“Whispers In The Dark: Three Stories Of Terror”

Imagine Chico writer N.J. Hanson penning a scary story about a writer penning a scary story about “a man who moves into a new house, one he gets for a very reasonable price, which is also haunted by the spirits of the family that was murdered there.” Imagine further that the writer penning about the spirits finds on a stormy night that he, too, must deal with one of those spirits because of the pen he is penning with.

Hanson’s story is called “Inked In Blood,” one of a triad of tales perfectly pitched for the pumpkin season. “Whispers In The Dark: Three Stories Of Terror” ($6.95 in paperback from Ink Drop Press; also for Amazon Kindle) also includes “Roadside” and “Wingbeats In The Night.” 

“Roadside” is about just desserts, some might say. It begins gruesomely enough: “With a heave and a groan, he threw the body off the bridge and watched it splash in the river below. The concrete cinder block tied to it quickly pulled the corpse down to the bottom, where the dead girl’s arms, legs, and hair listed almost delicately in the current. … The man got back into his truck, the old engine of his ’73 Chevy rumbled to life when he turned the key, threw it in gear, and drove away. It was time to find a new girl.”

It ends, as one might guess, gruesomely enough.

The longest story, “Wingbeats In The Night,” takes the narrator to Mexico “to visit ancient sites of Aztec and Mayan ruins. … I planned a trip to visit the ancient city of the Sun Pyramid.” Big mistake, actually. His guide is a sketchy character but the narrator’s intense interest in the legends of these cultures drives him onward. 

The “bat god of the underworld, Camazotz,” “a human-bat hybrid,” is on the pyramid above the image of “a man held down by his arms and legs across a sacrificial altar, his chest cut open, and his heart held towards the sky in the hands of a priest”—but, this being the diabolical Hanson, it isn’t just ancient history.

Close the shutters and make way for the shudders.

“Heretic Too!: An LGBTQ-Celebrating, Divine Violence-Denying, Post-Christian Universalist’s Responses To More Of Evangelicalism’s Concerns”

Chico writer Matthew Distefano, theological provocateur and Tolkien-lover, returns for another jab at the conservative evangelical tradition he grew up in. “Heretic Too!: An LGBTQ-Celebrating, Divine Violence-Denying, Post-Christian Universalist’s Responses To More Of Evangelicalism’s Concerns” ($19.99 in paperback from Quoir; also for Amazon Kindle) is a sequel to his earlier “Heretic!”—though this time he calls himself not a heretic but an “apostate.”

Though “I still think Jesus is the bee’s knees” (and so, he adds, is Buddha), “I don’t necessarily care about all the ins and outs of the faith. I no longer care about the Apostles’ or Nicene creeds, or any of the creeds for that matter. I no longer consider myself part of the Church…. Instead, I’m way more interested in who Jesus was as a human being, why it’s important to study his life, and, if you’re so inclined, to put into practice his ethical teachings.” 

Later, though, Distefano notes that “I live on the fringes of Christianity,” and its pull continues to be evident in each chapter, which critiques many of the teachings found in evangelical circles. “It’s not that I don’t care for what Christians have to say, it’s just that I’ve become more enamored with Buddhism than I ever thought imaginable,” and “one can be a Christian and practice Buddhism.”

The bottom line is that through the strife of our present life, “love wins”—or should. Distefano wants to dismantle the doctrines that, he says, separate person from person, and that includes hell, marriages with gender-assigned roles, and heterosexual sex as the only “normal” kind (the author has come out as bisexual). The book ends with impassioned letters against Christian nationalism and the rise of Trumpism.

“Often times,” he writes, “I am cheeky, and sometimes I can be rather biting.” His theological explorations are peppered with barnyard epithets which, in an odd way, are the sign of his caring. He envisions love abounding (which doesn’t mean anything goes), a world with the sensibility of the Hobbits’ Shire, a place one can enjoy good pipeweed (in his case, cannabis) and talk with friends far into the night.

“Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against The Far-Right Takeover Of Small-Town America”

“This is a story,” says Sacramento-based social-justice writer Sasha Abramsky, “about the forces tearing at America’s twenty-first-century fabric. It is about a country that, pushed to the emotional and political limits by Trump, by COVID, and by the endless misinformation and echo chambers of social media, has found itself on the edge of a precipice, with political violence normalized and with wild conspiracy theories too often framing public discussions.”

Abramsky, a correspondent for The Nation, wonders whether the “corrosive forces” of “the nativism and the xenophobia, the distrust of sexual and cultural and racial minorities” will “burn out in the face of growing public unease—and even repugnance—at all that is lost when extremists seize the helm.” 

He's convinced that “it is in local communities throughout America, in ordinary places such as Sequim, Washington, and Shasta County, California, that this challenge will be met….” Both areas are explored in depth in “Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against The Far-Right Takeover Of Small-Town America” ($30 in hardcover from Bold Type Books; also for Amazon Kindle).

He begins with the COVID crisis in Sequim (“pronounced ‘Squim’”) “a town of 8,000 residents on the Olympic Peninsula,” which becomes a center of anti-vax sentiment--to the consternation of public health officer Dr. Allison Berry, “scared of white supremacists and misogynists who want me dead.”

In Shasta County, “public health officer Karen Ramstrom, along with her supporters in county government, were facing a similar set of terrors.” The stresses of the pandemic, Abramsky notes, forced people to the extremes. If health officials erred in inconsistent masking mandates, some of those who were infuriated found a home in a Republican Party “larded with violent rhetoric.”

Some Shasta County supervisors also pushed back on California’s open-carry gun ban and its mandated machine vote counts. “By 2023,” Abramsky writes, “there was an omnipresent background hum of extremism and a growing presence both of disinformation and of paranoia in everyday life.” Yet by the end of 2023 Abramsky finds hopeful signs both in Sequim and Shasta County. 

It’s a complex and nuanced story, a plea for a measured response when “chaos comes calling.”

“Meditations For Mortals: Four Weeks To Embrace Your Limitations And Make Time For What Counts”

British author Oliver Burkeman (oliverburkeman.com) invites readers dogged by perfectionism and proliferating to-dos to join him on a mind retreat. Enter “Meditations For Mortals: Four Weeks To Embrace Your Limitations And Make Time For What Counts” ($27 in hardcover from Farrar, Straus and Giroux; also for Amazon Kindle).

Each week’s theme (“Being Finite”; “Taking Action”; “Letting Go”; and “Showing Up”) explores what he calls “imperfectionism,” a realization that “the day is never coming when all the other stuff will be ‘out of the way,’ so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality.”

Instead, accepting our limitations “is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment-filled life – and never more so than at this volatile and anxiety-inducing moment in history.”

Burkeman draws on insights from philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual writers of various traditions to open a door to what theorist Hartmut Rosa calls “resonance,” the world’s “capacity to touch, move and absorb us” when we recognize we are not, and can’t ever be, in total control of it.

He suggests some practical considerations, always recognizing they are not absolutes; we do indeed need to exert some control over our environment and sometimes must to do that pressing to-do. But if you can, he writes, “treat your to-do list as a menu”: “It’s surprising how many things do become more appetizing once you’re encountering them not as chores you have to plough through, but as options you get to pick.”

And this for people-pleasers: “It’s a fool’s errand … to make your sense of feeling OK dependent on knowing that everyone around you is feeling OK, too.” Be careful about worrying that others are thinking bad things about you; likely they’re not thinking of you at all. Novelist Leila Sales writes that “when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy, but when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.”

“This, here and now, is real life. This is it.” Choose from the day’s menu, and go for it, even if imperfectly.

“Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation On Race And The Meanings And Myths Of ‘Latino’”

“Like ‘mutant,’ ‘Vulcan,’ or ‘Wookiee,’” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Héctor Tobar, “’Latino’ and ‘Latinx’ and ‘Hispanic’ are the made-up words of storytellers describing a group of people engaged in an adventure. Latino people are brown, Black, white, and Indigenous, and they are European, Asian, and African. Some of us speak excellent Spanish, but many more of us do not.” 

Still, there are historical ties: “This diverse group of people is joined together by shared roots in the upheavals and the crises set in motion by the building of the United States into a global superpower, and, further back in time, by the Spanish Crown’s attempt to build an empire in the Western Hemisphere.”

Tobar (hectortobar.com) is a Professor of English and Chicano/Latino Studies at UC Irvine and the author of “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation On Race And The Meanings And Myths Of ‘Latino’” ($18.99 in paperback from Picador; also for Amazon Kindle), the 2024-2025 “Book In Common.”

Book discussions are scheduled throughout the academic year at Chico State (www.csuchico.edu/bic), Butte College, and in the community. The website notes that “Latinx students make up 37% of Chico State’s student body and over 30% of Butte College’s students identify as Latinx. Both of our campuses are Hispanic Serving Institutions” with the emphasis on “servingness.”

Tobar’s compelling prose blends the complexities of history, and his students’ experiences, with his own narrative including visits to his ancestral homeland, Guatemala, where he was conceived, and Los Angeles, where he was born, and where in 1967 a white supremacist moved next door. Later, James Earl Ray would become Martin Luther King Jr’s assassin.

Paradoxically, “The people now known as Latino seem to be perpetually on the brink of being the next group assimilated into whiteness (following the Jews, Italians, and other groups), only to be racialized as a dark other.” Though “race” is a biological myth, “We know race shapes how people see us, that it is a category into which our bodies and our histories are supposed to belong.” 

For Tobar, the question “Who am I?” would take an entire book to answer. This is that book.