In this issue:
Liminal vampires. Thinking about two recent novels that explore ideas of liminality, being trapped between worlds, vampirism, and queerness.
Cryptidcore vibes. Some shots from my recent trip to Salem.
More weirdness. Links to an interesting article about how ghost hunting has always been a part of Black and Latine culture, info about Resonant Shift Experiments, plus a rundown of some recent podcast episodes.
I've been thinking a lot about liminal spaces lately. And I'm probably not the only one. The last few years have been full of the sense of being betwixt and between, caught between the world we once knew and a new reality that we've all had to slowly come to terms with (or not, which has led to some troubling conspiracy theories).
I've talked about liminal spaces a little bit on the podcast, including during my series about Fordham University and its many hauntings. But I have also been thinking about liminality on a much larger scale, not just the ways in which it affects the paranormal perception of the world, but also how it ties into our ideas about our own future. (More on that in a future issue.)
So it's probably no surprise that no matter what I read, whether it's ostensibly related to paranormal research or not, I keep coming up with new details that seem to tie into these ideas of liminality in our world.
Liminal vampires
A few weeks ago, I read Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman, a book that explores the idea of vampirism from a view that I hadn't really seen much before. I've always loved media that deals with vampires, but never really thought about how part of my love of that genre is related to the inherent liminality of what it means to be a vampire.
Vampires are supposedly undead, but they move through our world as if they are living creatures. Many of the daily ravages of human life don't touch them, like aging or illness, and that sets them apart from other people. (Usually, depending on the worldbuilding of whatever you’re reading.) That difference puts them in a liminal space.
Liminal space is an area that exists between two different locations. Imagine a hallway with the entrance and exit cut off so that you're just stuck in a passage between origin and destination. Part of the horror of being a vampire is this idea of having no destination. You don't age like a human, and you don't die like a human. Your timeline is totally different. You end up feeling separated from everybody else and from humanity.
Then there's the added aspect of not being able to be out in the sunlight. That makes it so that as a vampire you can't really have a job or a normal human life, even if you wanted to try to have one. So much media about vampires depicts then as sort of wealthy, aristocratic figures. (I'm thinking of biggies, like Dracula, Interview with the Vampire, Twilight, etc.)
From a practical perspective, to live a halfway decent life as a vampire, you really do need to have a lot of money. You might need to hire people to do things for you during the day. You’ve got to able to pay for extra secure and specialized housing, since you are much more vulnerable than humans, in many ways. Sure, a vampire might be safe from many of human causes of death, but a human doesn't vaporize by going outside. So without a safety net of wealth, a vampire is kind of screwed.
Interestingly, in the last couple months, I've read two books (both released in 2022) that deal with the issue of struggling to survive economically/materially as a vampire who is discriminated against in society and—from a practical standpoint—less able to fully participate in capitalism because of their vampirism. (And living precariously, in a liminal space, as a result.)
The first book is How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager by D.N. Bryn. This one is a fun paranormal m/m romance. But despite the fluffiness of the genre1, a decent amount of the plot is tied to the struggle of surviving as a vampire. Vincent, the vampire character, has to resort to shady employment opportunities in order to make ends meet.
That comes back to haunt him when he has to confront the results of some of his own actions, as well as the other things that vampires have been forced to do out of desperation. Things get pretty dark. That being said, this is a romance novel and is definitely a romp in a lot of ways—but still you're always reminded of the economic reality of being a vampire and existing in a space where you are unable to fully participate in society, and where you're punished for that. (If queer paranormal romance is your thing, I really recommend that you pick up this book, by the way.)
And then there's the book Dead Collections. I would describe this one as literary fiction with strong paranormal and romance elements. It's beautifully written and is complex and challenging and honestly I could probably talk about it for hours. But since this is a newsletter, I'll try to keep it brief.
Unlike Vincent, Sol is lucky enough to have already been employed as an archivist prior to becoming a vampire. That means that he has a job that allows him to remain underground in the archives, where he is safe from the sun. As long as he can keep finding excuses not to go out to lunch and to work until after nightfall, he can kind of act as if he is a regular human. He's even given up his apartment, choosing instead to live inside the archives. So work has kind of become his entire life. (And—minor spoiler incoming—when he loses his job, that completely upends his life and tips him into precarity.)
Sol’s work, deep underground in the archives, is particularly liminal and strange, as he sorts through the detritus and ephemera of other people’s lives. Despite being confined to the archives, he's always aware of the presence of the outside world:
Every day I felt the city’s palpable weight. There was a ten-story building above us, sealing the daylight out like a stamp, but it felt sometimes like fifty stories, a hundred stories. I would come out at night almost dazed that the city was so small. In my mind, it all grew to monstrous height above me, rootless and dazzling.
The book very poetically describes the different natures of archives and (without using the words "liminal space") explores the ways in which they are places of liminality:
Archives are full of unfinished business. I always feel that they are haunted. Something clings to the papers after the people are gone.
There are moments in the story where he gets stuck in other liminal places when he stays out too late and the sun rises. He's trapped on the BART, riding the train underground until the sun sets again, finds shelter in a disused projection room at a movie theater, and hides out in a hospital storage closet. Most people who work outside the home are watching the clock, yearning for the moment that they can leave the office and their time can become their own again. But because Sol has no home, he’s living a life that seems to be missing a destination.
Adding to that, he's a trans man who had started taking T prior to becoming a vampire, but his transition has slowed to a crawl because in the world of the book, vampires' bodies don't change much. His plans for transition are just another part of human life that he feels like he's lost.
Dead Collections is such a nuanced and beautiful book that I really feel like you've just gotta pick it up and read it; I know I'm not doing it justice. But I was really struck by the layers and intersections of vampirism, the experience of being trans, and liminality, and the ways that all of those ideas and concepts build upon one another.
While reading, I ended up writing down a bunch of particularly striking quotes from the text. Here's one of them that really struck me as a description of liminal spaces:
We all know the claustrophobia of being in a dead building, that sense of being watched. We’ve all been in a building that has burned, or that has been abandoned for many years, or that’s just been empty of tenants for too long. The context is gone, and so is the unique pressure that human breaths give to the air in a room—that sense of its being heated, flushed, slightly toxic. Instead, there’s just air, swept clean, and the whiteness or the slick dark colors of the walls, and a terrible weightlessness.
Anyway, I'm still turning this over in my head and I’ve got a lot more to say about the topic. For example, there’s an obvious parallel between the precarity of vampirism and disability (check out this great video for an exploration of what it means to be someone who isn’t “useful” and who is punished by society as a result). But if any of this is at all interesting to you, definitely pick up How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager by D.N. Bryn and Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman.
What are your favorite vampire books? What are your thoughts on vampires and liminality? Are there other folkloric creatures who feel particularly liminal to you?
Cryptidcore shots from Salem
I recently went to Salem, Massachusetts, to meet up with some other contributors to The Feminine Macabre (a journal dedicated to lifting up the voices of female and non-binary people in the paranormal.) I had a really amazing time, and it was so great to be able to meet people who have known online for years. I might do more comprehensive writeup of the experience later on, but I wanted to share a few of my favorite Polaroids from the trip. Even though I just brought one backpack worth of stuff, I managed to bring my camera and some film, and I'm glad I did because I got some really cool shots in the Salem Woods.
I always feel like having a Polaroid camera is such a huge luxury, because the film is outrageously expensive. (Though I have found that you can get some deals if you buy film on eBay.) But I really enjoy having it for trips like this, because they make the perfect souvenir and it’s a fun game to try to figure out the best shots that I can get while out and about. And I feel like my Salem Woods pictures really fit into that fun cryptidcore aesthetic.
I had a really nice time exploring the Salem Woods, which was very close to the location where I was staying. It's about a 30 minute walk away from the main downtown area of Salem, but I was surprised to see how empty the woods were. I went a little bit before sunset the first time, and I only ran into a few other people on the trail. That was really weird, because when I had been in the downtown area, the streets had been completely full of tourists. I couldn't believe how crowded it was. Despite being November, which is supposed to be the quiet time of year, the whole place was hopping, to the extent that there was even a line to get into one of the cemeteries. So I was very grateful to escape into the quiet embrace of the woods after all of that.
Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my headlamp, hiking watch, or compass, so I had to get out of there before it was fully dark, but it was really nice climbing up to the top of a little hill in the woods and seeing the sunset. The next day, I was up early and went for a rainy hike around the whole loop within the woods. It's a very short hike—less than 3 miles long, if I recall correctly—but it took a bit longer than I expected. I think that’s because it was raining at the time and the ground was covered in leaves, which had become very slippery. It’s also a little hilly. It is a really beautiful hike, and I couldn't believe it was so empty on a Sunday morning. I expected to see runners and people walking their dogs, but I was the only person who I saw out there during that morning’s hike, even though I was out for more than an hour. So if you’re looking for a deserted place to spent an hour or two in Salem, check out the woods.
More weirdness
Amy and Ryan of Amy & Ryan's Weird Adventures posted a really cool blog post all about Resonant Shift Experiments that they've been doing. I'm really excited to try this out during a paranormal investigation, and I love that you can basically do this for free. I'm always in favor of free paranormal experiments. Has anyone tried this before?
I've been doing a series on the hauntings of Scranton, PA. So far, I've covered my first experience of sleep paralysis, a haunted park and hotel/former train station, and some other strange sites and urban legends.
To be clear, this is a factual statement rather than a judgement. Queer romance is my favorite genre of fiction, so I’m definitely not trying to belittle it here.