The quest for the truth is never-ending.New information keeps emerging and our poor brains have evolved to survive the perils of weather and wild animals, not to receive all available information.It’s the fear that I might’ve missed something that has me going back to a place I’d rather not go.Andrea Perron’s account of what happened in Harrisville, Rhode Island is the only real published source by eyewitnesses that’s readily available.Her three-book account, however, is a deeply personal ramble that isn’t easy for the fact-finder to follow.A couple of months ago I posted on volume one, intimating that I would probably have to go back and read two and three.There’s a compunction about completion that humans have.An economist once told me not to measure a venture by sunk funds.The same applies to books, I guess.
In my ongoing research into demons, and particularly the work of Ed and Lorraine Warren, I felt I had to continue with the troubled trilogy.Volume one barely mentioned the Warrens.Volume two finally revealed some of the story.It took 260 pages to get there, but finally, an eyewitness account!It has plenty of gaps, of course, but it is, as they say, different from the movie.You have to understand that a certain sector of the internet was buzzing like flies in January over The Conjuring.Based on a true story, it was a sympathetic treatment of the Warrens’ work that it was hoped would give credibility to the demon-hunting duo.
House of Darkness, House of Light in total is well over a thousand pages long.I know, I know—“caveat emptor.”Nevertheless, I’ve always felt that long books owe it to their readers to deliver on the promises.I want my haunted house books to be scary.Or at least moody with a gothic sensibility.I do understand the desire—the compunction—to approach life philosophically.Were I ever to put my life out there on display, beyond the occasional forays on this blog, I would hope to do it in a way that left readers wanting more, not less.Biography is a dicey subject.Autobiography even more so.The traditional publisher steps in with an editor firmly in hand.I know because I’ve been doing this for about a decade now.The writer and the editor, like the farmer and the cowman, should be friends.It’s tough, painful even, when someone takes a pen to what you’ve carefully crafted.The results, when they work, give the reader what s/he wants.The quest may indeed be never-ending. At least trilogies have only three parts.
