Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

It's interesting how the same idea will crop up in multiple places in creative circles, and roughly within the same timeframe. Consider 1993, when two films about Wyatt Earp came out, or a few years later when legendary distance runner Steve Prefontaine was the subject of not one but two biopics. I wrote last week about the television series Millennium, which involved a former FBI agent named Frank Black who used an almost-psychic gift to track down serial killers; the same year that Millennium debuted on FOX, another series showed up on NBC that was about an FBI agent named Samantha Waters who used an almost-psychic gift to track down serial killers. This show was Profiler, which lasted four seasons to Millennium's three.

All of these examples jumped to mind when I read this MSN article about a recent spate of novels centering on, of all things, the Jewish golem. I read one of these novels recently -- Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, which I reviewed here -- and I am a bit surprised that the golem is suddenly such a popular item. (It was also the subject of an episode of The X-Files during that show's fourth season.)