Thanks, Tony. I appreciate that. The book is so esoteric it's unlikely to attract much of a popular following. (I'm already seeing 'this guy's too smart for me' comments.) My hope is that the right people will discover it.
Rob (Mr. Affable)
******
She drifts upward, rising out of the mire of the human psyche and into revealing shallows. Around her, waves curl, glinting as sharply as castrating knife blades.
Few ancient seas existed in which sirens did not swim. This most perpetual of legends surfaces in Indian, Norse and Syrian mythology, and mermaids are mentioned by both Aristotle and Ovid. Swirling through a multitude of medieval bestiaries, they are as venerable as they are ubiquitous, and vestigial faith in these creatures in all their permutations – fish women, bird women, viper women – still ripples through the folklore of myriad cultures.
They never went away. Not really. Water sprites like the Celtic silkies or the Eastern European rusalki yet dwell in lakes and ponds. Devastatingly lovely, they float in fantasy and splash through fever dreams. The legends never die. Always, one consistent factor anchors these accounts: the desires such creatures provoke lead to destruction.
They devour, these femmes fatale, incarnating mankind’s most primordial phobia. Young girls might dream of pretty mermaids, but boys awake from sweaty nightmares of vagina dentate … of being drawn down to the deadly depths. Never forget the gender of mother earth. This planet is a body through which arterial tides pulse and surge, and within this fluid murk stir serpents, inchoate monstrosities of the amniotic id. All the sea hags of myth – Grendel’s mother and her kith – were nurtured by surf, emerging like Venus, swathed in spray.
Could there be a more tender or beguiling vision than Aphrodite? Isn’t she lovely? Don’t succumb. The back-story boasts significantly less in the way of seductive glamour.
At the urging of his mother (Gaea, goddess of deep-breasted earth), Cronus castrated his titanic father and cast the monumental genitals into the sea. The organ plunged, oozing a white froth that impregnated the waves themselves and birth proved instantaneous. Riding a swell of that foam, Aphrodite crested to become a goddess of Love ... as well as of Lust.
A star is born.