Hello, regular reader. Welcome to 2019’s brand new season of bi-weekly essays, brought to you by author M. F. Sullivan. To support her continued production of these essays and enjoy far more polished forms of her work, check out her fiction–and preorder The Hierophant’s Daughter by clicking this link, or one of the links in the sidebar or footer. Thank you as always for your continued support, and hang in
This Man Who Disappeared Was The Devil: Shirley Jackson’s Lottery Collection and The Occult
A friend of mine—whose last name is literally ‘Friend’, because sometimes the Universe feels the need to make things obvious for us—contacted me early one morning to say, “Reread the short stories in The Lottery by Shirley Jackson and watch out for James or Jim Harris,” and I, sufficiently intrigued, and not having read much Jackson since finishing We Have Always Lived In The Castle, opened the book and recalled,
The Xanthosis of Tobit: The Hidden Alchemy of The Bible’s Most Under-Appreciated Book
Have you ever read The Book of Tobit? If you’re a Protestant, the answer is probably no, because it was rendered apocryphal; if you’re a Catholic, the odds are higher, but it’s increasingly hard to find a practicing Catholic these days who’s actually read the book outside of what was proscribed to them in Sunday school. Considered non-canonical also by Judaism, it’s tucked away amid more popular Biblical books, coincidentally