#eleanor bourg nicholson

[apesoformythoughts]

When Father Michael Walsh, a Jesuit priest on the western coast of Ireland, faces a charge of embezzlement, a London newspaper sends expatriate Irish reporter Hugh Buckley home to deliver a story—or else. Buckley and his photographer colleague Frederick Jones arrive in the village of Doolin to find themselves embroiled in a tangled mess of parish politics, occult practices, and bloody murder. By night, as wicked things rise from the earth, Buckley faces his own long-repressed struggles with his country, his abandoned faith, and his dead family. But by day, he finds help, both professional and personal, from English Dominican friar Father Thomas Edmund Gilroy, OP, who has come to Doolin to support his friend Father Michael and to aid in the spiritual battle against the occult.

Can Hugh and Freddie save their employment—and their skins—as the grotesque violence intensifies? Or will they and the rest of the village of Doolin be consumed by dark powers lurking within the mysterious landscape of Ireland?

[septembersung]

do you know the magazine dappled things? and if you do, would you recommend it?

Yes and yes! Been reading them for years. Some of their content is available online for free, but not all, some real gems are print only. Get a subscription! They're great to write for, too; they pay their contributors and publish both new and established authors. If you hang around Catholic literary circles you'll recognize some of the names regularly featured there. (Joshua Hren [of Wiseblood Books], James Matthew Wilson, Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, Sally Thomas, just to name a few off the top of my head.)

Support Dappled Things!

[marta-bee]

This is so wrong, not in a way that's particularly offensive or even excessively important in terms of real-world implications and damage to actual people, but so ever-loving wrong it winds up being hilarious.

The Church has celebrated those in heaven (All Saints, November 1) and the souls of the faithfully departed (All Souls, November 2) since the latter half of the first millennium. Around these dates emerged various practices, many of which have become attached specifically to the eve of All Saints, "All Hallows Eve" or "Hallowe'en." In fact, today's celebration of Halloween is a brew concocted in the American melting-pot, combining early medieval Irish Catholicism with mid-medieval French Catholicism and throwing a smattering of late medieval English Catholic repression for added flavor.

English Catholics, in the wake of Guy Fawkes festivals, were harassed by visitors demanding "treats" with the threat of probably violent "tricks" hanging over them. Add some grotesquely decaying autumnal décor, and you have the skeletal framework of today's secular holiday-and an amazing setting for a good Gothic novel. Of course, post-Christian, neo-barbaric society would deny any Christian origins and cast October 31 in the light of an occult orgy of evil and candy.

All Hollow's Eve (Hallowe'en) was apparently originally a good Catholic holiday with no syncretism from pagan traditions that predate the Catholic one, but us moderns are so evil and death-obsessed and wanting a riotous indulgence of the senses and our love of the macabre, we bastardized it.

I. Am. Chortling.

[ihaveonlymydreams]

A BLOODY HABIT

By Eleanor Bourg Nicholson

Chapter 1

1 May 1900: Somewhere between Budapest and London

(From Jonathan Harker’s diary) She then rose and dried her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me. I did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind. She saw, I suppose, the doubt in my face, for she put the rosary round my neck and said. . .

“Pardon me.”

That was precisely the thing I was most unlikely to do, I thought to myself with wry bitterness as I looked up from the page and into the face of the little man who had invaded my course of light literary recreation. I did not often venture into the realm of Gothic absurdity, but when I did I certainly did not like to be interrupted by round-headed little men with pink faces and beady black bespectacled eyes, attired in flowing white dresses, with rattling beads strapped to their sides.

“Yes?” I replied, making a meager effort at keeping the irritation out of my voice.

“May I pass you, please,” asked the little man—he was some sort of a Roman priest or a monk, I could tell by his outlandish dress—“to open the window?”

I suppressed the urge to tell him that he would not be overwarm if he didn’t go about in that quaint ritual garb; instead I grunted a vague assent.

[catie-does-things]

Finished reading A Bloody Habit, by Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, and I can not recommend it enough.

If you like Dracula, Father Brown, and the Order of Preachers, you will love this book. If you don’t like any of those things, rethink your tastes.

[apostleshop]

Dracula-Ignatius Critical Editions

Great News has been shared on https://apostleshop.com/product/dracula-ignatius-critical-editions/

Dracula-Ignatius Critical Editions

Description Click here to visit the Ignatius Critical Editions website See more great novels at www.IPNovels.com . When solicitor’s clerk Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania on business to meet a mysterious Romanian count named Dracula, he little expects the horrors this strange meeting will unleash. Thus Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel of blood and passion begins, rapidly accelerating from Harker’s nightmarish experiences in Castle Dracula to a full-fledged vampiric assault on late-Victorian London itself. The story, narrated through a collection of documents-primarily journal entries and letters-chronicles the desperate efforts of a band of gentlemen to protect the virtue of their ladies and lay to rest the ancient threat once and for all. Often vacillating wildly between the terrible and the comic, Dracula at the same time brings to life a host of compelling themes: tensions between antiquity and modernity; the powers and limitations of technology; the critical importance of feminine virtue; the difference between superstition and religion; the nature of evil; and, perhaps most compellingly, the complex relationship between ancient faith and scientific enlightenment. More vivid than any of its varied film adaptations, and over a century after its first publication, Dracula still retains its sharp bite.

Bram StokerEleanor Bourg Nicholson

Editor: Eleanor Bourg Nicholson Pages: 558

[apesoformythoughts]

'"You don't believe in blood-sucking Romanian counts?" I asked in mock surprise.

"Oh, I don't mean that," he said with great seriousness. "It's all that other business that is so ridiculous. Little things. Like that business of the consecrated host and the putty. Rome would never grant a dispensation—and it would be a dispensation, not an indulgence, but then the author is not yet a Catholic and so wouldn't know. His wife is Catholic now. But it's all silly nonsense—harmless, really, but silly. I laughed out loud when I read it. Then there's the larger point. That business of consummate evil."'

— A Bloody Habit

[apesoformythoughts]

‘“Are these creatures everywhere?” I asked Father Thomas Edmund. “These creatures or the ones with which you are associated?”

“Associated.” He chuckled over the word for a moment. “Yes, my dear, evil spirits and fallen creatures are all around us. They are not, however, usually to be seen in daily life.”

“Why not?”

He cocked his head to one side. “You can discern the answer to that question readily, Miss Howard. Why do the gods of the myths usually approach mortals in mortal form?”

“Semele and Zeus. The gods are less alarming in the guise of men. Mere mortals cannot withstand the glory of Mount Olympus.”

“Let us consider a counterpoint then. If men went about seeing their fellows transformed into beasts or witnessed the onslaught of preternatural terrors in the night—”

“Your churches would be full,” I said with a chuckle.

“At least initially,” he acknowledged. “Therefore if, as I and those like me believe, these creatures operate with an opposite goal in view, would they not be likely to avoid undue visibility?”’

— Brother Wolf

[apesoformythoughts]

“G. K. Chesterton, musing over the Brontës in his monumental work The Victorian Age in Literature, reflected:

There is really, in a narrow but intense way, a tradition of Emily Brontë: as there is a tradition of St. Peter or Dr. Johnson. People talk as if they had known her, apart from her works.

This is one of the great tragedies of the Brontë sisters, and particularly of Emily. Evading public attention in life, she has in death been beset with every conceivable misreading that could be concocted against the domestically-inclined (borderline-antisocial), virginal daughter of an Anglican clergyman. The facts about her life are meager. So-called critical studies and film adaptations have deliberately misinterpreted what we do know, transforming her into a proto-feminist, a Marxist, and a nymphomaniac. Consequently, there are few works about Emily that are worth their weight in salt.

Rarely before has the scant data about Emily Brontë received such an illuminating treatment as it does at the hands of Tim Powers in My Brother’s Keeper. With all the thrilling trappings of the preternatural, this novel constitutes a more creditable contribution to Brontë Studies than the majority of books, articles, and professorial assertions I encountered while I was a graduate student.”

— Eleanor Bourg Nicholson: “Knowing Emily: A review of Tim Powers’ My Brother’s Keeper”

[apesoformythoughts]

‘“The evil person, habituated to vice, does not will any differently. He chooses evil. This makes him an object of blame. The wanton person has been habituated to vice as well but to the extent that his will has become irrelevant. Second order desires have no effect. He is compelled in the continuation of his vicious habits. That makes him an object of pity.”

“So we stake vampires and seek to rehabilitate werewolves?”

He smiled. “We dispatch demonic beings and seek to save their victims and, if still living, their minions.”

“Is this not also a form of theological hair splitting?”

“It is a complex business,” he acknowledged. “Scholastic precision and pastoral judgment are of vital importance.”’

— Brother Wolf

[apesoformythoughts]

BTW, Eleanor Bourg Nicholson called My Brother’s Keeper the “Most remarkable literary (and scholarly) publication of 2023” and said:

It's so incredibly good. I was able to read the manuscript and (as is always the case with Powers) I binge-read it. Superior insights into the Brontes than pretty much everything I heard in grad school back in the day.

[apesoformythoughts]

“There are some poor souls beset by darkness—part men, part beast. Your father would call it a sickness or a delusion. Something to be cured by doctors of the mind. We would call it an evil oppression. A crippling wound that, though they strive to overcome it, can only be relieved by God’s mercy.”

[apesoformythoughts]

“Yes, we are too late. Now we do not hunt to save. We must hunt to kill.”

— Brother Wolf

[apesoformythoughts]

«Father Thomas Edmund began gesturing in the air with his hands, like a professor might, chalk in hand, when sketching out tiers of a scientific pyramid.

“If we consider the degrees inherent in the demonic hierarchy, and place at the top—or, perhaps, more appropriately, at the bottom—the tyrannical viciousness of the Evil One, we will see dependent, subservient powers with increasing corporality. Thus we begin with—”

Holding his hand flat, he thrust it out and held it firmly in place: “The superstitious gypsy, the dupe, the dabbler in things magical and occult. Slaves without understanding and without special power. Above this we see—”

He elevated his hand by half an inch: “The werewolf, the man reduced to the brute, bound by disordered passion and slave to a higher, more corrupt intellect. Next—”

Once again, he elevated his flat hand by half an inch: “A creature such as Isabel, with strong intellectual powers or other preternatural abilities, a potential foil to the force that seeks to control her, yet all too easily herself a slave. Now—though this is an oversimplification, and there are other degrees we could identify here—” He elevated his hand once again. “We see the father.”

“Thus far you imagine him only in terms of his power over those below. He can indeed have power over both his children—you, Isabel, and Jean-Claude. He has advanced far in his own darkness. We might conceive of him as a master of the occult, or, as age-old superstition would put it, a dark priest or wǣrloga—the warlock, the Druid, the zokor. But you must once again remember—”

He thrust out his hand and held it flat then elevated it again to indicate a superior tier: “He is beholden to some stronger power for that which he claims to himself. There is some other being and he is subordinate to it.”»

— Brother Wolf

[apesoformythoughts]

“I shall seek out these robed Papists and, through a radical or mystical or magical super-endowment of diplomatic savvy, persuade them to admit me to the ranks of some sort of junior apprenticeship.”

[apesoformythoughts]

“I know him, and I know the madness. I know too the darkness. Like Jean-Claude, I was begotten of it. We are forged together —shackled, perhaps—against the darkness. And if the darkness consumes one of us it may well consume the other. I do not bear the mark of the beast. The darkness in me is quite different. I can yet fight it ably and perhaps give Jean-Claude a chance—a moment—to escape from this new hell he forges for himself. But there may also be a long course of blood and horror before us, no matter the outcome.”

— Brother Wolf