Won't You Be My Neighbor (2018).

"I've been thinking of a series of dreams" - Bob Dylan.

Once upon a time, a young boy was taking his dog out for a walk, and something happened.  The details at this point are sketchy.  There may be truth to the lad's words, and, of course, he could have made this part up.  The way he tells it, the boy was taking his pup for a simple afternoon stroll, out among the French countryside just outside of the village of Montignac, in the district of Dordogne.  At first everything seemed normal, until the lad heard his companion begin to bark.  He was well off into the countryside, now, and already it was possible to catch a view of the peaks and hill tops of the Vezere Valley which enveloped the region of his village.  When the boy heard his dog barking, his first instinct was to look for where he last saw him.  That's when he got his first real shock of the day, though there would be more.  To start with, however, the dog was nowhere in sight.  He could here the mutt's voice, yet it was like it was coming from nowhere.  Everything about the dog had vanished into thin air.  All except for the voice.  The young traveler was sufficiently freaked out enough by this, so that when the dog began to bark in alarm, he may have felt a genuine moment of panic.  The good news is that a continuous round of call and answer on the part of both pet and owner meant the dog's owner was soon able to locate where the barks were coming from.  That was when the boy from Montignac received his second shock that day.  It came when he discovered that his dog's voice was echoing from within a crevice in the rocky terrain of the region.

Not having much choice in the matter if he wanted to keep his companion, the boy followed the sound of his dog's voice into the crevice and discovered the third shock waiting for him inside.  It wasn't just a simple niche carved into the side of the Earth, it was the entrance to an actual cave.  It was just so well hidden that you had to be the size of, say, a regular Scottish terrier to be able to see it with the naked eye.  The entrance to the cave was well hidden enough so that it didn't take long for the light to vanish, and the dark to begin.  Luckily, the boy came prepared with either a box of matches or else it was a flashlight he had on him.  This is one of the those plot points on which I'm not quite sure of.  Like I say, this is a very old story.  One of those tales where it's easy to lose track of the exact series of events, and even the stage props involved.  Somehow the boy found a way to bring a little light into the cave as he searched about for his dog.  Maybe it was matches, maybe what the British know colloquially as a "Torch".  The point is the guy found some way of getting a light on the subject.  It was enough to allow him to see his way inside the cave, and to follow the sound of his dog's voice.  The good news is our intrepid day tripper and his best four-legged friend were soon united.  The better news came when he looked around at the spot where he'd found his dog.  That's where the final surprise lay waiting.

The entire walls of the cavern in which both man and beast found themselves was decorated from one end to the other in a series of intricately designed paintings.  These weren't just simple remains of some long vanished soul who somehow got it into their head that it would be a fun idea to leave their handprint on the wall (though these were there, as well).  Instead, what the boy saw was nothing less than a vast panoramic depiction of horses, bison, elks with impossible looking antlers where the horns grew to enormous lengths, so that that they looked almost like hands that were ready to reach out and grab you.  Above all, there were the depictions of human beings.  Some where hunting, others just standing there, like the illustration of statues.  One amusing sample depicts an intrepid yet perhaps unfortunate soul on the run from what appears to be a giant deer as the result of a hunt gone wrong.  For the moment, man and beast must have just stood their, both equally dumbfounded by the strangeness of their discovery.  When or however long it took for his senses to return, the first thing the boy from Montignac knew he had to do was get him and his pet out of there.  The second was that he had to go and tell the world about what he'd found.  That's the basic premise of the discovery of the Lascaux Cave Paintings in a nutshell.  Or at least this is the most widely accepted version of how we found out about this amazing series of ancestral artwork.  The trick is that it's hard to verify as fact.

What's beyond dispute is that somehow these ancient frescos were discovered at some point.  Yet the exact nature of this uncovering remains shrouded in a bit of mystery.  No one seems to remember who found it first, and when.  For what it's worth, the story I was told about the caves concerns the exploits of a young peasant girl and her father.  They were locals from the village of Montignac, and it was their custom, once the spring harvest rolled around, to venture out into the valley of the Vezere to pick for berries, and other types of plants that could be used as food.  This might have been sometime in the late 1800s, yet I can no longer pin the exact timeframe down.  Just a rumor of rumors.  Anyway, one of the tales this young girl grew up on were reports that some time, way long ago, there lived an ancient race of what her father described as "Monkey People", who used to dwell in their valley.  They were all long gone, or course.  Yet it was whispered by some that they might have left traces of themselves behind somewhere.  At the moment our story takes place, however, the girl's father hadn't time for fireside tales.  The harvest was in, and that meant picking as much food for the family dinner table as they could get their hands on.  So the man took his daughter in hand, and together they set out into the Dordogne in order to make sure they didn't starve to death.  At first, everything was normal, until the girl's father received one of those shocks which tends to count as the worst nightmare of every genuine parent.

His little girl was nowhere to be found.  The father called out her name, and to his relief she answered back.  The curious part that set his teeth on edge was the hollow, echoing quality to her words.  He kept calling her name and, like a good child, she would always answer back.  Much like the young traveler from another tale, the father followed her voice to that same niche of entrance to the caves.  In this version of the story, the second person to enter the caverns did, in fact, have a lantern with him, for some reason.  He used it to light his way through the stone hallways until he came to the same expanse where the boy recovered his dog.  There the man saw his daughter lying flat on her back, just staring up at the walls and ceiling.  He ran to her and scooped her up in his arms, and then she pointed out something he'd missed in all his panic.  That's when the father got his first real glimpse of the Lascaux Paintings for himself.  According to the daughter, who is supposed to have told this story later as an old woman, what she saw that day acted as something of a revelation to her.  When she caught her first glimpses of these first snapshots of daily life, no matter how primitve, she realized then and there that the townsfolk of her village were wrong,  These "Monkey Men" weren't beasts, they were people.

Would you like me to tell you a story?  I hope you enjoy it.  This is the tale of a young, little tiger, and how he came to be, and what he means.  It's also the story of the tiger's father, and what his life meant.  The young tiger's name is Daniel.  Can you say that name?  You can call him just Danny, if you like.  He doesn't mind.  Though he likes being known Daniel, if that's alright.  Can he just be that to you?  He's four years old, which means he still has a lot of growing up left to do.  Danny's father is named Fred.  Fred never minded at all if you chose to call him by his first name.  He's the kind of guy who encouraged people to do so.  Though to most folks, Danny's dad is best often known by his last name, Mister Rogers.  He's in a documentary called Won't You Be My Neighbor.  It's all about him.  The name of Daniel's mother is a bit more complicated.  In a sense, you might say that she was, and still is, a parent of many names.  You might refer to her as Thalia, because that's one of her functions.  She also answers to the name of Calliope, for that's how some knew her once, long ago.  No matter how you slice it, it all comes down to the same thing.  Daniel is the product of the interaction between the mind of the artist, and the strange yet necessary function or mental thing known as the Imagination.  That's a very important word, you know: Imagination.  Can you say it to yourselves.  Does anyone really know it?  Well, anyway, this is the story of Danny and his father, and what they created together.

The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019).

There are some books that require a bit of homework.  That sounds like a bummer, I know.  The real kick in the teeth is discovering that if you want to know more about a story you really like, then sometimes this means you're faced with a choice.  Do you steel yourself, roll up your sleeves, and take the plunge into all the historical archives and works of criticism that can help you gain a greater understanding of what it is that makes your favorite books and films work so well?  Or do you just sit back, shrug, and admit that you'll probably never understand what makes so much as a simple Don Bluth movie stick in the memory long after childhood is in the rearview mirror?  I think that's a false choice, by the way.  All that's required to understand what makes any work of art either function or fail so well is a willingness to be engrossed in the craft of study and scholarship.  It's as simple as that, though if I'm being honest, I reckon most of us just choose to shrug and walk away, rather than get down to examining the bones of our favorite story fossils.  Part of the reason for that seems to be that it takes a certain kind of mind to get into the work of a proper analysis of the writing arts.  It kind of seems as if some folks out there have this turn of mind that makes the idea of unpacking the artistry of movies, novels, and short stories desirable, in some strange way.  I'm told it's a frame of mind that's become a lot more acceptable to current social standards these days, yet somehow I think the need for a defense of some sort still remains.

The fact of the matter is that storytelling is a complex process.  It's one that requires a great deal of patience and skill if any of us ever wants to get a better understanding of why a book like Lord of the Rings has been able to stick around all these years.  Sometimes the folks who write books like this are able to give the curious a bit of help, here and there.  Tolkien, for instance, was considerate (or else just plain careless) enough to be willing to talk about the thought processes that went into the making of Middle Earth.  His letters are a treasure trove of what goes on in the mind of some nerds when they think the sports jocks aren't listening, and they're out of easy punching and locker stuffing distance.  The long and short of it is that this guy had one hell of an outsized Imagination.  The kind that's able to fashion entire secondary worlds with the type of skill that seems effortless, yet which the written record reveals took a great deal of trial and error.  If you ever want to find out why the world still can't seem to get enough about Hobbits, then the letters and critical comments on the nature of writing made by the author of LOTR are still the best place to start.  Tolkien's a pretty good example of what I mean when I say that there are some works of fiction where the audience has to do its homework if any of us ever wants a clearer understanding of what makes a place like Middle Earth so real to most readers today.

There is a kind of flip-side to this, however.  These are the works where its impossible for the critic to say much of anything about the nature of the work in front of them.  This is the case I wound up with when I sat down to review an odd sounding tale called The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice.  Like most of you reading these words, I'd never heard of the piece before in my life.  It was just one of those titles whose cover must have had enough skill to catch my eye.  Going just by a glance at the cover, the whole thing sort of puts me in mind of a lot of those old children's books I used to devour when I was a kid.  These were the nursery texts that await all the developing young bookworms who've managed to graduate beyond the realm of Dr. Seuss and Richard Scarry, and are perhaps able to surprise even themselves to discover that they want more.  It's what happened to me, anyway.  So that's how I came to learn about the fables of Aesop, the poetry of Jack Prelutsky, and the works of authors like Maurice Sendak and Kenneth Graham.  These stories were something of a level or two above the primer level of reading that guys like Ted Geisel specialized in.  The prose was unrhymed and the sentence structure and the situations they described could sometimes by a bit more complex than the exploits of The Cat in the Hat.  For one thing, a lot of the old children's fare I'm thinking of now was not afraid to tackle complex situations, such as the loss of innocence, and the need to reconnect with the past.

Those are the kind of lessons taught by Graham's The Wind in the Willows, or Antoine Exupery's The Little Prince.  It was from pre-teen scribblers like Prelutsky and Alvin Schwartz that I first began to get an understanding that fiction was capable of scaling a lot of incredible heights.  The cover for the Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice put me in mind right away of a lot of the content of those pre-teen young reader titles.  It has that kind of old school charm that's reminiscent of art styles of Sendak or Arnold Lobel, while also putting me at least in mind of a volume of poems edited by Prelutsky, and featuring pictures by the second illustrator mentioned above.  What I guess I've been trying to say is that somehow, taking a look at this text was adequate enough to put me in a proper nostalgic frame of mind to the point where I finally decided to buy a copy and see what it was all about.  Beyond all this backstory, however, the real point is that this is one of those cases where I'm going in just as blind as the reader.  I knew very little about the text under discussion here today, and after having gone through it, I'm still pretty much at the same disadvantage as everyone else.  It means we both get to examine a work of fiction on more or less the same footing.  So with that in mind, this is what happened.

The whole thing starts out with an Author's Note by the American poet and translator A.E. Stallings.  Right away, she makes presents us with a quirky framing device for how we're to read this work.  "When I heard that a rare volume had arrived in Athens at the Gennadius Library, I made an appointment to see it. The book was an early edition of the Batrachomyomachia (“The Battle between the Frogs and Mice”), printed in Germany in 1513, and edited by the poet Thielemann Conradi (1485–1522). In fact, this edition is the first Greek book published in Germany, and is one of only two known copies in existence. This mock-heroic epic, originally ascribed to Homer himself, proves to be a pivotal text—as well as wildly popular—for the Renaissance and the reintroduction of Greek to Western Europe.  It seems I had been the only person to request an audience with the physical book since the library acquired it. How strange that I could just take this ancient and fragile text to a desk to sit down with it and flip through its pages! (I did have to use a special book support, so as not to damage the binding, but I wasn’t required to wear gloves.) A couple of things surprised me about it—its modest size for one (about the dimensions of a classic Moleskine notebook, only much thinner).

"I also noticed that there were some tiny, tiny marginalia, faint, scratched in pencil. Also, some small scraps of paper that fell out of the book. They turned out to be used Athens Metro tickets—perhaps placed in the pages as bookmarks. These pieces of paper also had some  pencil marks scratched on them, in what I would call the same hand. I confess that I pocketed the scraps to examine later. I would then return to look at the marginalia in the Greek text. At home, under a magnifying glass, it was clear that these writings amounted to a sort of critical introduction to the text. The marginalia in the book itself turned out to be a lively English verse translation, with copious notes. I have made some minor modifications to the translation to reflect the Greek text in Martin L. West’s 2003 Loeb edition, and added information from the 2018 commentary—the first such in English—by Christensen and Robinson. The scholar and translator signs himself as A. Nony Mouse...I give you as much as I could of the paper scraps below (1-2)".  From here, the reader is given a most curious form of introduction.

"While the epic of our tribe is not attested in human literary sources until the 1st century A.D. (Martial alludes to it, as does Statius), references to a mouse battle far predate that period. Depictions of a battle with mice and cats adorn ancient Egyptian papyruses from as far back as the 14th century B.C. And Alexander the Great—so-called to distinguish himself from Alexander the (Cheese)-Grater, the famouse general—according to Plutarch, referred to an epic battle between the Macedonians and Spartans (330 B.C.) as a “myomachia”—a mouse battle. In 1983, fragments were discovered of an earlier epic poem, from the 2nd or 3rd century B.C., “The Battle of the Weasel and the Mice.” The BMM [Editor: Batrachomyomachia] seems to refer to this earlier battle. This tale was evidently a popular motif for depiction on tavern walls. The poem is unusual among ancient parodies, even other apocrypha ascribed to Homer, for being whimsical rather than satiric. The poem exhibits charm as well as pathos (or bathos, as humans might describe the epic sufferings of smaller creatures). Steeped in the Homeric tradition, its language, formulae, meter, and tropes, the poem was a favorite school text from the Byzantine period on, an entry point to the longer and more serious epics, with the added attraction of animal characters. [Editor: I would add that evidently the motivation for Christensen’s and Robinson’s 2018 commentary was again in using the text as an introduction to Homer.] Indeed, in its depictions of the goddess Athena wearing homespun and borrowing money with interest, it goes even further than Homer in “humanizing” the gods. The poet relishes the juxtapositions of scale—as Giants and Gods are to humans, so humans to the mice.

" Interestingly, there is no mention of Apollo in the poem. Apollo in Homer is referred to as “Smintheus”—the mouse god. (“Sminthus” was mouse in Cretan, although Aeschylus also uses that word.) And there is reason to believe that mice were honored in the Troad at Chryse and Hamaxitos in connection with the god, whose cult statue depicted him with a mouse. (See Strabo and Aelian.) Mice were propitiated in worship as a means of discouraging them from destroying crops in the fields. The 2nd-century A.D. travel-writer Pausanias also mentions a temple to Artemis Myasia on the road to Arcadia. Pausanias doesn’t speculate on the meaning of this name, but his small travelling companion, Pawsanias, explains that “Myasia” comes not from “mystery,” but from the Greek for mouse, μῦς—Artemis the Mouse Goddess. As Artemis is the sister of Apollo, it makes sense that she also has a mouse form and association.2 There is also a mouse Demeter (Demeter Myasia), no doubt because of her association with the earth and with grain. Mice tend to symbolize for humans the twin opposing forces of fertility and plague. Mice and humans eat the same food and share the same dwelling places, which makes them competitors as well as companions, and mice often stand in for men in fable and verse. For men as well as mice, the poet Robert Burns reminds us, “the best laid schemes . . . / gang aft agley.”

"... Mice may also turn the tide of human battle. There are two passages associating mice with warfare in the 5th-century B.C. Histories of Herodotus. In one instance, when the Persians seek to conquer the Scythians, the Scythians send a strange message—a mouse, a frog, a bird, and five arrows, without comment (4.131, 132). The Persians are perplexed as to the meaning. One theory was that it was meant as a surrender (of earth and water and themselves). But another of Darius’s advisors interprets it thus: “If you do not become birds and fly away into the sky or become mice and burrow into the earth or become frogs and leap into the lakes, there will be no homecoming for you, for we will shoot you down with our arrows” (the translation is Grene’s). I would myself point out that the conjunction of frog, mouse, and bird perhaps points to an ancient fable popular in the East and which comes to us through two of Aesop’s fables—the fable is a warning about the dangers of inappropriate alliances. (See below for more on the fable, which is clearly related to our epic.)

"In another instance out of Herodotus (2.141), mice destroy a human army. The Egyptian King Sethos is concerned that a great army, led by Sennacherib, king of the Arabians and Assyrians, will attack Egypt. But in a dream he is told by a god that he will be sent allies. The allies turn out to be the field mice, who at night gnaw at the enemy  army’s quivers and bows and bow strings and the handles of their shields, so that in the morning the army fled “defenseless.” A version of this story also appears in the Old Testament (2 Kings 19:35), but there the host of mice is only referred to obliquely as an “angel of the lord.” (Byron’s memorable poem, “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” unfortunately makes no mention of the mice.) A version of this tale also appears in the Chinese annals...While the fables of Aesop—according to Herodotus a slave and story writer of the 6th century B.C.—contain many stories of mice (“The Country Mouse and the City Mouse,” for instance) and of frogs (“The Frogs Seek a King,” etc.), there are two related fables about an unlikely friendship between a mouse and a frog that ends tragically. In both versions, a mouse and a frog become friends, the frog invites the mouse to his house, the mouse says he cannot swim, and the frog ties the mouse to his foot, only to end up drowning him. A deus-exmachina appearance of a bird means the frog comes to a grim fate as well. This ancient story of the frog and the mouse was widely known in the East. (The 13th-century Persian poet Rumi has a charming version of it.)

"The second, more elaborate Aesop version goes thus (Gibbs translation): Back when all the animals spoke the same language, the mouse became friends with a frog and invited him to dinner. The mouse then took the frog into a storeroom filled to the rafters with bread, meat, cheese, olives, and dried figs and said, “Eat!” Since the mouse had shown him such warm hospitality, the frog said to the mouse, “Now you must come to my place for dinner, so that I can show you some warm hospitality too.” The frog then led the mouse to the pond and said to him, “Dive into the water!” The mouse said, “But I don’t know how to dive!” So the frog said, “I will teach you.” He used a piece of string to tie the mouse’s foot to his own and then jumped into the pond, dragging the mouse down with him. As the mouse was choking, he said, “Even if I’m dead and you’re still alive, I will get my revenge!” The frog then plunged down into the water, drowning the mouse. As the mouse’s body floated to the surface of the water and drifted along, a raven grabbed hold of it together with the frog who was still tied to the mouse by the string. After the raven finished eating the mouse he then grabbed the frog. In this way the mouse got his revenge on the frog.

"The points of similarity with our epic are many—the mouse, and the frog, the mention of a bird of prey, the drowning, the fault (or deviousness) of the frog, and the catalogue of human food associated with the mouse. The real revenge, however, of the mouse is, I would say, our poem, which memorializes both the noble bravery of the mice and the turpitude of frogs. The courage of mice is of course a commonplace in literature. Consider Christopher Smart, “For the Mouse is a creature of great personal valor,” C. S. Lewis’s valiant Reepicheep, E. B. White’s plucky Stuart Little, or Kate DiCamillo’s Despereaux. The frogs in Aesop’s fables are consistent in their stupidity (consider the story “The Frogs Seek a King”), their booming bravado, and their uselessness in action. For frogs in battle, consider the fable of “The Frog, the Water Snake, and the Viper.” In this tale, the water snake and the viper fight over their territory in the marsh. The frogs, who hate the water snake, offer to be allies of the viper, but in the end, only sit on the sidelines croaking their support, proving both treacherous and ineffectual.

"In the Renaissance, versions of Aesop’s “The Frog and the Mouse” began to be provided with a backstory—that the frog and mouse are battling over the territory of the marsh when they are carried off by a kite. This variant seems to owe something to our epic. It also seems likely that the composer of our epic was familiar with this Aesop story and elaborated it, with mouse-ish ingenuity, into the battle narrative we now have (3-7)".  It's with this strange context setting the stage that I soon found myself looking into the peculiar history known as The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Chimaera (1851).

He is best remembered, if he's known for anything at all, as one of the main architects of the modern Horror genre.  This seems to have been the ultimate fate of the reputation of the early 19th century American writer known as Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Arriving in this world in the year 1804, he was a natural born son of New England.  Not only is that a relevant real-life plot detail, it also turned out to be the main shaping factor in the life and growth of the artist's mind.  His birthplace was none other than Salem, Massachusetts, home of the infamous Witch Trials.  To give an impression of just how much of a long shadow this event and its entire social milieu have managed to cast over American history, it is possible to argue that while there were other atrocities committed by the Puritans in their chequered and problematic history of settling on these Shores, there appears to have been something iconic about the Trials which has allowed it to standout as the guiding symbol of America's original sin.  The historical image and notion of Puritans turning their own moral decay and bigotry at last against their own kind, like a snake eating its tail, seems to act as the best summation of what happens when a society begins to go wrong.  It suggests that if the ideology of the original Plymouth Settlers can be spoken of as serving any kind of purposes, then its utility was of the most ironic kind.  The purpose of Puritanism, it seems, is to cancel itself out.

As a result, what makes the very fact of the Witch Trials so natural as a symbol is that it is somehow able to encompass a multitude of ethical failures, both personal and social, that have since been recognized as a catalogue of all of the major faults and transgressions for which the early European settlers to America were guilty of.  It includes the usual list of suspects, the chiefest of which is the allowance and legal sanctioning of slavery, prejudice, and persecution of others into the law of the land.  The others, in this case, were and are, of course, Africans, Jamaicans, and Native Americans as the most prominent victims of Puritanism.  It's this ironic accomplishment which has allowed the Plymouth colonizers and their immediate descendants the dubious honor of two further achievements, both of which have served to preserve and hold an awareness of their toxicity and depravity as a kind of memorial enshrined forever in our popular culture.  On the one hand, it was the Puritans who have given to, and cemented for American history its first and longest lasting notion of national evil.  The second, artistic correlate of this ironic accomplishment is that it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it was the legacy of fanatics like Cotton Mather and the Witch Trial persecutors who have been able to shape a lot of the contours and iconography of what we now know as Halloween.  It's of course true enough that a lot of the trappings of our Nation's most popular Autumn Festival have their roots in Ancient Celtic Traditions.  However, it seems as if the sins of the Puritans gave us an updated set of props and icons that have allowed this fundamentally antiquarian celebration to find its proper American voice.

This can best be demonstrated by recalling how everything that we know about Halloween always comes down to, or else includes the same set of images.  These being the time honored picture of witches and black cats on broomsticks, along with the idea of the haunted house with plenty of skeletons in all the closets.  These are all concepts that have come to define what the holiday means for us every time Autumn roles around.  However, there's one other element to this shared iconography that I don't think most of us have given enough attention to.  Part of that is down to the way familiarity makes the heart grow, not so much cold, as inattentive, and hence unobservant.  We remember the witches and haunted houses well enough.  Have you ever stopped to notice or pay attention to the kind of imaginative landscape in which all of these icons have their place, though?  The answer, of course, is yes and no.  Yeah, it's true, some of us might have spared a glance at the kind of topographic atmosphere in which the primary symbols of Halloween take place.  However, I wonder how many of us have ever stopped to ponder just what the prototypical setting of All Hallow's means, or amounts to.  In terms of set dressing, the typical All Saint's Eve backdrop has remained more or less the same ever since the Holiday was cemented into a part of the Nation's identity.  You've got these wide open, creepy looking fields that are either barren roads, or else its a stretch of rural farmland with either a hollowed out cornfield, or else a glowing pumpkin patch to provide a few background details.  This is about as far as most of us can get when it comes to conjuring up the stage setting for a Halloween atmosphere.

The one final detail that's needed to complete this picture is just one, simple observation.  Most of it tends to have this New England flavor to it.  Have you ever noticed that?  Think about it.  The basic backdrop of the typical American Halloween just tends to have that specific, regional kind of feel about the place.  It's like something you can tell just by looking.  It's a pervasive sense of atmosphere that you can't quite get anywhere else.  It just doesn't have quite the same vibe if you were to try and translate it into a setting such as the Louisiana bayou territory.  Places like that are more than capable of having an October atmosphere all its own, and that's just the point.  A sense of place that's steeped in, say, the carry-overs from old African, Creole, or Cajun traditions might have an appropriate flavor.  It even forms an essential part of Halloween.  It's just not the kind of vibe you get from that Autumn cornfield or Pumpkin patch which looks like it could be anywhere from the Midwest to the Nor-East.  That's because out most typical image of the Hallows stage setting was born and raised in the old Yankee country.  It was in the same New England territory that held the Witch Trials, and in which Hawthorne grew up that created the first initial iconography for America's Premier Autumn Festival.  In that sense, it's almost possible to say that Hawthorne grew up amidst the symbols and imagery of Halloween.

It was always just a part of the natural atmosphere that he breathed, both as a man, and an artist.  It explains why even his lightest stories tend to have this sense of soft, faded colors to them, like when the leaves start to turn into rich hues of red, yellow, and brown.  It seems a more or less inescapable fact that Hawthorne is a natural, Autumnal writer.  Born and raised in the Nation's pumpkin patch, he emerged as an Autumn voice.  Someone who is in the way of being a spokesmen for that time of year, born and bred.  It even makes a certain amount of sense when you stop and consider that with short stories like "Young Goodmen Brown", and "The Minister's Black Veil", or novels like House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne also has to stand as one of the key builders of the Holiday as we now celebrate it.  Heck, he's even the first artist to make mention of, and put the image of the Jack O' Lantern to good use in his writings.  So in that light, among other reasons, it makes sense to peg him one of the Nation's first great Horror writers.  I don't think this is a reputation that can ever be challenged, nor do I think it should be.  I just find it interesting that the same creative mind that helped pioneer the American Gothic (the kind of artist who could be described as Stephen King's metaphorical grandfather, in other words) was also capable of being something in the way of a writer for kids.  Here's the part I'm sure most folks aren't aware of.  Entertain conjecture that one of America' foremost tellers in Tales of Terror was also the author of collections with titles like A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls.  It's not the kind of thing you might expect.  It's like learning that someone like Lovecraft was fond of nursery rhymes.

Such a picture just creates too much cognitive dissonance to take seriously.  Hawthorne presents a milder, and hopefully therefore graspable version of the same conundrum.  How does someone with a reputation for telling scary stories come to write not just a children's story, but a whole book full of them?  When you put it like that, I'll have to admit the very idea sounds like an anomaly.  I can count the number of times its happened on the fingers of one hand.  It's a list that includes the likes of Steve King, Edith Nesbit, Dean Koontz, and Hawthorne.  Put that all together and you've got the a publishing phenomenon that still counts as enough of a rarity to be almost unheard of.  I'm also not sure its fair to include authors like Alvin Schwartz, R.L. Stine, Bruce Coville, or the Brothers Grimm in that catalogue.  That's because these are all examples of artists who went out of their way to write for a Young Adult market, in one case even before the market could be said to exist.  Instead, what I'm focused on here is writers of certifiable adult Gothic fiction, who have then turned around and graced us with a family friendly offering for the kiddies.  Like I've said, it's happen so few times in the past that there's still this air of novelty about, except in Hawthorne's case it's perhaps as weird as, say, discovering that a tome like The Secret Garden was Lovecraft's favorite book (which it isn't, so far as I know).

Instead, it's more the sort of left field novelty that you might not expect, yet there's still enough of a sense of intriguing about such an enterprise that you're willing to offer a cautious "Go On?" sort of encouragement.  I'll be the first to admit that I've never really looked into the children's entertainment side of Hawthorne's writings before.  So in a sense I'm going in just as blind as the rest of you as we take a look at what appears to be a retelling of Classical Mythology known as "The Chimaera".