Cat Magic syncs

Cat Magic (1986) was the last novel Whitley Strieber published before Communion redefined him as primarily an alien abductee rather than a horror writer. It's an interesting and unique book -- which, yes, is a way to avoid calling it "good," which it isn't, really. Recent syncs keep leading back to it, though.

In "Ruby Blue and Róisín" (April 14), I discuss Róisín, an Irish girl with whom Strieber was traveling in 1968, and who spooked him when he found a dead owl in her luggage. As explained in "Whitley Strieber in Italy with a dead owl" (July 2020), his nonfiction tellings of this story do not mention the girl's name; Róisín is induced from a passage in Cat Magic which is obviously not-even-thinly-veiled autobiography.

In "Red crescents and Winkies" (April 19), I described a cresent moon that reminded my wife of the smile of the Cheshire Cat, and I emphasized the "idea of a cat in the night sky." Here's the cover of Cat Magic (note that "Jonathan Barry," the supposed co-author, is also Whitley Strieber):

That's a cat in the night sky, and I guess you could say it's "smiling." Searching the text for cheshire on a hunch, I find only one instance, and it is the scene illustrated on the cover:

"Go outside and look at the sky. Look with your new eyes." . . .

As her eyes followed the smoke into the sky, she almost fell over backward with terror and shock. She was looking up the side of a towering leg covered with gleaming black fur. It was so tremendous that it was almost beyond seeing.

She looked up and up . . . perhaps a thousand feet above, and right into the grinning Cheshire face of the largest and most menacing black cat she had ever seen.

In "Ugly flying starfish" (April 20), I discuss the "crown-of-thorns sea star," and an added note associated this starfish with the "whore of all the earth"; this is a phrase from the Book of Mormon, referring to an entity also known as the "mother of abominations" (1 Ne. 14:10). One of the major characters in Cat Magic is a nun known as Mother Star of the Sea.

Today I somehow ended up listening to a very obscure YouTube video -- a whopping 6 views at the time of this writing -- which consists of someone reading a very long passage from the Poetic Edda and then asserting that it says basically the same thing as two passages from the Bible.

Part of the Edda passage read says of Yggdrasil "its leaves sough loudly."

Those who have read vast quantities of Whitley Strieber's output will know that sough is one of the distinctive words in his vocabulary. In "Wordsworth's daffodils as a symbol of death in Strieber's Transformation" (June 2020), I at first questioned the authenticity of what Strieber said was an extract from someone else's diary because it used that word ("the wind soughing amidst the trees"), strongly suggesting that Strieber himself was the author. By the end of the post I had established that the diary entry was authentic after all, but that I was right, too: Where the original diary had had sighing, Strieber had for some reason taken the liberty of emending it to soughing in his quotation.

Cat Magic is one novel to use the word: "the power of the wind that soughed around the house."