Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. (Getty Images.)

How does a literature blog respond to this past week’s ultra-depressing election of far-right wild guy Donald Trump as 47th President of the United States? Liar, grifter, felon, dictator wannabe, sexual predator, misogynist, racist, homophobe, non-reader…yes, that Donald Trump.

Well, a literature blogger could suggest a fact-based novel about how it came to pass that the ghastly Trump will again occupy the White House when that repulsive Republican should instead be occupying a jail cell. I’m not the person to author that book — I prefer to write about a cat happily occupying my apartment and life — but I can discuss some of the book’s main characters. Starting with…

Donald Trump himself: Born into a filthy rich family, he takes that one family fortune and turns it into six…business bankruptcies. Improbably becomes President in 2016. Loses reelection in 2020 to Democratic opponent Joe Biden, but Trump falsely claims he won via a “Stop the Steal” campaign that doesn’t stop Shohei Ohtani from stealing 59 bases in 2024. The 1994-born Ohtani accomplishes this feat despite not being a character in Haruki Murakami’s 1979 debut novel.

Mike Pence: The also-far-right (and judgmental Christian evangelical) vice president during Trump’s first presidential term subserviently does everything Donald wants for four years until refusing Trump’s order to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 election. The mob Trump subsequently goaded to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, ghoulishly threatens to hang Pence — who doesn’t recite lines from A Tale of Two Cities because Charles Dickens’ novel features a different method of execution.

JD Vance: Trump’s 2024 vice-presidential running mate first becomes famous for his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Vance around that time calls Trump “America’s Hitler,” but, seeing where the wind is blowing among Republicans, goes on to cravenly transform into a bootlicking toady for Trump. This pays off big time for Vance with Trump’s 2024 win, which also makes the grotesque JD an early favorite to become the 2028 Republican nominee for President…of The Bootlicking Toady Society. Not to be confused with Mary Ann Shaffer’s and Annie Barrows’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Mitch McConnell: The scheming but spineless Republican U.S. Senate leader initially denounces Trump for the January 6 riot, but doesn’t support the subsequent impeachment effort — dooming it to failure. That gives Devil in a Blue Suit (Trump) a political lifeline that helps Donald’s eventual return to power. Democrats prefer Devil in a Blue Dress, the Walter Mosley novel.

Merrick Garland: Biden’s 2020-2024 attorney general is so wimpy and cautious that the dawdling Democrat waits too long to try to bring Trump up on criminal charges for “Stop the Steal,” January 6, and more. Garland’s cowardly slowness makes Marcel Proust’s 4,215-page In Search of Lost Time feel like a quick read.

Joe Biden: A pretty good President in the domestic-policy area, partly thanks to the work of such people as progressive U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. But Biden’s continual arming of Israel’s brutally disproportionate assault on Gaza after Hamas’ brutal October 7, 2023, attack is a major blot on Joe’s record. Also, Biden had originally implied he’d be a one-term President but, despite advancing age and obvious cognitive decline, wrongly decides to seek reelection — short-circuiting a chance for a real 2024 Democratic primary that could have strengthened Kamala Harris or another candidate. The annual Jack Reacher novel is published anyway.

Kamala Harris: After Biden is finally forced from the 2024 race weeks after a disastrous debate performance against Trump, Vice President Harris becomes the nominee. She’s in tune with the majority of Americans on a number of issues such as reproductive rights, but being a woman and person of color doesn’t help in a country filled with so much sexism and racism. Harris runs a good, part-populist, part-anti-corporate campaign for a while — and makes the excellent choice of progressive Tim Walz as her vice-presidential running mate — but then tacks too right-center/Wall Street-friendly at a time when many Americans want change, are hurting economically, and distrust outsized corporate power. Of course, Trump is infinitely worse (including being even more corporate-captured) but still wins. So much for that — my could-be-wrong analysis, and the title of a novel by (Ms.) Lionel Shriver.

The Muse: Why did Trump win? Among the reasons: he’s perversely entertaining, doesn’t sound like a programmed politician, gives his supporters permission to be their worst selves, has a powerful right-wing political and media ecosystem behind him, and gets endless coverage from the mainstream media because that boosts their audiences and profits. Much of the media, and many Americans in general, are attracted to…the call of the wild — far-right wild guy Trump, and the title of the novel by Jack London.

Misty the cat says: “I’m where O. Henry will soon write ‘The Last Leaf’ again.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about Trump’s depressing win and more — is here.

The Chateau d’If, where Edmond Dantes was imprisoned in The Count of Monte Cristo.

Betrayal is a Harold Pinter play, and betrayal in novels is the subject of this blog post.

Literature with a betrayal element can make for intense reading. We feel sympathy for the betrayed, anger at the person doing the betraying, curiosity about whether the betraying person will get their comeuppance, and more.

The Bad Daughter, a Joy Fielding novel I just finished, includes plenty of betrayal — most notably perpetrated by a vile real-estate developer who betrays his son by marrying that son’s fiancée and at the same time betrays one of his daughters because that fiancée was also the daughter’s best friend. Is the father’s betraying action why he gets shot in the book? The Bad Daughter is a suspenseful page-turner with several skillful red herrings, but is unfortunately marred by a surprise ending that doesn’t feel believable.

Another nasty/betraying dad not respectful of boundaries is Fyodor Karamazov, who’s enamored with the same woman (Grushenka) his son Dmitri is in love with in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Monumentally betrayed is Edmond Dantes, who’s framed for a crime he didn’t commit in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. A long imprisonment and epic revenge ensue.

Another 19th-century classic containing a memorable betrayal is George Eliot’s Silas Marner, whose title character is done wrong by his supposed best friend. This devastates Silas and changes the trajectory of his life in two profound ways — one bad and one good.

Modern fiction offers many other betrayals in addition to those in The Bad Daughter. For instance, the title character in Toni Morrison’s Sula and Nel are best friends when growing up, but Sula later has an affair with Nel’s husband. In Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, a cowardly Amir betrays his friend Hassan by not intervening when Hassan is attacked — and Amir’s longtime guilt subsequently drives the plot. Ian McEwan’s Atonement features a teen girl who betrays her older sister and that sister’s boyfriend by not-so-mistakenly accusing him of a rape he didn’t commit.

Betraying one’s country is also a thing, as Benedict Arnold did during the Revolutionary War. Arnold is among the real-life American notables who have cameos in Diana Gabaldon’s (mostly) 18th-century-set Outlander series.

Any thoughts about, and/or other examples of, this theme?

By referencing a memoir during his leashed walk this morning, Misty the cat doesn’t betray book readers. (Alternate quip to the one on YouTube: “From Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day to Misty the cat’s The Remains in the Bray.”)

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about Columbus Day vs. Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and with more about a possible moratorium on artificial-turf fields — is here.

Flying without an airplane in The Master and Margarita. (Screenshot by me.)

Most novels are basically realistic, but quite a few others — including those in genres such as sci-fi, fantasy, time travel, and ghost fiction — are, shall we say, imaginative.

Then there novels that fall somewhere in between: containing a little or a lot of the magical/supernatural, yet also grounded in actuality — making for a potentially fascinating mix. Those hybrid-ish books are the subject of today’s blog post.

I just read Elin Hilderbrand’s The Matchmaker, an excellent novel about the life and work of Nantucket woman Dabney Kimball Beech — whose long-ago love returns to the Massachusetts island after 27 years as a foreign correspondent. All is pretty much realistic, except Dabney has the power of knowing if a potential couple is or isn’t made for each other by the color of an aura she sees surrounding them. Dabney has “arranged” 42 still-intact marriages over the decades — even as her daughter Agnes is in a toxic relationship that Dabney had warned against. What happens with them and other characters makes for compelling reading of the uplifting and tragic variety.

Another supernatural-type moment in an otherwise mostly realistic novel is when the title character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre hears Edward Rochester’s anguished voice from a distance way too far to have actually heard his voice. A reader might initially think this pivotal occurrence was Jane’s imagination, but the novel makes it clear it wasn’t.

All-too-real domestic violence perpetrated by a brutal police officer against his wife is a major focus of Stephen King’s novel Rose Madder, but things eventually take a turn to the fantastical when people can literally enter a painting. Which reminds me of Jasper Fforde’s novel The Eyre Affair, in which people can literally enter the pages of Bronte’s aforementioned classic.

Then there’s “magical realism” — the very name of which says this genre of fiction combines the material and the mystical. For instance, some people fly in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the character Clara in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits possesses paranormal powers. Also, “father of magical realism” Jorge Luis Borges wrote short stories that included such things as a library of infinite size.

In Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, there’s also a character who flies sans airplane — as well as a magical skin ointment that creates invisibility and, most notably, the appearance of Satan among humans.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series? Mostly set in the wizard world, but there are also various scenes in the human (Muggle) world where a young Harry lived for more than a decade.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Not ghost fiction but ghost fact: In the video below, my cat Misty encounters a pre-Halloween decoration during his daily leashed walk this past Friday morning. 

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a problematic former mayor who’s running for governor, the welcome possibility of a moratorium on artificial-turf fields, and more — is here.

This photo by my human Dave is misleading because the novel on my cat tree is NOT sleep-inducing.

It’s been nearly two months since I, Misty the Cat, guest-wrote a “Dave Astor On Literature” post, so the Time has come. Or was it Newsweek that arrived?

Speaking of legacy media, Cat Fancy magazine ended in 2015 — the same year of my feline birth. That’s almost as coincidental as Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes both dying in April 1616. Cervantes of course wrote Don Quixote, the saga of a kitty-knight-errant who swats at windmills; and Shakespeare penned Much Ado About Nothing, about the overreaction to me swatting Dave off his chair so I could gain access to his computer.

Anyway, why is this blog called “Dave Astor on Literature”? Does my male human sit atop novels rather than read them? “Misty the Cat on Ten Folded Blankets” is more like it. But I prefer 15 folded blankets for maximum sleeping comfort.

When not napping, the novel I read most recently was Gore Vidal’s The Smithsonian Institution — set in 1939 as World War 2 neared, but with much mind-bending manipulation of time. Quite satirical and historical and philosophical and fantastical. Heck, in the 1998-published book, dead U.S. presidents and other museum exhibits even come to life! Which is more than I can say about my little stuffed mousies that don’t move unless I swat them.

Don’t assume that I successfully swat everything. I once tried to knock War and Peace off the dining-room table, but couldn’t move it. Dave needs to buy one of Tolstoy’s novellas.

I particularly enjoy novellas that contain only one word. The plot and character development are a bit lacking, but I finish them quickly enough to get on with the important things in life — such as swatting the “e” off Dave’s computer keyboard. Which lxads to sxntxnces likx the onx I just typxd.

In more positive news (besides me putting back the “e” key), the most recent Liane Moriarty novel came out last month and I can’t wait to read it. It’s called Here One Moment, and it joins a long line of excellent Moriarty books that also include — among others — Apples Never Fall (unless I swat them from the tree). And it’s worth mentioning that the kitty editions of Moriarty’s Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers are titled Big Litter Lies and Nine Purrfect Strangers.

Then, on October 22, comes the latest Jack Reacher thriller by Lee Child and Andrew Child. That one’s called In Too Deep, which reminds me of when I briefly stepped in a 1/16th-of-an-inch puddle during one of my outdoor leashed walks. The post-traumatic stress disorder lasted for 61 hours. Tee-hee — the name of my favorite Reacher novel.

Reacher is 6’5″ and 250 pounds, which is also my size after I gobble several cat treats.

The Reacher books are escapist, mass-market fiction — albeit as well-crafted as my high-quality cat tree pictured in the photo atop this post. True literature is by an author such as George Eliot, who, like George Sand, was a woman. Female novelists, especially long-ago ones, would sometimes use male pen names to have a better chance in the publishing realm of a patriarchal world. Eliot’s real name? Mary Ann Evans. Sand’s real name? The tongue-twisting Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil. George Washington’s real name? Geddy Lee. Sorry — had to get a reference in this post to the band Rush, even though Geddy sang “Vital Signs” rather than “Vidal Signs.” Still, I think Gore Vidal signed some copies of The Smithsonian Institution.

Dave will guest-write replies to comments to allow me, Misty the Cat, the time to swat unwanted marketing pitches from the WordPress spam folder into the WordPress trash folder.

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — also written by Misty the Cat, but completely different — is here.

Some famous novels just don’t live up to the hype for some readers.

My latest experience with this involved Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, a bestseller that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and, as of today, had amassed a whopping 228,425 reviews on Amazon — with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Not that I disliked Doerr’s 2014 book when I finally read it last week; I’d give it a B. But I was expecting more — more transcendence, perhaps.

As a number of you know, All the Light We Cannot See is a World War II novel that alternately focuses on gifted blind French girl Marie-Laure and German prodigy Werner, who was pulled into the Nazi war effort for his radio expertise. Will the two teens eventually meet?

Among my disappointments with the novel: Too long for its content. Writing that was periodically beautiful while periodically straining too hard to be beautiful. Constant jumping around in time that seemed unnecessary. Not as much dramatic tension as the circumstances would warrant. Some hard-to-believe coincidences. More than one major unresolved plot line. Etc.

I did like that the main part of the novel’s conclusion defied expectations. And, along with several interesting secondary characters, the young Marie-Laure and the young Werner were quite well-drawn amid the carnage of World War II’s battlefields.

Which reminded me of the title of this 2024 song:

Anyway, my feeling about All the Light We Cannot See is just one reader’s opinion; many people obviously love Doerr’s bestseller. But I have personally found quite a few World War II novels to be more compelling — among them several Erich Maria Remarque titles, Elsa Morante’s History, Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale, Kate Quinn’s The Huntress, Leon Uris’ Mila 18, and Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance, to name a few.

Another well-regarded novel that disappointed me was also a Pulitzer winner: Marilynne Robinson’s 2004-published Gilead, about a minister and his much younger second wife. I found a lot of the book boring — and its May-December marriage off-putting. Not my expected reaction given that I loved Robinson’s 1980 debut novel Homecoming. (Gilead was the author’s second book despite not arriving until 24 years later.)

Then there’s Mardi, a Herman Melville novel I finally read in 2022. Though it started quite well, and had some great writing, it eventually became overlong and tedious. After having previously read most of Melville’s novels, novellas, and short stories, it became my least favorite work of his.

A year later, in 2023, I very belatedly got to Dan Brown’s mega-bestseller The Da Vinci Code. An intricately plotted page-turner, but the often-clunky writing kept me from becoming completely engrossed.

When an author writes a masterpiece, another masterpiece is not super-likely to be in the offing. Such was the case with Amor Towles, whose A Gentleman in Moscow is absolutely terrific. I then read Towles’ The Lincoln Highway, which was excellent but didn’t reach the same rarified heights.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has been widely acclaimed for, among other reasons, its rather quirky “third person present tense” writing style. I did kind of admire that approach (as well as the author’s prodigious research), but found the historical novel to be periodically confusing as I wended my way through…its rather quirky “third person present tense” writing style.

In a somewhat-related 2019 post, I mentioned several other novels that didn’t live up to my expectations — though I thought they still ranged from good to very good. They included Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and John Updike’s Rabbit, Run.

Any thoughts about, or examples of, this theme?

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about the start of fall, a new library director, a new fire chief, and more — is here.

Edgemont Park in my town of Montclair, New Jersey. (Photo by me, 9-21-2024.)

I’m doing something different for this week’s blog post — reprinting my local “Montclairvoyant” humor column from this past Thursday, September 19. Why? This particular Montclair Local piece melds news in my New Jersey town with a literature theme. Some of my local references will not be understood by non-Montclair residents, but I think the column will still be an entertaining read as various famous novels and authors are mentioned.

My weekly Local column is always in a question-and-answer format — with me doing both the asking and the replying. So, I’m conversing with myself. Obviously, I have some psychological issues. 🙂

As usual with my weekly Sunday literature blog posts, there’s a link to my weekly Thursday humor column at the very end of today’s piece, where you can see local reader comments and my replies. Some weeks just a few exchanges, other weeks many.

DEAR MONTCLAIRVOYANT,

Montclair’s government operates under the Faulkner Act, which was explained at a recent meeting hosted by our two councilors-at-large. That Act gives a township manager lots of power, right?

Sincerely,

Clare Mont

Too much power, as granted by an Act named after late Montclair mayor Bayard Faulkner rather than author William Faulkner, whose 1932 novel Light in August chronicled 31 Montclair sunrises last month.

DEAR MONTCLAIRVOYANT,

Not true. But the Faulkner Act makes me think that other forms of local government could be named after novelists. Some examples, please?

Sincerely,

Nitwit for Lit

I’ll start with the Jane Austen Act, which mandates that 21st-century councilors wear clothes from the 1810s and put a needed-but-expensive new Municipal Building and Police Headquarters in Mansfield Park.

DEAR MONTCLAIRVOYANT,

There’s no such park in our town. What about the Stephenie Meyer Act, named after the author whose Twilight vampire novels have a high school setting?

Sincerely,

There Will Be Blood

That Act forbids Council meetings from taking place the same evening as Back to School Night, which was held at Montclair High on September 11. So, none of the impressive teachers that evening wore Dracula baseball caps.

DEAR MONTCLAIRVOYANT,

Are Dracula baseball caps even a thing? What about the Toni Morrison Act, named after the author of such novels as Beloved and Jazz?

Sincerely,

Sula Solomon

That form of government prevented the talented musicians at September 14’s Montclair Jazz Festival from going into executive session.

DEAR MONTCLAIRVOYANT,

A day later, the September 15-to-October 15 National Hispanic and Latino Heritage Month began, and it’s being celebrated in various ways in and near Montclair. Your thoughts as the parent of a Guatemalan-American daughter?

Sincerely,

Latina Heritage, Too!

I’m reminded of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Act that allows a resident’s OPRA request to remain hidden for One Hundred Years of Solitude before the requested public records are released.

DEAR MONTCLAIRVOYANT,

That seems exaggerated. On September 18, a special election was held to fill the seat of the late U.S. Rep. Donald Payne Jr. in a congressional district that includes part of Montclair. Is there a form of government that evokes a political novel?

Sincerely,

G.O. Peeved

Yes, the Robert Penn Warren Act named after the All the King’s Men author born early enough (1905) to walk from his native Kentucky to New York City for the 1910 opening of the old Penn Station.

DEAR MONTCLAIRVOYANT,

Penn Station and Robert Penn Warren are not related. What about the Marcel Proust Act?

Sincerely,

Remembrance of Pings Past

That Act, named after an author known for his LONG multi-volume opus In Search of Lost Time, codifies Council meetings that last more than five hours — a frequent occurrence in Montclair. After midnight, a pumpkin turns into another pumpkin.

DEAR MONTCLAIRVOYANT,

Interesting take on Cinderella’s transportation. Is there a form of government that allows a resident to make a Council meeting public comment when not physically present at a Council meeting? (A resident currently can’t do that in Montclair.)

Sincerely,

Peak Speak

The Alexander Pushkin Act allows virtual commenting, but only if the resident has the same name as Pushkin characters Eugene Onegin or Tatyana Larina.

DEAR MONTCLAIRVOYANT,

Seems rather limiting. Other current councilors besides Montclair’s at-large ones have also held or will soon hold community meetings. Is there an Act besides the Faulkner law that encourages those welcome meetings?

Sincerely,

Feedback to the Future

Not the Anne Bronte Act, because that author wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall rather than The Councilor at Edgemont Park House.

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which is reprinted in the above blog post — is here.

A petrifying poltergeist protagonist. (Getty Images.)

Halloween is still six weeks away, but I wanted to discuss novels and short stories that include ghosts (after having written somewhat-similar posts in 2016 and 2021).

Why? I recently finished Elin Hilderbrand’s The Hotel Nantucket, and while that compulsively readable 2022 novel includes many compelling characters and plot lines, the highlight might be the presence of a 1922-murdered ghost still floating around the book’s Massachusetts hotel in the 2020s. That specter is 19-year-old Grace Hadley, who is bitter, funny, mischievous, and good-hearted. She keeps up on 21st-century trends, too.

A brief interlude: Three more wonderful reviews of my Misty the Cat…Unleashed book have appeared! 🙂 Author/blogger Carolyn Haynes wrote one of them on September 8, “Purrs of Wisdom” blogger Ingrid King wrote another last month that I saw belatedly, and Geri Rombach wrote still another review for the current issue of Pet Scene magazine. Links near the end of this post. Thank you very much, Carolyn, Ingrid, and Geri! 🙂

Late last year, I read George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo — populated almost exclusively by ghosts stuck in purgatory, including President Lincoln’s recently deceased son Willie. An odd novel that’s not exactly a page-turner, but haunting.

Also a ghost of sorts hovering between life and death is Nora Seed of Matt Haig’s intriguing The Midnight Library, which I read in 2022. While in the cosmic library of the novel’s title, Nora experiences various personal timelines that might have been.

I read Toni Morrison’s famed modern classic Beloved a number of years ago, but somehow neglected to include it in my aforementioned 2016 and 2021 posts. The formerly enslaved Sethe believes there is a spirit named Beloved who is the deceased daughter she killed to prevent her from becoming a slave.

Novels and stories with ghosts mentioned in my 2016 and 2021 posts include — among others — Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (whose supernatural characters include the hilarious Peeves the Poltergeist), Edith Wharton’s many excellent ghost stories, Oscar Wilde’s humorous tale “The Canterville Ghost,” Graham Greene’s short shocker “Proof Positive,” and Dickens’ story “The Signal-Man.”

Ghosts in literature definitely give authors a chance to use their imagination, scare their readers, create dark humor, and more.

Any fiction with ghosts you’d like to discuss? And I should mention that ghosts rhyme with (blog) posts. 🙂

Carolyn Haynes’ review of Misty the Cat…Unleashed: 🙂

MOVED TO FRISSON!

Ingrid King’s review: 🙂

Review: Misty the Cat…Unleashed

Geri Rombach’s review: 🙂 It appears on page 35.

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which includes a weird take on a valuable baseball card, a welcome change in gas station ownership, a too-big townhouse proposal, and more — is here.

The career trajectories of novelists can be very different — depending on how many good ideas are in their brains, how prolific these writers are, their health, their lifespans, sales, critical acceptance, whether the authors do series or stand-alone books or both, etc.

A brief interlude to say that Rebecca Budd — the wonderfully skilled Canadian podcaster and blogger who often comments here and who many of you know — interviewed me about my 2024 Misty the Cat…Unleashed book. You can click on the link near the end of this blog post to listen to the conversation.

Back to this week’s trajectories theme…

There are of course “one-hit wonders” — with a single published novel during an author’s lifetime — such as Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights), Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind), and (if one considers Go Set a Watchman an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird) Harper Lee.

Then there are authors whose first or first few books are excellent and/or very successful before things either level off or go somewhat downhill. For instance, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s and Joseph Heller’s best books were their debut novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Catch-22, respectively.

Conversely, there are authors who start with so-so (at best) novelistic efforts and then quickly or more gradually hit their masterful strides. Examples of wordsmiths who took the fast-improvement route after mediocre debut books include Edith Wharton and Jack London (never thought I’d put those two in the same sentence 🙂 ). Those who did a slower build include Cormac McCarthy and Rosamunde Pilcher; actually, it wasn’t until she was in her 60s and had written more than 20 novels that Pilcher made a spectacular leap from good to great with The Shell Seekers.

Fyodor Dostoevsky started good (Poor Folk) and ended spectacularly (The Brothers Karamazov), with the amazing Crime and Punishment written in mid-career. George Orwell’s authorial career concluded with his two best novels: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Of course, Dostoevsky and Orwell died before becoming “senior citizens,” so they might have penned some lesser works if they had lived longer.

Authors who started strong, continued strong through mid-career, and then did less well or didn’t publish as much in their later years? Mark Twain is among those who come to mind.

I’m leaving out some “categories,” but I’ll end by mentioning a number of authors who started out fairly or very strong and then sustained or are continuing to sustain that skill level for virtually their entire careers. Charles Dickens and George Eliot are past novelists among that group.

Living writers who’ve been churning out one excellent novel after another for decades include — among various others — Joy Fielding, Kristin Hannah, Barbara Kingsolver, Walter Mosley, Outlander series author Diana Gabaldon, and Jack Reacher series author Lee Child (who is gradually turning over his thriller franchise to younger brother Andrew).

If anything, several of the authors listed in my previous paragraph are doing some of their best work during the past few years. For instance, the 1955-born Kingsolver’s latest book (Demon Copperhead) won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and her previous novel (2018’s Unsheltered) was terrific. I haven’t yet read the 1960-born Hannah’s latest novel (The Women) but her three releases before that (2021’s The Four Winds, 2018’s The Great Alone, and 2015’s The Nightingale) were among her very best. And the 1945-born Fielding hit home runs with Cul-de-sac (2021) and The Housekeeper (2022). I just read The Housekeeper, about a too-good-to-be-true aide who moves into the home of a gravely ill woman, and it’s a top-notch suspense thriller with a couple of knock-out surprises.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Rebecca Budd’s podcast: 🙂

Season 6 Episode 12: Misty the Cat . . . Unleashed: The Spirited Adventures and Amusing Antics of an Asthmatic Feline on the Loose

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about the start of the school year and another too-pricey new residential building in my town — is here.