Been thinking about…Reading the summer vampires

The old white rocking chair creaked and the morning sun slanted through the window, a long ago sun dappled by the leaves of the rain tree. For the first time in 10 years, I was reading for the fun of it and the book I chose? The classic paperback “Interview with the Vampire” by Anne Rice. The moody atmospheric violence was all-encompassing, and I pushed off responsibilities like dishes or laundry until I had finished. After almost a decade of worrying, hustling and creating StateoftheOzarks, being able to take the time just to read a novel was both a relief and a luxury.

Literacy is something of a prized skill these days. According to one report, over half of Americans cannot read above the sixth-grade level. It’s important to understand that — growing up — my family was not one of those classic academic families whose brand was education. My dad was an engineer. My mom was a housewife. My maternal grandpa was a carpenter. My mom hated school growing up and did not go to college. But in a quietly noble and American fashion, reading (and reading well) was baked into life.

I was a late bloomer when it came to reading, finally learning when I was seven-going-on-eight. I had it in my head that if I learned to read my mom would quit reading to me (I was right) and I didn’t want that to happen so I resisted learning. Still, when I finally did learn, I went from reading the Dick and Jane books for first graders to the next month’s issue of National Geographic — in particular, an article about the Soviet space program. Still, the years of having been read to (and read to well) stayed with me, the melody of the English language becoming elemental in my soul.

“Learn to read, write and do basic arithmetic,” my mom would say, “And you can teach yourself everything else.” The advice can seem overly simplified and yet it is true. But the engine driving that particular machine is the human spirit and no amount of bureaucratic funding can create that. Instead, it takes human interaction, care, soul, a willingness to invest that goes above and beyond getting paid.

Time-plus-care-plus-attention is a magical recipe, one that moves quietly below the waterline, making good things happen in society usually without notice. Apparently, for 54% of Americans, that time-plus-care-plus-attention thing didn’t happen nearly enough; but just throwing more money at programs is not the answer we seem to think it is. My mom never got paid to teach me. Following her example, when it came to volunteering at our nearby homeschool co-op, it really never occurred to me to get paid either. If we really care about the next generation, then we invest ourselves rather than invest other people’s money into the vague and generous ether.

It was in that milieu of 2017 that I found myself reading “Interview with the Vampire’ and preparing to teach a novel writing class for a dozen or so homeschool kids. The only problem was I hadn’t written a novel. The solution seemed comparatively simple to me so I wrote my first novel while I was teaching the class. I think the kids appreciated my honesty as they also kept asking me to read excerpts of the book as it developed, even though I had to redact portions to fit the age group. Writing Anne Rice fan fiction didn’t seem like a great idea so I steered clear of vampires entirely when writing “Plague Child’s Doctor,” although I added plenty of other characters from dark European folklore.

Still, there is something about the oppressive summer heat as the late evening sun slips behind black horizons that conjures up thoughts of the elegant undead. My long interest in the macabre still gets me occasionally branded as an unbeliever but true Gothic horror makes no sense unless framed within a fundamental Christian worldview. Contemporary Christian culture struggles with horror, perhaps more of a nod to our long peacetime relationship with religion and the church’s larger pandering to modern, feel-good marketing than we would like to believe. Older generations touched by war and death struggled less with the luxury of pretending bad things don’t involve us, or that bad things aren’t us whatsoever.

“No one is good but One, that is, God,” said Jesus in the book of Mark. And, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” as written in the book of John. What we seem to overlook is that truth can be very dark, very scary, very painful. Life hurts, but much of modern church spins its wheels on sweetness and light (and honestly so does the New Age crowd). For those stuck in that belief, the world’s capacity for inhumanity keeps coming back as some sort of Groundhog Day surprise. The vicariously virtuous among us wring their hands, call for peace, then slight their neighbors. If we care about our faith, we roll up our sleeves and quietly help others, exercising quiet grit without judgement.

And somewhere in all of this, I still find solace in the dark, accepting of our darker natures so well-interpreted by Anne Rice who found her own solace in writing the human tragedy — and writing her own tragedy at the loss of her baby girl to leukemia in 1972. The truth is, no man is good. But in humility, we still strive, even as the summer heat lingers long past sunset, even as we war against our darker natures, even here, now, in a world where the lines between good and evil within and without blur. Even now, striving to find beauty in the dark, even here, among the summer vampires.