Psycho-sexual Ravenloft: Tapestry of Dark Souls II

Some people hate being wrong. Some people will never admit to being wrong. I'm not one of them; I love being wrong. Each time you're wrong you get a chance to broaden your perspective, to learn something new.

And man, was I wrong about what the tapestry represents in Elaine Bergstrom's novel!

I had previously analyzed it as a kind of emancipatory khora, something akin to the titular yellow wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story. But...it turns out that the tapestry is just another awful male figure. In fact, it's pretty much just a scheming rapist: "I knew the woman would conceive; knew it from the moment I touched her trembling body. Ah, delicious! After so many hungry years of half-life in this prison, her fear bubbled through me, fresh and sweet as new wine. How I used her, feasting on her innocence" (88).

As if to underline how awful the power of patriarchy is, we immediately get a flashback to Gundarak, where the taxation of female children leads to a culture of infanticide: "Torvil, her husband, wasn't willing to pay it or support the girls, who would undoubtedly be taken from him later. So Dirca had done what so many women in the land had done. With her own hands, she carried each babe to the hills and left her to die. Afterward, she sat in her plain, stone cottage and listened to the distant howling of wolves, thankful her daughters had been born in winter, when the cold alone would kill them" (100). This description essentially doubles-down on depicting a distorted and monstrous masculine authority. Not only does Dirca's husband refuse to offer security to his female children, part of his reasoning for withholding that support is that the daughters will just eventually be taken away by other, more powerful, men anyway.

Interestingly, grotesque masculine authority is shown to be the cause of its own undoing. When Dirca goes to a gypsy woman for a potion to make herself barren, she instead walks away with a poison with which to kill her husband. It's his insistence on upholding the misogynistic order the creates the opportunity of his own demise. 

But now that Leith is out of the way, the novel has turned to her son, Jonathan, as its protagonist and/or antihero. However, even with this new focus, Maeve is still in the picture, and is as polymorphously perverse as ever: "As she walked barefooted through the crowd, everyone, women as well as men, paused to look at her" (166-165). Male gaze, female gaze...it all likes to glide over Maeve. And speaking of Maeve's perversity, not only has she had the mother, but she now sets her sights on the son as well: "'You are welcome to come and see me any time you wish,' she whispered and kissed him. He tried to pull away, but her grip was too strong and the emotions she touched in him were as potent as his rage had been" (170). The use of the word "emotions" here seems like a euphemism. Maeve also isn't afraid to let Jon know that she keeps a number of side-pieces on tap. Even though she has just invited him to "visit" at any time, she arranges matters so that he see one of her other lovers making the walk of shame: 

As Jon lay belly down in the brush near the river, wondering if he dared accept the woman's invitation, the cottage door opened and one of the village elders came out. Maeve followed, her bright orange gown glowing in the morning sun. Her parting kiss was as deep as the one she had given Jon last night, though her eyes were open and she stared over the elder's shoulder at the place where Jon was hidden. A small, private smile danced lightly on her lips as the man said good-bye. After her visitor left, Maeve went inside, leaving the door open behind her. (175)

But if Jon experiences a weird psycho-sexual confusion of eros and thanatos, he's not alone in the village. In fact, in a Wicker Man-like move it turns out that the community engages in ritual sacrifice as a fertility rite. A goblin captured during the harvest is burned alive while the village elder chants "To the spirit of the land, we give this sacrifice. May its pain and its blood make the earth fertile, make the spring seed sprout, make the waters flow" (168). All we need added is a bit of Britt Eckland. Jon, for his part as a spectator, seems turned on by this bloody spectacle: "Jon returned his gaze to the goblin. Some dark pleasure was churning in him as well, the savagery of the sacrifice arousing a hunger he could scarcely understand" (169).

This is the man that the beautiful, innocent Sondra marries. I'm sure that will work out just fine, right?

Psycho-Sexual Ravenloft: Tapestry of Dark Souls I

The Mists gather around us once more, leading us into the darkened confusion that is a Ravenloft tie-in novel! If you're unfamiliar with my Psycho-Sexual Ravenloft series, here's the deal: I read a Ravenloft novel and post an earnestly-hamfisted literary analysis of it to mine-out all the odd bits of unconscious sexual weirdness that inevitably creeps into these things. 

This October's victim novel is Elaine Bergstrom's Tapestry of Dark Souls, a book that seems to be somewhat reviled by Ravenloft aficionados for being a bit too visceral and morally bleak--which is odd because those qualities put it more in line with the Gothic literary tradition than any other books in the series.

The unstated theme of the first part of Tapestry of Souls is that a woman trapped in unhappy marriages might look to sapphic comfort as a nice alternative to stifling hetero-matrimony. Such is the case with Leith, who has an antagonistic relationship with her husband Vhar. It's only when she meets the adventurer Maeve that we see Leith actually react with interest to another person; their initial meeting is portrayed in tones of love at first sight: "The woman had a vitality that was impossible to ignore," Leith notes (28). 

Indeed, as soon as her husband is gone, Leith begins to think of Maeve as a surrogate for him: "But, without Vhar, I needed another protector. This woman had come with no one, her presence challenging every male in the room" (31). It is Maeve's combination of feminine and masculine qualities--that curious admixture that defines lesbian figures in the popular imagination--that form the basis of Leith's attraction to her; she takes note of Maeve's feminine beauty, but also prizes her ability to intimidate men on an even playing field.

Of course, the underlying impetus for that attraction is Leith's realization that fitting into the preordained heteronormative relationship of husband and wife has left her unfulfilled as a person and especially as a woman: "I thought of how poorly I knew my husband and much I resented him. He didn't love me. I was a useful possession like the knives in his crates, like this treasure in my lap" (37). Leith's resentments are portrayed in surprisingly sympathetic tones. Even when her indignation boils over into violence it actually reads as understandable, if not murderously empowering. As they struggle over possession of the novel's accursed tapestry, Leith thinks, "all the resentments I had buried for so many years exploded into rage, giving me a strength I didn't know I had. I swung the heavy skillet up and sideways against his head. He fell. I hit him again, and again. Then, dropping the skillet, I pounded him with my fists, stopping only when I was too exhausted to continue" (39). Leith is woman, hear her roar!

But what of the titular tapestry? It too has a symbolic function in Bergstrom's novel. This cursed, billowing, enveloping fabric functions as a chora-like figuration that promises feminine self-actualization, freedom from patriarchal constraint, and erotic liberty. The tapestry is the devouring maternal vagina that all men fear due to primordial prejudice: "Whipped by some internal wind, it broke free of its linen cover and billowed out into the storage room. I held tight to one edge, but the rest flapped out, covering Vhar. He cried my name as the cloth fell, and suddenly his voice grew sad and faraway, as though he were plummeting down a bottomless shaft. I pulled the cloth away too late. Worn planks lay beneath it, but Vhar--husband, adversary, friend--was gone" (40-41). 

Although the tapestry seems inimical to male life, for Leith it comes to represent the promise of recognition, shared sorrow, and liberation: "The shapes took on a shadowy life separate from the fabric, spinning away from it one by one, beating at the door like dry winter leaves in a gale. ... Real voices howled with fury at the chanting captors outside. I howled with them--first with fear and later with the terrible certainty that I belonged with them" (48). 

Compare that description of the damned souls trapped within the tapestry with this description of the women trapped within the walls in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper": "Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern DOES move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!" As much as those trapped figures are dreadful of aspect, they are symbols of just rage that is beginning to seek its own freedom; indeed, as the narrator of Gilman's story becomes addicted to watching the wallpaper expectantly, the tapestry--with all that it promises--becomes Leith's obsession. 

The tapestry also serves to blur the lines between different kind of female assignations. The categories of lover, beloved, mother, daughter, sister all become threads wrapped inseparably together in the tapestry's polymorphously perverse weave. For Leith, the tapestry promises not only the solidarity of sisterhood, but the long-withheld dream of motherhood: "I had suspected that I was pregnant before that terrible night in the shrine. Even so, I couldn't be certain that I had conceived before then" (53). Things become even more tangled as the relationship between Leith and Maeve begins to take on maternal and erotic aspects as well; "I see my mother in you," Maeve tells Leith in a rare moment of emotional intimacy--which is interesting as it is Maeve who has assumed a maternal role in caring for Leith. Again and again in the novel the boundaries of what separates one woman from another are transgressed or erased.

The metaphors and images of feminine malleability are given further strength when it is revealed that Leith has been infected with lycanthropy. Resonantly, Maeve refers to lycanthropy as "the change"; "Nothing can stop the change," she tells Leith (71). "The change" from woman to beast, of course, stands in for a variety of life-cycles through which women progress, most notably menstruation and menopause. 

Here, the notion of womanly change also stands in for potential freedom from men if women have the guts to seize it. Maeve describes her mother's failure to embrace the change and the liberty is brings: "My father used to speak longingly of her wit and beauty before the change. I think she could have reclaimed it any time if she wished, but she was too cowardly to leave him. Instead, she allowed herself to be trapped by him, then by my uncle, and then the town" (74). The change, then, is an escape from patriarchal control within the novel's narrative logic. Maeve herself is a vixen (a eyebrow-raising term term for a werefox) who displays her own change while simultaneously reminding Leith of her own agency as a woman, "'Change, but don't forget who you are. Remember before you make your choice,' she whispered and shifted form again. In moments, a large silver fox stood before me, its head tilted, its expression expectant" (75). Note that both women shed their clothes, inhibitions, human forms, and the shackles of normative society in this scene, all because the change frees them from constraint.

And Leith has good reason to rage against the machine; when husbands, monks, and surly menfolk aren't getting in the way of her fulfillment, they're taking the form of strangers who ask for a night's lodging only to administer a date-rape drug: "I said he could sleep in our garden. It seemed natural that I would share supper with him, then share his wine. So sweet it was, so honey-thick, so full of power. I woke with him beside me" (78-79). That's pretty heavy stuff for a Ravenloft novel. Nevertheless, at a third of the way through the book I'm finding that those hot-blooded and horrifying elements put Tapestry of Dark Souls more in-line with the Gothic's source material than anything else written for the Ravenloft line. We're definitely in Matthew Lewis territory here. Can't wait to see what happens when Leith's child is born!

Psychosexual Ravenloft: Heart of Midnight III

The formation of an identity is a progressive process. “Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written," wrote Oscar Wilde--an author who certainly knew the difference between knowing one's self (theoretical self-knowledge), and being one's self (the praxis of that self-knowledge). In the bildungsroman that emerges from Heart of Midnight's clumsy gothicism, the shift from self-knowledge to self-actualization is encoded in terms that equate Casimir's wolfish desires with a kind of errant queer sexuality. His friend Thoris, for example, questions how Casimir can be in a relationship with a woman when he knows, deep down, that he is a "werewolf"; "How dare you kiss her, knowing what you are?" he asks with barely-disguised venom (157).

Thoris attempts to help Casimir with his "problem" in a very misguided way. In a scene that reads uncomfortably like gay conversion therapy in D&D drag, Casimir is taken to a cleric to have his wolfish nature exorcised in a religious rite. Of course, Casimir's "problem" is more nature than nurture and cannot be dispelled so easily; the cure fails, and Casimir kills the priest. Harkon Lukas offers Casimir another way out of this tangle of hidden desire and public censure: self-acceptance. "Your salvation has always come from the beast within you," Lukas posits, "When you deny the beast, you are nothing. Only be embracing it do you live!" (206). If the world deems to you to be a "beast" because of who you are, then a beast you must be. Lukas's message is one of radical acceptance; Casimir's choice, then, is between giving free reign to the impulses he has denied and attempted to abjure, or "living a lie" as Lukas terms it (207).

(As an aside, it turns out that Casimir isn't a werewolf after all--he's actually a wolfwere. While the distinction is academic to all but those concerned with D&D monster stats, we might read something into this as well--the wolfwere as a queering of the overly masculinized figure of the werewolf. More beast than man, the idea of the wolfwere also fits certain homophobic renderings of male homosexuality as animalistic, bestial, and a set of behaviors unchecked by a proper sense of one's humanity.)

To usher Casimir into a place of self-acceptance, Lukas takes him to a "temple for children of the night," which we might read as a coded stand-in for cruising spot, bathhouse, or gay club (253). It is here that Casimir experiences his euphoric coming out moment: "For the first time in his life, he felt true release. For the first moment in twenty years, he knew what and who he was. The pangs of conscience were gone. The chorus of remembered screams had been silenced forever. A wild howl of joy erupted from his lungs" (255). Holla atcha boi!

(Also, note that while Casimir believed Zhone Clieous to be his father and killed him previously in accord with the dictates of an unmastered Oedipal complex, he later discovers that Harkon Lukas is his real father...which promptly turns into another Oedipal confrontation that pits son against father in a blood-soaked, phallic contest.)

Of course, since this is a Ravenloft novel nothing will end particularly well. Casimir's moment of self-realization is a fine thing, but it still has to contend with an outside world that is hostile to Casimir's identity. Thoris provides the chorus of widespread homophobic panic, defining the scope of different orientation as horror at the possibility of a monstrous horde: "How many werewolves are there, Casimir? How many? I thought you and Zhone Clieous were freaks. But now it's Harkon Lukas, too...and how many more?" (282). For this set of characters, the ending devolves into a bloodbath--ultimately ambivalent, Heart of Midnight shows us the value of self-acceptance and a world in which it will always be destroyed in fear. You might find self-acceptance, but the world won't listen.

I'm kinda proud that I've survived four of these novels.

Psycho-Sexual Ravenloft: Heart of Midnight II

If you thought I was just whistlin' Dixie with all this "lycanthropy as metaphoric cover for unspoken gay desire," check out this description in which Casimir attacks a drunkard at a bard party in order to steal his fancy costume: "Even through the roses, Casimir could smell his prey--not the salty, natural tang of a commoner, but the sweet, liquor-tainted scent of a nobleman. His mouth was watering again. The man's odor brought a savory taste to his tongue. His heart felt suddenly hot in his rib cage" (45).

Nevertheless, that's not to say that Casimir isn't attracted to women as well. However, Casimir's desire for Julianna Estovina is also depicted in terms of male queerness; the quantity of his desire for her is matched by the quantity of his desire to be penetrated by her: "The kiss felt painfully hot, but Casimir didn't pull back. Her breath was sweet and intoxicating. Her small hands pressed him mercilessly against her, as though she hoped to cut him open and crawl inside. Casimir trembled. Her very soul seemed to force its way into him. The sensation was wonderful" (57). Though this encounter is but a dream, it seems that his subconscious is revealing the overall shape of Casimir's desires through an obfuscated trajectory. Another layer of sexual strangeness is added when Casimir and Julianna include the similarity of their coloring and appearance as part of what makes them want each other: "'It's as if we are blood kin,' Casimir ventured cryptically" (61). The inversion of desire toward one's family here replicates and compliments the attendant fear of the inversion of desire toward one's own gender.

Of course, this being a Ravenloft novel, Heart of Midnight at last goes Full Freudian on us. As readers we've already been party to Casimir's quest for revenge against Zhone Clieous, but now we learn that his vengeance is nothing less than the Oedipal Complex writ large: Zhone Clieous is Casimir's father. Casimir's revenge must go to the final extremity; Clieous is the phallus-wielding father who must be killed so that the son can come to terms with the man he is inside. "I want to kill my father, not just frighten him," Casimir is forced to admit to himself (86). In this case the symbolic phallus materializes as control over Harmonia; after killing his father, Casimir assumes his "scepter" and becomes the new lord of the land.

Casimir's metaphoric confluence of homosexual desire and lycanthropy isn't just staged in terms of violence in Heart of Midnight; it also informs the ways in which Casimir will be accepted or rejected for who he is both by himself and by others close to him. When Casimir transforms into wolf form and finally kills his father in a blaze of Oedipal glory, his long-time friend and companion Thoris witnesses who Casimir really is. Horrified by the revelation that his friend has a secret self that he cannot understand, Thoris takes to the streets where he is robbed and left for dead by thugs. Upon finding his crumbled and battered form, Casimir realizes that his secret has consequences for those he loves. This puts Casimir at a crossroads: he can't change who he is, but he needs his friend to accept and understand him. "I can't go on without him," he says, acknowledging the painful interplay between what he is and how that endangers the homosocial bonds the nourish him. 

He also needs to find a way to accept himself. Indeed, self-acceptance is what Casimir finds most alluring in the masterful bard Harkon Lukas: "The scent that come from him was jaded, confident, sober. He was the first man Casmir had met who was perfectly at home in his own skin" (142). If we read Heart of Midnight as a bildungsroman, we might argue that this is what Casimir's coming-of-age moment will entail: self-actualization in the form of owning who he is both internally and to the outside world. Will he get there with Lukas's help? Let's see how things progress in our next installment.

Psycho-Sexual Ravenloft: Heart of Midnight I

I knew I wanted to do another series of Psycho-Sexual Ravenloft for the Halloween season, but I had a fear: what if the next novel in the line-up played it straight and there was no raw material to expose as sexually uncanny?

Why on earth did I worry about that? This is Ravenloft, baby, things are bound to get weird!

If you haven't read any of my psycho-sexual Ravenloft posts before, here is what you can expect: I will read a Ravenloft novel from the 90s and pay attention to the psychosexual undertones that emerge from the text's literary unconscious. It's all done on a lark, but eventually I will get hate mail from fans of these books or the Neverwinter Nights community. It's okay, fellas, I like Ravenloft too--we're just funnin' here. On with the body count, as Ice T said.

J. Robert King's Heart of Midnight is essentially a revenge tale. Young Casimir is out to avenge the death of his mother by confronting her killer: Zhone Clieous, the meistersinger of Harmonia. What is a meistersinger, you ask? Well, what you need to understand about the nation of Kartakass is that it is a nation of bards. (Shudder) Each town elects its executive official (the meistersinger) through a yearly singing competition. So our setting is a country of bards governed by the results of American Idol. Let the implications of that sink in; if the US was run like Kartakass, Kelly Clarkson would have been president in 2002.

But back to the matter at hand: the novel begins with a wolfman attacking a watchman. But of course, this being Ravenloft, this is a wolfman attack with a difference: it carries with it all the danger, beastliness, and secrecy associated with homosexual cruising. The wolfman is driven by a hunger he both cannot contain and cannot countenance during the daylit hours: "He had known he would kill a man tonight, known the moment he donned the black cape and slipped through the window. The hunger had been inexorable" (3). Note that the target of the attack is a guardsman, that favored class of trysting partners in the urban Victorian sexual landscape. 

While this encounter leads to pleasure for only one of the pair--the wolfman "consumes" his prey with relish--its resolution carries with it some rather unsubtle sexual symbolism: "He was naked except for the blood that coated him from nose to knees" (3). The wolfman, our surrogate urning flaneur, finds himself naked and covered in another man's bodily fluids after their chance meeting on the dark streets. Heart of Darkness is a novel that equates the ravenous, bestial side of man with the errant perambulations of the love that dare not speak its name.

Up to this point in the novel, Casimir has only exacted minor-key vengeance upon the hated Zhone Clieous. One such vengeance comes when his friend Thoris offers to spit on Clieous as they spy on him from atop a cliff. This also conflates illicitness (they will spit on him from afar), desire (revenge is as hot-blooded as love), and violence (they view spitting on Zhone as a sort of assault and know they will be harmed if caught in the act). Consider also that this form of revenge is literally meant to embarrass Clieous by ejaculating a bodily fluid upon his face.

Of course, this tangle of secrecy, desire, and violence is confusing to Casimir; he's a youth of eighteen struggling to define exactly what his passion for revenge actually means as well as struggling with bodily change and how that defines who he is. When Thoris follows Casimir on one of his nightly explorations--one of his "cruising" sessions--Casimir takes himself to a lonely cliffside spot and attempts suicide; unable to cope with the realization that he is something the world won't accept, death seems like the only option. "What can I do, Thoris?" he asks, "I've tried to fight it, but I'm too weak. I'm so ashamed" (29). Of course, being that he's the protagonist and we're only two chapters into the novel, Casimir survives.

For the record, Thoris isn't to be taken as a bedrock of supportive heterosexual normalcy in the novel. When we first meet him in a flashback to the duo's childhood, Thoris is hanging out with and talking to the corpse of his mother. If Thoris puts on a dress and stabs a woman in the shower by the end of the book, J. Robert King owes me a Coke.

Psycho-sexual Ravenloft: Dance of the Dead III

The descriptions of Larissa learning DANCE MAGIC linger over the curves of her body, despite these scenes supposedly being about the empowerment of women by women. Worse still is the flashback where Raoul recalls first meeting Larissa: Raoul watches her dance, “performing solely for her own pleasure”; she looks like “a feather caught by a wanton breeze”; he thinks of her as “fey and wild.” You know why this flashback is gross? Raoul is appraising her beauty and at this point she is TWELVE. TWELVE YEARS OLD AND HE IS WATCHING HER THINKING YEAH KIND OF A HOTTIE. Thanks for getting all pedo on us, Golden.

Oh, Raoul is also thinking what a good investment she is because he's just won Larissa in a card game against her father, I shit you not.

While it started off with surprising (albeit minor league) promise, Dance of the Dead quickly spirals into the land of schlock as soon as Larissa's tutelage in the art of DANCE MAGIC happens. The chapters in which the Maiden instructs Larissa are bad enough, but things get even worse when she's sent to the mansion of of Anton Misroi (Souragne's zombie-master Dark Lord) where she learns the DANCE OF THE DEAD! Of course, as the Maiden did earlier, Misroi makes Larissa put on a clothes that give him a better view of her tits; “It was shockingly low-cut,” the narration intimates. She must have some rack on her—everybody in the novel wants a peek at it.

Gosh! As a parting gift, Misroi gives her a riding crop; Larissa discovers that to initiate the Dance of the Dead she has to flog herself with it. Kinky.

On the way back to the Maiden's home, Larissa rides something called a LEZerd. I'm just going to leave that tidbit here and let you mull it over on your own.

At this point in the novel we're treated to some pretty squicky animal torture by its antagonists. Larissa leads a really unspectacular siege against the showboat to free all the animals within. Guess what? She does the DANCE OF DEATH at the climax! That didn't seem like a plot point at all when Misroi taught it to her, right? Unfortunately, Larissa accidentally kills her new will o' the wisp-lite boyfriend with the DANCE OF THE DEAD. Ooops.

In the end, the crew of the magic showboat decides that Larissa should be their new captain since Raoul & co. are now dead. Yeah, I can see how being good at dancing makes one a suitable captain of a ship despite not having a whit of sailing or navigation experience. But, as the saying goes, the show must go on. 

Thankfully, the novel does not.

Psycho-sexual Ravenloft: Dance of the Dead II

Eventually, seeing Larissa prance about in her stage costume like some sort of Ravenloftian Shakira proves too much for Raoul, so he concocts a bizarre plan to have her attacked by a sailor so that he might save her; his theory seems to be that in return for his protection Larissa is sure to give him a little sugar. Larissa reacts with an almost surprising level of horror when Raoul attempts to force himself on her, runs away, and is aided in her escape by some witchy guy from the swamp. Of course, she eventually returns to her “Uncle's” boat even though he just tried to molest her. What a tease or something.

Larissa has to run away from Raoul and his magic showboat again. She takes refuge in the swamps of Souragne, where she meets a spirit of nature known as the Maiden. Up until this point the novel had been cruising at a median depth—neither good nor bad, just plowing along in a workmanly paperback fashion—but once we get to the scenes of Larissa and the Maiden things plunge back into the terribleness I've come to expect from a Ravenloft novel. You see, the Maiden endeavors to teach Larissa...DANCE MAGIC! And the scenes in which Larissa learns to channel elemental magic through the power of DANCE are more than a bit like the scenes in Dirty Dancing where the Swayze teaches Baby to shake it like a Polaroid picture. This is, horrifyingly enough, the Gothic Fantasy equivalent to a training montage from Flashdance or Fame.

But, being a Christie Golden novel, it's got to get a bit sexually weird. The Maiden demands that Larissa where something skankier to...make the MAGIC DANCE better or something: “To Larissa's annoyance, the Maiden made the dancer remove her clothes and tear them into pieces for new garments. Larissa bound her breasts with a halter made of the skirt's material and fashioned a skirt of the lighter-weight chemise. She fastened the skirt about her slender waist and glanced at the Maiden for approval. 'No,' the Maiden chided. She tugged the skirt from Larissa's waist and retied it so it hugged her hips. 'The only time I've ever worn this little is when I was bathing,' Larissa muttered.” What happens in the swamp, stays in the swamp.

But then, this focus on Larissa's body is pretty typical of Golden's writing style. I don't know how else to put this, but she writes about women the way a fourteen year old boy would. From the way the narrative lens glides over feminine bodies throughout the novel it's clear that we, as readers, are meant to be complicity elided with the male gaze that evaluates and objectifies the physicality of women. For example, check out the weird pit stop this description of a woman's anger takes to dwell on her tits: “Her cheeks were flushed and her green eyes sparkling. Her low-cut dress, the same one she had worn at dinner revealed the tops of her breasts. She was absolutely stunning in her rage.” Translation: she is really mad but also she has great titties.

Psycho-sexual Ravenloft: Dance of the Dead I

Last week somebody ended-up on my blog after searching for "funny Ravenloft stories." Welp, here you go.  Laugh until you cry, friends.

Since it's the Halloween season, it's only fitting that October sees the return of the Psycho-sexual Ravenloft series. If this is your first time at the rodeo, the premise is simple: I read one of the official Ravenloft novels from back in the '90s, post about all the weird and yucky sex bits that lurk under the book's otherwise banal surface, and you all get a good laugh at my pain as I slog through this underwhelming sequence of tie-in novels.

Next up is Christie Golden's Dance of the Dead. Oh god, not another Golden novel so soon. I wonder if that guy who had a meltdown the last time I dared besmirch Golden's literary status is reading; are you still out there, buddy? I digress.

I'm actually a bit surprised to find myself saying this, but...Dance of the Dead seems to be an order of magnitude better than Vampire in the Mists. Perhaps I've been brain damaged by the first two Ravenloft books I've read as part of this project, but I'm willing to hazard a guess that freed from the tyranny of having to write about Jander and Strahd has enabled Golden to get an actual plot in motion and to create some characters who are human enough to be at least slightly compelling. The set-up of Dance of the Dead is actually interesting; the novel follows the exploits of a traveling showboat that docks in various domains in Ravenloft and puts on a magic-powered cabaret for the downtrodden denizens of the Demi-plane of Dread. Of course, things go awry and the performing troupe find their boat arriving at Souragne, Ravenloft's Louisiana cum Haiti zombieland pastiche.

Of course, this is a Golden novel, so we're not going to escape having to read about a bunch of rapey male characters. In fact, we get our first abusive guy on the second page of the novel when we're introduced to Sardan, an actor who likes to make the leading woman in the troupe's play sexually uncomfortable: “it was well-known that Liza couldn't stand Sardan. As a result, Sardan made it a point to turn every onstage kiss into a passionate one, taking a devilish glee in the fact that Liza had to pretend to enjoy it.” Yep, we're back in Ravenloft all right.

And back in Ravenloft we are indeed, as we're next introduced to the disturbing relationship between our heroine, the white-maned Larissa, and Raoul, her guardian and the captain of the showboat. From the way Raoul is initially described, it's clear that we're meant to take him as a figure of sexual power. “He was big in more than a physical sense,” the narration winks at us and lolls its tongue lasciviously. Furthermore, we're treated to the “flash of his sea-green eyes, the tightening of his sensual mouth, the clenching of his powerful, callused hands.” Since he's such an obviously virile specimen of manhood, it seems only natural that Larissa would want to ride him like a Shetland pony, but you know what turns it from bodice-ripper to stomach-churner? The fact that she calls him “Uncle” throughout the first third of the novel.

Psycho-sexual Ravenloft: Knight of the Black Rose III

Speaking of what a weird-ass pervert Strahd is, it turns out he likes to be the creamy filling in a big necromantic Oreo. You see, Soth has been injured fighting a dragon so Strahd offers to act as a conduit that transfers life force from some mortal mook to the deathknight. And make no mistake, Strahd likes being the monkey in the middle: “The look on Strahd's face told Soth that the vampire enjoyed the workings of this particular spell. Strahd's dark eyes rolled back and fluttered, showing only their whites. His pale cheeks flushed with color; his cruel mouth stretched into a wide smile of pleasure. The vampire's fangs had extended to their full length.” Extended, to their full length, no less.

At this point in the novel it is painfully clear what Lowder's biggest problem is with the narrative: everything that is happening is just him killing time (and page count) on the way to giving Soth his own domain in Ravenloft. Soth and his werebadger (!!!) pal go to Gundarak on a quest to use a supposed portal out of Ravenloft that amounts to nothing; Magda, the only character we can identify with because she's the only one with a reasonable worldview and graspable goals, buggers off in the middle of the night—never to reappear—because Lowder clearly just doesn't have a plot arc in mind for her. All of this is ultimately meaningless and the novel is really just running down the shot clock before it throws Soth into Sithicus.

Somewhat entertainingly, Soth uses a Bigby's Hand spell at the climax. I mean, come on, that joke just makes itself.

Ultimately, Soth's reoccurring problem is that he can see that he's walking into traps, but he's so dumb he blunders in anyway. This happens in Soth's back-story when he knows he's being tricked into leaving his quest to spare Krynn from the Cataclysm, and it happens again at the end of Knight of the Black Rose when Strahd walks Soth into the mists so that a new domain will form around him. The thing is, Strahd doesn't exactly have to get Machiavellian to maneuver Soth out of Barovia. Essentially, Soth says, “You're trying to trick me into entering the mists!” Strahd says, “Yep, I am.” Soth says, “Okay, see you later! Imma go into the mists now.” Soth is so hammer-headed that it is a wonder that Jander doesn't show up to put the moves on him.

I have to give Lowder credit, though, Knight of the Black Rose at least ends on a note that at least recycles some conventions found in Gothic literature. Nedargaard Keep is described as the unheimlich double of Soth's fortress in Krynn; it's almost like he castle he's familiar with, but the details are off just enough to drive him mad. Still, this bit is too little too late. Here's the Cliff Notes for the novel: “Strahd goes to Ravenloft, Strahd continues to perv, Soth gets stuck in Sithicus.” And that's all there is.

Psycho-sexual Ravenloft: Knight of the Black Rose II

Sadly, Lowder has as tin an ear as Golden does when it comes to writing dialog. “You have no idea how angry you've made me,” Soth sulks to Caradoc, his ghostly servant. Actually, Caradoc does have an idea of how angry Soth is, particularly as Soth has just crushed the skull of Caradoc's mortal remains under his boot and is currently throttling Caradoc with a mailed fist. (Yeah, Soth can strangle ghosts; don't think about that for too long.) Oddly, despite watching his child die in a fire, strangling a ghost is what gets Soth sucked into the mists of Ravenloft. Also, this nets us the weirdest description of the mists EVER: “It crept through the gaps in Soth's armor and rubbed against him like a monstrous cat. Tendrils of the milky stuff ventured into his ears and mouth and nose.” Like...a monstrous cat? Milky stuff going into his mouth? FUCKING RAVENLOFT!!!

And yet, it's neither Soth nor Strahd who turn out to be the creepiest character in the novel. Meet Andari, a gypsy youth who discovers his sister about to be raped by a boyar. Boy does that get him angry! Only he isn't angry at the rapist, he is mad that his sister's pleas of “No!” distracted him: “Look what you've done! Your screeching made me drop my violin!” The reason why Andari isn't angry about his sister's sexual assault is that he was the one to pimp her out in the first place; indeed, since his sister is putting up too much of a fight to be violated for money, he offers up some other members of his extended family for sexual defilement: “Or perhaps you would prefer the company of one of my cousins?” Yeah, that's right, gypsy pimps and prostitutes—it's like a Tiger Lillies song gone horribly wrong.

Even though we've just read Soth's back-story in that ridiculous opening prologue, we get it again when he visits the gypsy encampment. Soth doesn't like people looking in on his past (he likes to stay on the down low) so he flips out and burns the fortune teller's wagon down. If you recall how Soth treated his wife and child, this begins to look like a pattern of how Soth treats women: can't live with 'em, can definitely light them on fire. 

So where does Soth's rage toward women come from? Perhaps we can glean something from a description of Strahd reading Soth's mind: “Strahd ventured further, and a wave of seething hatred and impotent lust broke around him.” IMPOTENT LUST. Yeah, that kind of explains it. In fact, it explains why Soth smashes three tables, knocks down a bunch of doors, and squishes a bunch of Strahd's giant spiders—he is envious of anything that is hard. Soth not only needs Zoloft, he needs Viagra.

(Strahd keeps reading Soth's mind, by the way, because it fills him with “the perverse joy of a voyeur.” Fuck, Ravenloft is yucky.)

Psycho-sexual Ravenloft: Knight of the Black Rose I

The Prologue of James Lowder's Knight of the Black Rose is a back-story avalanche. Of course, the novel has to do something to introduce a well-known character like Lord Soth, but the rapid-fire summation of his career is particularly clumsy as a narrative technique. Still, there are some elements worth picking at here. Soth belonged to an order of goody-two-shoes knights and seems like he was the goodiest-of-two-shoes amongst them. He marries a noblewoman, builds a keep, quests around fighting evil, and basically lives a Dudley Do-Right lifestyle. Until he gets it on with an elf maiden he rescues from some ogres: “Soon after, they became secret lovers, though in doing so Soth broke both his sacred marriage vows and the Code of the Knights of Solamnia.” When the fact of Soth's transgression gets out, he's sentenced to death. Yeah, you read that correctly, the punishment for having a side piece in Krynn is death. Infidelity is literally a capital offense. Holy shitballs, the Dragonlance setting really was created by Mormons!

With the aid of some still-loyal knights, Soth escapes prison and heads back to his keep where he attempts to do the right thing. His wife having disappeared, he marries the elf lady, prepares to raise their child, and prays for guidance from the gods of good. Yet, for some unexplained reason, the other elf women that Soth rescued decide to play some mind games on him: “The elven women he had once rescued now poisoned his mind with intimations of his wife's infidelity.” Those bitches hate the playa, not the game. All of this results in Soth letting his wife and child burn in a fire before his very eyes, his elfbabe honey cursing him with her dying breath, and Soth emerging as an undead monster.

Already I've got grave concerns about where this novel is headed. Whereas Vampire of the Mists turned out to be The Confessions of a Justified Rapist, Knight of the Black Rose is starting out as a whole different kind of psycho-sexual Ravenloft. Where Golden's novel casually dropped squicky sexual descriptions in your lap like some unwanted, spittle-sodden dog's chew-toy, Lowder's fictive universe is one in which sexuality is wrong and must be punished. Hopefully this aspect of the novel is confined to this prologue of inherited Dragonlance drivel, but I don't have high hopes for where this book is about to take me.

...or maybe it will continue the trend already initiated by Vampire of the Mists. You see, much like Jander Sunstar, Soth has plans to re-animate Kitiara as his eternal companion that can only be described as “a bit rape-y” and “kind of necrophiliac-y": “After retreiving her corpse and trapping her soul, Soth planned to abandon the fight and return to Dargaard Keep. In the shelter of that hellish place, he could perform a rite that would make the highlord his un-living companion for all eternity.” Soth apparently isn't the only undead monstrosity that likes Kitiara's bodunkadunk; the deathless guardians of the Tower of High Sorcery seem to have groped her and stripped off her clothes as they killed her: “Her night-blue dragonscale armor had been stripped away by the tower's guardians, and her black, tight-fitting doublet was shredded, revealing her tan beneath.” All the dead guys love her; what a lucky gal!

Besides having literally unnatural designs on Kitiara, Soth can't stand thinking about the fact that Tanis has already tapped that ass; “Tanis had been one of Kitiara's many lovers,” he thinks as he attempts to duel Tanis to the death. We also get a view into the nature of Soth's curse, which turns out to be little more than run-of-the-mill depression: “Yet the death knight felt no joy at that realization; like many emotions, joy was denied him by his curse.” Take some Zoloft and get over it, Soth!

Psycho-sexual Ravenloft: Vampire of the Mists III

Things are starting to get a bit bizarre in general at this point in the book. Strahd and Jander play what seems like the weirdest board game two vampires could play with each other: “The Doe has reached the warren. According to the rules that gives me five more Kittens to introduce into play.” Oooookay. (Also, Strahd gets royally pissed off when Trina the werewolf messes with his pieces.) Characters are also starting to behave in ways that defy any pretense of characterization. Jander, despite having made a promise of honor to never enter into a particular room in Strahd's castle, declares that he had his fingers crossed the whole time and breaks in while Strahd is away. And what does he find in there? A centuries-old wedding cake. Yeah, Strahd is Ravenloft's Miss Havisham.

Speaking of Strahd, did you think we were going to get out of this novel with him playing his “organ” again? SUCKER! “One afternoon, he sough distraction by playing the organ. The diversion worked for a while, wrapping him up in its reverberating music that sang to his soul/ His fingers flew over the keys, coaxing chords that echoed his torment yet brought release from it.” So, Strahd gets bored, his “fingers flew” over his organ, and “coaxed” something out of it that 'brought release,” huh? Seriously, Golden? So much to answer for.

While Strahd is masturbating furiously, Jander continues to be a shit-heel. Jander asks Sasha to help him fight against Strahd, but Sasha replies that he has real responsibilities—like to the community he serves as a spiritual leader and as a husband-to-be. Jander, predictably, flies into a rage: “Jander's silver eyes flashed with anger. 'I don't want to hear about your responsibilities. I don't care about your fiancee.” Those are real quotes. He says these things in his out-loud voice instead of keeping them part of his inner dickhead monolog. Basically, he's a sociopath. Which makes you wonder, why doesn't he just mentally dominate Sasha into going along for the ride? Oh wait, that's right, because Sasha's a man and Jander only bends women to his will.

In a move that will surprise no one, it turns out that Strahd is the one responsible for driving Jander's dear Anna (the mentally ill woman he was ballin') into madness. In a convoluted “twist” that no reader could possibly give a fuck about, Anna is revealed to be a piece of Tatyana's soul that was transported from Barovia to the Forgotten Realms at the moment she jumped from the towers of Castle Ravenloft. That Strahd is the big villain all along was obvious; he's the only bad guy the novel ever mentions so it was clear he would end up being the Big Bad. What is a mystery for Jander was never a mystery for the reader. Golden is clearly no Agatha Christie.

Of course, the revelation of Strahd as the central villain comes about through an avalanche of back-story and flashback sequences. The only thing I really gleaned from it was this piece of advice I wish I could travel to Ravenloft and give to Strahd personally: Dear Strahd, if the girl you're obsessed with keeps calling you "Old One," either her name is Anna Nicole Smith and she's just being honest or she just isn't that into you.

Eventually Jander & co. confront Strahd in the crypts, and Strahd is driven off but not killed. For a climatic scene, it's utterly empty of any tension or real feeling of threat. Strahd buggers off to heal up so he can play with his organ some more, Jander realizes that Ravenloft has just been funnin' with him this entire time, and Sasha has to go into hiding. The best part about the end is that Jander dies. I just wish that had happened on page 2 of the novel and not page 239.

Cole did this and he wants you to know it is based on an actual picture of Jander.

Oh, and because we can't have nice things and because Ravenloft truly is a world that hates us, Jander is retconned back into unlife in some god-forsaked supplement. There is no justice, none at all.

Psycho-sexual Ravenloft: Vampire of the Mists II

Guess what? Surprise! Jander continues to be a real fuck-nugget! Despite swearing an oath to protect the burgomaster's daughter, he willingly goes with Strahd to her family's house, feeds on her sister, sits on his thumb while Strahd's minions kill everyone else in the house, and does absolutely nothing to stop Strahd from killing Anastasia before his very eyes. What a god-damn champ.

Aside from continually using his hypnotic powers to maneuver women into doing what he wants, we can also ascribe to Jander a pattern of making promises he doesn't even attempt to fulfill. Despite pledging to Anna that he would solve the mystery of her madness, he stays in Strahd's castle for TEN YEARS without doing much of anything. Seriously, he's got this sworn quest and he gardens at Strahd's place for ten fucking years instead of displaying a trace of follow-through.

Thus far I haven't really commented on Golden's writing. The best thing I can say about it is that it is workmanly. There are no attempts at artistry here, and I'm better off for it as they would definitely fail entirely. Her real weakness as an author is dialog; she has a tin ear when it comes to the way people actually talk to each other. Worse yet, out-of-place phrases slip into the prose. Anastasia describes her unborn child as “kicking like mad”; another character answers in the negative with a teenage mall-crawler's “Nope.”

Actually, I take that back. The worst thing about Golden's writing is her inability to resist the temptation that comes with a protagonist who is largely unaffected by the passing of years; that is, since Jander is a vampire she feels no qualms about advancing the novel's time-line by leaps and bounds. This has two very unfortunate effects: first, it results in secondary characters who aren't around long enough to be developed or for the reader to care about, and two, it really makes it seem like Jander is just loafing around Castle Ravenloft and not actually trying to solve the mystery that he pledged to see through.

Speaking of character development, Golden's Strahd is a bit of a furry. Toward the middle of the novel, Strahd brings his new werewolf girlfriend to the castle: “'She makes an excellent spy and a merry bedfellow.' He turned his attention back to the wolf.” Note that Strahd praises Trina's sexual prowess while she's in wolf form. Castle Yiffenloft, right? Also, soon after Jander has another in what are becoming a series of annoying and poorly-crafted flashbacks; this time, he recalls an incident where he was saved by a weredolphin. Let me type that out again in capital letters in case your mind repressed the word I just used: WEREDOLPHIN. Golden has included a weredolphin in her story. That is an amazing lapse of taste, judgment, and decency. Jander doesn't mention how fuckable the weredolphin was at least.

So, remember the Jander is some sort of shining, radiant elf guy? Well, he's so solar-powered that he gets mistaken for Lathander Morninglord, god of the sun, by a priest of that deity. It's important to Golden that we know that Jander isn't just shit-hot, he's as shit-hot as a god. This distresses Strahd a little bit; adopting a very 90210 pose he accuses Jander of upstaging him at some gala party that Strahd has thrown in his own honor. This, more than anything so far, illustrates what vampires are in Golden's novel: they are pick-up artists who peacock around and trick women into sleeping with them/letting them feed off them.

In what seems like a bizarre narrative misfire, Golden has the young cleric Sasha drown one of Strahd's vampire brides. At first I thought this was invoking the whole “vampires can't cross running water” thing, but the description really focuses on the water filling the vampire's mouth and nostrils—and Strahd explicitly states that someone drowned his vampire lady. Chew on that for a moment; I'm over two-hundred pages into a vampire novel and the author of said novel hasn't yet realized that vampires don't breath and therefore can't drown.

Psycho-sexual Ravenloft: Vampire of the Mists I

When I'm not blogging about my spooky elfgames, I teach courses on Gothic literature at a university. I'll be honest with you, the Gothic is often not the most literary of modes; it has never been a particularly respected literary form and its constituting novels were written by amateurs looking to capitalize on the mania for Gothic horror. As such, traditional Gothic literature was, in most cases, the disposable escapist, pot-boiler, mass market fiction of its day. I've slogged through a lot of it in my studies, and it has frequently been rough going.

So, I should be well-prepared to slog through the Ravenloft novels, right? Welcome to an ongoing series in which I attempt to fight my way through the official fiction of the Domain of Dread. Oh god what have I done. First up, Christie Golden's Vampire of the Mists.

The biggest hurtle in this story will likely be the protagonist, an elf vampire called Jander Sunstar. (What a name!) Jander is the Forgotten Realm's answer to Twilight's Edward: he feeds off of animals until the hunger gets to be too much for him...at which point he then feeds on the helpless inmates of an insane asylum (!!!). And that's not even the most problematic thing he does at the asylum; not content to merely take his sustenance from the disturbed, he actually falls in love with a woman who is clearly mentally handicapped. (But she's handicapped because of magic, so I guess that's okay?) Seriously, he visits her every night for ten years and eventually things get a bit physical. Physical, in an insane asylum where she is incarcerated for being mentally ill. Shades of Edward watching Bella sleep here. Also, while he doesn't sparkle, he's some sort of shining “gold elf” and his gaseous form is described as Joseph's Technicolor Dream Fart.

Of course, eventually Jander's lunatic gal-pal gets a fever and seems to be on the edge of death. Even clerical healing will not avail her. As a last-ditch attempt to keep his madwoman madame with him he tries to make her his vampire bride—but she refuses the curse of undeath. Enraged, Jander...flips out, turns into a wolfman, and kills every motherfucker in the place; seriously, he slays the madwomen and jailers, the innocent and the guilty alike. Which, obviously, leads him to be sucked into Ravenloft.

The sexual descriptions in the novel continue to be just fucking awful. Petya, our rogue-ish gypsy youth, has apparently made a career of professing his love to virginal girls so he can get up their skirts before skipping town—as he does with the burgomaster's daughter. “I like her, but I don't like-her-like-her,” is a faithful paraphrase of his rationale. And, if we had any doubt that women who are otherwise on-the-ball and clear-headed would become instantly wet at the sight of Jander, the young gypsy seer Marushka's clothes start falling off as she trades coy flirtations with our proto-Edward: “Marushka sat down beside him on the wooden bench and shrugged, her blouse slipping off one dark shoulder.” 

Also, let's not forget that Jander is a bag of dicks in vampire form. In what is the squickiest scene yet, Strahd sends Jander a young woman to feed from: “I am to tell you that I am untouched here – she placed a finger to her throat – and here – she cupped her hands about the mound between her legs.” Jander makes a big deal of telling the girl that he doesn't plan on hurting her, then uses his hypnotism power to take away her free will anyway because he's basically a self-justifying rapist.

By far the oddest psycho-sexual scene yet, however, occurs when Jander and Strahd bust out their flutes and pipe organs to have a vamp-bro jam: “A sweet, pure sound issued forth, a bird's call to the rumbling waterfall of Strahd's organ. The count looked up, and something like delight mingled with surprise on his pale face. Together, the vampires created spontaneous music. The clear tones of the flute danced and skittered like light over the organ's deep chords." I defy you to not read that as gay pr0n. At least they come away mutually satisfied: "Simultaneously they finished their songs..." If you know what I mean.