Whitley Strieber and the sinister serpents of luck and joy

Derbyshire, England -- not the planet Abaddon

In his non-fiction book Breakthrough (1995), Whitley Strieber recounts an experience in which he and one other person took a wrong turn off Route 17 in New Jersey and for several minutes found themselves in what seemed to be another world, before eventually finding their way back onto the highway. Strieber describes the scene:

The houses were set back from the street, in lawns heavily planted with shrubs and emerald-green grass. The house I could see most clearly was one story and had no visible roof, which made it look like a huge box. It appeared to be made of tan stone deeply etched with carvings of large serpents. [. . .] I observed another one just the same, then took a turn. The place was sinister, to be frank, and I really did not want to attract the attention of whatever it was that thought images of giant snakes were attractive decorations for a home.

In Strieber's novel 2012: The War for Souls (2007), Whitley Strieber stand-in Wiley or Wylie Dale (both spellings are used indiscriminately throughout this poorly edited novel) visits the Union, a little corner of the evil reptilian planet Abaddon where the reptilians are good -- or are environmentalists, anyway, which for Strieber amounts to the same thing. (In most parts of Abaddon, "mentioning global warming drew a death sentence," but in the Union, I kid you not, "it was illegal not to mention global warming"! Sound familiar?) Here Wylie describes one of the houses there. (I won't say whose house, lest I spoil what passes for a plot, but they're good guys.)

Wylie [. . .] watched the rich green Union land speed below them. [. . .] They came down on a pebble driveway before a modest old sandstone, its worn carved serpents of luck and joy barely visible in its ancient walls.

This is obviously the same sort of house described in Breakthrough, but now the carved serpents symbolize "luck and joy." Much like Tolkien, Strieber seems to work with memorable images which can be interpreted in more than one way. (Tolkien's Black Riders evolved out of a scene that originally featured Gandalf rather than a Nazgul.)