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I picked up MONSTERS AND MAD SCIENTISTS: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie by Andrew Tudor to see if it had any insight into Dr. Jekyll (I think it does, though I’m not sure what yet). Tudor takes the analytical approach of counting mad scientist and mad science films from the 1930s through the 1980s and looking at how science and scientists are treated. He concludes that while the 1930s were keen on Misguided Visionaries, later mad scientists are likely to be Pure Evil and science itself exists as a threat without a mad scientist figure (e.g., radiation-spawned monstrosities of the 1950s). While it wasn’t a point the book brought up it did make me realize one difference between Jekyll and Frankenstein is that it’s much harder for Jekyll to destroy the monster he’s created.

BROKEN WORDS: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics by Jonathan Dudley, argues that although evangelical conservatives insist their claims about abortion, evolution, homosexuality, etc. are based on the word of God, they ignore that it’s their interpretations of the Bible and that it’s open to be interpreted in other ways (as Mark Noll has written, both abolitionists and slaveowners cited the Bible prior to the Civil War). Raised evangelical, Dudley is horrified at the turn to the right his wing of the faith has taken, though he points out that liberal evangelicals are prone to the same weakness.

TWO-GUN WITCH by Bishop O’Connell has an elven bounty hunter in the post-Civil War West (I had a depressing feeling this was going to go with “elves are the Native Americans in this world” but no, they coexist and are both discriminated against) hunt down an unspeakably evil magus who turns out to be artificially tainted with dark magic. But who could do that? What would they stand to gain? This was a good read, though more leisurely-paced and character-centric than I expect from a weird western.

I was less entertained by Richard Kadrey’s THE EVERYTHING BOX which feels like an unsuccessful attempt to knock off Good Omens. In the aftermath of Noah’s flood, an angel assigned to wipe out the survivors loses the accursed box of plagues he was given for that purpose; in the modern world, a thief, his poltergeist sidekick and an FBI agent all get involved in the hunt for the McGuffin. Everything from the banter to the inept angel felt too familiar to keep going with this one.

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Oct. 27, the day we adopted our dogs.

Here’s Trixie in the cage when I first saw her, five pounds sopping wet. I knew she was special even then.

Here’s Plushie right after we took him home.

Here’s a couple of more recent photos.

As a couple, TYG and I have had them in our lives longer than we lived without them. I know someday we’ll have to go on without them, but hopefully it’ll be a few more years yet.

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Part of what I got when Dad passed was several old reports from my early schooling (in England, despite the Brooklyn name). Here’s one of them.

I would have been seven, in case you’re wondering.

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I post covers! First by Barye Phillips.

A woman in trouble on an uncredited cover.

This one’s by Lawrence Stern Stevens

Rudy Nappi provides this one. From what I know of the novel (not much) it’s not as outrageously sexy as the cover makes it look.

And another uncredited cover to wrap up.

#SFWapro. All rights to images remain with current holders.

Because women don’t need to think about it, now that he’s going to be their protector. I’m astonishingly unconvinced. Indeed, I highly recommend thinking about abortion a lot as a reason to keep Trump and Vance out of office next month.

“10 year-olds mandated to give birth. Miscarriage patients being arrested. Women forced to carry doomed pregnancies to term, turned into ‘walking coffins’. Why do they hate us so fucking much?” Jessica Valenti asks. ” They expect doctors to watch patients deteriorate into sepsis, and pregnant cancer patients to forgo radiation. They’re passing laws that have women losing fallopian tubes and uteruses, while directing OBGYNs to give patients with life-threatening pregnancies c-sections rather than a ten minute abortion. There’s no talking point that can explain away that cruelty, no political stance to make sense of the horror. They want us to suffer, and they don’t care if we die.” So get mad. Stay mad.

Do not buy their argument that drafting men for war is no different than denying women abortion. I’m not a fan of the draft and if we ever had one again it should apply regardless of gender—but as of today, it’s been 50 years since anyone’s been drafted (though forcing soldiers to stay in the military via “stop loss” in the Iraq war was also bad). Women are dying and suffering physical injury right now. And “men get drafted so women shouldn’t get abortions” is not a good argument. See also this old post of mine.

Nor is there any grounds for Ron DeStalinist in Florida demanding TV stations not run ads supporting an abortion rights amendment. He’s doing it anyway because stories of what women are suffering are effective and he wants them to stop. Why care about free speech when Ron has a political career to boost?

When JD Vance or anyone talks about a “minimum national standard” for abortion laws, don’t be fooled. What he means is a national ban—maybe not a total 100 percent ban but a universal 12-week or 6-week minimum with states free to go more draconian if they choose. They were always lying about leaving it up to states to decide. Vance also has no qualms about the federal government stopping women traveling for abortions. Just as Trump not only had no qualms putting anti-abortion justice Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, he worked to cover up Kavanaugh’s alleged history of assault: “It would have been grisly enough if Trump had merely continued to support Kavanaugh in spite of the allegations. But that is not what he did. He actively helped to suppress the truth about him.”

Vance also says he supports defunding Planned Parenthood. Never mind that it provides women with lots of low-cost health and ob/gyn services, not just abortion: they hate the idea of birth control and planning parenthood just as much. And they’re happy to track women’s pregnancies and miscarriages to make sure they’re not getting away with something — not a new idea either.

All things considered, I salute New Jersey for proposing travel advisories for state residents alerting them to which states it’s not safe to be pregnant. But I want to make it safe in more places, for more women. Vote Republicans out in November or vote to keep them getting in. It’s literally life or death.

Inevitably my movie book research runs into films that are just marginally relevant to the subject, the kind of thing that might fit in an appendix, or maybe skipped altogether.

HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945) marked the end of the Universal horror era that began with Frankenstein and Dracula. Kindly Dr. Edlemann (Onslow Stevens) finds himself treating Dracula (John Carradine) to restore his humanity, unaware the vampire’s real agenda is to seduce Edlemann’s nurse (Martha O’Driscoll). Edlemann’s main research is into using a fungus-derived treatment to make bones soft and malleable. This could cure his hunchbacked nurse Nina (Jane Adams) and Wolf Man Larry Talbot — it turns out the cause of lycanthropy is that Talbot’s skull is too tight around his brain (?). Oh, and Talbot and Edlemann discover the body of the Frankenstein monster which they bring to the lab but the doctor wisely refuses to reanimate … until Dracula gives the doctor a transfusion of his blood, which gives him an insane split personality. As I thought, there’s nothing terribly Jekyll/Hyde-like in this (though the nightmare Edlemann goes through may have been inspired by a similar sequence in the Spencer Tracy Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) but it’s the closest Universal came to adapting Stevenson during its peak monster years.

The results are a poor shadow of the company’s great horror films, particularly the Frankenstein creature: Glenn Strange spends the whole time lying on a laboratory table, then dies in some stock footage. Still, the cast does its best and Universal’s eerie mansions always look great. “I don’t like people who break their promises, Mr. Talbot.”

Mr. Roberts was a classic film in which Henry Fonda plays an officer on a dispirited WW II Naval vessel shipping supplies between Pacific bases while battling the tyrannical captain (James Cagney) and finding camaraderie with Ensign Pulver (Jack Lemmon) and ship’s doctor William Powell. The sequel, ENSIGN PULVER (1964), has no Mr. Roberts and replaces Lemmon and Cagney with Robert Walker (better known as Star Trek‘s Charlie X) and Burl Ives (Walter Matthau as the doctor is fine). The plot concerns Pulver struggling to fill Roberts’ shoes and mostly failing; what got my attention is that on movie night the captain always wants to watch the fictitious monster mashup, Young Dr. Jekyll Meets Frankenstein, created primarily by chopping up bits of Boris Karloff in The Walking Dead and adding a couple of shots of Morgan Paul as Young Jekyll. Not significant enough in any way to include in the book and not particularly good. “Alexander the Great conquered half the world just to show up to his father — but he still conquered it.”

HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1958) opens with a woman using a pair of gift binoculars only to discover they’re booby-trapped with needles that drive through her eyes into her brain. It’s one of several spectacular unsolved murders and arrogant true-crime writer Bancroft (Michael Gough) is ripping into Scotland Yard for not solving them — especially when the killing weapons are modeled on Scotland Yard’s own black museum of criminal memorabilia.

It turns out, however, that Bancroft is behind the killings, both to eliminate some inconvenient people and to give himself material for his writing. While his crippled leg seems to disqualify him, it turns out he’s been using his young aide Rick (Graham Cunrow), hypnotizing him and injecting him with Dr. Jekyll’s formula (unusual to have it an injection rather than something to drink) to turn him into an obedient assassin (“It is reality born out of legend, truth out of myth!”).

The murders shock but the film is more unpleasant than entertaining and not particularly intelligent; Jekyll’s formula feels completely unnecessary to the plot but it definitely qualifies the film for the appendix, if nothing else. “In every war, the historian receives more money than the foot soldier.”

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Not quite a day that dropped out of time, but close.

I had multiple appointments that day: taking dogs to the groomer with TYG; donating blood; and my biannual eye checkup. As I’d allowed for one day off in my September schedule, that seemed like a good day to take it. I got up and read in the morning, then we took the dogs in. 90 minutes after that I was at the Red Cross … where 30 minutes after arrival, the check-in process hadn’t even started. Given how long donating takes, it was obvious I couldn’t get it done in time to pick up the dogs and reach the eye doctor so I left. I rescheduled for next week.

Then we got the pups. As usual Plushie looked even fluffier and cuter than before. Trixie doesn’t change much.

Then off for my eyes. I’d picked a time late in the day in the assumption it would be a work day and that would eat up the least amount of work time. Apparently whatever delays and walk-ins they were dealing with had come home to roost because it took a couple of hours (mostly waiting) to get through everything. I made the next appointment for early morning — I’ll see if that goes smoother.

I had a productive work week, though less of that was my own stuff than I’d planned. The Local Reporter had an urgent need for extra articles so I wound up doing three: one on plans for 164 acres of government-owned land, the Carrboro community’s opposition to paid downtown parking, and discussions of both abortion rights and tree removal. The latter had probably one of the strongest opening lines I’ve ever used: “I am a member of the community who will require an abortion if I become pregnant or else I will bleed out and die.” (also one of the most horrific things to hear, even though I know, in the abstract, such things are true).

That sucked up way more time than I’d planned to spend on newspaper work (though I get paid for all of it, of course). With one day off on top of that, I got nothing done on Southern Discomfort but I did get quite a bit of rewriting done on Jekyll and Hyde. The silent-film chapter is now in much better shape, plus I rewatched the March and Tracy versions from 1932 and 1941, thinking about how they look in context of the subgenre overall. I’ll have some thoughts probably next week.

Over at Atomic Junk Shop I wrote about an odd bit of nostalgia from 1969, and some DC stories from the same era, including a failed attempt to give DC its first black superhero (art by Nick Cardy).

And that was my week. A little frustrating, a little productive. Oh, and my eyes are in great shape, so yay.

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We’ve tried buying a couple of different scratching posts to divert Wisp from tearing up our furniture. The latest one doesn’t attract her claws, but after sprinkling catnip on it —

Also this week, Trixie sacked out on my leg.

I love her so.

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