Weird books at Carson's

Hm. So it looks like I'll regularly have hours on Mondays at Carson Books (4275 Dunbar) for the next while, and will check in with delightful, weird, or curious used books now and then. Today, after chatting with a friend about Sammy Davis Jr. and the Church of Satan, I decided to poke about to see what we had on the "dark" side on our shelves. Mostly the store focuses on the more positive end of things - we have tons of books on Buddhism and self-help and Christianity and so forth, but not that much on Satanism or the occult. Still, I definitely had my eyebrows raised to find Michelle Belanger's The Psychic Vampire Codex: A Manual of Magick and Energy Work in the occult section. It's a manual for feeding on the energy of others, talking, for instance, about how you can feed on the ambient energy at a concert. From page 97: "You can actively harness ambient energy to inspire emotion, consciously redirecting this through a crowd so that the energy becomes even more intensely charged. This technique encourages the natural cycling of energy within a crowd, and it can also insure that, when feeding, you do not drain the area of all emotion, literally 'sucking the life' from the room..."

While anyone who has been to a metal or punk show will be familiar with getting off on the energy in a room, how unpleasant to think that there are some people out there who are dark enough in their view of themselves, and stingy enough in their givings-and-takings, that they experience being at a live show as a form of... "feeding!" How, uh, sad! After some reflection, I moved the book, published by Weiser, to the "vampire fiction" area, with the Twilight books and so forth, since I think the book will likely sell faster to maladapted Goth teens than to ritual magicians... no offense to Ms. Belanger; we just don't get a lot of ritual magicians in the store these days...

Actually we don't get that many maladapted Goth teens in, either...

While I was in the "vampire fiction" section, what did I stumble across but the delightfully-titled Women Who Run With the Werewolves: Tales of Blood, Lust and Metamorphosis. Sounds like a must-read for Ginger Snaps and The Company of Wolves fans; it's a collection of short stories  about girls turning into werewolves, apparently. Now THAT I find a charming idea - this sort of thing as the topic of fiction is nothing but piquant; it's only when one starts taking it seriously that I start to get a bit spooked...

Thanks to Adrian Mack for the cool Sammy Davis Jr. pic!