Monday, October 01, 2012

The Horrors of Waco

The part of our family which did not go to Vassar went, by and large, to Baylor.  To this day, we have a great many relations, both by blood and marriage, in Baylor's hometown of Waco, Texas.  Including our mother-in-law.

If this weren't reason enough to avoid Waco at all costs, we must now consider the possibility that this otherwise pleasant suburban college town has been struck by a Pharaonic plague.  According to NPR, Waco is overrun by crickets -- so many that the stink of their crunchy little corpses now fills the streets like a satanic miasma.

If that weren't enough, the brilliant Jess Nevins (in a must-read article on early science fiction by African and African-American authors) has recently revealed that Waco was once home to a mysterious secret society determined to conquer Texas and provoke a race war in America.

At least in was in an 1899 novel, Imperium in Imperio, by "an author, social activist and Baptist minister" named Sutton E. Griggs.  You can read the book online here, although we haven't.  We may yet, though, if only to pester our relations with it.

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