilgrims and inspiring cash donations. Many congregations devoted a special day to their saint once a year, when the body in its protective glass case might even be removed from the church and sent on parade before returning to its place of honor.
 
Catholicism is rare among religions for displaying a revering relics. The Protestant criticisms (eventually taken up by Catholic leaders during the Enlightenment in the 1800s) were both religious and aesthetic. The religious complaint is that the public doesn't understand sophisticated theological arguments about how the visible relic is the symbol of a saint who intercedes between God and the congregation to amplify their prayers - the complaint is that people worship the bones directly, and attribute miracles to the physical object, not the soul of the saint, or to god. And indeed, each relic accumulated a growing list of supposed miracles over the years, most often injuries healed and illnesses cured. The aesthetic argument is that they're silly and ugly and old fashioned. And of course, the gold and jewels are attractive targets for both criminal theft and legal confiscation.
 
Very few churches that received catacomb saints still have them, and many that remain are hidden away in storage, in attics and closets. Most of the disposals took place during the Enlightenment, when secular German leaders and Catholic authorities alike decided to hide or dispose of what they'd come to see as an embarrassing legacy, often despite the wishes and objections of everyday churchgoers who still valued the relics. That was one thing that struck me, throughout Koudounaris's account of history - how often leaders of all kinds made unilateral decisions about how the people under them ought to believe and worship, and how often those decisions were premised on the idea that the common people were stupid and must be doing it wrong.

How to Make Friends with a Ghost

 

How to Make Friends with a Ghost

by Rebecca Green

Tundra Books

2017

 

 

How to Make Friends with a Ghost is a children's picture book, but at almost 50 pages, it's longer than these books often are. In the style of an instruction book, complete with pun-filled fake citations and references to other works, author Rebecca Green explains how to find, befriend, and care for a ghost, and discusses the benefits of such friendship.
 
What Green describes sounds a bit like having a pet, or an imaginary friend. I don't necessarily think it would help a child missing a deceased relative - though I could be wrong. I think it would appeal most to a kid who likes spooky stuff or is curious about death in a more abstract and less personal way.
 
Green's art is pastel crayon against a white background, so that it looks reminiscent of children's art. She uses a restricted palette of black, browns, greys, and taupes, and red. The ghost is a classic bedsheet ghost - she both warns against mistaking another kid in a costume for a potential ghost friend and recommends trick-or-treating as a fun activity your ghost can enjoy. The child protagonist of the book is a girl whose face often looks intently interested, but never scared.

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

 
 

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

An Auto-Bio-Graphical Novel

by Zoe Thorogood

Image Comics

2022

 

 

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth is a graphic memoir documenting half a year in 2021. Thorogood is a young cartoonist, and her first book came out near the start of the covid pandemic. It was well-received, but the normal promotional process was disrupted before it could start. Thorogood also has severe, uncontrolled depression, which is the single dominating focus of It's Lonely.

I haven't made a secret of own depression, which was quite bad when I was younger, but which is now mostly mild and well-managed, even if it's never truly gone away. If my depression is like an old cut that has never fully healed, but at least is clean and has a scab, Thorogood's, by comparison, is like a ghastly open wound that weeps blood and lymph and stinks of sepsis and gangrene. It is shocking how much she hates herself and how much pain she feels. It feels indecent to witness it. I hope, sincerely, for her to manage to get older, and to succeed at taming and tempering her depression some as she does.

There are two things about my depression that can make it hard for me to read about someone else's though. The first is that it's always there in the background of my emotions, usually far back, like a figure who shows up in the crowd in every photograph. But because it's never gone, there's always a chance it come forward again. The second is that, because both the pain and the memory-of-the-pain of depression come from the same place, they feel the same. The muted echo of pain you hear when you think about a bad memory sounds exactly the same as the quiet early notes of orchestra warming up to play a full new symphony. And so I don't know if it's really true, but it feels like thinking too much about my own depression will cause it to come all the way back. So I try to be careful not to think too much about it. It's Lonely kind of ambushed me because I only knew that it was a critically-acclaimed graphic memoir.

Thorogood makes the decision to start her memoir after a particularly bad day when she feels suicidal. She keeps it for another six months or so. During that time, she also works on illustrating a comic series that someone else wrote. She plans a trip to America to attend a comics convention, but the trip gets canceled due to covid. She visits her parents. She attends a convention near home in England. She makes a new plan to visit another artist in America, hoping to hook up and maybe fall in love with him. She does visit, but it's disappointing. She decides to stop the memoir and start her next project.

I will say this for Thorogood. She's a very good artist. She clearly has mastery over a range of styles and is able to blend them freely, in a way that reminds me of collage. She has like 4 different avatars for herself in different cartoon styles, plus the looming black-cloaked, monstrous avatar of her depression. She interchanges which one is 'really her' from panel to panel. Her compositions are dynamic and interesting. Most pages are riots of emotion and information, even when her avatar is simply sitting still.

The closest visual (and I guess topical) comparison I can think of is the Eternity Girl comic book by Magdalene Visaggio and Sonny Liew, which uses a variety of art styles from the Golden and Silver ages of comics up to the present day to show its depressed, suicidal-but-immortal heroine grappling with a life whose purpose has already ended.

Thorogood's surreal techniques also remind me of one trend in women's writing, both fiction and non, that prizes this kind of kaleidoscopic viewpoint over straightforward or consistent narration. It's a style that feels, I suppose, like browsing the internet, jumping from voice to voice and thought to thought. It's like if the film Everything Everywhere All At Once was a style guide. Writing on Literary Hub, Dayla Benor describes it this way:

"Writers like Gertrude Stein, Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson have all experimented with the use of fragmented, free-flowing text. But underneath the seeming disorganization, their books have strong organizing principles - the fragments have an accumulative effect for the reader, so that by the end, the parts amount to a whole. These books, part non-fiction, part memoir, part criticism, stop and start like a sputtering engine. They require a certain dedication to see them through, requiring the reader to maintain focus when the narrator prefers not to."

"It's a style of writing that seems to be gaining traction, if less for the content and more for the 'idea' of what it represents - an aesthetic of artisticism, intellectual superiority, and a refusal to abide by the rules. In the beginning, fragmentation found its home in feminist literature as a way to reject patriarchal order. Historically, the style is a form of protest. But now, a rebranding of 'stream of consciousness' writing has the next generation in a chokehold."

I don't recommend this book to anyone else with depression. In fact, I'd like to warn you away from it. I sort of wish I hadn't heard of this book or read it. Not because it rings false, but because it's too true - too raw, too unprocessed, too accurate, too real. Reading it hurts - and in a way, and a time, that I had no real need to subject myself to.

Dark Archives

 
  

Dark Archives

A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

by Megan Rosenbloom

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2020

 

 

Dark Archives is a surprisingly chatty account of the author's work to date with the Anthropodermic Book Project, an effort, first to verify through scientific testing, and then to catalog, every book with a human skin binding. It's a pretty morbid topic! But Rosenbloom is an upbeat narrator. And while she's aware of the macabre fascination some people have with these objects, her main interest is learning who made these books, whose bodies were used, who collected them, and most importantly, why?

One thing we quickly learn, as we follow Rosenbloom on her travels, is that there are probably a lot more books rumored to be bound in leather made of human skin than there are actual books bound this way. She doesn't receive permission to test every book she visits, but of the ones she tests, something like ½ to ⅔ are fakes, just animal leather with an aura supplied by salacious rumor. At the time of her writing, only about 50 were verified worldwide, an unknown percentage of an unknown total. But the fakes are all quite old. Often a library, or a series of collectors, has spent over a hundred years thinking something that turned out to be false, usually because someone a century ago wrote a note on the book itself with the claim. You can't tell by looking; the leathermaking process eradicates any visual indicators.

The peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) test that Rosenbloom and her colleagues use was developed at Harvard in the early 2010s, and allows the identification of leather based on a grain-of-rice sized sample, even when DNA testing is impossible. The test doesn't distinguish sex or race, can't even tell humans from other apes, but can definitely determine if something is made of cow, pig, goat, or whatever, or a human. (The one possible source of error would be a false positive generated by a person handling the sample before it was tested.)

When most people guess what sorts of books might be bound in human skin, they think of the occult - books about magic, demons, witchcraft. Historically, people have also sometimes slandered their enemies by claiming that they made books out of human skin. White colonists in America claimed this about Natives, and royalists claimed the French Revolutionaries did no on a factory scale. The most common anthropodermic book though, is a book on human anatomy, owned by a gentleman doctor around the time of the start of modern clinical medicine and surgery, who had access to the skin through his work, and used it on a book he already treasured, probably to make it more valuable as a collectible by using the rarest possible material. The typical current owner is the rare books' section of a medical library.

It's not that there are no occult or 'sexy' books bound in human skin, but there are very few. None of the rumors about Natives or French Revolutionaries that Rosenbloom tested turned out to be true. There are also persistent rumors about the Nazis. And like, there are ways the Nazis commodified the bodies of their victims on an industrial scale, such as collecting gold teeth, and, I learned, making felt from human hair. One SS officer's wife at the Buchenwald concentration camp may have made a lampshade from human skin, though if so, it seems to have been destroyed before the war ended. There are photos and even museum exhibits that use stand-in lamps while repeating this claim, and viewers probably sometimes think they've seen the real thing. One museum owned a particularly grotesque lamp they never displayed, and feared it might be made with human skin. Rosenbloom and the PMF test determined it was cellulose, the plant fiber used to make film for movie cameras, much to the museum's relief.

I'll admit that part of me wishes all the rumors were false, that historically, the desire to do something like that never once coincided with the skill needed to do so. But what Rosenbloom's research so far reveals is that the 'evil geniuses' who turn human bodies into books are just doctors, and the 'evil empires' that facilitated these acts are the US and England. If there's evil here, it's mostly banal, the result of the routine and dehumanizing prejudices of the sort of wealthy White men who mostly became the early doctors colliding with the unfinished norms and anemic ethics of the early days of scientific medicine in the 19th century.

Also, nearly all new books in those days were sold as text blocks that the customer was responsible for having bound into a finished hardback, and rare book collectors routinely rebound old books to suit their own asthetic preferences. Even having the skill and material, and lacking any restraint to stop them, I think even fewer (of the already few) doctors would've done this if the book technology at the time didn't facilitate it too, which is probably why there almost no anthropodermic books from much earlier or later.

So a lot of Dark Archives ends up being about the history of medicine. Dissecting cadavers is an invaluable way to learn anatomy, still used today, and it's one reason scientific medicine is so much more effective than earlier techniques - it's based on direct observation of real human bodies. A lot of the time, getting the bodies involved grave-robbing. In England, dissection after death was an additional punishment added to the sentence of some criminals. Later, poor people's bodies were used instead (which they initially found intolerable.) It's not until well into the 20th century that the prior consent of the deceased became enshrined as an ethical principle. 

Part of learning this way involves a certain amount of emotional detachment and desensitizing. We wouldn't have many surgeons if they all felt like they were committing assault or inflicting torture. But understandable as all that is, the way the rest of us think about the dead and the correct way to honor them means that it's not ethical to take skin from a dead person and use it as a raw material. The laws around this aren't always clear, but the feelings of the public haven't actually changed much over the past 200 years, with the biggest change being a positive one, that fewer of us see any of our fellow humans as being equivalent to animals.

The Skull

 
 

The Skull

A Tyrolean Fable

by Jon Klassen

Candlewick Press

2023 

 

 

The Skull is the most recent kids' book by Jon Klassen. It's his take on a folk tale. As a joke, I might describe it as the Halloween version of I Want My Hat Back, but actually, I think the superficial spookiness of the skull imagery hides a more serious underlying darkness. Klassen's use of parallelism and subtext gives this brief tale a depth I wasn't expecting.

The story opens with a girl, Otilla, running through the forest, running away from home. She goes into the deepest, oldest part of the forest, and finds an ancient manor house. She knocks and asks to be let in. She's tired and needs a place to stay. She doesn't want the people who might be following her to find her. She doesn't want to go home, ever. Otilla is answered by a talking human skull, who lets her in once she agrees to carry him.

Otilla carries the skull as he gives her a tour of the house. It's clear he enjoys the company. By the end of the day, they might be friends. Otilla gets ready for bed, and tucks the skull in next to her. He warns her that every night, a headless skeleton enters the house, demands the skull, chases the skull, tries to capture it. So far the skull has always stayed away, but he's afraid. He doesn't want to be caught, ever. Otilla promises to protect him.

In the middle of the night, the headless skeleton appears and shouts for the skull in a booming voice. Otilla is barely able to keep her friend away. They're chased all over the house.

Then Otilla finds a way to get the upper hand. She incapacitates the skeleton, and tucks the skull back into bed. Then she systematically and vehemently destroys the skeleton. She returns to bed and assures the skull that the skeleton won't be back. He invites her to stay with him in the house, and she agrees.

We never explicitly learn what Otilla was running away from, only that she's afraid of being made to go back, and that she's happy to start a new life with her new friend. I think Otilla sees the skull as a kindred spirit. There's an obvious similarity between her situation and his desire to not be reconnected to the skeleton.

The ferocity of Otilla's violence against the skeleton is almost shocking, even for a fairy tale. It shows the strength of her emotion. It seems to symbolize what she'd like to do to whatever she's running away from. (Did Otilla also fear someone much larger coming in the middle of the night to pull her from bed?)

I don't know if kids will pick up on the implications here, or if that subtext will only be visible to adult readers. But I suspect they'll notice, at least, that the story is somewhat deeper than its surface, that Otilla's actions show she feels more than her placid face lets on. The friendship here seems strange, but it's based on an underlying similarity and mutual respect that goes beyond appearances.
 
Klassen's art is deceptively simple. If you've seen his other books, his style is instantly recognizable. He works in block shapes and speckled colors, and finds a way to include more emotional nuance than seems like should be possible. For most of the book, Otilla seems worried but displaying a calm she doesn't feel. When she destroys the skeleton, she has a kind of satisfied determination.