Are angels the new vampires? More Enochiana.

PSEUDEPIGRAPHA WATCH: Are angels the new vampires? More Enochiana today in a Globe and Mail review of Danielle Trussoni's Angelology:

Indeed, the book’s central reference is the Book of Genesis, in particular the strange few verses in chapter six describing how the “sons of God” took “the daughters of men” as wives, producing a race of giants.

These are the creatures who inhabit Angelology: malign and imperious, determined to enslave humankind, kept in check only by the heroic efforts of a secret fellowship of scholars who have been on to them from the beginning. Literally.

“I would argue that angels are much older than vampires or any of these other creatures, that they’ve been a part of our culture from before the Bible,” Trussoni says, warming to the trend question. “So I don’t know if you can say that’s new. It’s not trendy. It’s actually really arcane and nerdy, to be honest.”

Angelology is replete with ancient texts and biblical apocrypha like the Book of Enoch, the action winding from one musty library to another. Comparing it to the work of Umberto Eco, the Times reviewer called it “an elegantly ambitious archival thriller.”

But make no mistake: Trussoni’s angels are every bit as dangerous as anybody else’s vampires. The ones she has walking among us are unsavoury at best, albeit beautiful beyond imagining. The ones she has imprisoned at the bottom of the Devil’s Throat Cavern in Bulgaria’s Rhodope Mountains are downright terrifying.

This is what angels are, Trussoni says, explaining her desire to “peel back” the modern sentimentality that has reduced them to “puffy little new-age cherubs, which I find unbearable.” The “puffy white stuff” feeds a spiritual yearning, she admits, but it hardly fits with the true history of angels.

Indeed. I enjoyed Kostova's The Historian and this book sounds interesting.