It's Alive! It's Alive!!!

Hello Darlings,

The following newsletter contains: official A Companion in Vice art, news of some upcoming reader polls, an anniversary, and something spooky from the Patreon vaults.

After many months of absence, the undead remains of the What Manner of Man newsletter rise from their untimely grave on this most evil of days. Rumours of my death have not been exaggerated, it’s simply that death isn’t enough to stop me.

The reason I have been quiet is the disappointingly mundane fact that there is simply not much to say about about an in-progress novel (although Patrons have been getting regular updates on my activities.) At long last, however, my monster is beginning to show signs of life, and I am gearing up to begin more regular releases of new and shiny things. A Companion in Vice is coming.

Today I bring you a Halloween gift: the first official art for A Companion in Vice! And what’s more, our mad scientist and his assistant now have names — the mad scientist Dr. Ithas Avenroyth, and his assistant Martin Rem.

A Companion in Vice is a gothic-noir novel about hazardously toxic queer romance and mad science.

Martin Rem knows his beloved Dr. Avenroyth isn’t dead, because he brought him back with his own hands — although that’s more than he can say to the police.

When people connected to Dr. Avenroyth start dying under mysterious circumstances, Martin must find a way to protect his own dark secrets, as well as the life of the man who may be trying to kill him.

Can love survive the frightening transformation the doctor has undergone? What lies at the heart of this labyrinth of institutional corruption, professional ambition, jealousy, sex, and death? A Companion in Vice is a subversive tale of obsessive love and mad science.

Like What Manner of Man, it will be released for free, a chapter a week, via this newsletter.

Much like I did with What Manner of Man, I am going to be running a series of polls giving readers a chance to provide input into the development of A Companion in Vice. All readers will be able to see what I’ve written for this event and to see the results, however, voting in this upcoming round of polls will be limited to Patrons.

This event will likely begin some time in November.

As for the novel itself, it creeps ever closer to publication. Thank you all for you patience with this unexpectedly lengthy development cycle — A Companion in Vice is an order of magnitude more complex a project than any I have ever tackled before. I promise the wait will be worth it!

In spooky Halloween news that is frightening to myself and myself alone, happy one year anniversary to What Manner of Man! The complete ebook edition was published a year ago today. And I am pleased to announce that, after a truly unnecessary amount of nonsense, the physical editions of the novel are back in progress.

If you haven’t had a chance to pick up the digital edition of What Manner of Man yet, you can find it on Amazon / DRM-free on Itch.io.

As a special Halloween treat, I’m releasing from the archives what might be the highest effort Patreon post I’ve done to date. This is a post originally published in November 2023 (written for Halloween. Mistakes were made) about the history of Jack-o-lanterns — now yours, for free.

The ancient Celts were notorious for taking heads that didn’t belong to them.

At Entremont in Provence, a Celtic tribe, the Salii, constructed a sanctuary based on the cult of the severed head. When the Romans routed the tribe, some time after 125 BC, they found assorted statues and actual remains of human heads. [...] A child’s gentle head, a woman’s head veiled and ear-ringed, several primitively carved representations of heads — twelve on a single perpendicular column — added up to a weird and distressing (even to the Romans) atmosphere of extreme religious practice.

(Frank Delaney, The Celts, 1986)

Frank Delaney even pays the Celts the compliment of calling them “perhaps more explicit and lively in the practice” as compared to other cultures that habitually engaged in such things.

He goes on to name a further archaeological example where skulls and severed heads were found in stone pillars, which he describes as having been “enshrined to echo the Celtic reverence for the part of the body which they believed contained the soul.”

These head-hunting traditions are generally connected to the religious veneration of the head and the belief that the soul resides, so to speak, physically within the head (a belief one might argue is well-represented today in the layman’s conception of modern brain science).

All this seems rather adjacent to… (wait here a minute while I go look up a word) …cephalophores. Those saints — St. Denis of Paris, St. Winifred of Wales, etc. — who are generally represented carrying their heads about with them, having been so careless as to get separated from them in life. I have the J. G. Frazer disease — I’m always inclined to suspect Christian practices of being pagan in origin.

Of one thing we can be certain — they made the ultimate Halloween party cocktail glasses.

The Celts [...] gathered the heads of enemies and displayed them in the tribal settlement, and the more eminent the slain enemy the greater value did the head possess. In one encounter, the Celts killed a Roman official: they “stripped his corpse, severed the head, and bore their prize in triumph to their most sacred temple. There, according to their habit, they cleaned it, decorated the skull with gold, and employed it as a sacred vessel for the pouring of libations, for the priests and acolytes of the temple to drink from.”

(Frank Delaney, The Celts, 1986)

(here)

I hope that all of you have a wonderfully dreadful and spooky Halloween.

Yours in love and terror,
St John