How Did I Do?

There is a new Southern Vampire book out by Charlaine Harris called Deadlocked. When the last one came out, there was a magical object called the 'cluviel dor' in it. I engaged in some idle speculation as to what that object might be. My post can be read here.

So, on to my speculations about the object: *Spoiler alert* I think 'golden key' was a fine guess since it could open a way to Faerie but my guess 'golden thread of life' worked even better because it was how Sookie ultimately used the object - to bring someone back to life. I suspect that Sookie could have used it to bring Eric back to life, which I think is still a good hunch, in spite of Harris saying 'once a vampire, always a vampire.' Any object that can overcome death is a powerful item. However, it seems clear now that Sookie is not going to find happiness with Eric and Harris' answer reflected her intention that he would remain a vampire and did not reflect what the object could do. This outcome has made some fans of the series unhappy and probably accounts for some of the negative reviews.

I don't like that ending myself but I find the novel was still written with the usual quality of the previous eleven books.

Murder Mystery

Robert Harris's Lustrum opens with the body of a young child has been found. It appears to have been ritually slaughtered and drained of blood. My first reaction on reading this was to groan. I had seen the Wikipedia entry on Catiline where it was said of him that, as an initiation ceremony for his co-conspirators, they had killed a child and drained its blood and drank it. This was attributed to Sallust. As of today, that entry has been amended.

I knew this was wrong because I had just read Bellum Catilinae and, although he mentioned that there was rumor about drinking blood, there was no mention about where the blood came from and he stated that it was a rumor. So, how did Robert Harris get the idea to put a murdered child in his historical novel? Somebody must have written something about that at one time.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, since he got a great deal of political mileage from frightening people about a conspiracy that was plotting the violent overthrow of the government, to burn Rome, and kill hundreds of citizens, if there was any suggestion that there had been anything like taking oaths by drinking blood going on at the meetings of the conspirators, would have been all over it. It would not even have to be true, just a whiff of a hint would have sufficed. But, he said nothing about this in his speeches in the Senate against Catiline or in his letters.

Approximately twenty years later, when Sallust was writing his history, he mentioned the rumor. Plutarch, writing 100 to 150 years later in Greece, wrote in his biography of Cicero that Catiline's men had murdered a man and drank his blood. Dio Cassius, writing 200 years after the events, related in his history, Book 37, section 30, that Catiline killed a boy. The tale grew in the telling, like the game of telephone.