Strangely enough, one of them is not "dark fantasy" at all. It's a Nora Roberts book called The Search. It has search and rescue dogs. I work with animals. It has a woman living independently in a cottage on an island which is very close to my own lifelong dream. She trains search and rescue dogs. Can I ever relate to her frustration at trying to teach people how to interact with their dogs! She enjoys blogging everyday on her dog-training blog. Hello! I have caught the blogging bug! There is an unusual, intelligent, attentive, creative, and intriguing man as a romantic interest. There is a diabolical serial killer on the hunt for the main protagonist. That's close enough to a vampire if I stretch it I suppose. At least it adds just that necessary bit of danger to my reading. But, I'm glad I don't have any serial killers after me in real life! It's written fairly well -- meaning that none of the sentences or paragraphs set off any of my bleep-o-meters. So it gets a pass even though it's not dark fantasy, and I'm only 143 pages into a 488 page novel.
As I lay in bed reading myself to sleep last night I realized a salient point. More than anything else, Robert's use of everyday, earthy, sensual details to keep the reader grounded, engaged and interested appeals to the Pagan and Witch in me. Part of the slowly simmering seduction between the protagonist and her love interest involves teaching the man to relate to his puppy through the senses of a dog. Another part involves healthy, homemade food like a crock-pot of minestrone, a loaf of rosemary bread, good red wine, and a dish of olives. (YUM!) He makes wood into artful furniture and convinces her to let him uproot an old stump which he wants to make into a massive sink. She agrees only if he will buy and plant a new tree in the void left by the removal of the stump. What makes the story and the characters come alive for me is their perceptions of the quality of light, the time of day or night, taste, smell, hearing, and feeling, their concern for their environment and the interconnection of all things. How much more Pagan can you get?
And this realization made me create some connections outside of the novel. My last thoughts before I turned out the bedside table lamp lingered on how early it got dark last night. We are just in the beginning of September, and it was pitch black at 8:30 pm. For a Pagan, the amount of light or darkness one has each day as the Wheel of the Year turns is extremely important. Every day, with all of our senses, we pay attention to the Sun, the Moon, the Air, Fire, Water and Earth.
This summer I re-kindled a fixation upon Kate Bush's music and it is this same focus on The Sensual World (the title of one of her albums) which also grabs the Pagan in me. To illustrate, below are the lyrics to her song "Nocturne" which is on her Aerial album. The lyrics intertwine the sensuous and the spiritual all at once - which the Pagan in me knows is the best way to have things. It seems that both Nora Roberts and Kate Bush feel the same way. So here's to the spiritual immanent within the sensual!
"On this midsummer night
Everyone is sleeping
We go driving
Into the moonlight
Could be in a dream
Our clothes are on the beach
These prints of our feet
Lead right up to the sea
No one, no one is here
No one, no one is here
We stand in the Atlantic
We become panoramic
We tire of the city
We tire of it all
We long for
Just that something more
Could be in a dream
Our clothes are on the beach
The prints of our feet
Lead right up to the sea
No one, no one is here
No one, no one is here
We stand in the Atlantic
We become panoramic
The stars are caught in our hair
The stars are on our fingers
A veil of diamond dust
Just reach up and touch it
The sky's above our heads
The sea's around our legs
In milky, silky water
We swim further and further
We diving down
We diving down
A diamond night
A diamond sea
And a diamond sky
We dive deeper and deeper
We dive deeper and deeper
Could be we are here
Could be in a dream
It came up on the horizon
Rising and rising
In a sea of honey, a sky of honey
A sea of honey, a sky of honey
Look at the light
At all the time it's a changing
Look at the light
Climbing up the aerial
Bright, white coming alive jumping off the aerial
All the time it's a changing like now
All the time it's a changing like then again
All the time it's a changing
And all the dreamers are waking"
