One aspect of my Southern Discomfort research I didn’t include in the online bibliography — parapsychology and related pseudoscience. Not that my magic is based on psi powers or the like, but the occultish beliefs of the early 1970s form a constant element of the background. The reason it’s not in the bibliography is that I was around in the 1970s and I was fascinated by that stuff. I didn’t need much reference reading.
As Thomas Hine puts it in The Great Funk, the dysfunctional aspects of the 1970s fueled an enthusiasm for trying all kinds of new things. New fashions. Radical experiments in TV, such as All in the Family. Jim Starlin’s mind-blowing Warlock run. Cults. And an explosion of interest in what would later be called New Age stuff, though a lot of it started in the late 1960s.
Erich Von Daniken told us aliens arrived on Earth in the Chariots of the Gods. The Bermuda Triangle became the subject of multiple movies. John Keel proposed UFOs, bigfoot and the Mothman were other-dimensional Strange Creatures From Time and Space. Serious physicists looked at whether quantum entanglement and other strange effects could explain psi-powers — if two particles could interact at a distance when they have absolutely no contact or connection, is telepathy or TK out of the question? As it turned out, this approach didn’t work better than any other effort to prove psi-powers are a thing.
Did you know plants can understand what we say and react when we talk about trimming them? At least according to Cleve Backster, an interrogator who tried hooking plants up to polygraphs — a notoriously unreliable device — and concluded they were conscious, intelligent, and reacted to our words.
I was way into all of that as a tween. Eventually I accepted there was no real evidence for any of that; heck, even at the time I could see holes in von Daniken’s arguments. Still, when I was 14 it was all incredibly cool, like a scientific revolution happening in front of me. I wasn’t alone in that feeling and there’s lots of stuff I haven’t even mentioned — Carlos Castaneda’s mysticism, reprints of James Churchward’s books about the lost continent of Mu — that I didn’t get into but others did. Lots of characters in Southern Discomfort are into this stuff too.
It’s known that Pharisee County is unusual. Sherman’s army marched around and missed them. Stories of night riders entering Pharisee and never returning home. A major snowstorm in early 1973 didn’t touch the county. And kudzu has never gotten a foothold there. Stories of the Pharisee Mystery began building up in the 1960s and as more newcomers move into the area, they’ve gained strength. And even a new name, “the Pharisee Triangle.” The Bermuda Triangle name wasn’t as common in 1973 as it would become but it was in circulation.
High-schooler and science nerd Susan Moreno is convinced the elves Olwen and Aubric MacAlister are really aliens straight out of Von Daniken (she has theories for a lot of the other weirdness as it develops). Maria makes reference to plant consciousness in one scene where the plants in a public park are trying to trap her.
There’s talk of tesseracts, dimensional rifts, supposed psychic Uri Geller. None of it essential but it does capture some of the flavor of the era. And that’s part of the point of writing historical fantasy.
Covers by Samantha Collins (top) and Jim Starlin. All rights to images remain with current holders.
