For several years now, I have been reading these early theorists, thinking that their vision of geological and evolutionary time might give me a context for understanding not just the age of mountains but something more current. It’s one thing to hear of the millions of years it took the Andes to rise; it’s quite another to hear that, in mere centuries, the oceans may reach levels of acidity not seen in 300 million years, or that the earth is the hottest it has been in the past 125,000 years. These days, geological forces, formerly the stuff of earthquakes and volcanoes, have escaped the confines of deep time to present themselves daily, winter, spring, summer, and fall.
It is on this other end of the scale of time—in seasons rather than eons—that my own interest in natural science began and where today it finds its focus and concern. As a child and to this day, one of my deepest pleasures has come from walking farm fields and alpine meadows, watching for butterflies, a pursuit that takes on a formal touch each year when, in early July, I join the annual Concord, Massachusetts, butterfly count. Fifteen or twenty naturalists, most of us amateurs, gather and split into several teams to search a set list of local fields and woods. My group always begins in nearby Sudbury, where there’s a colony of Appalachian Browns, not a rare butterfly but one found only in wet woods, swamps, and bottomlands, a habitat I would have done well to read about before my first visit, when I waded into a field of tall sedges and spent the rest of the day in waterlogged shoes.
Keeping my livelihood as remote and dissimilar from my passion as possible has been a favorable, if not a totally accidental, strategy. In fact, it was precisely (and ironically) my experience as grocery-store worker that occasioned my big break at a major publication. And perhaps it’s this fact keeps me insecure and conflicted. Am I a writer first, or a grocer? And is it possible to be fully and completely both, to be present in a dual reality?
This anthology manages to be satisfying on the simple level of horror-genre plotting, while also thoughtful in its relentless exploration of contemporary horrors like police misconduct, misogyny, violence, and many other social issues. Ultimately, this collection explores morality—in these stories, death is not necessarily absolute, nor is a proud legacy guaranteed.
The bluntness of Purvis’s title, which refers both to the girls transforming into dogs and to their neighbors taking up the hunt, is a hint: This is not a novel particularly interested in nuance. Instead, it wants to directly engage the subtext of all witch stories, in which femininity itself is perceived as a menace, and to try to understand why women are often seen as natural conduits for unnatural forces. Hence the sisters—because if a woman is strange and unnerving, a group of them connected by the inherited bonds that link sisters is even more so.
Cluster headaches are relatively rare, affecting less than one per cent of the population, whereas migraine is among the most common serious maladies. Globally, some 1.2 billion people suffer from it, some forty million of them in the United States. Men are more likely to experience cluster headaches, whereas female migraine patients outnumber their male counterparts at a ratio of about three to one. The two conditions provide the focus of Zeller’s book, which weaves together history, biology, a survey of current research, testimony from patients, and an agonizing account of Zeller’s own suffering, which began when he was in his twenties. Readers with migraine or cluster headaches will find themselves, as I did, comparing their own experiences with the rich material in the book, which is both a survey of the field and a great cry of pain.