An Eccentric Easter Reading List

I've always wondered why Shakespeare didn't take a crack at writing a play about Jesus. Perhaps because it would have been seen as heretical. After all, D.H. Lawrence got plenty of criticism for his short work, The Man Who Died some three hundred years later. (If you've never read that, it's available from Project Gutenberg online.) Imagine the fallout there would have been had he kept the book's original title, The Escaped Cock.

 Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (1990).  I'm not a huge Terry Pratchett fan. I tend to think his whimsical humor is heavy-handed. I do like Neil Gaiman's work, though, and this novel--about two angels trying to prevent the apocalypse--is a romp through pop culture and religion and you name it.

Good Omens makes a good companion piece to Christopher Moore's Lamb. I loved, loved, loved christopher Moore's Practical Demonkeeping and also liked Coyote Blue quite a bit. I've read pretty much everything he's written and while Lamb is not my favorite, it's a lunatic piece of work detailing Jesus "lost years" as told by his friend Biff.

The Gospel, According to the Son by Norman Mailer (1997). One of my English professors, Reynolds Price, was a biblical scholar and he was pretty scathing in his review of Mailer's novel, which he didn't think was "inventive" 'enugh. (One of my other professors, Buford Jones, used to make fun of Price for his heavy-handed allegory in the novel A Long and Happy Life.)

King Jesus by Robert Graves (1946). Graves is  the man who gave us I, Claudius and Claudius the

God. He also wrote The White Goddess, a book on poetic mythmaking that was required reading, along with Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces when I was just starting out as a writer. The book views its title character as a philosopher rather than a messiah.

The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain (1953). I read this book when I was in high school and liked it a lot. (I also loved the author picture, which depicted Costain and his very fluffy white cat.)
It's about a Greek artisan named Basil who crafts a silver chalice to house the Holy Grail. I don't remember it being a "prequel" to the Arthurian legends of the Holy Grail, though, so I may re-read it.

Cemetery fiction

Source: Wikipedia

When I was a kid, you could--if for some reason you wanted to--picnic at Arlington National Cemetery. For me, this was not as bizarre a concept as it might have been to some people because in the South, there's a tradition of "visiting relatives" in graveyards, cleaning up around tombstones and memorial markers, and generally "keeping in touch." There are some truly beautiful cemeteries in the South, from the above-ground vaults in New Orleans' Saint Louis No. 1 to Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah. (If you've seen the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, you've seen one of the cemetery monuments from Bonaventure.)

I'm not alone in my appreciation of a beautiful cemetery. Life's Business Insider once ran a pictorial called "20 of the World's Most Stunning Cemeteries." (Find it here.) Cemeteries from all over the globe were photographed, and the US still had some of the most beautiful. Some of my favorite fantasy books are set in cemeteries. They are:

Two People You Wouldn't Expect to Have Written Vampire Novels/Stories

One of the least-known works by Theodore Sturgeon, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science fiction writer, is his short horror novel Some of Your Blood. Like Dracula, it's told in epistolary form, but it's more like Twelve O'Clock High in subject matter. The story is gritty and unsupernatural, and well worth checking out.

Neil Gaiman's short story "Snow, Glass, Aples" is a dark retelling of Snow White in which the stepmother is not the villain(ess). It's unlike much of his work and makes you long for more twisted fairy tales from his unique perspective. If you want to buy it stand-alone, it can be yours for a little under two thousand dollars (on Amazon here). It was collected in the anthology Love in Vein II, which is available for around $68.  (Look for it at your local independent book store.)