John Kendrick Bangs and Philip José Farmer Associated Shades

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

When dem bones mentioned John Kendrick bangs in his Alastair Gunn [ed.] - 12th Wimbourne Victorian Ghost thread I looked him up.

He was prolific and wrote four books in a series called Associated Shades.

A House-Boat on the Styx, Being Some Account of the Divers Doings of the Associated Shades (1895); New York: Harper & Brothers

The Pursuit of the House-Boat, Being Some Further Account of the Divers Doings of the Associated Shades, Under the Leadership of Sherlock Holmes, Esq. (1897); New York: Harper & Brothers

The Enchanted Type-Writer (1899) – collection; New York and London: Harper & Brothers

Mr. Munchausen: Being a True Account of Some of the Recent Adventures Beyond the Styx of the Late Hieronymus Carl Friedrich, Sometimes Baron Munchausen of Bodenwerder, as Originally Reported for the Sunday Edition of the Gehenna Gazette by Its Special Interviewer the Late Mr. Ananias Formerly of Jerusalem and Now First Transcribed from the Columns of that Journal (1901); Boston: Noyes, Platt

When I saw the main idea that everyone who has ever lived is resurrected on the Styx it reminded me of the Riverworld series by Philip José Farmer. It seems I wasn't wrong to think that.

My online book service describes the first as follows:

The premise of the book is that everyone who has ever died (up to the time in which the book is set, which seems to be about the time of its publication) has gone to Styx, the river that circles the underworld.

and:

Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series is similar in that the main characters are, for the most part, historical figures who are resurrected on a planet with one great river winding around it, and Farmer credited the book as one of his inspirations for the series.

Not having read either of these series I can't comment, but it is often interesting to discover just where some authors get their sparks of inspiration from. Some people have actually made a living out of doing this, taking it to extreme levels, trawling literature from the period contemporary with an author, then declaring they had found a source text for a novel or play or poem, despite there being no proof the author ever read it. There is a name for this pedantic method, it is Xanaduism, named after The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, a famous study of the great poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by John Livingston Lowes.