On April 8, a rare planetary alignment will result in a total eclipse of the sun which will be visible across a select area of North America in the afternoon. People have traveled to areas of the country near the path of totality and taken up hotel rooms, making the event double as a perfect vacation. People are getting married. Sun-worshipping faiths will have a wonderful time.
Back on August 21, 2017, I was working when the last solar eclipse appeared, but I was prepared with an old-fashioned shoebox with a pinhole and viewing window cut into it especially for the occasion. When I went to the rear of our office building to see how far along the sun was to being completely hidden from view, I saw some of our complex’s landscapers nearby and offered to let them take a look using my contraption. They were equally captivated by the spectacle, and I was privileged to share with them.
This year, I’m working as well, but from home, so I will step out my back door with my free specially designed eclipse viewing glasses (which look much like the 3D freebies we once received for movies using that technique, but don’t try switching out one for the other).
As much as I feel privileged to see what may be the last major eclipse I will view in my lifetime, the reader in me sees a much different significance to this event, for when I hear about an eclipse, I think back to my favorite books.
Long before there was the popularity of Twilight or Harry Potter, I was reading a series of books for mature readers stretching back to 1978 and which transported me through history, romance and horror into the 1990s and beyond. After having read Interview With the Vampire, my interest was piqued when my book club offered an “if you’ve read this, try this” story. I ordered a copy of Hotel Transylvania by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro from the club, and from the moment I read the first page, I was permanently engaged, and stayed so to this day.
Yarbro’s ability to write historical fiction not only enthralled me with the adventure, but I was unknowingly receiving an observational look at world events and how women fit into (or were excluded from) them. Sometimes the characters had rank and power, while others were ostracized and treated with cruelty. Living among them was Saint-Germain, a mysterious man who chose to wear almost exclusively black, carried himself elegantly and adapted readily to whatever culture his travels thrust him into. At his side would be close companions often relegated to servants in the eyes of outsiders, but his longest-serving partner, Roger, was always ready to perform whatever task was needed to keep their foreign status from being taken in a negative way, as outsiders in many periods of history often were.
The secret: Saint-Germain is a vampire, and Roger is a flesh-eating ghoul. Their travels bring them face to face with Mongols, Charlemagne, Ivan the Terrible, a coven of Satanists in France, Kali worshippers, Nazis, and a variety of evils throughout the world.
The novels (I have 26 in my collection, along with short stories and related works) are both narrative and epistolary in nature, and contain a wonderful mixture of eroticism, action and violence.
The connection to this upcoming event: Saint-Germain’s sigil is the eclipse.
The publishing world being as it is, there are more novels awaiting book form, and I look forward to the announcement that the saga will continue. As I look at this rare period of semi-darkness on Monday, my mind may well wander back to other places and times of eclipses and earthquakes, battles won and lost, practices embraced and forgotten, and the books that took me there.
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