Occasional essays on literature, poetry, and culture.

A blog by any other name would smell as sweet.

Winsor McCay’s Fiend exists at the meeting place of two of the seven deadly sins: Gluttony and Sloth. Infantile in his nightshirt (especially the scene in which he dangles by it from a weathervane like a baby in the beak of a stork) he is as remote from Lust as Bertie Wooster; Greed we might infer, but his universe is too solitary to beget much in the way of Envy, though his rather magnificent white suit and top hat certainly suggest the sin of Pride. His Wrath is directed inward by the vehicle of dreams and too much cheese, spawning the white devils mining his unconscious for surreal imagery.

As an emblem for a writer preoccupied by the screen between himself and others—a screen on which he repeatedly attempts to project something of his inner life—the Rarebit Fiend will do. And I’m also fond of hot cheese.

Welcome to Dream of a Rarebit Fiend by me, Joshua Corey, author of Hannah and the Master (MadHat Press) and the forthcoming novel How Long Is Now (Spuyten Duyvil Press). Professor of English at Lake Forest College. Poetry and SFF fan. Very occasional boxer. A suburbanite middle-aged dad. Hiya.

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