Donald Roy Pollock -- Ohioan author

 I was watching a youtube channel of a man that does book reviews of "dark literature", primarily what's called "crime story-telling"... not a genre I'm naturally drawn to but I've seen a variety of subgenres this guy blends into with his interests, some of his likes drift closer to tales of haunting, though not entirely or specifically supernatural. Anyway, one day I just slipped into his latest video and he was talking about a book that he described with genuinely uncomfortable vibes. He talked about feeling the need to "take a shower" after reading some of the avenues this guys story telling wandered into. More specifically the part that gave him the greatest discomfort was the part of the story that dealt with a man and woman/couple who were serial killers. Not a truth based story at all, this was completely this guys imagination that created these characters and the deeds they did. That was not something that particularly scared me away, not really. But it's not the kind of story I have a hunger to experience either. What was of particular interest for me was the locale where the stories took place, and the time of history they occurred. Southeastern Ohio - the Chillicothe region, specifically back at the turn of the 1900s, give or take a generation either side of the new century mark. Why this sparked my interest was because I know that I have a few generations of relatives that lived in that region during those eras. I thought that by reading this novel I might gather insights into what life was like for these ancestors.

His writing somehow reflects the tone and demeanor of someone who might have lived there through those eras, and was recounting stories of people that he actually knew. This, to me is a great exercise in channeling while writing. This man who obviously grew up in that region of the country, and who most likely did have his own ancestral connection to the place probably grew up hearing stories from grandparents and aunts and uncles of what life was like when they all grew up there. This IS how oral tradition works. By being a resident of the area, and not an outsider popping in wanting to read local history reports in rural libraries, and then trying to imagine stories of what life might have been like, this author was part of the true community, he grew up in these hills, and knew what it felt like to walk these country roads, and swim in the hidden rivers and ponds... he grew up seeing the old architecture of the region and knew what it felt like to sleep in an old house that was 100+ years old, he could smell the decay in the woodwork and old wallpaper... all this access to the "old land" seeps into a writer's consciousness like a whispering spirit... so yes, I think Donald Roy Pollock was one of the few people, writers, that could have conjured up these characters and story lines. He's also brave enough to not hesitate to create scenarios that are uncomfortable for most people to read. He's not a gore-hound, he doesn't go into illustrious descriptions of death-scenes, but he's brave enough to figure out how to say just enough to get your skin to crawl, where you wonder, "Really?? There are people like that out there?? And who did I rub elbows with today in the marketplace etc, having no suspicion at all that THIS lies beneath the surface behind their thin smiles and soft handshakes..."

I grabbed a copy of the novel that the youtuber talked about first. It was the latest novel written by Pollock. I was sucked into it within the first few paragraphs. That's a rare experience for me. There's some quality about this man's writing that makes his words adhere to your inner ability to visualize what he's describing where you not only see what he sees, you feel what he feels. I experienced this aural sensitivity to his word crafting, page after page and just couldn't get enough of what he had to say. I read that book more quickly than any other novel I've picked up in years. After I finished it, I found the Netflix film that was made from the novel. Surprisingly, it follows the story very accurately only removing a couple of characters and their plotline, for brevity of film making's sake. Everything else the filmmakers did followed the novel extremely closely. I was happily impressed. 

Then I discovered that he wrote two more books. Both written before the one I read first. I read the second written one next, and then read the first written last.  I read all three books within a months time. An unheard of feat for me. I was literally structuring my days around finding times where I could sit and read read read... 

I asked ChatGpt to suggest other books for me that it thought I would also like. I tried several of them but found that none of them hooked me exactly the same way that Pollock did. So I'm not sure where I'll go next for my next reads. Possibly and probably back to the youtubers that love to talk about the books they love to read...

OH, the other aspect of this experience, of finding a vantage point to peer into the historic experiences of my ancestors... I don't have any solid ideas or plans of what to do with this information yet. I do know that I have grandparents and great-grandparents that had very large families back in the 1800s and early 1900s (up to eleven children) and that they were people that worked the land, as in "farmers"... so climbing into the worldview that Pollock created, and letting the names from my genealogical family trees "reach into this visual imaginative world and take root"... as a psychic medium, I'm imagining that I could choose a name from my family tree, go into trance and see what they show me. Oddly, when I've tried to do sessions with very recent family tree members, a lot of the time I'm just met with silence. I attest that to the fact that they have been dead for so very long now, and that there's just not a lot of us that are living that are sitting down trying to get them to talk. In being dead for so very long, they are deeply asleep, or have travelled elsewhere enjoying reincarnation or just being busy somewhere out in another galaxy. Not that this makes me feel like giving up the task, but that it'll take more initiative and ingenuity to figure out how to communicate with them. We'll see how and where that ends up going, in time.