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Lizzie Borden – Skipping the Dark Fantastic

July 13, 2017 greydogtales 2 Comments

Firstly, it was a hatchet not an axe, and no, Ms Borden did not deliver a series of eighty one deadly blows to her parents, despite what it says in the skipping rhyme. If she did it at all. Today we interview Christine Verstraete, author of Lizzie Borden, Zombie Hunter, sidestep into a couple of aspects of the Borden case itself, and generally do what we do. Oh, and we mention the forthcoming film as well.

So who’s the focus here? Lizzie Andrew Borden (1860 – 1927) became rather too famous for her own liking after being tried and acquitted for the murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. She may well have committed the crime, but the technical evidence was circumstantial, and there were other suspects. These included a local labourer, the Irish maid Bridget Sullivan, a suggested illegitimate son of Andrew Borden, and Lizzie’s maternal uncle. None of them, however, fitted the bill as well as Lizzie herself.

Her father Andrew Borden was a rich man, but miserly and not always popular in the town. The Bordens had been landowners in the area for a very long time:

“In 1703, Benjamin Church, a prominent veteran of King Philip’s War, established a sawmill, a gristmill and a fulling mill on the Quequechan River. In 1714, Church sold his land, including the water rights, to Richard Borden of Tiverton and his brother Joseph. (This transaction would prove to be extremely valuable 100 years later, helping to establish the Borden family as the leaders in the development of Fall River’s textile industry.)” (Wiki)

His cheapskate ways and his second marriage, after the death of Sarah Borden, the mother of his children, caused friction. There were reasons for the Borden sisters, Lizzie and Emma, to dislike their step-mother Abby, whose family seemed to be benefiting over-much from money which should have eventually come to them. Widely covered in the press at the time, the case became one for considerable debate, especially in terms of sexuality and gender politics.

Eileen McNamara, of Brown University, argues that incest could have played a role, citing the extreme violence of the attacks—the first few blows were sufficient to kill each of the Bordens. She conjectures that if Lizzie or Emma were subject to abuse by their father, it would explain the apparent frenzy.

Lizzie Borden took an axe

And gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done,

She gave her father forty-one.

As we love a good complicated mystery, it’s probably worth mentioning that veteran author Ed McBain even covered the case with his own theory, involving a lesbian relationship between Lizzie Borden and the maid Bridget.

And Rafia Zakaria, writing in The Guardian earlier this year, discussed various interpretations subsequently put upon the Lizzie Borden affair:

“Where people had previously fixated on the binaries of guilt or innocence in Borden’s case, radical feminists focused on oppression and liberation. Lizzie was expiated – whether or not she was innocent.

“Where Lizzie’s contemporaries speculated about her criminality, and radical feminists about her oppression, this century just seems to enjoy the opportunity for kitsch and gore. In 2016, for instance, CA Verstraete suggested that Borden may have killed her parents because they were already dead, in her novel Lizzie Borden, Zombie Hunter.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/may/11/the-lizzie-borden-industry-wont-die-but-its-feminism-has

Not that feminism and gore need to be exclusive of each other in horror literature. Anyway, we’ll come to C A Verstraete in a second, as promised. We will add first that, in addition to written fictional, factual and even factional pieces on Lizzie Borden, the film industry had been there too, most recently in the TV movie Lizzie Borden Took an Ax (2014). Christina Ricci, who starred as Lizzie, described this version as “self-aware, campy, and tongue-in-cheek”.

Now there’s a new, far more serious film on its way, due late 2017, which is said to treat the matter more as a dark psychological drama, with a touch of the Gothic. As Lizzie features Chloë Sevigny as Lizzie Borden and Kristen Stewart as Bridget Sullivan, it seems likely that this version will explore the relationship between the two women in some depth. We expect a lot of intense staring.

But it’s interview time. Let’s go to someone who has put a very different twist on Lizzie Borden, and ask a few questions…

An Interview with Christine Verstraete

greydog: Christine, welcome to greydogtales. Maybe you could start by telling us how the idea of Lizzie Borden, Zombie Hunter came to you. Flash inspiration, something you read, or a long, slow germination?

christine: Thanks for letting me stop by your blog! I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Lizzie Borden. And after looking at the autopsy photos and records, I realized another theory could be offered for why the victims had been so viciously killed – and repeatedly hit in the head… they’d turned into zombies. It made perfect sense.

greydog: It’s more persuasive than some of the other theories we’ve read. So, we’re back in 1892. What do you find are the challenges of writing period fiction? Did you seek a late Victorian ‘voice’, or did you opt for a more contemporary style?

christine: It’s pretty hard, and hard on the reader, I think, to stick with formal English, so I tried to use modern English but without modern words. I stuck in references to the time period as I could, but some of Lizzie’s actions were a bit more modern, perhaps. Of course, Victorian life wasn’t as staid behind closed doors as we think, so some of her actions could be possible. After all, it’s not everyday you’re facing the gallows—and fighting zombies. Kind of changes your perspective, I’d say.

greydog: You obviously researched the actual case. Did you get any feeling as to what actually happened, and if the real Elizabeth Borden did kill her parents?

christine: I did a lot of reading on the crimes, the news of the day, and of the inquest and trial transcripts. Though she is guilty, in a sense, in my version of events, I still can’t quite decide whether she did it or not. It certainly seems that way, but there’s no real evidence or proof. It’s all circumstantial…

greydog: Do you think there’s a ‘statute of limitations’ issue when drawing on real-life killings? Characters like The Ripper and Lizzie Borden belong to a time which seems distant enough for many writers, but is there a stage at which it becomes inappropriate to ‘go there’ for purely fictional purposes?

christine: I think once a crime is at least 100 years old, it does put it into a different time frame. It’s of the past century and open to more interpretation. Some crimes like say, the Black Dahlia murder while just as sensational, still seem too close in time. But maybe it’s more a feeling of a crime being more open to interpretation and fictional treatments once it’s at least a generation or more away.

greydog: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Jane Austen/zombie reworking by Seth Grahame-Smith, was a more parodic take, really. Is your Lizzie Borden, Zombie Hunter played straight?

christine: As straight as putting zombies in anything can be realistic, I suppose. But I did write it as if it is a real-life event. It’s the reason for the murders, and fits around the changes in Lizzie’s world with the real-life trial and a few other events in her life. I felt it important to not ignore the important and real parts in her life as that is what most people know about who Lizzie Borden is and was.

greydog: You also wrote GIRL Z: My Life as a Teenage Zombie, a contemporary piece. This is more of a Young Adult take, isn’t it?

christine: Yes, I wanted to try something different by showing a teen’s view and how her life changes when she turns part-zombie. So it’s ‘angsty’, and humorous, and full of quirks, and well, no, she doesn’t eat “that.”

greydog: The zombie theme runs and runs, much to our surprise. What do you see as its fascination?

christine: It has to be a contrast, a way of coping, to all the real-life horrors maybe? There’s so much going in on in our world today, so what better way to personify those things than with zombies? They’re the monsters in our life that can be seen and hopefully controlled when all else seems, and is, out of our control.

greydog: And what’s next from your pen? Is there more Borden to come?

christine: I loved writing about Lizzie and don’t want to give her up just yet. Coming out soon is The Haunting of Dr. Bowen, A Mystery in Lizzie Borden’s Fall River. This is a supernatural-flavored mystery novella set in Lizzie’s hometown, and told from the point of view of her doctor and neighbour. I also have been writing some short mysteries with her as the investigator. Then, of course, I have some ideas for a follow-up to Lizzie Borden, Zombie Hunter.

It’s a fun, scary world that I’m enjoying writing about and others seem to enjoy reading about, so, I’m happy and want to keep the readers happy, too!

greydog: Good luck with your continued explorations, and thanks for calling in.

Lizzie Borden, Zombie Hunter is on offer until the 15th July.

About Lizzie Borden, Zombie Hunter:

Every family has its secrets…

One hot August morning in 1892, Lizzie Borden picked up an axe and murdered her father and stepmother. Newspapers claim she did it for the oldest of reasons: family conflicts, jealousy and greed. But what if her parents were already dead? What if Lizzie slaughtered them because they’d become… zombies?

Amazon: http://getbook.at/LizzieBordenZombieHunter

Website: http://cverstraete.com

Blog: http://girlzombieauthors.blogspot.com

Over the next few days on greydogtales – The lurchers go to the seaside, and some more William Hope Hodgson scares. If you want to be warned which is which, subscribe for free via the top left hand corner…

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Ginger Nuts and Grey Dogs

July 8, 2017 greydogtales 2 Comments

Do you hit the ground, or does the ground hit you? Sadly this isn’t a lurcher post, but a thought or two on websites, reviews, exhaustion and other animals. Many will have heard that the redoubtable Jim McLeod has closed his UK review site, Ginger Nuts of Horror, which has been running for years. Jim prided himself on providing a wide range of review and features covering the horror genre, with especial attention paid to independent authors and ventures, who might not otherwise get decent coverage. It was unique in many ways, a major endeavour. And major endeavours are exhausting, even if you have an informal team behind you.

Greydogtales is almost two years old, and in thinking about Ginger Nuts, there’s a lot of material to mull. Obviously, we never attempted to reach the height of what Jim did – we’re a quirky set-up which ignores many of the rules, but you can see how it starts to grind you down. We’ve often followed Ginger Nuts’ comments about the difficult aspects of the game, and had a few similar problems, though not on the same scale. To take a few examples…

a) People don’t always get that you have to work to pay the bills, and that the vast majority of these sites are done out of love (or occasionally obsession). They happen in the small hours between shifts, at times when you should be recovering, at times when you should be doing family and friend things. And they happen when you’re feeling ill, or depressed, if you can manage it.

b) Things run late, and sometimes a few of them never run. There are guests and other contributors who have their own lives, shocking though that is; book publicists who accidentally promise things they can’t deliver; publishers themselves who are great but who run late on their output schedule, and books or projects with which you just cannot click, however much you try. Or ideas that seemed great after an ale and playing with dog, but which don’t pan out the next day or the next week. A dozen reasons, sometimes more than one at once. We can get it wrong.

c) The communications network does your head in. Between multiple email accounts, forms, other projects, Tweets and Facebook, private messages and the occasional actual letter, it can take on the appearance of a thousand people all wanting you to do something – and do it now. Even if individually, they’re nice, easy-going people, en masse it gets scary.

d) People remind you of what you planned, and may even nag, but you haven’t got an immediate – or helpful – answer (see a, b, c and e). It’s not unreasonable – we all want our own work to be highlighted, pushed forward, held up in front of the world. We are You.

e) The technology collapses. Things get bugged, you can’t access your own site, the server slows or crashes… and it requires at least some design work to be readable. You get things sent which won’t open, even with a crowbar. Links die or move, and ought to be checked more often, and then your scanner won’t speak to your central heating system, or some such nonsense. This stuff eats up more time and temper.

So if you try to do something ambitious and well-meaning, it can bite. We empathise with sites who feel the pressure; we know what the cost can be (and yes, there can be a financial cost as well as an emotional one).

For greydogtales, if it don’t happen we live with it, and occasionally apologise. We occasionally mean it, too. We don’t have a team of reviewers. We have a handful of nice folk who help out greydog when the heat is on. We look at themes and ideas in people’s work, and interesting books that we’re offered – or which we come across by accident. Once in a while we get so excited that we ask for an ARC or review copy. And then we wish we had time to read it.

We post long, complicated features about dead writers, obscure philosophies, detectives, history, folklore and legends, because… no, we can’t remember why we do that. It’ll come to us.

Our other staple is the interview, and we won’t do one of those without reading some of the works, looking at the background and so on. We have no set list of questions, which makes each interview harder but usually more interesting. Makes it a slow process, as well.

In between the above, we still have plans for our most popular feature, Lurchers for Beginners and its spin-off articles. The Little Donkeys told us to keep doing those.

an author, being herded by little donkeys

We mourn Ginger Nuts of Horror (unless it arises again one day, maybe), and we understand at least some of what makes websites a nightmare. And we can only wish Jim McLeod the very best.

Despite the fact that it would be a darned sight easier to potter along doing an author blog, we’re still here. So the oddity that is greydogtales.com survives, to stagger on and do what it can to signpost new and interesting stuff in weird, horror and related fiction. And to mention lurchers a lot.

We’re simply… dogged (in any sense you want to take that).

UTTERLY DIFFERENT NONSENSE

Away from the wild glamour and prestige of heading greydogtales, the confused horror that is John Linwood Grant has put together his first collection. Except that it’s not supposed to be his first collection, which is more likely next year. A Persistence of Geraniums and Other Worrying Tales is a selection of strange stories, all set in the Edwardian era. Some are exclusive to the collection, and have never been published anywhere. It happened sort of by accident when he realised that he had a number of these tales in hand.

Geraniums contains murder, madness and the supernatural, but not necessarily all three at once. Illustrated delightfully by Paul Boswell, it should be out in the next month or so, and be available (in print at first) on Amazon, from Electric Pentacle Press. We may go on about this at more length in the future, because we’re running short of dog food.

Oh, and for those in the know, the collection will include the first print appearances of Mr Edwin Dry.

The Deptford Assassin is in town.

Over the next few weeks – lots of weird features and ‘sort of’ reviews’, plus we have some decent lurcher photos again, from their adventures, thanks to the camera finally agreeing to download them. Which was another cause for delays and temper…

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A Taste of Other Weapons

June 30, 2017 greydogtales Leave a comment

A while back, I wrote a novel. Which happens, I suppose. I didn’t do a lot with it, because I had other things going on. And short stories turned out to be more fun. So it’s under the table somewhere. It wasn’t Edwardian – it was a tale of dystopian Britain, wrecked by civil war, and a world generally coming apart at the seams.

If you need a place for it, you might call it Dark Young Adult, though I’m not sure that helps. It was called Strange Weapons. It had some nasty bits, some gentle bits, and a lot of worried people in it. Here’s a sample, because – well, why not….

Continue reading A Taste of Other Weapons →

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Did Erich Von Däniken Discover the Mountains of Madness?

June 24, 2017 greydogtales 1 Comment

And did Space Gods Build the Pyramids? Can you calculate the date of the Apocalypse by squaring the height of the second building on the left at Chichen Itza? No, basically. So today we take an interest in speculative author John Sladek, dear old H P Lovecraft, Erich von Däniken and a smattering of Arthur Conan Doyle. This is a fortunate state of affairs, as our next question comes from a Mrs von Däniken, of 3 The Alps, Switzerland, who wants to know which alien astronaut caused her little boy Erich to commit embezzlement, fraud and other naughty things.

Well, Mrs von Däniken, it might be that your son suffers from the belief that he is one of Theosophy’s Root Races, and that his kind will eventually prove the rest of us wrong. Or that he’s nuts, and likes money. He certainly enjoyed his hidden books. Listeners who have been here before will remember the Book of Dzyan, mentioned in one of Lovecraft’s stories:

“I learned of the Book of Dzyan, whose first six chapters antedate the earth, and which was old when the lords of Venus came through space in their ships to civilise our planet.”

The Diary of Alonzo Typer, H. P. Lovecraft & William Lumley

We have, of course, already pottered around HPL, the roots of weird fiction and Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy in early outings ( the fawcett saga pt 1 ). We’ll come back to HPL later, but note that Von Däniken liked to bring this book up as a key source to back up his theories.

On the other hand, Samuel Rosenberg (1912 – 1996), the American writer, photographer and literary consultant, described the Book of Dzyan as “a fabrication superimposed on a gigantic hoax concocted by Madame Blavatsky.”

Rosenberg is better known to some for his peculiar interpretations of Sherlock Holmes, in the book Naked is the Best Disguise (1974). There’s always someone with a new theory about the Great Detective. A search for hidden meanings in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, when it first came out this book was described by some Holmes scholars as more a desecration than a legitimate contribution to the field.

“The presence of Friedrich Nietzsche at the Reichenbach Falls in 1877 was the premiss for Rosenberg’s theory that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based the character of Professor Moriarty on the German philosopher and that Doyle’s detective stories were the “pre-Freudian psycho-dramatic confessions” of a “self-revealing allegorist”.

“His findings were published in 1974 by Bobbs Merrill (or Boobs Merrill as he referred to them). The book, Naked is the Best Disguise: the death and resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, enjoyed great success in America (where it sold over 25,000 copies in hardback and was on the “Book-of- the-Month” list for several months), and there was success of a different sort in England where Desmond Elliott of Arlington Books was forced to remainder many thousand copies to the delight of bemused Sherlockians, who were able to purchase them for as little as 50p a copy.”

Richard Lancelyn Green, Rosenberg Obituary, Independent (1996)

But more to the point, we recently re-read John Sladek’s The New Apocrypha (1973), and saw both Rosenberg and von Däniken turning up (on different sides). We were reminded of much nonsense from those heady times.

John Sladek (1937-2000) was a remarkably clever and amusing writer, a favourite of our youth – Roderick at Random, The Reproductive System, The Steam-Driven Boy – and, of course, Keep the Giraffe Burning, a wondrous title. You might call him an SF writer, but really much of his work tunnelled inventively into and around SF, producing satires and parodies which still stand up forty or more years later.

Sladek was part of the New Wave movement of the sixties and seventies, and was in Britain at the time of Michael Moorcock and the New Worlds magazine. Not that he was limited by it, nor was it exactly a coherent movement. But it was a time of great experimentation in prose style and subject, in the abandonment or subversion of old SF tropes. More William Burroughs than Edgar Rice.

Such matter formed a substantial part of our reading habits in the seventies. In the process of digging into J G Ballard, Thomas Disch, Joanna Russ, Michael Moorcock and the like back then, we also picked up Sladek’s The New Apocrypha: A Guide to Strange Science and Occult Beliefs. It’s not a novel, but a most enjoyable romp through the fact-free nonsense and pseudo-science of the time, with a special place reserved for von Däniken. Sladek described von Däniken’s book Was God an Astronaut as:

“…A kind of crank compendium. Nearly every dubious theory of the past century is enlisted to prove that spacemen visited the earth at some time in the dim, dumb past.”

Within The New Apocrypha you can find chapters on deceptive psychics and ESP, the ‘lost’ lands of Atlantis and Lemuria, crank medicine, perpetual motion, the Apocalypse, ufology, how astronauts did not build the pyramids, and much more. Sladek gives referenced details for the debunking of much nonsense, and does so in a way which is highly readable. An excellent fun book.

We mentioned Sladek’s The Steam-Driven Boy collection a long while back, because it includes a number of excellent parodies ( parodies and possibilities ). By coincidence, the Guardian obituary for Sladek was written by David Langford, who we mentioned in that same post. As a Secret Grandmaster of British SF Fandom, he is no mean parody writer himself. He wrote, of Sladek’s myth-busting:

“Urged by Moorcock to document the irrational byways of modern thought, Sladek produced the useful and funny The New Apocrypha: A Guide to Strange Sciences and Occult Beliefs. The realisation that pseudoscience could be highly profitable was all too tempting: as James Vogh he published Arachne Rising (1977), laboriously justifying a “long suppressed” 13th zodiac sign, Arachne the Spider. One of the invented case studies is of Cassandra Knye. Eventually he summarised this project as “a gigantic waste of time”.”

David Langford, Sladek Obituary, The Guardian (2000)

Roughly contemporary with the development of the New Wave, there arose another more peculiar piece of “non-fiction”, The Morning of the Magicians.

Written in 1960 by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, it appeared in England in 1963 as The Dawn of Magic, and in America as The Morning of the Magicians, in 1964 (that was also the year in which Moorcock was appointed as editor to New Worlds magazine).

“The author provides raw material for speculation of the most outlandish order – secret societies, ancient prophesy, alchemical transmutation, the giant race that once ruled the Earth, the Nazca lines. Whether or not Pauwels or the reader believes any or all of these theories is beside the point.”

Our interest here is that we can follow The Morning of the Magicians forward, through Sladek’s New Apocrypha debunkings, and on to a far more recent book, The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestial Pop Culture, by Jason Colavito (2005)

“Many Americans believe that so-called ancient astronauts (visitors from outer space) were responsible for historical wonders like the pyramids. This entertaining and informative book traces the origins of such beliefs to the work of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). The author takes the reader through fifty years of pop culture and pseudoscience highlighting such influential figures and developments as Erich von Däniken (Chariots of the Gods), Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods), Zecharia Sitchin (Twelfth Planet), and the Raelian Revolution. The astounding and improbable connections among these various characters are revealed, along with the disturbing consequences of Lovecraft’s “little joke” for modern science and public knowledge.”

Basically, the author proposes that, allowing for some synthesis from the thoughts of earlier writers and from movements like theosophy, Lovecraft’s “weird SF” ends up being the root of much of the nonsense that followed. Examples include ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, with its aeons of alien colonisation and experimentation, which may be seen as lighting the fuse for The Morning of the Magicians, the confused theories of von Däniken, and so on.

Does it all come together in a seamless trail? Do we agree with everything that Colavito proposes? No, but there is some pleasure to be had from watching people try to make such leaps, whether or not they succeed. And for HPL fans, it’s another string to the bow when discussing how influential he was – or might have been.

Our Verdict: When in doubt, ignore the Astronaut Gods and read Sladek. He was a marvellous writer, and should be far more widely known.

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An Interview with Christine Verstraete

About Lizzie Borden, Zombie Hunter:

Every family has its secrets…

UTTERLY DIFFERENT NONSENSE

Literature, lurchers and life