The Witch of Hebron

If you are interested in reading about an 11-year-old boy who experiences not one but two separate instances of a guy masturbating in front of him, boy do I have a book for you! How about reading about a guy who would rather pawn his wife off to another man to “be satisfied” instead of being emotionally close to her? Because, of course, the only way a woman could be satisfied is with male penetration! But it’s OK! Everything is better because he went to a fancy prostitute, who gave him drugs and turned his manhood back on. Or how about a “he/she” prostitute getting murdered because the guy who was paying for their services felt icky about it?

This is the most cis white boomer male book I have read in a very long time.
-Women show more are the homemakers and don’t want to bother their pretty heads with running the town. They require a man to protect them. No exceptions.
-Boys become men by having sexual acts foisted upon them.
-Men who have sex with other men are wrong and twisted, but prostitution is ok as long as it is between a male and a female. A man has needs, you know! Doubly ok when said prostitute is beautiful, lives in a very nice house, and can cook.
-A man is not a man if he can’t perform sexually. In fact, he has no reason for living.
-That newfangled rock music is just noise.

On and on and on. show less

The Witch of Hebron by James Howard Kunstler is the second book of a dystopian trilogy and picks up right where the first book left off. After the wars had been fought there was a collapse of both government and economy, and the world has reverted back to the past. Travel is by horseback, and farming is the main occupation. But this is not a peaceful world, bandits roam the country and prey on those who are weaker and illness is a constant threat. In the small town of Union Grove in upper New York state, the townspeople and the strange religious cult that call themselves the New Faith Order are uneasily sharing the town. Jasper Copeland, the local doctor’s son, in a fit of grief over his dog’s death, has poisoned Brother Jobe’s show more prize stallion. Ashamed and miserable, he has run away from home. While on the road he falls into the hands of a young bandit called Billy Bones, who it turns out, is little more than a crazed killer.

While I enjoyed the story of young Jasper and his adventures on the road, I still had some major issues with how the author portrays women. For the most part women are shown to be the docile helpmate that are kept firmly under a man’s thumb or they are the wanton siren, there for men’s comfort and sexual pleasure. These people came from a world where women were gaining in equality, ran companies, held professional jobs, yet all that is neither acknowledged or is it explained how are now considered second class citizens.

The author evidently has deep ecological concerns about the direction we are heading and has created a richly imagined world but unfortunately his characters are throw-backs. The men are firmly in control and speak, dress and behave like they come from the 18th century. Whereas the women seem to have value only if they have good, child bearing hips. I have the third book of this trilogy on my shelves and I will most likely give it a try at some point, but I won’t be rushing to pick it up anytime soon. show less

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

I'm not sure why exactly I decided to read James Howard Kunstler's newest post-apocalyptic "doom-n-gloomer" novel The Witch of Hebron; after all, I found the first book in this series, 2008's World Made by Hand, rather ridiculously silly, taking what's actually a fairly fascinating true subject (the fact that sometime soon, the human race is simply going to run out of fossil fuels) but then constructing a laughable if not perversely charming melodrama around it, envisioning a neo-Luddite utopia in upper New York where for some reason all these show more former commuting white-collar workers now not only live like the Amish but even dress and talk like them too. And indeed, if you find the details of that first novel teeth-gnashingly bad, then get prepared for a major dentist visit with this new one, which essentially picks up exactly where the first novel left off, taking the former's absolutely most annoying details and making them the main thrust of this second book: the cornpone "Little House on the Prairie" dialogue, the self-righteous indignation (sometimes right in the narration itself) regarding 20th-century lifestyles, the idea that women in a post-Industrial world will voluntarily go back to being the demure, powerless baby factories that God Meant Them To Be. (Plus, I have to admit, I have a lot of respect now for the Atlantic Monthly Press marketing staff, who managed to keep a straight face while selling this to the public as a prescient extrapolation of the theories in Kunstler's nonfiction book on the same subject, The Long Emergency, when in fact one of the major concepts in both these novels [with this newest one even named after it] is that a post-oil world would bring a return of people with literal magical powers, actual witches and actual oracles and others from the "days of fairytales" that the invention of electronics in the 20th century wiped out, which pretty much once and for all finally puts the kibosh on that "Kunstler is a genius and we should all pay attention to what he says" argument from your crazy survivalist friends.)

In fact, this book contains so many scenes of quiet women with child-bearing hips voluntarily dropping to their knees and servicing the men around them, no matter if they're the story's villains or heroes (and seriously, I'm not exaggerating when I say that this occurs at least once with nearly every female character in the entire novel), I started wondering after awhile if we haven't in fact all been interpreting these novels completely wrong, and that what Kunstler is really doing with these books is creating an astounding modern remake of John Norman's so-bad-it's-brilliant "Chronicles of GOR," a series of fantasy novels from the '70s and '80s that purportedly detail life among a non-human race of full-time Conan-like muscular warriors, but in reality are all about the gender-role-based, elaborately ritualistic dominant/submissive erotic rites that define the relationship between men and women in their culture. After all, Norman didn't mean at first for the GOR books to be erotica either, but rather a countercultural-era Lord of the Rings ripoff, until both the author and his readers started responding more and more to the sexual details he kept slowly adding a little more to each volume, until by book 5 or so everyone looked up and realized that the GOR books had become out-and-out smut; and I have to confess, I'm highly tickled by the idea of Kunstler's post-oil books succumbing to the same fate, until half a dozen books in they're suddenly completely about hot submissive Amish sex and kinky hive-mind witch orgies. Now that would be a series worth reading, versus the harmless yet nonetheless infuriating drivel that constitutes these first two books.

Out of 10: 4.7 show less

I've long been a fan of James Howard Kunstler's blog Clusterfuck Nation. His point of view - cultural, economic, political - can be summed up by that dead-on line of Emerson's "Things are in the saddle and they ride mankind." And when Kunstler gets on his high horse, and makes a Pickett's charge at the latest Straw Man from Hell - be that a Bernie Madoff, a Glenn Beck, or just the boys at Goldman Sachs - well, there's just nothing more glorious. Except maybe Al Pacino, in Scarface, going down in a two-fisted blaze of automatic weaponry. Nobody strafes them better. Not even Larry David. [see: http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/09/scary-people-scary-times.html]

That said, I was prepared to cringe when I began The Witch of Hebron. All I knew in show more advance was that the fiction would embroider Jim's vision of a post-oil boom, semi-apocalyptic United States. Thus I was braced for a longwinded "vehicle" like a "novel" of Ayn Rand - a social commentator with equally vehement, though counterpoint, beliefs. I anticipated cardboard characters delivering gratuitous meditative passages about deserted strip malls, while a cold wind swept autumn leaves into broken display windows. Well, there was a touch of that, but only when a sepia tone was called for.

Instead, what I found was one of the better Stephen King novels not actually written by Stephen King. Think Tom Petty covering a Bob Dylan song. While the Witch of Hebron (who is a good witch, by the way) contains a pinch of the supernatural (precognition and telekinesis), the greater resemblance to King is to King's Castle Rock topography. Kunstler creates a very believable and mixed bag of small town characters and big city exiles. They are anything but stereotyped, and one character, the highwayman Billy Bones, could almost be from a Mark Twain story. There's additionally a bit of a steampunk in reverse feel - old ways grafted back onto new. The use of opium ball suppositories, for example, as an anesthetic for an appendectomy. Surprisingly, Kunstler's apocalyptism, though it provides the setting for the story, is otherwise subdued. There's no preachiness. The focus, instead, is on imagining a livable, recognizably humane future without all the mod cons and mad con men. This is not The Stand, or The Road or a vista by Hieronymous Bosch. It's simply Glens Falls, NY in 2023? 2045? 2056?

Three cheers for Jim, who also is a fine amateur watercolorist. He's pulled off a renaissance man hat trick! show less

I thought this was better than the first book, more focused, especially once it starts following the young boy on the run. Other characters grow, bonds are formed, there's a hopeful feeling you don't often find in these books. I was actually hoping I wouldn't like it because I'm short of space for books and this is a four-part series. Already ordered the other two.

The Witch of Hebron is a followup novel to "World Made By Hand." It picks up the stories of the Hudson River Valley residents of Union Grove, New York pretty much where "World made By Hand" stopped. I think it best that a new reader have read "World Made By Hand" first, but that isn't a necessity since the backstory is woven in, especially within the first several dozen pages to bring new and old readers up to speed on the characters.

I had enjoyed World Made By Hand well enough to pick up this sequel. I liked the characters and I wasn't disappointed with this. There were elements of the first novel I didn't care for, especially the supernatural stuff at the end and there is a bit of that here too, but less so. What is here is more show more believable, more storytelling, and I think Kunstler has made an effort to repair some of the faults of the first novel in this one. We are given some explanations of the goings on in the first book that were left unexplained.

This story benefits from being built off the first novel. There is some bad guy stuff happening here, just as there was in the first novel. The first novel set a good stage, and I think I actually enjoyed this followup a little more. We have some multiple story lines that come to a satisfying conclusion. Overall, though, this remains a bit like a dark-shadowed Little House on the Prairie version of a dystopian future. (That is not necessarily a bad thing!) Both novels are worth a read and are reasonably entertaining and should give one at least a few reasons to think about the after effects of "Peak Oil". I like these people and hope that the series sees a future installment. show less

James Howard Kunstler revisits Union Grove and Washington County in upstate New York in The Witch of Hebron, his sequel to a World Made by Hand. Set in an America of the future, after Washington, D.C., has been destroyed in a terrorist nuclear explosion because of this country’s protracted involvement in a Holy Land War, and after the economic collapse has ended all oil imports, the novel spans a period of two weeks in late October. The townspeople inhabit a world without electricity, rely on their own feet or horsepower for transportation, and subsist by exchanging their expertise in a field like carpentry or medicine for food and other necessities.

Kunstler provides enough exposition early in the novel to reacquaint readers with his show more America and to make it possible for a new reader to enjoy this book without having read the previous one. Having that acquaintance with a World Made by Hand makes it possible to fully appreciate his characters and their interactions.

Often violent, this novel reveals a time when order, particularly outside of Union Grove, no longer exists. Bandits like Billy Bones roam the county, looking for food, sex, something of value that can be exchanged later, or the material that will provide another stanza to their ballad of misdeeds.

Religious faith is often cast in doubt. Characters sometimes turn to the comfort of medicinal herbs and attach magical significance to the associations that we Euro-Americans have carried with us regarding the end of October.

Kunstler doesn’t ignore the sexual lives of his characters, proving particularly adept when describing the intimate relations of married couples. To his credit, Kunstler has created two strong female characters, Jane Ann Holder and Barbara Maglie. Young women, however, often have to give freely of their bodies.

In addition to the occasional sexism, one other drawback to the novel is the medical knowledge of an eleven-year-old, who is able to perform a sophisticated medical procedure after only having watched and assisted his father.

Kunstler, at first, splits the narrative by pursuing the actions of several different characters. At the climax of the novel, these characters are brought together in ways not expected. This control of Kunstler’s over his characters and his plot causes the reader to move through the novel quickly and to desire more of what happens in Union Grove, New York after the America we know has changed so drastically. show less