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ESOTERICA_THRILLERS

                                              March 2, 2005


Has anyone ever made a
definitive list of
Esoterica Thrillers?

You know the kind of
thing I mean, right?

The main character
investigates a mystery,
and it turns out to be
intimately bound up in an
ancient conspiracy of
Templars and Masons who
encoded a secret message
in a certain edition of
the Tarot deck, which if
analyzed correctly via
nuclear magnetic resonance
will reveal a Terrible           Another important feature is
Secret that competing            historical celebrity name
factions are attempting to       dropping.  A letter sent by
control/supress/publish on       Thomas Moore to Roger Bacon
livejournal/etc.                 explaining the *real* reason
                                 the Puritans needed to be
                                 sent to America.


I just read "The Club Dumas"
(1993) by Arturo Pérez-Reverte,
and it turns out to be a decent
example of the genre.

A nihilistic book expert is
drawn into an intrigue              That is to say,
involving a Dumas manuscript        a man whose
and a Satanist work published       relationship
in Venice in 1666: "Book of         with books has     He obsesses with
the Nine Doors to the Kingdom       deteriorated       re-fighting
of Shadows".                        into the purely    Waterloo via
                                    professional.      historical
                                                       wargame, however...
Much is made about how someone
seems to be engineering events                             QUOTE_OF_QUOTES
that are much like events from
Dumas books, and there were
moments when I feared that all
would degenerate into
postmodern metafictional froth
(I mean, he even namedrops
"Umberto Eco", who I suspect
does a cameo appearence in a
crowd scene as well), but
mostly it all holds up, and
along the way there are many
excuses for trotting out
minutiae about the hisorical
sources Dumas raided for The
Musketeers, the contribution
of his anonymous collaborator
Auguste Maquet, Dumas'
scandalous mistress Adah
Menken...  all of which is the
real life-blood of the
Esoterica Thriller.


There are certainly many other examples of
the genre: There's the movie "Pi", and as I
understand it "Focault's Pendulum" by Eco is          DA_VINCI_FLU
another one.

   But then, I've heard it
   suggested "Focault's Pendulum"
   is a "sendup" of the genre.
   Purely ironic of course.  A
   man like Umberto Eco wouldn't
   get his hands dirty writing         (He *transcends genre*.)
   mere entertainment.  He just
   writes *about* them.


An old favorite of mine is Fritz Leiber's
"Our Lady Of Darkness": "Megapolisomancy"
amidst the hills of San Francisco; the
modern results of some very old spells
cast in a ritual performed with August
Derleth and Jack London...

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