Three gothics by Tyler Tichelaar

“Haunted Marquette deftly weaves history, urban legends, and unexplained phenomena into a kaleidoscope of ghostly hauntings … Founded as a harbor town to ship iron ore from the nearby mines, Marquette became known as the Queen City of the North for its thriving industries, beautiful buildings, and being the largest city in Upper Michigan. But is Marquette also the Queen of Lake Superior’s Haunted Cities?” — Sonny Longtine

Dear friends and readers,

My good friend, Tyler Tichelaar’s remarkable book tracing the history and contextual circumstances (often historical) of ghost and other paranormal experiences in Marquette, Michigan, is now an audiobook, read in its unabridged form by Brandy Thomas.  I write this blog to tell other lovers of the gothic about the audiobook and Tyler’s other gothic books.

Faithful readers of my blogs may remember how much I like the gothic and how many blogs I’ve written over the years on gothic books & films; one of these a number of years ago was about his first book, a superb literary study, The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption. As his title suggests, the book is a survey, history, analysis of the Christianizing gothic, mostly male-centered books, politically conservative; The Gothic Wanderer often centers on lesser-known (nowadays) Gothic classics (Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni), interpreting the more famous ones (Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities) in unusual ways.

This summer I read what I’d call a continuation of this book, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, 1789-1897. In this book, Tyler demonstrates the close alliance and influence that exists between long narrative, once famous (and sometimes still read) fantastical and visionary urban books in French and English. Authors covered include the still famous, Byron, Scott, Hugo, Dumas (many of his books are covered), Stoker (the book ends on his work leading up to and Dracula); the lesser known, William Ainsworth, Eugene Sue, Paul Feval, Bulwer-Lytton; to the all but forgotten but important for a book, e.g., George Croly. We move from books about secret societies (racist diatribes in some of this), to radical re-castings of the French revolution, ending in the era vampires.  Seamless literary history.

The book is chock-a-block with very useful retellings of the stories like Eugene Sue’s Wandering Jew and Mysteries of Paris, extended literary analyses like Paul Feval’s Les Mysteres de London, accounts of the lives of writers as well as eloquent defenses of their books (George M. W. Reynolds), letters of editors, source studies. Categories include Marie Antoinette books. I was startled by some of the connections of melodramatic plays of the era; even Gilbert and Sullivan finds a place here (Ruddigore). We reach truly popular material rarely treated so seriously. There are extensive bibliographies for the reader to explore when he or she finishes the text.

Tyler quotes extensively from his chosen texts and conveys the quality and experience of them. There are women authors (Radcliffe) with some unusual qualities pointed out: in possibly Elizabeth Caroline Grey’s The Skeleton Count, or the Vampire Mistress), we discover “the homoeroticism of the female vampire preying upon members of her own sex” (p 346), hitherto only seen in Coleridge’s Christabel, and not again until Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871). As a reader of Scott, I appreciated his earnest analysis of Anne of Geierstein. I never read anything about this later book of Scott’s before and here it emerges as important and interesting.

Yet the book does not read like an encyclopedia. Tyler loves many of these books, is enthusiastic about nearly all of them, and occasionally writes in a personal voice and vein, “As I grow older, I personally feel more and more like the Wandering Jew, watching the world I knew as a child disappear and all those I love dying off, leaving me alone to wander through life and wondering why so many ill events must be part of my and all of humanity’s fate” (p 192).

**********************************************

Tyler’s most recent novel (see review by Mack Hassler)

Still it makes sense to me that the first of his books to be reproduced in audio form is not one of his many novels nor the academic books on the gothic, but his Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City. I read this one during the pandemic. It is well-written, absorbing and entertaining reading and looking — at the many pictures.

On one level, Haunted Marquette is a probing (and intellectual) history of the region from a popular standpoint, taking legends that arose when terrible crises or catastrophes, public and private occurred, forms of consoling redemptive explanation, of oddly uplifting survival, and parsing them — showing how they arose, developed, now linger. On another, it’s an art book: it’s just chock-a-block with black-and-white (and grey) photos of people, places, landscapes, animals too, which could almost be artful illustrations, giving the book a feel ancient history — ordinary people across the era, dressed up in strange outfits, and buildings galore, places people made a living, many of them with unconventional histories retold. Here and there faint depictions of glimpsed ghosts. You learn in detail the constructions of cathedrals over time, the post office too. It’s an ethnography, a study of a culture from a fanciful perspective. Chapters are named after these structures, with addresses given and their headers to the chapters questions: “Does the captain who saved many lives still watch over the lake a century after his death?” “Who is the little girl staring out of the lighthouse window?” “Broom and mop in hand, the deceased man continues his work … ” Lots of evocative nouns and verbs, like Cottages, Storms, Lighthouses. Harbors and Lanterns. I’ve no doubt many of these places are haunted by the same local tourists over and over again.

I enjoyed the book as a travel account — you don’t have to believe in the ghosts; it’s the penumbra surrounding them that intrigues.

Click here and you’ll get a publisher’s synopsis, learn about Tyler (a seventh generation resident of Marquette), and hear some of Haunted Marquette read aloud.

Ellen