The Outermost Season
During the coldest weeks of winter on the Outer Cape, when the year-rounders are hunkered down and trying to stay sane, the towns of Wellfleet and Provincetown might as well be islands north of the Arctic Circle...
Ever-dependable Elsie Bigelow has arrived on a fool’s errand. Pressed by her family in Maine to keep an eye on her dangerously beautiful brother, she has taken a job at a bookstore that involves fronting for the owner’s affairs.
Her life on indefinite hold, Elsie is frustrated and lonely––until a chance encounter with Viveka von Loftenburg, a Swedish Baroness and former starlet of 1970s Italian vampire movies. Vivacious, generous, and altogether outrageous, Viveka is far more cultured than her films would suggest. At turns mystified and fascinated, Elsie jumps into the older Viveka’s welcoming orbit, taking her first steps toward a creative education that stirs long-deferred instincts, but will it be a relationship with a crazy aunt, an artistic mentor or a life-altering love?
“When we took up the challenge posed by the original Provincetown Bookshop to come up with a novel set on the Outer Cape, we were more than aware that the task was a fraught proposition. But we immersed ourselves in stories told by old friends and relatives much closer to the cultures depicted. We made a list of elements to be touched upon, namely: the instinct to find love, community and creative expression amidst the grinding isolation, limited means, and pervasive addictions––all of which are explored further in The Outermost Year. But also the essential outrageousness of P-Town had to be present, even in the coldest patch of the year––hence Viveka von Loftenburg.
As for Hrefna Elsie Bigelow, the novel’s heart and soul, the decision to make her half-Icelandic (and that much more of an outsider) dates back to the original 1999 film project Off Season, where her character as well as Joe, Claire, and Dean’s first emerged. Many of the collaborators on the film were from Scandinavia, including the Icelander Elin P., who was originally going to play Elsie and managed a Maine accent better than most of the American actors in New York. The original Icelandic collaborators are no longer available, but their influence remains––fine-tuned with the help of Olöf Petursdóttir in France.”
Doc Crane
Dreaming of Freydis
WHAT MAKES A MYTH?
And how do those myths in turn shape us, sustain us, and sometimes prove to be our undoing?
These are the questions at the heart of DREAMING OF FREYDIS, a novel about two very different cousins from a gifted Danish family with a knack for re-invention and some hard memories of the Nazi Occupation.
Holly S. is a minor legend among the post-grads of late ‘90s Harvard Square. Soulful and cerebral, but without credentials in academia or the arts, her attempts at starting a creative career and being a flamboyant “Dane of her own making” have left her dismissed as an eccentric ex-pat. Holly falls back on her ongoing research on Leif Eiríksson’s heroically villainous sister Freydis––a lifelong fascination passed down from her uncle Karl, a renowned in-vitro pioneer and amateur archeologist who once practiced in Greenland.
Shadowing Holly is the recent success of her younger, Americanized cousin, Winnie. Tough and cocky, Karl’s daughter is in every way Holly's opposite, having evolved from a prep-school terror to a promising mountaineering and extreme sports star. But when a climbing expedition in Antarctica ends in disaster, forcing Winnie to make a ruthless decision, everything changes. Confronted with her notoriety, Winnie takes a recuperative corporate job in Greenland developing an alpine resort. Upon returning to her father’s old territory, Winnie turns inward, becoming obsessed with evidence that suggests an unnerving link between herself and Freydis.
It falls to Holly to sort out the truth and bring her cousin home, however she soon finds that Winnie’s feverish claims shroud wartime family secrets far darker than either of them could ever imagine.
Reading by Charlotte Sutherland
Nightfolk
Which is more frightening– Gothic Genre or a History of the Twentieth Century?
–because compared to the likes of Hitler or Stalin, Dracula might as well have been a quaint, country squire with a few fetishes…
While residing at an Adirondacks hotel in the winter of 1930, the socialite occultist and political intriguer W.A. Richardson surmised the existence of an ancient, preternatural people imbued with pervasive memories and vampiric proclivities. Describing them in his journal as “Travelers,” Richardson would witness the disappearance of Emily, a chambermaid who returns transformed, prompting a calamitous reaction from her husband Jack.
Fifty years later, disenchanted graduate student Fran Avery encounters a still youthful Emily. Drawn into her memories, Fran glimpses a legacy reaching back across the centuries to Medieval Scandinavia——beginning a metamorphosis of her own. Watched over by an aged, seething Jack, Fran contrives to find a way beyond her newfound instincts, her conscience retreating into past experiences and events where she soon gleans the costs of transcendence and redemption.
In the Magical Realist traditions of The Master and Margarita and The Tin Drum, Nightfolk departs from the Gothic genre into the mythic territories of legend and folklore, offering an intimate perspective from within the shadows of history.
Review by Belle Struck– There’s no point in saying that Nightfolk isn’t a vampire novel, but with the exception of one slip of the tongue, the word is never used. The preternatural people at the heart of the story are clearly that, (whether described as “Nättfolk,” or “Travelers,” or even “Nox Viatori,”) but where Ms. Saknusseneouw is offering an expansive and extremely impressionistic historical narrative, vampires with their long lifespans and contagious memories make for a nifty vehicle. Mind you, I’ve never come across any previous nosferatu lore that involved shedding memories, but it’s a flexible metaphor, promising nocturnal locales and predatory glamour, although in Nightfolk the vampires are far less predatory than some of the mortals and movements they come across over the centuries. This is a point made right from the prologue, a journal entry by a boozy old codger named Richardson, whose florid prose style veers between H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft. Sitting out the Depression in an Adirondacks hotel, Richardson sets the story in place, recounting the tale of Emily and Jack, a destitute couple that could be out of a Frank Capra film. When Emily is transformed from a chambermaid into an otherworldly ingénue, her mousy, everyman husband Jack also changes, his puritan instincts curdling with repulsion and desire– turning him into a Paul Bunyan-like recluse.
Transformations abound in Nightfolk. This is clearly where Ms. Saknusseneouw’s fascination lies, for the central character, Fran Avery, is in a process of metamorphosis throughout the novel. Fran starts out a seething upper-middle class WASP who has just ditched her crunchy boyfriend during the summer of 1979. Fran is only too ready to put the liberal seventies behind her. She is craving reaction if not outright tyranny, her instincts aligning with Sylvia Plath’s lament of “women adore a Fascist.”
So when Fran meets a still very-young Emily, and is lured into her universe with it’s invasive memories, she will indeed get to meet Fascists, among them Jack. One can picture Fran evolving into a kind of Ann Coulter if she made it into the Reagan Era–if she stayed on in what the novel calls “the Natural World.” But upon being transformed, Fran passes through a succession of memories and consciences, effectively becoming a time traveler. Along the way, Fran finds a conscience of her own, and tries to forestall morphing any further by becoming a Rip van Winkle.
During her long, long sleep, she glimpses a number of periods, some iconic, such as the French Revolution and the London Blitz, other eras are obscure, involving long-forgotten revolutions, pogroms, and cocktail parties– with the Nightfolk forever watching from the sidelines. A few of the Nightfolk that Fran encounters are indeed quite dangerous, while others are discreetly hapless, or have simply seen too much. More often it’s the mortals of the daylight hours who are out of control, especially Emily’s ancient husband Jack, whose crazed pursuit of redemption over the years assumes monstrous proportions. Jack is a complicated fellow. He starts fires, fights fires, and then embraces a homegrown Fascist group in the early ‘30s only to kill hundreds of Germans when war comes. As hard as Jack tries to purge himself, he can never shake off his attraction for Emily– a fact that Richardson, even as a ghost, repeatedly teases him about.
History, for Ms. Saknusseneouw, seems to be an ongoing process of waking up a relic, no longer relevant, while the people who have stayed on have changed beyond recognition, possessed by events, ideologies, and misguided piety.
The result is a web of mythic tangents, as Nightfolk plays out like a dreamy labyrinth– making for a rather cracked morality tale.
On January 5, 1931, the socialite occultist and political intriguer W. Arthur Richardson sat down for a newsreel interview. It would be the last public record he would offer, drawing from a diary that forms the beginning of NIGHTFOLK.
The Last Passions of Myron the Woodchuck
Love is hard in this fable about a Vermont meadow, but it’s much harder when you fall for someone who can devour you…
Although not for children, The Last Passions of Myron the Woodchuck follows in the storytelling traditions of Beatrix Potter, E. B. White, and Shirley Jackson, offering a world of fated romance amidst the plots and schisms of a northeastern animal kingdom.
