The Stars at Noonday

How to Be Better

2012-02-29T03:59:00.000-05:00

This post is a little outside the usual subject matter of the blog, but I think it's important.

A request for readers of this blog who are white, or male, or heterosexual, which I think includes most (but not necessarily all) who find their way here on a regular basis. Read this. Then read the posts it links to, both on that blog and elsewhere. Then read, or at least skim, other posts on Requires Only That You Hate. Try to find something that offends or upsets you. Unless you read only horror and no science fiction or fantasy, I doubt it will take very long.

So, my straight/white/male reader, what might you be thinking after all that reading? Here's one possibility. It's what I (a gay white man) have thought in the past when confronted with similar perspectives. "Well, I certainly support feminism/anti-racism/LGBT rights. And there are definitely some pieces of fantasy/science fiction/horror that show various biases or get into problematic territory. Bakker's defensiveness might be going a little too far. But this acrackedmoon is too extreme/too political/too blind to nuance/too angry. I can't take her seriously."

That sounds like a reasonable enough attitude, right? After all, we all decide every day whether particular opinions are worth our attention. We can't read every word of commentary from every perspective. And surely, just by the law of averages, there have to be anti-racists/feminists/GLBT activists somewhere who aren't worth taking seriously. Right?

Well.

Next, read this. What are you thinking now? Perhaps something similar? Maybe Sady Doyle goes on the list of feminists too die-hard to be taken seriously. Or are you beginning to see the problem?

Issues of representation and social justice tend to reach the mainstream of Internet genre fandom only when authors or other "important" bloggers respond negatively to being called out. Their responses get noticed, and much discussion and drama ensues. Now, let me be clear: although my opinion doesn't matter all that much, for reasons I'll get to, I think that's a good thing. These issues need to be discussed by any means necessary. But because such discussions only intermittently draw the attention of straight/white/male fans not already immersed in social justice debates, it's easy for those fans to see a sequence of individual critics, and reject them one by one without engaging the larger question of their own relationship to social justice commentary.

That question, simply put, is this: How can straight/white/men justify our claim to care about the concerns of oppressed groups while ignoring or dismissing any criticism coming from members of those groups that doesn't immediately strike us as valid? And the answer, simply put, is We can't.

* * *

One of the things acrackedmoon deals with in the post linked above is the white male fear of being labeled sexist or racist. As far as I can tell, that fear springs from an embarrassing inability to grasp the simple fact that saying, doing, or writing something sexist or racist is not an irremediable blot on one's soul. You don't become Theodore Bilbo by making a single mistake; that's a natural consequence of living in a world full of different kinds of privilege and bigotry. acrackedmoon was not suggesting that R. Scott Bakker is a monster in human form, that he secretly or subconsciously hates women, or that the only solution is for all decent-minded folk to gather pitchforks and torches and storm his castle. She was saying that she, as a woman and a feminist, found his response to criticisms regarding misogyny in his works severely lacking in several ways. Yes, she said it bluntly and mockingly. So what? Critics are not obligated to be nice. If you don't want your ideas and feelings abused, don't share them. Otherwise, accept that not everyone is going to like you and go from there.

Once straight/white/men have decided that the rhetoric or ideology of a particular blogger is over-the-top, we often perceive over-the-top demands as well, even when they plainly don't exist. For some reason discussions of racism and sexism in given books tend to generate unjustified fears of censorship, as though anyone is calling for authors to stop writing or for their works to be destroyed. This feeds the fear of admitting to, acknowledging the mere possibility of, racism or sexism; the white men in question seem to think that the only possible follow-up to such an admission would be to unplug their laptops and vow to write no more. Again, no.

Here's what we need to do, as white/straight/men confronting claims of bigotry against groups of which we're not members, in works we've written or works we like: acknowledge the validity of the interpretation. Even if you're not versed in the academic language on which it draws, accept that that language exists for very good reasons. The little voice that says "But it isn't, but it doesn't..."? Tell that voice to shut up. Part of being open-minded is accepting that you might not be right, even when it really, really feels like you are. You know how, when a friend expresses a firm dislike of some author you really admire, you don't spend the next six months trying to convince that friend he's wrong? Instead, you say "OK," and try to accept that his reading experiences have shaped different criteria by which your favorite author sucks. Maybe you secretly tell yourself that he's wrong and foolish and blind, but I really hope not, and in any case you only say that secretly. You don't throw it in his face. Well, when it comes to sexism, racism, and homophobia, the issues are more important but the principle is the same.

Women, people of color, and non-heterosexuals know more about bigotry than you, white/straight/men. They just do. They know it by bitter personal experience, and by the informed study that often follows such experience. They know more in the same way that Ph.D's in a given field know more than excitable amateurs with a little reading and some crazy theories. Yes, you can construct some wild hypothetical in which the Ph.D's are wrong and the crackpot is right, but if you're deciding that the crackpot is brilliant every single time, something is wrong with your intellectual system. It's ridiculous to regard oneself as open-minded if one constantly rejects the uncomfortable but well-informed radical argument over the safe, deeply ignorant status quo.

The thing about acknowledging the validity of such criticism is that it's not only, and even not primarily, about you. It's about respecting the right of women/POC/LGBT people to be uncomfortable with how they are portrayed (or not portrayed) in fiction, and to voice that discomfort. It's about not seeming (and even if this isn't what's intended, it's how such behavior comes across) more interested in shutting down criticism of something you like than in allowing all members of those groups to contribute to and shape the movements that act on their behalf. It's about not privileging your own progressive self-image above the concerns of those you profess to care about. Feminism belongs to women, anti-racism to POC, and so on. That doesn't mean that straight/white/male allies can't contribute to those movements; it does mean that we need to allow them to be what they are: spaces where, in contrast to the wider society and virtually every sub-culture, the beliefs, needs, and desires of oppressed groups come first. That includes all members of those groups, not just the ones who tell you what you want to hear. (Oh, and that perspective you have, the one you're worried won't be aired if your white/male/straight voice isn't heard? There's a woman, or a person of color, or a lesbian who shares it. Minority discourses are richer than the individual blogs you come across during the latest cycle of drama. They don't need you. Sometimes it's all right to say nothing at all.)

And here's the good news: not only does such an acknowledgement make you a better, more genuinely progressive person, it's also the only thing you have to do. (If you're the writer of the work in question, you might also want to apologize for any frustration or offense you caused, even if you didn't mean to cause any. That's just good manners.) Despite the grim daydreams some white men indulge, you won't be ordered to drop your books onto a pyre and watch them burn. You won't be asked to stop reading them or stop enjoying them, or pledge your absolute agreement with every word of every criticism. What you can do, when reading or writing such works in the future, is remember those criticisms and ask yourself how to avoid perpetuating hurtful ideas while still liking what you like. Or, as another blogger, whose comments are both briefer and sharper than mine, put it, "The best defence is to forget about defence. Just listen and think about it and try to be better."

Vine update, and some general notes

2012-02-22T01:43:00.000-05:00

I've gotten out of the habit, so here are a few of my recent Vine reviews that may be of interest to readers of this blog:

Steampunk!, a YA anthology of... well, guess: here.

The Demi-Monde: Winter, the first book in a series about a massive VR scenario that jumbles different historical periods: here.

When She Woke: a dystopian variation on The Scarlet Letter: here.

Ed King: a modern retelling of the Oedipus story, the final chapter of which makes for a decent SF novella: here.

The Thorn and The Blossom: an accordion-format curiosity by the great Theodora Goss: here.

The Flame Alphabet: a surreal dystopian novel in which language becomes poisonous: here.

The Games: technothriller with genetically-engineered animal gladiators: here.

The Uninvited Guests: drawing-room comedy with magical elements: here.

As a reminder, I sometimes post on Amazon non-genre reviews that don't appear here. There are also a few lightly-edited or updated versions of posts that originally appeared here and weren't immediately copied there. To see all my Amazon reviews, click here.

I apologize for the lack of content here lately; moving house and dealing with some other personal situations has cut down on my reading time, and various non-genre titles have taken up much of what remains. It'll be at least another three weeks before my schedule opens up much, but in the near future I hope to finish The Century's Best Horror Fiction (only 49 stories to go! Remember you can find my ridiculous brief story-by-story reviews on Twitter) and get back to The Sense of the Past: The Ghostly Stories of Henry James, not to mention the Tartarus Press collections of Arthur Machen I got for Christmas. Before all that, though, and hopefully in the next few days, will be a review of Mark Valentine and John Howard's new joint collection, Secret Europe.

On another topic entirely, I'm thinking that the white-on-black design of this blog is tough to read, and a bit dull to boot. Unfortunately I have absolutely no ideas on what would look better and still fit the tone of the blog. Reader suggestions are welcome.

The Century's Best Horror Fiction: Twitter Reviews

2012-02-06T21:38:00.000-05:00

Today I received The Century's Best Horror Fiction, a mammoth two-volume anthology edited by John Pelan and published by Cemetery Dance that does exactly what it says on the tin. One story per year, one story per author. 1550+ pages and 700,000+ words. Obviously with something this hefty I'm not going to mention each story in my formal review, but I have decided to do a quick review of each story on Twitter as I finish it. To see the review tweets, which will begin tonight, you can go to my Twitter feed or check out the tag #CBHF. Because space in a tweet is at a premium, I'm only listing the year of publication, not author or title. To find out which story goes with which year, you can check out the table of contents under the appropriately-labeled TOC tab on the Cemetery Dance website, where you can also pick up a copy if it strikes your fancy. (The first printing is almost gone and the already substantial price tag will increase for any second printing, so order soon if you're interested. The individual volumes are also available separately and substantially discounted from Amazon.com; here are Volume One and Volume Two.) As soon as I click "publish" on this post I'm closing the laptop screen and embarking on the 1901 story. Weirdly exciting!

The Janus Tree and Other Stories

2012-02-05T19:17:00.000-05:00

Let's begin with the only disappointing thing about Glen Hirshberg's third collection: it includes nothing but the stories. No introduction, no afterword, no story notes, not even previous publication info or an author bio. The stories in Part Two are labeled "Tales from the Rolling Dark," but those not familiar with Hirshberg will have no way of knowing that's a reference to the Rolling Darkness Revue, an annual ghost story tour founded by Hirshberg and Peter Atkins. This may seem a small thing to complain about, but front/back matter is a major element in making a collection feel like a book, a coherent entity unto itself, rather than a set of stories that happen to be appearing together. The division into three loosely-themed parts is a help, but the stories do seem a bit lonely on their own.

Perhaps that's appropriate, though. Hirshberg's great gift is to write about profound loneliness, grief, and regret without the resulting fiction ever becoming maudlin or grandiose. He communicates better than almost any writer I could name the pain, both in the moment and in hindsight, of realizing that you can't make the connection you want to make, that sometimes love and friendship and family bonds aren't enough. His characters are often damaged, hurting each other not out of malice but from deeper, inscrutable impulses that turn them into tragic figures. What prevents them also turning into tragic abstractions is Hirshberg's command of character: even in the shorter stories, his protagonists are never types, because they've been given details of personality that don't fit any cliche. Add in prose that creates a credible melancholy atmosphere in virtually any setting, and it's small wonder that Hirshberg is widely considered one of the best writers of horror fiction to emerge in the last decade.

His first collection, 2003's The Two Sams, was an extraordinary debut despite including only five stories; as Ramsey Campbell noted in his introduction, it was the sort of book to guarantee the author's reputation even if he never wrote another word. American Morons followed in 2006, and while there wasn't a single bad or even mediocre story among its seven, the overall effect was less dazzling than that of its predecessor. The Janus Tree is somewhere in between, which makes it very good indeed. Nearly half of these eleven stories have appeared or will appear in best-of-the-year anthologies, and the title story won the Shirley Jackson Award and was nominated for the International Horror Guild Award. I think it's about time to take a closer look at the work that's won all this praise.

"The Janus Tree" features one of Hirshberg's most evocative settings yet, a ruined, fading mining town whose people are as powerless to control their relationships and impulses as they are to restore industry and liveliness to their homes.

What I remember is walking with Robert one night during the summer after sixth grade, all the way across Aluminum Street past the hunched, dark taverns with their decades-old, hand-lettered signs proclaiming NO MINERS still posted in the windows. Just in case Company employees from some other town with enough miners left to matter decided to come by on a road trip, we guessed. We walked under a ridiculous, blazing moon, down rows of tightly packed, boxy Company houses, their yards full of rusting bikes and truck parts and swingless swingsets, into a wind that pummeled our faces or horse-kicked us in the back, depending on whether we were coming or going... We cleared the houses, and the wind half-lifted us off our feet, but we punched forward. To our right, the gouged mountains loomed black and treeless. The moonlight pooling in the biggest of the abandoned blast pits up there made it look more like an eye than a wound. To the east and below us, the plains stretched out, running free of the mountains.

So bleak a landscape casts into stark relief the dramas the young narrator faces: the loss of one friend, his growing affection for another, and his conflict with a third, a bully and drug dealer whose cruelty might, in their barren town, be mere desperation for some genuine feeling. That child antagonist, inexplicably nasty yet not entirely unsympathetic, makes "The Janus Tree" somewhat reminiscent of Hirshberg's earlier story "Struwwelpeter," but Matt Janus is thoroughly different from Peter Andersz; all they have in common is the insight they provide into the intensity of the lives of young adults, an intensity that, as Hirshberg's novel The Snowman's Children so keenly shows, can reverberate down the years into adult life.

The final element of "The Janus Tree," the one that explains why this book is being reviewed on a horror-driven blog, is the supernatural presence that lies beneath it all. Hirshberg's most powerful stories withhold the meaning of their mysterious phenomena until the end, when the connection between plot and theme flows over the reader in a wave of simultaneously chilling and moving comprehension. (You may be getting a sense that I like this stuff.) Here there isn't even an overt sign of the supernatural until the climax, but the barrenness of the town, in which the closest thing to an inspirational teacher is a man so emphysema-riddled and sedentary he barely seems human, creates an eerieness all its own. "The Janus Tree" stands alongside "Struwwelpeter" and "Dancing Men" as one of Hirshberg's most atmospheric and resonant stories.

The other three pieces in Part One ("Longer Stories") aren't as rich as "The Janus Tree," but they're every bit as well-observed and involving. In "I Am Coming to Live in Your Mouth," a wife facing the last days of her terminally-ill husband and a fraught relationship with his mother begins to see a threatening figure around the house. Hirshberg deftly walks the tightrope of writing about imminent death, avoiding both overblown sentimentality and unrevealing despair in favor of a simple, honest representation of the rhythms of the situation: despair, frustration, fleeting happiness, even more fleeting normality. Which may make it sound "heavy," but everything is woven together so carefully that the story never feels burdened with ambition or thematic program. "You Become the Neighborhood," which is (as far as I can tell) original to this collection, links the personal dramas of several residents, mental illness and loneliness and loss, into what is probably the most touching and humane story ever written about... but I shouldn't give away the ending. And then there's "The Pikesville Buffalo," an easy story to summarize but a difficult one to describe. In plot terms it might sound like a farce, but style and craft turn it into a delicately magical meditation on the question one character asks: "How do you survive the love you outlive?"

The "Tales from the Rolling Dark" in Part Two are somewhat shorter than what precedes and follows them, and since Hirshberg's best stories are usually his longest ones, these are a bit less impressive than the rest. The section is, however, book-ended by two excellent tales of the dangers of grief that were reprinted in successive volumes of Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year. In "Shomer," a young Jewish man is asked to guard his uncle's body overnight, and once he's alone in the funeral home he begins to suspect there really is something to guard it against. It's one of the more purely unsettling stories in The Janus Tree, and it's also another harrowing reflection on loss and memory:

Abruptly, another thought surfaced, dragging with it emotions Marty had forgotten were down there, or convinced himself he'd buried, and he sat hard on the depressed pillow and gripped his knees with his hands. The irony was not lost on him, was in fact unmistakeable. For twenty years-- more-- he'd longed for just one more night alone with Uncle El. Like when he was a kid, and El had taken the train down from college and spirited Marty away to the diner for blintzes, to some minor league baseball stadium he'd never been able to find since where fans hooted every time their Owls scored or threatened to score, to the Delaware shore in the dark in the middle of winter to swim for thirty seconds in their underwear and then drive straight back home, shivering, singing along to awful country songs on El's old car radio. So much of the code Marty used for processing the world-- the numbers and slashes for transcribing baseball games in scorecard boxes, the slanting or adjacent --ing and --ed and --er and --un combinations that signaled opportunity on a Boggle board, the squiggles and dots of trop in Torah portions in prayer books that indicates changes of pitch or chances to make the secret pretend-farting noise with your lips-- he'd learned from El, on those nights. And now his wish had been granted. They were going to spend one more night alone together.

At the other end of Part Two is "The Nimble Men," in which the pilot of a small commuter plane on a nighttime layover in rural Ontario sees lights in the surrounding woods that might be the aurora, or something else. The setting is suitably spooky, but what makes the story stand out is the bond between the narrator and his co-pilot, in which light-hearted (and amusing) banter conceals a deeper admiration that, set against the emotional and physical chill of the milieu, is genuinely affecting rather than soppy.

The remaining Rolling Dark stories are effective, but lack the spark carried by the rest of Hirshberg's work. (I imagine they work evwn better when performed aloud in their original context.) "Miss Ill-Kept Runt" has a child protagonist with realistic psychology, and hides its final revelation well, but isn't substantial enough to achieve the fullest possible impact. "Millwell" is creepy, with another inspired setting, but would likewise be better if it were more thoroughly explored. And "Like Lick Em Sticks, Like Tina Fey" (marvelous title) is flawlessly executed but has a premise that has become familiar over the past forty years' worth of horror fiction.

Part Three features "The Book Depository Stories," of which so far there are only two. The first, "Esmerelda," closed out the Ash-Tree Press anthology Shades of Darkness and appeared in the first volume of The Best Horror of the Year. The second was due to debut in issue 65 of Cemetery Dance, but that issue was delayed so long that it has only just appeared, simultaneously with The Janus Tree. The concept for the series, born of these photographs of a derelict warehouse of school supplies (more information here), is ingenious: as the physical book declines, depositories of dumped volumes appear all over the country, and people-- bibliophiles, urban explorers, the homeless and directionless-- take to visiting them, wandering rooms full of worn, moldy, and forgotten titles.

The Roosevelt, Michigan warehouse, where the books sprout mushrooms from their ruined pages and the hills of still-shrinkwrapped texts and composition notebooks rise shoulder high and higher, a mountain range of waste paper complete with alpine meadows of pink and green binders and waterfalls of paperclips and liquid paper bottles. Miles and miles of them. There's even weather; the rot and damp create a haze that rises from the ground on warmer nights and drifts about the giant, echoing space, as though the words themselves have lifted right off the pages like little Loraxes and floated toward the window sockets to dissipate over the abandoned thoroughfares of the Motor City.

But however appealing in their gothic way, the book depositories aren't safe. These are stories about the power of books and the imagination, and not in the stale, self-congratulatory way you might expect. These abandoned books are dangerous, and the characters who run afoul of them are among Hirshberg's most damaged and driven, living on the edge of insanity in a world that invites such excess, a world that these two stories can only begin to reveal. As impressive as Hirshberg's work to date has been, the book depository series could easily prove to be this author's magnum opus. And coming at the end of this extraordinary collection, an initial taste of it provides an ideal capstone to The Janus Tree's demonstration of the versatility of one of the first great talents in 21st century horror fiction.

The Janus Tree and Other Stories is available from Subterranean Press.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

2012-02-01T13:55:00.000-05:00

What sets Ransom Riggs' debut novel apart from other young adult fantasies is not the text but the illustrations. The bulk of them are, as an afterword notes, "authentic, vintage found photographs," from Riggs' collection and those of other vernacular photography enthusiasts. In fact, the novel began with the pictures, which Riggs used to guide the construction of the narrative. This unconventional source of ideas lends the invented milieu a strange, slightly disjointed quality that works for the book rather than against it, creating an appropriately quirky feel that separates the book from the bulk of "teenager discovers magical secret" titles. Factor in the creation of a fairly realistic teen protagonist, and you have a title engaging enough to recommend to YA genre readers of all ages.

Jacob Portman thought he was an ordinary boy destined to lead an ordinary life, but given the type of novel he's in that's obviously not going to last. The stories his grandfather told about a children's home in World War II era Wales and its residents with bizarre talents used to fascinate him, but now he thinks they're just a metaphor for a life lived in the shadow of the Nazi holocaust. That belief isn't destined to last either. When his grandfather dies in a horrifying way that makes Jacob wonder if it was all true, there seems to be no solution but a trip to Wales. What he finds there is even weirder than he imagined, and even more dangerous. The hidden world his grandfather alluded to is very real, and in great danger, and whether he wants to or not, Jacob has a role to play in its fate.

All of which may sound, to those widely-read in the genre, like standard fare. What elevates it is that the fantastic elements, and the way they fit together, are less traditional. Since the novel takes its time in revealing them, a reviewer shouldn't give anything away, but they blend fantasy, science fiction, and horror in a way that doesn't feel restrained or defined by the conventions of any of those genres. It helps that even the non-supernatural elements, from Jacob's unconventional best friend to the way of life of the remote Welsh island where he makes his discoveries, are equally striking, offbeat and amusing but not clumsily or cheesily so. And the wild invention is balanced by the realistic characterization of Jacob, whose relationship with his parents is edged with authentic personality flaws and failures of communication. The first-person narration is only partly successful-- at times Jacob sounds like an ordinary teenager, at others like a writer trying to achieve atmospheric effect-- but it hits often enough to work, and witty asides ("my mother was loath to pass up even the flimsiest excuse for a celebration-- she once invited friends over for our cockatiel's birthday") help keep the prose involving and the pace lively.

Another part of what makes the setting feel rich is that much of it remains unexplored. Only some of the peculiar children of the title have had their powers and personalities revealed, and there's a wider community of unusual types to be discovered. The ending is more of a new beginning that promises further adventures, so it's no surprise to learn that Riggs is currently gathering photos on which to base a sequel. If it puts the same distinctive spin on teen fantasy as its predecessor, it'll be a book to watch out for.

Digital Domains

2011-12-19T20:03:00.000-05:00

Between 1996 and 2005, leading speculative fiction editor Ellen Datlow selected original fiction for three different online-only publications: OMNI Online, Event Horizon, and SCIFICTION. In Digital Domains, Datlow reprints fifteen stories, many of them award winners or nominees, culled from those outlets. As the anthology's theme is place of publication rather than content, the stories are remarkably diverse, from near-future science fiction to mythic fantasy to a very modern ghost story. I could say that these stories, uniformly well-written and often excellent, prove that great fiction can be published online, but I think that in 2011 most people know that, even if they would prefer to read that fiction in paper formats. So I'll make a broader and equally accurate statement: these stories demonstrate the strength and range of turn-of-the-century speculative fiction, period. That's why the subtitle is "A Decade of Science Fiction & Fantasy," full stop.

With contributors like Kelly Link, Jeffrey Ford, and Kim Newman, Digital Domains doesn't lack for big names, but the stories by less familiar writers are just as good, from the inimitable Howard Waldrop's "Mr. Goober's Show," an eerie tale about the dangers of nostalgia and the history of very early television technology, to Simon Ings' "Russian Vine," a quietly poetic piece of science fiction that meditates on the mechanisms of imperialism. A fine companion piece to "Russian Vine" is M. K. Hobson's "Daughter of the Monkey God," in which an unusual form of outsourcing is the basis for a moving demonstration of the power of forgiveness and emotional catharsis. And then there's Severna Park's "Harbingers," where the instability and violence of contemporary Africa is the backdrop for a mind-bending story about two young women caught up in events beyond their comprehension, involving aliens, time travel, and more disturbing things. These are the elements of science fiction, but Park uses them in an eerie, suggestive manner that gives the story a welcome flavor of dark fantasy.

Some stories speak directly to the concerns of the modern world; others have timeless, unearthly settings. Almost a prose poem, Jeffrey Ford's "Pansolapia" echoes the Odyssey, providing a sense of the epic and the numinous in only three pages. Kelly Link's "The Girl Detective" is an unclassifiable, difficult to describe melding of elements from myth, fairy tale, and twentieth-century juvenile fiction into a surreal, strangely evocative story about the search for meaning and emotional connection. Plus it's pretty funny. Actually, there are a few funny stories in the mix here, like Paul Park's "Get a Grip," the concept of which has aged in the years since its publication, but which remains a pleasure because of the ironic sharpness with which Park imagines its details. Or Kim Newman's "Tomorrow Town," in which a utopian society based on the ideas of classic science fiction turns out not to be quite what was hoped for.

Although Datlow has edited and enjoys all types of speculative fiction, she's most strongly associated with horror, not least because of her long career identifying the genre's best stories, which will hit the quarter-century mark with the 2012 volume of The Best Horror of the Year. Unsurprisingly, several of the stories in Digital Domains are dark enough to be called horror. Most striking to me were Nathan Ballingrud's "You Go Where It Takes You," with its potent, upsetting metaphor for the flight from responsibility, and Richard Bowes' "There's a Hole in the City," a story about the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks that demonstrates the author's ability to write fondly but unsentimentally about New York City, and to evoke the tragic force of memory and regret.

Although there were a few stories that resonated less for me, like James P. Blaylock's "Thirteen Phantasms," a World Fantasy Award winner that I thought was well-crafted but driven by hollow, unconsidered nostalgia, there was nothing I thought was so outright bad it brought down the total grade for the anthology. I'll admit that I bought Digital Domains on a whim at a bookstore liquidation sale, and didn't expect to enjoy it all that much. But as is so often the case, a retrospective covering a longish span of time turned out to offer the cream of the crop. As Datlow's dedication mentions, there was a time when online publication was seen as a risky, vaguely unprofessional proposition. But a group of great writers took the risk, and the positive results, of which this book is just one, are all around us.

There's Nothing in Why: Robert Aickman's "The View"

2011-12-14T01:32:00.000-05:00

"The View," Robert Aickman's third contribution to We Are for the Dark, is the first of four of his "strange stories" that have very similar narrative outlines. A man goes on holiday, where he meets an attractive and mysterious woman with whom he forms a brief, blissful physical relationship before some disaster separates them, bringing his happiness to an end. This might be "The View," or "The Wine-Dark Sea" (where there are three essentially interchangeable women rather than one), or "Never Visit Venice," or "The Stains." To point out this similarity is not to suggest that the stories are repetitive; indeed they are not, for the specificities, of character and setting and supernatural phenomenon, render them quite distinct. One common feature, however, makes them difficult to write about within the framework of these essays: there is little about them to explain. Both in terms of broad narrative meaning and of wide-ranging theme, they seem to me fairly straightforward. (If I can be forgiven a digression, this may be why they have never struck me as among Aickman's finest tales; the air of unsettling ambiguity, though present in all of them, is not as strong or as all-pervading. In this, and in most other ways, I think "The View" is the best of the four.)

One could, of course, dig deeper, searching for a hidden level of meaning, a key to unlock the story and make every bewildering detail relevant. But I'm not sure that's a helpful approach. Both Aickman's theory of the ghost story as an artifact of the unconscious, "akin to poetry," and his philosophical stance that the modern over-reliance on reason and the scientific method represents a "wrong turning" for the human race, suggest that past a certain point the search for meaning is fruitless or even dangerous. "The View," though not the first Aickman story to hint at his criticism of the modern world-- there are intimations of that perspective in both "The Trains" and "The Insufficient Answer"-- is the first to move it into the foreground, contrasting the over-explained, dreary, unhappy world of contemporary England with the baffling, beautiful, fascinating Island and its lovely inhabitant, Ariel.

The critique of modernity begins with the description of the protagonist's temperament in the second paragraph. "Carfax always saw all good in terms of 'emancipation': all beauty, all duty. Others had seen the vision, but the slave selves of their past had intervened, making the gorgeous tawdry, the building in strange materials as rapidly failing in beauty, use, and esteem as the human body itself." (In the same vein is his later remark that "There are no beautiful houses in England now. Only ruins, mental homes, and Government offices." Note, by the way, that Carfax's own brief escape from his "slave self" is followed by the rapid aging of his own body.) Shortly afterward comes a glimpse of several such slave selves, in the array of overheard comments on the deck of the boat, which captures in a few brief paragraphs the depressing, faintly absurd quality of daily life and the various unsatisfactory bulwarks built against it.

"She has no idea how plain she is and of course you can't tell her," observed a conspicuously unattractive woman of about forty-five to a replica of herself.

"Communism gives the workers something to work for," vehemently asserted a man in a raincoat. His wispy colorless hair appeared on his prematurely obtruding scalp-line like the last vegetation in the dust bowl.

"So I said I'd give it to her if she promised to have it dyed green," remarked a round matron to her bored and miserable-looking husband.

"If you'll bring in the orders, I'll look after production. You can leave that to me. I know how to handle the ruddy Government."

"In the end I had to drag the clothes off her, and she tried to turn quite nasty." The speaker looked away from the other man and laughed gloatingly before resuming his former confidential manner.

"There's no hope for the world but a big revival of real Christianity," said the serious-minded, rather important-looking man. He was apparently addressing a large popular audience. "Real Christianity," he said again with emphasis.

"Look, Roland! A porpoise!" said a woman of thirty to her offspring, in the tone of one anxious to guide rather than dominate the child's formative years.

The pessimistic tone set by this passage and by the disagreeable boat journey is disrupted by the arrival of the woman known as Ariel, Aickman's first real femme fatale and the voice in this story of the rejection of modern communal values. There is her dismissal of her real names as "hideous commonplaces names of schoolgirls and young brides, and elderly lonely pensioners, and pure women in books. Godparents' names. Goodly names. Useful names which people in shops can spell." There is her description of Carfax's usual existence:

You live surrounded by the claims of other people: to your labor when they call it peace, to your life when they call it war; to your celibacy when they call you a bachelor, your body when they call you a husband. They tell you where you shall live, what you shall do, and what thoughts are dangerous. Does not some modern Frenchman, exhausted by it all and very naturally, say 'Hell is other people'?

The complaints she invokes are at once sweeping-- describing life in England as lived "entirely among madmen"-- and exact-- references to the absence of British taxes on the Island and to eating a lot of butter with breakfast. And finally there is the couplet written in her hand, reiterating her rejection of the pursuit of explanation: "There's nothing in why/The question is How?/Whatever you learnt/From the golden bough."

Faced with a story that itself seems to abrogate exegesis, one might simply throw up one's hands and enjoy it as an encounter with the irrational and beautiful and disturbing world that exists, or might exist, or ought rightly to exist, under and around the common one. But the details of that world, while not fitting into a reductive schematic explanation, do contribute to its resonance in ways that may not be obvious. "The View" is one of Aickman's more profusely allusive stories, rich in reference to the worlds of myth and art, and the remainder of this essay will track down some of those allusions for the benefit of readers who don't wish to do so themselves, suggesting in places how they relate to the larger theme of the story. Such a process does, of course, leave one at risk of "fancying absurd resemblances" and "making quite false identifications," but when analyzing Aickman, such risk is never far away.

Carfax: the name of Dracula's home in England in the Stoker novel, but I doubt that matters much. Its origin is in the Latin word for a crossroads, which would certainly fit the character's status, but it may just be the sort of British name Aickman was drawn to: at once vaguely aristocratic and faintly ridiculous (cf. Wendley Roper, Laming Gatestead).

Ariel: Shakespeare's air spirit from The Tempest, obviously, perhaps with reference also to the Biblical angel of the same name. Considering the gender ambiguity surrounding the Shakespearean character, which is explicitly mentioned in the story, the Aickman character's habit of dressing as a man is striking, if only as a suggestion of a more than human quality or of a duality comparable to a simultaneously human and non-human nature.

Fleet: Time is fleeting, indeed.

the Island: wherever it is. That it is left unnamed is surely the point. The Isle of Man is located in the right general area, and is likewise something of a tax haven, but I don't detect specific reference to that or any other place.

The Last of England: a Ford Madox Brown painting, shown here along with an accompanying sonnet by the author. The poem is, in tone if not in details, suggestive of Carfax's ambivalence about his holiday.

the Pastoral Symphony: Beethoven's Sixth, intended to suggest the pleasures of travel in the countryside, with movements labeled "Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country," "Scene at the brook," "Happy gathering of country folk," "Thunderstorm, storm," and "Shepherds' song, cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm." The association with Carfax's pastoral recollections and reflections is obvious.

Voltaire: his freethinking tolerance is, of course, quite fitting for Ariel.

the carpet: Possibly with an echo of Henry James' "The Figure in the Carpet," where a writer's great and secret intention is compared to "a complex figure in a Persian carpet," though one hardly needs to have read James to use carpet patterns as a metaphor for pointless meaning-seeking.

a huge and burly man: "one of the Island gods" according to Ariel, and therefore perhaps with some reference to giants of Celtic myth. It's worth mentioning that, with its mysterious woman, its strange and magical landscape, and its unexpected time dilation, "The View" has an underlying similarity to very old stories about visits to faerie lands.

Ariel's verse: This is a translation of a Sappho fragment by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of a pair of fragments he combined into a poem variously known as "One Girl" and "Beauty." Aickman's ellipsis at the end covers his omission of the final words "till now." The second fragment as translated by Rossetti is "Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found,/Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound,/Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground." Sappho has already been mentioned as part of Carfax's train of thought that was interrupted by Ariel-- that drew her into being near him, if one wants to interpret the story in that way. Critics have observed that Rossetti's use of these fragments has mythic significance, reflecting on love and death with reference to underworld myths like those of Orpheus and Persephone. But that observation postdates the writing of this story, and the general resonance of these images of the desired, the unattainable, and the destroyed for "The View" is a simpler matter given Ariel's own fleeting quality.

Così è se vi pare: Literally means "You're right if you think you're right." The title of a Pirandello play dealing with the fragility of truth and the relentless search for meaning.

Beddoes: Thomas Lovell Beddoes' work demonstrates an ongoing obsession with death, which would seem to make it a poor, or perhaps a telling, choice for Carfax's musical endeavor.

Dahlmeier's collection of Judaeo-Arabic fables: I assume this is a real book, though I can find no information about it. I have no idea about the relevance, if any, of the first fable to Carfax's situation, unless to suggest he has made or will make a wrong choice, but both the second, with its tradeoff between lifespan and pleasure, and the third, with its "pleasurable but dangerous activities... of some visitor from another world" are certainly suggestive.

"Dover Beach": I imagine the relevance of the poem to Carfax's situation is obvious from the section quoted by Aickman, but for those who somehow got through school without reading it the whole thing is here.

the golden bough: As the text suggests, Sir James Frazer's book was The Golden Bough, a rationalist, non-theological study of myth and religion, and as such a logical target for Ariel's (and Aickman's) criticism of scientific analysis at the expense of metaphysical significance. The absence of capitals, if it means anything, may also be meant to bring to mind the specific "golden bough" out of which Frazer's book grew. This was a ritual associated with the goddess Diana Nemorensis in which a runaway slave could pull down a bough from a special tree and fight the priest-king to the death; if he was successful, he became the new priest-king, at least until someone successfully challenged him. Frazer linked this practice to a perceived worldwide myth about a sacred king, married to a goddess, who died and was reborn as part of a cycle associated with fertility.

Without forcing a tempting but imprudent one-to-one comparison (Carfax as runaway slave, the impossibly tall figure as dominant god), one can see this legend and others reflected in "The View," a story that, for all its distinctive Aickmanesque touches, has something classically mythological about it. Whether a conscious product of revision or a result of the unconscious workings to which Aickman attributed the success of all true ghost stories, this air of myth produces that juxtaposition of the quotidian and the uncanny on which Aickman and so many other great writers of the supernatural have drawn.

Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One)

2011-12-01T15:53:00.000-05:00

One of the pleasures of reading widely is that you can achieve enough distance from an author's work to make you forget how brilliant it is, so that when you return to that author, the rediscovery is almost as powerful as the initial encounter. Caitlín R. Kiernan is such a talent, and her latest collection, Two Worlds and In Between, is ideal both for discovery and rediscovery. It's a "best-of" volume spanning 1993-2004, and like all great retrospectives it demonstrates at once the range of which its author is capable and the recurring themes, images, and stylistic features that make her work distinctive. At about 200,000 words and nearly 600 pages, it's a generous selection, including 25 short stories and novelettes and a long novella, each followed by a brief author's note on its genesis or its place in Kiernan's oeuvre. But enough of facts and generalities: on to the stories.

Lucy has been at the window again, her sharp nails tap-tapping on the glass, scratching out there in the rain like an animal begging to be let in. Poor Lucy, alone in the storm. Mina reaches to ring for the nurse, stops halfway, forcing herself to believe that all she's hearing is the rasping limbs of the crape myrtle, whipped by the wind, winter-bare twigs scritching like fingernails on the rain-slick glass. She forces her hand back down onto the warm blanket. And she knows well enough that this simple action says so much. Retreat, pulling back from the cold risks; windows kept shut against night and chill and the thunder.

The tricky thing about retrospectives is that they're usually arranged chronologically, putting the weakest work in front. Kiernan herself observes of two of the first three stories in the collection that they seem to her more ambitious than successful. But the ambitions themselves are enough to make these stories basically satisfying, especially given Kiernan's style, which even in her earliest work lacks any hint of awkwardness and has the darkly propulsive intensity that has become one of her hallmarks. The prose has been touched up over the years, but a look back at the original versions shows that this was only a honing of already-polished language.

"Emptiness Spoke Eloquent," quoted above, follows the long decline of Mina Murray in the aftermath of Dracula, and by interweaving her personal tragedies into the sweep of the century (world war, influenza, interwar Paris, war again, psychoanalysis in 1950s Manhattan), impresses even as it fails to compel on an emotional level. "To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)" has a few extraordinary evocations of a storm, but likewise lacks the psychological force that would be necessary to guide the reader through its careful tangles of prose.

But with the very next story, "Tears Seven Times Salt," that force arrives, and is instantly overwhelming. This story was recently chosen for the mammoth Century's Best Horror Fiction, and its invocation of displacement, dissatisfaction with identity, despair easily earns the distinction. The great genius of Kiernan's early writing is its depiction of the lives of outsiders and isolates; as Neil Gaiman put it, she is "the poet and bard of the wasted and the lost." Addicts, prostitutes, blocked artists, those who can't or don't want to find a place in what is sometimes called the adult world: Kiernan's gift is to write about them so sympathetically that even those who dismiss them as lazy or twisted can be made to understand how their lives feel, how the "unnatural" becomes the only natural thing.

Three very small rooms and each of them filled with his books and newspapers, his files and clippings and folders. The things he has written directly on the walls with Magic Marker because there wasn't time to find a sheet of paper before he forgot. Mountains of magazines slumped like glossy landslides to bury silverfish and roaches, Fate and Fortean Times, journals for modern alchemists and cryptozoological societies and ufology cults. Exactly 1,348 index cards thumbtacked or stapled to plaster the fragile, drained color of dirty eggshells and coffee-ground stains. Testaments uncorrelated, data uncollated, and someday the concordance and cross-reference alone will be a hundred thousand pages long.

That's from "Rats Live on No Evil Star," a portrait of something like schizophrenia, of pattern-making and the desperate search for truth, and the portrait of eccentricity, the evocation of a decayed yet strangely attractive place, are found throughout these early pieces. The settings, from the heat of a New Orleans summer to the chill solitude of a millionaire's estate on the Hudson, are as vividly captured as the flawed, obsessive, volative characters who populate them. But there's more at work than human yearning and despair; these are, after all, fantasy stories, dark and disturbing ones. Kiernan's supernaturalism, enhanced by her knowledge of geology and paleontology, of things so ancient or unrecognizable that to the common imagination they might as well be monsters, is, in its very different way, as reserved and elusive as that of the classic ghost story; it's unsurprising that the producer who wanted to turn the marvelous "Onion" into a screenplay should have mistaken it for only the first half of a story. Her work may not offer the expected answers, but as Kiernan writes, "one good mystery is worth a thousand solutions," and it is the awe brought on by the inscrutability of the phenomena she writes about that gives them their staying power. Without answers, there are only the images, which tap into the terror that comes when our fragile sense of order is disrupted.

But Frank didn't run away, and when he pressed his face to the crack in the wall, he could see that the fields stretched away for miles and miles, crimson meadows beneath a sky the yellow-green of an old bruise. The white trees that writhed and rustled in the choking, spicy breeze, and far, far away, the black enormous thing striding slowly through the grass on bandy, stilt-long legs.

As Kiernan's style develops over the course of the collection, another gift becomes evident, a mastery of narrative structure comparable to H. P. Lovecraft's. Stories told out of chronological order, further flashbacks within those disordered sections, dreams that echo the unrevealed past or foreshadow the future, excerpts from books whose banality is belied by the reader's knowledge of their true significance: Kiernan has mastered every device, gradually pulling back the curtain to reveal as much as she's ever going to. Small masterpieces like "Andromeda Among the Stones" and "La Peau Verte" use this non-linearity to great effect, building up to their defining moments so that those moments have the grandeur, the terrible and long-lasting reverb, for readers that they do for the characters. Eventually Kiernan begins to experiment with the first-person point-of-view, which she had long resisted, and the narrator's struggle with ordering events, with describing the indescribable and focusing on the horrific, further increases the brilliant structural complexity out of which fleeting and sinister knowledge emerges. For readers expecting the straightforward, the double whammy of elaborate structure and elusive meaning will be frustrating, but for those who prefer carefully-orchestrated and suggestive cosmic dread, there are few greater pleasures.

I wish I could convey what makes each of the stories in this collection excellent, but I don't know how to do so without bogging down in plot summary, which is beside the point. So let me mention only a few favorites. "The Road of Pins," a werewolf story except that it isn't one at all, in which profound unease grows out of the work of a contemporary artist, a mysterious film, and the writer's block and fragile romance of the protagonist. "The Dead and the Moonstruck," which shows the unexpected ease with which Kiernan's decidedly adult vision can be adapted for a satisfying young-adult story. I especially admired the few science fiction stories mixed in with the fantasy. Science fiction allows the weirdness that exists in the shadows of Kiernan's fantasies to emerge into the light and define her universe, which makes the element of cosmic terror all the more potent. In "Riding the White Bull" and "The Dry Salvages," the aliens are truly alien, but they're only a part of the strangeness of space-- vast, dangerous, beautiful-- and human society itself has or might become a nightmare scenario.

I give up. That paragraph feels hopelessly false, exactly what I might say about half a dozen writers I admire, nothing specific to Kiernan's talent. All I can think to do is quote more, the stopgap of throwing out the author's words when my own prove insufficient. And in the end, it's perhaps the way an author uses words that matters most. Themes, motifs, structural devices: they're common coin, accessible to anyone, but the flow of sentences is nearly impossible to imitate.

And all the world goes white, a suffocating white where there is no sky and no earth, nothing to divide the one from the other, and the Arctic wind shrieks in her ears, and snow stings her bare skin. Not the top of the world, but somewhere very near it, a rocky scrap of land spanning a freezing sea, connecting continents in a far-off time of glaciers. Dancy wants to shut her eyes. Then, at least, there would only be black, not this appalling, endless white, and she thinks about going to sleep, drifting down to someplace farther inside herself, the final still point in this implosion, down beyond the cold. But she knows that would mean death, in this place, this when, some mute instinct to keep her moving, answering to her empty belly when she only wants to be still.

A simple paragraph in some ways, picked more or less at random, but what I respond to in Caitlín R. Kiernan's fiction is there as much as it is anywhere else. It's not representative of her style-- no one paragraph could be-- but it has a compelling rhythm, captures the sense of being tossed into the deep end, somewhere you can't catch your breath, can only hold it in as you navigate the marvelous, malevolent landscape while looking for the way out. An easy experience? No. Never crude, Kiernan's work is nonetheless raw, likely to upset certain readers in ways they aren't looking for. But anything worth reading is going to upset someone, and if you want fiction that juxtaposes emotional frailty with the magnitude of the universe, fantasy that leads you someplace else and makes that place as real as here and now, Kiernan should be at the very top of your reading list.

Fantasy, Lite

2011-12-01T01:38:00.000-05:00

At the risk of becoming one of those people who gets sniffy every time Tolkien is mentioned in the mainstream media, I'm going to take a minute to look at this New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik. Which isn't actually about Tolkien; as far as I can tell, it's an attempt to explain the popularity of Christopher Paolini, into which Tolkien is awkwardly interjected. Of course Paolini is influenced by Tolkien; he is, as you would expect from a writer who began his series as a teenager, influenced by virtually every piece of fantasy and science fiction he ever read. But, superficial points aside, is there an actual basis for comparison? Paolini has the same relationship to Tolkien that caffeine-free diet soda has to the caffeinated, sugared variety: everything that makes it what it is has been taken out. Considering Tolkien through the lens of his imitators is inevitably going to diminish what makes his work different. Focusing on Paolini, and to a lesser extent Stephenie Meyer, also means the article flirts with treating The Lord of the Rings as a similar young-adult saga, even though it manifestly isn't.

Considering which, the key thing about the article is that it isn't too bad. There are problems, of course, or we wouldn't be here. We're told that The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin are early works, which is of course an oversimplification: depending on which texts you're looking at, they're early, they're late, they're contemporaneous with The Lord of the Rings. The context in which they're called early is the interesting part; they're distinguished from The Lord of the Rings because they lack "Hobbits and humors and pipe-smoking wizards" and are "as dull as dishwater in consequence." The irony is that the earliest version of The Silmarillion has a frame story that, while hardly a counter-balancing social comedy like Hobbiton, is more immediate and human than the later approach that of necessity won out in constructing the published text. That both The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin are, despite the existence of editorially-managed continuous versions, incomplete is also something Gopnik doesn't mention or consider.

But none of that really matters, and one can hardly argue the general point that for a lot of readers The Silmarillion as it stands is less interesting than The Lord of the Rings because of the absence of "lovable local detail." (One might, however, demur from the notion that J. K. Rowling's invented world is anything like "Tolkien's sword-and-sorcery realm," or that Tolkien's realm has anything to do with what's usually called sword-and-sorcery. All fantasy is not pretty much the same thing.) More important is this:

Modernist ambiguity, or realist emotional ambivalence, is unknown to Tolkien—the good people are very good, the bad people very bad, and though occasionally a character may be tossed between good and evil, like Gollum, it is self-interest, rather than conscience, that makes him tip back and forth. Betrayal and temptation happen; inner doubts do not. Gandalf and Aragorn never say, as even the most patriotic real-world general might, “I don’t know which side I should be on, or, indeed, if any side is worth taking.” Nor does any Mordor general stop to reflect, as even many German officers did, on the tension between duty and morality: there are no Hectors, bad guys we come to admire, or Agamemnons, good guys we come to deplore. (Comic-book moralities, despite their reputation, are craftier; the “X-Men” series is powerful partly because it’s clear that, if you and I were mutants, we would quite possibly side with the evil Magneto.)

That's a little better than an absolute denial of moral depth, but not much so; in the fundamentals it's no different from the usual response you get when readers of psychologically realistic fiction bounce off Tolkien's epic morality. Several things might be said in response: that in a novel about the seductive nature of power, self-interest is not readily separable from conscience; that Frodo's failure, a vital part of the novel's moral structure and not reducible to "self-interest," hasn't even been mentioned; that talk about who "we" do or don't come to admire or deplore is an act of projection. The underlying problem is that some readers confuse the style by which moral complexity is conveyed in twentieth-century literary fiction with the substance of that complexity. That the tragedy of Boromir is not described in interior monologue doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or that it isn't part of the appeal of the novel. The absence of a debate about the morality of takings sides in a particular invented war is not the absence of morality.

Eventually, after some mockery of the Inheritance Saga, we get the explanation of the appeal of fantasy:

And the truth is that most actual mythologies and epics and sacred books are dull. Nothing is more wearying, for readers whose tastes have been formed by the realist novel, than the Elder Edda. Yet the spell such works cast on their audience wasn’t diminished by what we find tedious. The incantation of names is, on its own, a powerful literary style. The enchantment the Eragon series projects is not that of a story well told but that of an alternative world fully entered. You sense that when you hear a twelve-year-old describe the books. The gratification comes from the kid’s ability to master the symbols and myths of the saga, as with those eighty-level video games, rather than from the simple absorption of narrative.

It's not so much that that's objectionable, although there are young adult fantasies that don't deserve to be treated as mere exercises in world-building, or that it's inaccurate, although I'm not inclined to take someone who writes with such anthropological distance as an expert on how kids read. It's that, as an explanation, it's utterly banal. Fantasy is unrealistic but people respond to the depth of the mythology-- this is an insight worthy of four pages in The New Yorker? It's like writing an article on Cubism whose big insight is that Picasso actually meant his paintings to look that way. The young-adult spin, that books like Eragon and Twilight provide typical adolescent struggles plus a light gloss of magical wish fulfillment, is equally unprofound. This, I suppose, is what gets on my nerves: that in 2011 the audience of a putatively intellectual magazine still needs to be told that fantasy isn't purely juvenile escapism, that it has some connection to the real world. An article like this should be an elaboration of the complicated appeal of fantasy, not a basic look at how the other half reads. The argument Gopnik makes ought to go without saying.

(By the way, is Huckleberry Finn really "a narrative whose purpose is to push the hero toward a moment of moral crisis?" I rather doubt it.)

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

2011-11-20T17:12:00.000-05:00

In 2003 there was The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, in which a group of roughly fifty authors described bizarre, humorous, or downright disturbing illness the mainstream medical community refused to acknowledge. That anthology built on the work of the brilliant, eccentric, and entirely fictional Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead. Now it transpires that the doctor, who died in 2003 at the age of 103, was also a great collector of artifacts, inventions, found objects, and miscellaneous junk, and an even larger group of authors and artists has undertaken to describe the highlights of his collection. The result is a quirky blend of fantasy, science fiction, and horror that ranges from the comical to the creepy and back again.

After an introduction that elaborates the fiction of Dr. Lambshead, perhaps excessively so, the first of several themed sections is "Holy Devices and Infernal Duds: The Broadmore Exhibits," which features four unusual pieces of steampunk tech, from "The Electrical Neurheographiton," an unusual electroshock device invented by Nikola Tesla and described by Minister Faust, to "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny," the ultimate in high-tech child-reading as explained by Ted Chiang. An excerpt from the former will suggest the particular note of weirdness much of the book strikes:

On January 12, 1943, Mr. Tesla was claimed to have died, although reports were conflicting. Many in Hollywood conjectured immediately that assassins in the pay of Big Cinema had done in the Serbian genius for selling them "exclusive" rights to a device whose blueprints contained, in tiny print, the phrase "I have omitted an explanation only for the motive unit which makes the entire machine work, in fear that the alchemists of celluloid might enthrall their nation and the world with ludicrous tales of vacuous lives." Others believed that Mr. Tesla's madness finally claimed him, infecting him with a Jovian "brain burst" that produced not Minerva but rather a puddle of bloodied grey matter upon Tesla's hotel room floor. Among the modern-day Fraternal Society of Teslic Scientific Investigators, there remains the belief that Tesla's "corpse" was an electrophantasmic discharge that had merged with organic materials in the hotel room to produce a permanent simulacrum of Tesla, while the "real" man departed from this world to explore the Universe, unhindered by the constraints of mortals.

Next up is "Honoring Lambshead: Stories Inspired by the Cabinet," six fictions based on artifacts from the cabinet. From Garth Nix's "Ambrose and the Ancient Spirits of East and West," about a British government operative with a gift for magic, to Holly Black's "Lot 8: Shadow of My Nephew by Wells, Charlotte," about the fate of a bear raised as a human, all the stories are good, but several lack the peculiar charm of the rest of the cabinet. Only "Relic" by Jeffrey Ford, with its lonely church and surreal parishioners, is as disarmingly funny, strange, and sad as the catalog entries. Tad Williams' "A Short History of Dunkelblau's Meistergarten" is also great, but it's not really a story, and but for a superficial similarity to Chiang's piece, it would be more at home among "The Broadmore Exhibits."

The next two sections are built around artists: four pieces illustrated by Mike Mignola ("The Mignola Exhibits") and two by China Miéville ("The Miéville Anomalies"). As it happens, one of the Mignola illustrations is for Miéville's "Pulvadmonitor: The Dust's Warning," one of the eerier entries. Although it's found, whimsically enough, in the attic of British Dental Association Museum, the Pulvadmonitor is no joke, but an unsettling reflection of the human search for meaning. Lev Grossman's "Sir Ranulph Wykeham Rackham, GBE, a.k.a. Roboticus the All-Knowing" is funnier, but its account of a British nobleman whose fame in artistic circles is enhanced rather than diminished by his prosthetic lower body and head has an edge of pessimistic melancholy that runs throughout the Cabinet of Curiosities, making it more than an extended steampunk gag. Another example: the second Miéville Anomaly, "The Gallows-horse," is at once a satire on contemporary philosophy and academic theory and a series of unpleasantly pessimistic variations on a memorable image.

The final section of exhibits is simply titled "Further Oddities," and lives up to that title. There's "The Thing in the Jar," in which Michael Cisco recounts Dr. Lambshead's seven attempts to explain the origins of "an anthropic creature" that might be an aborted minotaur, an Olmec carving come to life, or the offspring of a man and a volcano. And Caitlín R. Kiernan's "A Key to the Castleblakeney Key," an epistolary horror story about an impossible bog artifact and the terrible dreams it brings, suffused with its author's gift for balancing historical and archaeological erudition and portrayals of the fraying human mind. And Alan Moore's "Objects Discovered in a Novel Under Construction," which uses elements from his unfinished novel Jerusalem, envisioned as an enormous but unfinished building:

Making a considerable contribution to the already unsettling ambiance is the anomalous (and even dangerous) approach to architecture that is evident in the unfinished work: the lowest floor, responsible for bearing the immense load of the weightier passages and chambers overhead, seems to be built entirely of distressed red brick and grey slate roofing tiles with much of it already derelict or in a state of imminent collapse. Resting on this, the massive second tier would seem to be constructed mostly out of wood and has been brightly decorated with painted motifs that would appear to be more suited to a nursery or school environment, contrasted with the bleak and even brutal social realism that's suggested by the weathered brickwork and decrepit terraces immediately below.

Following these oddities are personal accounts of visits to the collection, dating from 1929, when N. K. Jemisin studies Dr. Lambshead's supply of kitchen implements to acquire the awesome power of "The Singular Taffy Puller," to 2003, when, as recounted to Gio Clairval, Dr. Lambshead's housekeeper sealed the collection's fate by trying against orders to clean "The Pea." That might seem an ideal conclusion for the book, but there's one more thing for those who just can't get enough of Lambshead's collection: "A Brief Catalog of Other Items," paragraph-long descriptions of such curiosities as the Bear Gun (it fires bears), the box of Reversed Commas, and St. Blaise's Toad (a miraculous relic).

With a contributor list featuring some of the biggest names in several varieties of imaginative fiction and art (in addition to those mentioned above, there's Aeron Alfrey, J. K. Potter, Michael Moorcock, Holly Black, Brian Evenson... I could go on), The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities is a treasure trove of the weird. The playful metafictional conceit and some of the more tongue-in-cheek items may lead some readers to expect a wearyingly cutesy volume, but there's more than that going on here, and the total effect of the varied items is all the more powerful precisely because they don't adhere to one easily-described style. Beautifully designed and laid out, this is one curio that any reader of non-mimetic fiction should at least flip through, and many will want to own.

Three Creatures and a Castle: Robert Aickman's "The Insufficient Answer"

2011-11-20T03:39:00.000-05:00

After much consideration, it seems to me that the best approach to an explanatory analysis of "The Insufficient Answer" is three mini-essays on the story's central characters, each of whom appears to be a supernatural being of one sort or another.

Felicity: The Ghost

That Felicity is a ghost now seems so overwhelmingly obvious that I have no idea how I ever missed it. She has a tomb, for heaven's sake, even if housekeeping standards at the Schloss Marcantonio are so eccentric that it might just be an unusual bed. And Cust considers the possibility that she might be a ghost, which is, in an Aickman story, the equivalent of a large neon sign spelling out "SHE'S A GHOST!" in violent green letters. Her ability to move among the locked rooms of the schloss is another clue. But I didn't quite put it all together when I read the story a few months ago. That's the thing about Aickman; his stories are so rich in detail and implication that they become overwhelming, creating an impression of inscrutability so profound that even obvious connections can be overlooked. For that reason, I'll deal briefly with Felicity's two appearances in the narrative, highlighting the hints of her ghostly nature, some of which may not be noticed even by those who know a ghost when they see one.

Felicity died when, in her desperation to escape the schloss, she threw herself from its only large window, the one Cust finds and wonders about. As a ghost, she relives those moments over and over again. This is why, in her first conversation with Cust, she begins to fade as the sounds from the hall are overheard; the sounds are her, weeping as she runs down the corridor toward the window, and disappearing from the room altogether as she and the fallen iron shutter, which Cust sees at the end of the story, on the ground outside and covered with years' worth of vegetation, strike the ground below, setting up the enormous clattering that is either the source of Mrs Hastings' aversion to noise or an especially ironic mockery of it. That there is, despite the comparatively new glass Cust notices, no sound of its breaking when he sees the figure fall from the window, is another indication that the fall is spectral rather than physical.

A few aspects of Felicity's dialogue, which is, like Beech's at the end of "The Trains," a model of the suggestive yet opaque manner of certain Aickman characters, also allude to her status, of which she seems at least partially aware. (If that's so, there's a chilling pathos to her description of being imprisoned and looked in on and getting out.) The statement that Cust wouldn't believe how long she has been at the schloss implies her death was so long ago that, if she were aging normally, she'd be much older than she appears. The concern about whether women still say "bloody" in London also reflects the passage of time. Her reference to "the goose who lays the golden eggs" is presumably about herself as Mrs Hastings' model, killed like the goose by another's cruel greed. And finally there's the remark that Poppy is always ill "at these times," a sign that she knows there is some unnatural cycle involved in her escapes.

But how did that cycle begin? Why was Felicity imprisoned, and what need of Mrs Hastings' did she fulfill?

Mrs Hastings: The Vampire

Just as "The Trains" brought Aickman's distinctive devices to certain horror tropes, so too does "The Insufficient Answer" seem to be his variation on two great nineteenth-century tales of vampirism: Stoker's Dracula and Le Fanu's "Carmilla." As "Carmilla" was itself an influence on Dracula, the specific source of some of these similarities can't be pinned down. All three works have English characters in Central European castles, with an emphasis on secrecy, locked doors, and emergence late in the day. All three feature mysterious, powerful characters whose effusive and learned conversation is emphasized. Dracula and Mrs Hastings are both unexpectedly robust and both are shown sleeping in chapels deep inside their castles (though for very different reasons); both castles are without mirrors. Even Miss Franklin's delirious mutterings about Whitby may be an allusion to Stoker's novel, in which that city was the site of Dracula's first landing in England. There's also the mention at both the beginning and the end of the story of the Irving statue near which Benson's gallery is located. That would be Henry Irving, whose friend and biographer Bram Stoker used the actor-manager as an inspiration for Dracula. The most salient direct parallel between "The Insufficient Answer" and "Carmilla" is that in both stories the dominant figure and her victim are female.

Given the absence of explicitly monstrous behavior in the Aickman canon, the question these similarities raise is not so much whether Mrs Hastings is a blood-drinking vampire as it is what subtler form her victimization might take. One need not assume any supernatural manifestation at all; it might be that she is simply a cruel, controlling woman whose behavior drives people to despair. One certainly doesn't know what she might have done to cause her husband's plane crash, or exactly what (if anything) happened to Miss Franklin's sister Lilian, whose belongings are for some reason stored in the castle. But in the case of Felicity, we have a little more to go on.

In the first place, there is something off about Felicity's willingness to travel halfway across Europe to stay at a ruined castle with an older woman she's only just met. It's perhaps not insignificant that one of the subtexts of "Carmilla," and many other female vampire stories, is lesbianism. The reference to unspecified "talk" about Mrs Hastings could support such a reading (or any number of others, of course), and even the mention of "just a phase" could be so interpreted if one wished. Most interesting in this context is Miss Franklin's explanation of why Mrs Hastings came to Slovenia: "I should say it was simply to get away from the world of men." This, like several of her explanations, appears to be consciously disingenuous, trading on the difference between "men" as a species and "men" as a gender; it is at the very least suggestive. But in any case a sexual reading is hardly necessary, as the strongest intimations of strangeness around Mrs Hastings are not about love but about art.

If Felicity is to be believed, Mrs Hastings imprisons her simply to use her as a model. That could be motivation enough; she has great hopes for the work she does with Felicity's image, and it is, in Cust's judgment, "curious" and "astonishing;" he "had never seen anything like it." The tomb sculpture in her shape is "brilliantly suggestive" and a "masterpiece." More is involved than beauty, though; in one of the story's more bizarre moments, Mrs Hastings' statement that she is learning to paint in the dark "seemed perceptibly to shake the previously assured Miss Franklin." Is there something dangerous about her talent? A now-obscure allusion may be significant here.

When studying Mrs Hastings' library, Cust pulls out a book at random, Chris Massie's Corridor with Mirrors. This is a real novel, published in 1941 and therefore fairly recent at the 1951 publication of We Are for the Dark, but both it and its author are so poorly-known today as to have left little mark on the Internet. Any readers of this essay who are familiar with the book or the author are encouraged to leave a comment, but in the interim I must rely on this summary of a 1948 film version. If it's at all representative of the novel's plot, Aickman's allusion to the story of a woman shaped by an eccentric figure into the ideal female of his imagination may be a hint of how intense, ominous, and possibly supernatural is Mrs Hastings' interest in Felicity. Or it might just be that the title of that novel allows Aickman to bring up the absence of mirrors in the schloss.

Whatever her precise nature, Mrs Hastings is certainly a powerful personality. But by the end of the story one suspects she is not the most powerful woman in the castle. That dubious honor must go to the third member of the story's peculiar triad.

Miss Franklin: The Witch

I've suggested that Miss Franklin's answers to Cust's questions are sometimes dishonest. Three times she pauses before replying to him: when asked about the loud noise, when asked about Mrs Hastings' reason for leaving England, and when asked if she has any control over Felicity's appearances. In the first instance, her answer is a lie with a hint of the truth; in the second, it's so ambiguous as to be meaningless. I would argue that the third answer is also dishonest: that Miss Franklin is in fact the source of the apparition of Felicity, and since that apparition is (savor the irony of her name) the reason the older women "must absent ourselves from that felicity [of leaving the schloss] a while," she has therefore imprisoned Mrs Hastings as thoroughly as Mrs Hastings once imprisoned Felicity. Cust himself, remembering Felicity's "fear and hatred" and "constant references to her rather than the sculptress," is on the verge of a similar conclusion, and back aways from it only out of fear.

Before going over the evidence for this proposition, it's worth looking at the relationship between the two older women. Felicity says, "They hate each other, of course," and Mrs Hastings' indifference to Miss Franklin's potentially fatal illness ("It's very tiresome of her and quite unnecessary") backs up that contention on one side. On the other, Miss Franklin shows no sign of warmth toward or about anything or anyone. It's unlikely such enmity was there from the beginning; Miss Franklin would hardly have taken so solitary a job with a woman she despised. One might speculate, then, that the mutual hatred began when Miss Franklin saw what Mrs Hastings was capable of, what she did to Felicity, to her husband, or to Miss Franklin's sister Lilian. Possessed of that knowledge, Miss Franklin apparently armed herself against becoming the next victim. As she says to Cust, after inexplicably unlocking her door without a key, "I have no intention of being trapped."

There are a few signs that she is linked to Felicity's appearances. It's Felicity herself who observes that Miss Franklin is always ill at these times, and Miss Franklin is said to have woken suddenly in the middle of the night, presumably around the time Felicity appeared or disappeared. But the largest clue is her amusement when Cust suggests a mundane cause for her illness, and the exchange that follows.

"Pneumonia?" Cust might have said rabies.

"I recollected your cold when we last met."

"Oh yes. That." Miss Franklin laughed. "I followed my sister Lilian's remedy."

"Your sister Lilian?"

"Two heaping tablespoonsfull of salt in a tumbler of water piping hot and drink it down."

"I see. It certainly seems to work like a charm."

"Well, it works, Mr Cust. Charms often don't and when they do you oftener wish they hadn't." She still looked extraordinarily ill and her hair was a disorganized heap; but she was fully dressed in an ugly brick-coloured frock.

"You know about charms?" inquired Cust lightly but, all recent events considered, fearing for the answer.

"I've been asleep for goodness knows how long. That's something I'm not used to at all. I think there must have been magic in the air." The sentimental cliche sounded ludicrously sinister.

Magic indeed. In this light, Miss Franklin's unflappable calm (I think especially of her "neat ladylike figure" and amused laughter during Mrs Hastings' fitful response to Felicity's appearance), and the statement that she loves her job, make a grim sense, as does her fear of Mrs Hastings' ability to paint in the dark: if the two women are in some way dueling forces, an unexpected advance on the part of one might endanger the other. And their relationship is psychologically rich as well; one hardly need invoke the supernatural to imagine dangerous power games, driven by secrets, in the dynamic between a servant and her mistress. Possible sexual interpretations of Mrs Hastings' behavior become interesting again here: Miss Franklin as abandoned lover, Miss Franklin as willing or unwilling procuress.

But whether one prefers a reading that involves sex or one that emphasizes other deep, mysterious drives, the psychological element is a constant. It's often true of Aickman that even when the narrative details of a story remain obscure, the philosophical and psychological weight is clear. Whatever the specific connections and secrets that were involved, all three of the story's female characters are trapped in the Schloss Marcantonio by networks of mutual need and loathing, and each is, despite evident flaws, tragic or pathetic in her own way. There is, as Miss Franklin suggests, no end in sight to their suffering, and Cust, who only spends a week with them, loses his job as a result of the contact. Not all Robert Aickman's stories are bleak, but the world of this one does seem to be an inescapable and permanent hell.

Open Questions

1. As mentioned above: how similar is Massie's novel to that film version? What further connections might be made by one who had read the book?

2. Names are important in Aickman. "Cust" is probably related to constancy and perseverance, which is rather funny in the circumstances, and the irony of "Felicity" has already been mentioned, but what about Lola Hastings and Poppy Franklin? Is there anything there? And why is it called the Schloss Marcantonio? A reference to the engraver? The composer? Someone else? My guess would be the first, but what would be the reason? Is there a specific work of his that might be relevant?

3. Is something particular meant by that bit about painting in the dark?

As ever, comments on these or any other aspects of the story are welcome.

The Secret Books of Paradys

2011-11-19T13:11:00.002-05:00

This four-book series is linked by the milieu of Paradys, a city that's not so much a fictional analogue of Paris as a distillation of the Decadent, Gothic, and romantic aspects of its image. Populated by vain noblemen with decaying mansions, unappreciated poets drinking in darkened taverns, and lunatics locked into cruel asylums, Paradys is a perfect setting for the brand of lush, ornate horror that is, I think, the most distinctive of the many modes in which Tanith Lee writes. In both style and substance writing of this type can seem exaggerated, ludicrous, but for those on the right wavelength it captures something of the glittering intensity of obsession, a state of mind in which the exaggerated and the ludicrous seem natural, are in fact the only way to express one's heightened awareness.

Darkness closed on Paradys. But the night City was no worse, no more impenetrable, than a night in the country. This too had its own strange sounds, its own pitfalls, and generally the City gave more light than the forests, hills and fields, which were lit only by fire-flies, fungus, stars and moon. The City moon was made of dull plate, but lower down other luminosities shone out. High round windows in various towers of a college where the students pored late over huge books and parchments, dim bars of light behind iron grills and panes of sheep-skin. Sometimes, at the gates of a fine house, or along the river and its bridges, torches flashed on poles. But on the lower bank the hovels crowded to each other in sympathy, darkling, though here and there an occasional fire bloomed on stones in the street.

The Book of the Damned is made up of two short novels and a novella, unlinked in narrative terms but sharing recurrent motifs of duality, mutable gender, and romantic obsession. In "Stained with Crimson," the poet Andre St. Jean becomes infatuated with a mysterious noblewoman, but as you might expect the consummation of his desire comes at a terrible price, trapping Andre in a cycle of lust, violence, and revenge from which escape may take a very long time. In "Empires of Azure," Louis de Jenier, who makes a living and finds an obscure satisfaction in imitating women on the stage, rents a house in Paradys that proves already occupied, by a ghostly female presence to which he is fatally drawn.

These are fine stories, but the highlight of the first volume is "Malice in Saffron," an especially dark and disturbing meditation on such ambiguous distinctions as male/female and good/evil. Jehanine escapes a physically and sexually abusive stepfather to join her half-brother Pierre, the only remotely good person in her life, in Paradys. But her reception is not what she expects, and Jehanine soon carries out a cruel revenge whose consequences will come to haunt her. With nowhere else to go, she finds a bifurcated life in Paradys: by day the female Jhane, novice of the convent called the Nunnery of the Angel, and by night the male Jehan, leader of a band of thieves that terrorizes the city. Her existence has the febrile quality of a dream or a delusion, as pregnant with meaning as an allegory yet more potent in its fearsome strangeness than flatly symbolic fiction. Plague, satanic mysticism, festival, and a horrifying sacrifice are some of the components of this harrowing short novel.

He had of course lost himself on emerging from his apartment. There were no lights anywhere, only the worm-runs of windowless corridors on which the occasional door obtruded. Now and then, from perversity, he had tried these doors. Three gave access to barren chambers, empty of nearly anything. One had a shuttered window, another a candle-branch standing on the floor. (The branch was of iron, worth little. The candle-stubs had long ago been devoured by vermin.) A few other doors resisted his impulse. He fancied they were stuck rather than locked. Presently he reached an ascending stair he was certain he had not seen on entry with the hag. He paused in irritated perplexity, wondering if it would be worthwhile to climb. Just then a woman appeared and went across the stair-top, evidently negotiating the corridor which ran parallel to that below.

She did not carry a candle, and that he saw her at all was due to his own light, and the pallor of her hair and skin which caught it. Her gown was of some sombre stuff, high-waisted as was now not always the fashion, and she held her hands joined under her breast. A stiff silver net contained her hair; it glittered sharply once as she glided by. That was all. She was gone literally in that flash. Her face he did not really see, yet her slightness, something about her, made him think her girlish.

Come to Paradys to pursue his education, Raoulin finds himself more interested in this woman-- this ghost, as he suspects-- of the ancient, decrepit house where he has taken a room. A disturbing experience with a local prostitute only increases his certainty that there is a story to be discovered, and eventually, he finds the woman and encourages her to tell it. Once she was Helise la Valle, daughter of one noble house and promised to marry into another, the d'Uscarets. Ignorant of what will come on her wedding night and overhearing whispers of some terrible rumor about her new husband's family, Helise waits in fear. But what happens after the ceremony, and what she does to stop it, are not quite the Gothic cliche one might be expecting.

It's true, though, that a curse haunts the d'Uscaret line, a curse the novel eventually traces back to Roman times, when the city was known as Par Dis, and a soldier called Vusca received a strange gift. Following the story of The Book of the Beast back in time has its fascinations, even though the core of it, once revealed, is not terribly complicated. Vusca's story is especially evocative. When the narrative returns to the present for its resolution, the thread of interest is lost, but the luxuriant, slightly antiquated flow of Lee's language carries it through to a satisfying conclusion.

Paradys too has its cemeteries, its little graveyards tucked out of sight, its greater yards of death that hug the churches, the cathedral that is called a Temple. It has its places of graves, between the houses in sudden alleys. Between the paving stones, here and there you may look down and see a name that paves the way, a date of beginning and the other of surcease. Even under the house floors now and then they will raise a carpet and a board and point you a grave: Sylvie sleeps here, or Marcelin. Paradys is a city of the dead as she is a city of the live, the half-live, the undead, and perhaps the deathless.

The Book of the Dead is a short story collection, its tales of the city linked by the cemetery in which the characters have been laid to rest. Generally I'm a great fan of Lee's short fiction, so it was a surprise to find this the weakest of the four Paradys books. None of the stories are bad, but without the elaborate structure of the longer works set in the city, they aren't particularly atmospheric, and too often the resolutions are disappointingly simple. "The Weasel Bride" carefully builds up a mystery about the tragic events of a wedding night, but its solution is a familiar, and rather crude, piece of folk mythology. "The Nightmare's Tale" is nicely written, but the Haitian voodoo on which it builds is too lodged in the popular imagination to become truly threatening.

Despite their limitations, a few of the stories make for pleasant minor reading. "Beautiful Lady" offers a nice, if ultimately irrelevant, twist on a basic concept, and the interplay between the eccentric, unsettling siblings who explain the history of "Morcara's Room" is far more interesting than the history itself. Perhaps the ultimate failing of the collection is that it doesn't consistently capture the particular mixture of eroticism, fantasy, and horror that makes Paradys a fascinating place to read about.

It was early afternoon, but as ever the daytime City was enveloped in gray mist. The sun had been invisible for years. The architecture of the City itself-- decayed, ruinous, romantic, and depressing by turns-- was visible in shifting patches, or regularly to a distance of seven meters. So that, as Felion climbed the long stair of a hundred steps, his world sank away into a sea of fog from which a few ghostly towers poked. And above, the Terrace of Birds began to form around a single dot of light-- which would be Smara's lamp. That is, he doubted anyone else would have climbed up here. The unhinged citizens of Paradise were also sluggish and indifferent, obsessed with rituals and trivia.

Felion and Smara are residents of a city called Paradise. But their inheritance from their late uncle includes a house with an icy labyrinth that leads to another city, called Paradis. That city, in turn, is ambiguously connected to Paradys itself. Is it one place at three different times, or three parallel realities? Who can say? What matters is that the distance between them is not insurmountable. In Paradise, Felion and Smara are as mad as any of the city's residents, but in a different way, and they hunger for something new. A second inheritance awaits them in Paradis, if they can handle the "cousin" who holds it for them. But Leocadia has troubles of her own.

Framed, as she sees it, for the murder of a lover, she is held in Paradis' asylum, given every luxury but certain that those luxuries are a ruse to cover poisons that will make her as mad as they claim she already is. Her art may be the only thing that can save her, but how will it be affected by what she discovers in the ruins of a former asylum, whose warders were killed and whose prisoners disappeared in a mysterious event many years ago? Meanwhile, in Paradys, a lovestruck young woman initiates a sequence of events that will lead to her imprisonment in a medieval madhouse, far harsher than the one in Paradis. Only the kindness of some of her fellow inmates might save her from the stupidity of the guards and the indifference of the sole doctor.

Subtle interactions among these storylines emphasize their parallels, but for the most part they function separately as stories of the tragic dignity of insanity. The interlocking structure gives a sense of great scope to a comparatively short novel whose stories are, taken individually, not all that complicated, and the sympathetic treatment of madness provides an appropriately moving conclusion to a series that has dealt with overwhelming emotion in all its wonderful and terrible forms. Paradys is as much a state of mind as a city, and we all go there from time to time. The Secret Books of Paradys is an excellent dark fantasy series, and an example of Tanith Lee's most striking and passionate work.

Blood and Iron: Robert Aickman's "The Trains"

2011-11-11T20:57:00.000-05:00

This is the first in what will, I hope, be a series of in-depth essays on individual stories by Aickman, in the hope of diminishing the unwarranted air of utter impenetrability that surrounds them. Disagreements, amplifications, alternate theories, and other additions are strongly encouraged. Use the comment form at the bottom of the post.

Robert Aickman's career as a writer of what he called "strange stories" began in 1951 with the joint collection We Are for the Dark, containing three stories by Aickman and three by his then-lover Elizabeth Jane Howard. Coming second in the table of contents, Aickman's "The Trains" was his first story in that collection, and therefore (though we cannot to my knowledge ascertain the order of composition) in some sense his first published work. (It was eventually reprinted as the penultimate story in his final, posthumous collection Night Voices, and thus comes close to bookending his career.) Perhaps fittingly for a writer whose stories would often be seen as constituting a modern variation on the classical ghost story, "The Trains" combines narrative elements from traditional horror stories with the psychological focus, fear of modernity, and surreal opacity that are common to Aickman's fiction.

An Old House With a New Twist

Certain aspects of the plot of "The Trains" would not be out of place in a campfire yarn. The travelers, the sudden storm, the isolated house, the eccentric inhabitants, the dimly-seen figure on the stairs, and Margaret's final vision of the hanged Miss Roper, described in terms that are for Aickman unusually explicit (and I think chilling, though less so outside the context of the story):

Then Margaret became aware of something very horrible indeed: it began with the upturned dead face of an old woman, colourless with the exact colourlessness of the colourless light; and it ended with the old woman's crumpled shape occultly made visible hanging above the trap-door in the corner of Margaret's compartment-shaped room. Up in the attic old Miss Roper had hanged herself, her gray hair so twisted and meshed as itself to suggest the suffocating agent.

Such similarity to the popular idea of the ghost story is uncommon though not unique in the Aickman canon. But for all that "The Trains" is recognizable as a ghost story in the way that something like "Into the Wood" or "The Hospice" is not, it has features that are, from the perspective of tradition, baffling. The ambiguity over whether Margaret's vision of Miss Roper is "real" or internal is the least of these.

The description in the above passage of Margaret's room as "compartment-shaped" is part of a pattern in which the old house Margaret and her traveling companion Mimi take shelter at is described not in terms of an "old dark house" in the Gothic sense but of a train or some other feature of the railways. This begins with the doorbell. "'It's a curious bell,' said Margaret, examining the mechanism and valiant to the soaking, shivering end. 'It's like the handles you see in signal boxes.'" (Signal boxes are, as some readers may not know, the points along a rail system by which the movements of trains are controlled. The handles would shift the rails and other equipment so that trains moved in the correct direction.) Later railway-influenced descriptions of the house introduce a note not only of oddness but also of distaste. The first floor of the house (in British usage; the second floor to Americans) has "several large doors, such as admit to the bedrooms of a railway hotel, but no furniture... nor were the staircase or either landing carpeted," an unappealing sparseness. The comparison to a "railway hotel door" is later repeated.

Images of railroads as well as railroad-influenced design begin to appear. The dining room contains engravings of the railway construction done by the house's builder, and a clock that "clicked like a revolving turnstile," though the association of turnstiles with mass transit may be too recent for Aickman to have meant this as a railway allusion. The drawing room, which is like the dining room described as "bleak," has more railway items, including "scale models of long-extinct locomotives" and "a vast print of a railway accident, freely coloured by hand." Margaret later realizes something about her room, whose barred windows had disturbed her: "the room suddenly struck Margaret as having the proportions of a railway compartment, a resemblance much increased by the odd arrangement of the windows, one at each end. Old-fashioned railway carriage windows were commonly barred, Margaret was just old enough to have noticed." At dinner Margaret comments on these "railways influences about the house," and eventually, finally invited into a room she regards as normal and inviting, Margaret thinks that "the railway blight" is totally absent.

Of course, it is not simply that the house happens to invite various railway associations; it is located directly next to the tracks of the railway the house's builder constructed, and on which he died in what may have been an odd accident or a suicide. The passage of trains is a constant, disconcerting undercurrent during events in the house: when first noticed it is "a sudden rumbling crescendo, which made the massive floorboards vibrate and the light bed leap up and down upon them. Even the big black stones of the walls seemed slightly to jostle." It punctuates the meal-- "At intervals through dinner, passing trains rattled the heavy table and heavy objects upon it"-- and continues late into the night. It is little surprise that Wendley Roper, grandson of the builder, once worked in the railway business like the rest of the family, and even having gotten free continues to research and publish books on the history of railways, under an ironic pseudonym, Howard Bullhead, that is itself a railway reference. (For the curious, "bullhead" refers to a particular type of rail design, based on its cross-sectional shape, and fishplates, the subject of Roper's book, are the pieces of metal that link the rails at either end.) His conversation with Mimi as they drink coffee in the drawing room uses trains as an existential metaphor: a branch line, a dead end, getting off the rails. It is little wonder that he should say, "I can't get it altogether out of my blood... The family motto might be the same as Bismarck's: Blood and Iron."

Why, from a literary perspective, all this focus on trains? To answer that question fully we must step back and look at the opening section of the story, before Wendley Roper and his railway-blighted house have even appeared.

"It's Not Nice Country"

Before the storm that traps them at Roper's house, Margaret and Mimi pass from pleasant countryside into a bare, deserted valley. "They noticed no traffic on the road, which, when reached, proved to be surfaced with hard, irregular granite chips, somewhat in need of re-laying and the attentions of a steam-roller. 'Pretty grim,' said Mimi." The first building they visit is an abandoned wreck, the second a barely used and unlicensed Guest House. "'Not much traffic,' said Margaret... 'They all go by train' [said Mimi]." Met in the Guest House with taciturn service, Margaret learns from a local man that the area is called the Quiet Valley and that indeed "the locals don't come here... They all take the railroad. They scuttle through shut up like steers in a wagon."

After leaving the Guest House, Margaret and Mimi have a close encounter with one of those trains.

As they stood uncertain, the sound of an ascending train reached them against the wind, which, blowing strongly from the opposite direction, kept the smoke within the walls of the cutting. So high was the adverse gale that it was only about a minute between their first hearing the slowly climbing train and its coming level with them. Steam roared from the exhaust. The fireman was stoking demoniacally. As the engine passed to windward of the two women far above, and the noises from the exhaust crashed upon their senses, the driver suddenly looked up and waved with an apparent gaiety inappropriate to the horrible weather. Then he reached for the whistle lever and, as the train entered the tunnel, for forty seconds doubled the already unbearable uproar. It was a long tunnel... A nimbus of oily warm air enveloped [Margaret], almost immediately to be blown away, leaving her again shivering.

And later, as Margaret is in bed in Roper's house attempting to sleep:

Immediately she had groped into the pitch-dark bed, a train which seemed of an entirely new construction went past. This time there was no blasting of steam and thundering or grinding of wheels: only a single sustained rather high-pitched rattling; metallic, inhuman, hollow. The new train appeared to be ascending the bank, but Margaret for the first time could not be sure. The sound frightened Margaret badly. "It's a hospital train," her mother had said to her long ago on occasion of which Margaret had forgotten all details except that they were horrible. "It's full of wounded soldiers."

Out of all this one could construct a theory that for Aickman trains are an unpleasant and malevolent force. As he says in "An Essay," his remarks on winning the World Fantasy Award in 1976 for the short story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal," Aickman believed that humanity had taken a "wrong turning" around the time of the Industrial Revolution, pursuing rationalism, science, and technology at the expense of our sense of the inexplicable, supernatural, and numinous. Trains, stark, loud, and polluting, seem an ideal symbol of that error, and the notion of a countryside deserted because people are taking trains past it rather than traveling through it-- a countryside where Miss Roper's frantic waving for help is ignored or misconstrued, and only the sight of blood has any hope of drawing attention from the mechanical passersby-- has obvious implications as a metaphor for indifference and isolation in a technological society. Up to a point such a reading is useful, but there are stumbling blocks.

In the first place, Aickman plainly did not dislike trains. He was (for a time) a close friend of railway enthusiast L. T. C. Rolt; both were founding members of the Inland Waterways Association, and Aickman apparently appreciated Rolt's ghost stories, some of which have railway settings and are not noticeably down on railways. And within the story itself there are signs that Aickman's point of view is not as crudely anti-industrial as a shallow interpretation of his philosophy might lead one to believe. As the story opens, Margaret and Mimi have just departed an industrial city, which Margaret has not at all disliked but Mimi has hated.

The city Margaret had found new, interesting, unexpectedly beautiful and romantic: its well-proportioned stone mills and volcanic chimneys appeared perfectly to consort with the high free mountains always in the background. To Mimi the place was all that she went on holiday to avoid. If you had to have towns, she would choose the blurred amalgam of the Midlands and South, where town does not contrast with country but merges into it, neither town nor country being at any time so distinct as in the North. To Margaret this, to her, new way of life (of which she saw only the very topmost surface), seemed considerably less dreadful than she had expected. Mimi, to whom also it was new, saw it as the existence from which very probably her great-grandfather had fought and climbed, a degradation she was appalled to find still in existence and able to devour her. If there had to be industry, let the facts be swaddled in suburbs.

Given that Margaret is the point-of-view character and generally seems to be more perceptive and stronger than Mimi (she notices earlier that there is something disturbing about Roper, and is the one to devise a solution to their predicament, a point to which we'll return; even the name "Mimi" suggests a trivial flightiness as compared to the solidity of "Margaret"), I would suggest that the perspective of the story is closer to Margaret's than to Mimi's: that the industrial, however regrettable its existence, is not incapable of beauty. In this context we might wish to consider a single sentence from Margaret and Mimi's encounter with the train that I tactically withheld via ellipses:

It was a long tunnel. The train was not of a kind Margaret was used to (she knew little of railways); it was composed neither of passenger coaches nor of small clattering trucks, but of long windowless vans, giving no hint of their contents. A nimbus of oily warm air enveloped [Margaret], almost immediately to be blown away, leaving her again shivering. (emphasis added)

Contrast this with the train Margaret hears (or imagines she hears) while in bed, which is "of an entirely new construction," and one begins to see that what Aickman finds sinister are not the trains of the early 20th century (with which he very probably grew up; those opposed to modernity do tend to give a pass to their own childhood associations) but the trains of the future, computerized, metallic, and impersonal and without the rustic (if polluting) charm of steam and the thundering of wheels.

But why, you might ask, is the house of the Ropers so grim and dangerous, if it is only the trains of the future that are such dark portents? One answer would focus on the fact that Margaret and Mimi are, as noted, largely ignorant of the industrial world; trains may have a certain charm from a distance, but living literally in their shadow is another matter. A second, somewhat richer answer provides a window into Aickman's aesthetics and the psychological aspects of the story.

Not on Solid Ground

In Aickman's worldview, as expressed in both stories and essays, strange and supernatural events are always impinging on the rationalist perception of normality, and it takes a concerted effort of mental will (of which a great many moderns are capable) to ignore this fact, to maintain the sense of order that defines a resolutely natural universe. Recall that the passing trains rattle the heavy dinner table and the heavy plates upon it, even seeming to jostle the walls themselves. What better metaphor for the effect of the paranormal upon staid sensibilities? Then there is the exchange between Margaret and Roper on the late-night movement of trains, of which Margaret had been ignorant.

"I see you're not used to living by a railway," said Roper. "Many classes of traffic are kept off the tracks during ordinary travelling hours. What you hear going by now are the loads you don't see when the stations are open. A railway is like an iceberg, you know: very little of its working is visible to the casual onlooker."...

"But surely only the passenger trains have time tables?"

"My dear Margaret, every single train is in a time-table. Every local goods, every light engine movement. Only not, of course, in the timetable you buy for sixpence at the Enquiry Office. Only a small fraction of all the train movements are in that. Even the man behind the counter knows virtually nothing of the rest."

"Only Wendley knows the whole works," said Mimi from the sofa.

There are more trains in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Trains, then, are like many mystical things in that they bring greater knowledge, but also greater danger, as suggested by the fates of Joseph Roper, Miss Roper, and Beech, by the probable fate of the insane Wendley Roper, and by the narrowly averted fates of Margaret and Mimi. This is a common theme in Aickman's stories, where characters often receive disturbing yet life-altering revelations.

It is in this light that Margaret's psychological development in the story is best examined. She is, as the story begins, a novice at hiking, deferring to Mimi's wisdom much of the time. Their rather uncertain friendship, tracked in seemingly innocuous exchanges with Aickman's usual subtlety and acuity, is particularly strained by Mimi's flirtation with Wendley Roper. Margaret's frustration leads to an epiphany:

Suddenly, looking at Mimi sprawling in her trousers and tight high-necked sweater, Margaret saw the point, clearer than in any book: Mimi was physically attractive; she herself in all probability was not. And nothing else in all life, in all the world, really counted. Nothing, nothing. Being cleverer; on the whole (as she thought) kinder; being more refined; the daughter of a Lord: such things were the dust beneath Mimi's chariot wheels, items in the list of life's innumerable unwantable impedimenta.

Taken by itself, this could be critiqued as rather patronizing male sympathy for an unattractive woman, with more than a hint of class condescension worked in. But as the story evolves, it becomes obvious that there are in fact things beyond attractiveness that "really count." Mimi's attractiveness has brought down on her the baleful attentions of Wendley Roper, and also of the man in the Guest House, with whom Roper is linked by the "inverted echo" of his words, itself explicitly paralleled to the verbal echo by which Margaret begins to realize that Beech is a woman. Recall also Margaret's observation that the man in the Guest House is "one of the many men who classify women into those you talk to and those with whom words merely impede the way." Mimi's lack of cleverness has also left her unable to see that Roper is quite dangerous. Margaret's cleverness, on the other hand, allows her to recall the existence of Mimi's knife and use it to save herself from Beech, which in turn helps her protect Mimi from Roper's attentions, though not before Mimi has had whatever disturbing experience the train tickets shoved into her pockets are meant to suggest.

The conclusion of the story, with the tickets, the revelation of Beech's cross-dressing, and the abrupt ending so common in Aickman, has a mysterious and surreal quality that is equally common in Aickman, but each of these elements has its logic. The tickets, whatever one thinks of them aesthetically-- personally I find them too absurd to be unsettling, if to unsettle was the intention-- are an extension of "the railway blight," its invasion of the person of the visitor. It may be trite to point out that pockets are yonic, but with Aickman one never feels that the sexual is very far away. Beech's cross-dressing is a consequence of the love that has also trapped her with Wendley Roper. I can't work out whether she is supposed to have been in love with Miss Roper, in which case her cross-dressing, undertaken only after Miss Roper's death, would have an added pathetic irony, or with Wendley; I'm inclined to assume the former. Either way, the perils of attraction and attractiveness are once again involved, as they are in many of Aickman's stories about women. (His stories about men, on the other hand, tend to glamorize and mystify female attractiveness. These are not incompatible approaches, but I'll withhold further discussion of the point for a more appropriate essay.) And the ending, in which Margaret uses Beech's bloodstained blouse to wave to the train, represents the triumph of Margaret's cleverness over Mimi's sex appeal, Mimi having given up and been reduced to near-catatonia. There is also the potency of the approaching train, previously an image of mystery, power, and danger, becoming a symbol of hoped-for rescue.

There is, though, a darker reading of the story's final image. Miss Roper, after all, had been signalling from the same window several times a day for years, and all anyone ever did was wave back. Although the blood on Beech's blouse might be expected to garner more attention, there is no guarantee that Aickman meant to suggest Margaret and Mimi would achieve rescue; one cannot rule out the possibility that they are trapped. But that would be atypical, as Aickman's stories with female protagonists generally end, if not optimistically, than at least with the sense that their lives have opened out rather than being curtailed: "Bind Your Hair," "The School Friend," "Into the Wood," "The Real Road to the Church," "Growing Boys," "The Next Glade." ("The Inner Room" is an exception, though, to the extent that its protagonist's gender is significant, and "Hand in Glove" is a more pertinent one.) It is that sense of opening out with which "The Trains" begins:

On the moors, as early as this, the air no longer clung about her, impeding her movements, absorbing her energies. Now a warm breeze seemed to lift her up and bear her on: the absorption process was reversed; her blood stream drew impulsion from the zephyrs. Her thoughts raced from her in all directions, unproductive but joyful.

Such "lifting up" is the result of supernatural experience in many of Aickman's tales, whether they end well or ill; even the fatal carries with it certain revelations. "The Trains" is thus the first of many explorations of what one will find if one wanders (forgive the slight muddling of metaphors) off the beaten track.

Out of Oz

2011-11-11T13:04:00.001-05:00

In 1995 Gregory Maguire published his first novel for adults, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which reconceived L. Frank Baum's Oz as a country with a realistic history, culture, and geography, using the iconic villain to consider the process by which outsiders, neither good nor bad in any easily defined sense, become thought of as the embodiment of evil. (The novel was, of course the basis for the 2003 musical Wicked.) Then in 2005 came a sequel, Son of a Witch, following the Witch's son Liir as he sought identity, stability, and purpose in an Oz thrown into chaos by the Matter of Dorothy. 2008 saw A Lion Among Men, which examined the lives of the Cowardly Lion and the Maguire-invented character Yackle. It was with that book, which though it told a complete story felt less substantial and more part of an ongoing narrative, that the notion of a series, called The Wicked Years, first appeared. And now we have Out of Oz, the sprawling final volume of that series. With a large cast centering on "Wicked Witch" Elphaba's granddaughter Rain, the new novel explores the consequences of trying to maintain human relationships, especially those between parents and children, in the deprivation and disorder of war. Maguire's wry humor and deeply-felt humanism make for a nuanced and moving conclusion to his saga of a magical society in the midst of political turmoil.

Over the first three books in the series Maguire has built up quite a variety of characters and settings, and in Out of Oz he brings virtually all of them back at least briefly, giving the book at times the feeling of a leisurely farewell tour. (Some of the returns ought to be kept secret, but one at least is mentioned on the cover copy and can be discussed here. Dorothy, unintentional killer of Elphaba and her sister Nessarose, is back from Kansas, and with a more substantial role than in any previous book. I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a coherent narrative reason for Dorothy to be in Out of Oz, but like many of Maguire's characters she has such delightful comic eccentricities that I don't feel like complaining.) There's a war on between Loyal Oz and the Free State of Munchkinland, but by and large Maguire's characters are concerned with staying out of it, so they spend large chunks of the book traveling incognito across Oz or in hiding in particular locations. This material is not very eventful, and plot developments mostly arrive in the form of exposition from visiting characters; multiple explanations, both of new storylines and events from previous books, in implausible dialogue are the major downside of the novel. But the witty exchanges that punctuate this exposition make it less of a chore than it might be, and the long interludes allow the characters' relationship to develop. One of the most potent themes in Out of Oz is the cost of protecting oneself and one's loved ones from war. Liir and his wife Candle have separated themselves from their daughter Rain to protect her, but when the time for a reunion comes, will they ever feel like a family again?

Other aspects of life during wartime are also considered. Maguire's Glinda, simultaneously daffy and canny as ever ("I'm not much for correspondence. I could never choose the right stationery, rainbows or butterflies."), is under house arrest as a possible traitor to Loyal Oz, and her mansion is being used by General Cherrystone as a base for some move against Munchkinland. Can she discover and circumvent his plans while protecting herself and her few remaining servants? Oz under Elphaba's brother, the allegedly divine Emperor Shell, is a dangerous place to live, but Munchkinland is no better. The witch Mombey holds power there, and as a comical yet deadly show trial demonstrates, is prepared to be as ruthless as her enemies. The book of magic known as the Grimmerie could bring the conflict to a decisive end, but it's far from clear that either side deserves to win, or that there's any good result on the horizon for the ordinary people of Oz.

These situations evolve in a slow but satisfying manner, leading up to an ending (one aspect of which readers of Baum's other Oz books will see coming) that strikes the right balance between resolution and ambiguity. Tongue-in-cheek references to the original Oz, both book and movie, and other children's classics complement the tart dialogue. ("Sister Apothecaire. As I live and breathe. I thought you'd taken a vow of chastity?" "I accidentally left it behind in the mauntery when you carried me off in that cart six months ago. Oh well. Whoever finds it can keep it; I'm through with it. Anyway, mind your own beeswax.") But it's the characters who make Out of Oz enjoyable: Liir, goodhearted but possibly not strong and wise enough; Brrr, the Cowardly Lion, less cowardly than aware of past mistakes and eager to protect those he loves; Little Daffy, formerly Sister Apothecaire, and her irascible husband, the dwarf in charge of the Clock of the Time Dragon; and of course Rain, a solitary and tough-minded child interested in the natural world but uncertain of the worth of human trust and love. Military pursuit, kidnapping, and death enforce terrible separations and give the bonds of loyalty a pain equal to their pleasure, but Rain and the others learn how to live in a world where nothing is certain, a world very like our own. For readers who have come to love his strange but recognizable milieu and its flawed, ambiguous characters, Maguire's Out of Oz is a delightful lingering farewell.

Madder Mysteries

2011-11-07T13:20:00.000-05:00

Why should I review this book? I write reviews for two reasons: to clarify my opinions to myself by putting them in written form, and to offer those opinions to others who might find them helpful in making their own purchasing decisions. In the case of Madder Mysteries, neither reason quite applies. I've read most of the content of this book before, and my opinions on it are reasonably well-established. And the book currently sells for $250 and up in the supernatural fiction market; paying that much money for a book that is no more elaborately designed than many mass-market hardcovers is more a collector's than a reader's decision. Opinions on the content are almost irrelevant. Nonetheless, I'll give mine anyway, on the off chance I'll say something that might be helpful or at least interesting to a future reader.

From the perspective of an admirer of Oliver's fiction who does care more about the content than the collecting, Madder Mysteries is easily his least significant collection. It contains only eight stories, four of which also appear in Centipdede Press' omnibus Dramas from the Depths, which, though expensive, offers better value for money than any other method of assembling Oliver's early fiction, and is (at the moment, anyway) significantly less expensive than Madder Mysteries itself, to say nothing of the three earlier collections the omnibus reprints in their entirety. Of the four stories not included in Dramas from the Depths, "The Game of Bear" (an accomplished completion of an M. R. James fragment) can be found in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 21, and "The Head" in The Fourth Black Book of Horror. Two remaining pieces have never been printed anywhere else, but "The Wig: A Monologue for an Actor" is a modified version of the story "The Copper Wig," which appeared in the collection The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and therefore also in Dramas from the Depths. The version in Madder Mysteries has, as you might expect, been reworked as a monologue and includes a few notable changes but is not, in my estimation, worth the expense to those who've already read "The Copper Wig." Which leaves us with one purely exclusive story, "Tawny."

The publisher's website describes "Tawny," an all-dialogue story, as a tour de force, but while the limitation to dialogue is well-handled, the story's compressed quality makes its outcome all too obvious; the hints of something unpleasant, which Oliver usually handles with masterful subtlety, inevitably come off rather heavy-handedly when worked into party conversation, and the characters' failure to be even slightly alarmed by what they see makes them seem even stupider than the story intends, to the point of cheap parody. I don't mean to disparage "Tawny" too much-- it's a capable minor story-- only to suggest that, as a reason to buy the collection, it doesn't have much to offer. The final lines, suggestive of a decline into madness, are rather nice, though.

Unsurprisingly given the collection's title, that threat of madness is a recurring theme, and Oliver writes the varieties of insanity, from gentle rambling eccentricity to overpowering delusion to disturbing associative babble, very well and very eerily. But it's not only the characters that are madder here, but the stories themselves. Oliver's early work was very much in the mode of the classic English ghost story, with familiar settings, characters, and devices given new force by Oliver's erudition and eye for detail. As his work evolved, however, new and bizarre elements began creeping in. So in Madder Mysteries we find stories like "Baskerville's Midgets," which is very much a traditional, subtle ghost story in structural terms, but in which the eccentric personalities of the title characters and the theatrical landlady they haunt contribute to a sense of absurdity that is more menacing than comical, making the story something akin to surrealism or the strange stories of Robert Aickman. "The Head" is another case in point. I suppose it too is a ghost story, but the ghost's deranged utterances are hardly what one expects from a specter.

But other stories are more quietly unsettling. "The Game of Bear" makes excellent use of the disturbing qualities of improving children's fiction in the early 20th century, and is an excellent pastiche of James. The highlight of the collection, and one of Oliver's finest works to date, is the novelette "The Devil's Funeral." Composed of letters and diary excerpts from 1882 and concerned with clergymen in an English cathedral city, it may sound like an antiquarian ghost story, but although there are terrifying dreams and visions suggesting a supernatural presence, the darkness that haunts Morchester is all too human. Once understood, the signs and portents that the characters have failed to understand provide a sly, unhappy satisfaction as well as a powerful sense of the numinous. And the story is so rich in subtle psychological and moral insights about, among other things, institutional politics and the perils of unrequited desire, that though I've now read it three or four times I'm still discovering nuances that I've missed in the past.

In addition to the eight stories, Madder Mysteries also includes five essays (one fictional) and ten ironic pastiches of late Victorian and Edwardian magazine articles. All the essays and half the pastiches also appear in Dramas from the Depths. The essays, on the supernatural fiction of Stella Gibbons, Montague Summers, M. R. James, and Henry James, are thoughtful and succinct (in an aside, Oliver aptly summarizes Frankenstein as "that ill-written work of genius") but rather on the rudimentary side; they work better as a capstone to Dramas from the Depths than as a substantial portion of Madder Mysteries. Nonetheless, admirers of Oliver will be interested in his insights into these writers, and what they reveal about his own artistic principles. The fictional essay, on the life and work of the non-existent Decadent writer Jules Charnier, and the newspaper pastiches (two titles, "A Cautionary Tale Concerning Beards" and "A Boiled Egg Called Lowestoft," will give a flavor of them) are amusing, though despite their brevity they wear a bit thin.

The range of content in Madder Mysteries speaks to the range and depth of its author's knowledge and interests: he can write convincingly about Victorian clergymen, ancient Greek religion, Casanova, Henry James, contemporary stage actors, and old newspapers. If Madder Mysteries were available at something close to its cover price, it would be easy to recommend. But it isn't, and the irony of the Dramas from the Depths omnibus is that the one then-available collection it doesn't include in full is the one least worth owning separately. Oliver's most devoted readers will want to have it anyway (which is why I do), but less passionate fans can feel safe in waiting and hoping for a less expensive reprint of some or all the exclusive content.

Great Ghost Stories

2011-11-07T11:50:00.000-05:00

At the risk of sounding like one of those bloggers for whom every review is a fragment of autobiography, I think I should say that I bought Great Ghost Stories only because there happened to be a cheap secondhand copy that would use up the balance of an eBay gift certificate. A few days after it arrived, my mother happened to see it on my shelf, and I had so little interest in it that I immediately lent it to her. As with Haunts, also a ghost story anthology by Stephen Jones, she was roundly impressed with it and I, when I finally got around to reading it, felt rather less so. But, considering that I barely wanted the anthology in the first place, really it delivered more than I had anticipated.

Great Ghost Stories draws on the twelve volumes of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes between 1973 and 1984. In addition to older stories, Chetwynd-Hayes also published recent or original work by contemporary writers, including himself. (In this he was to some extent following the precedent set by the editor of the first eight Fontana Book volumes, Robert Aickman, who included his own stories in several of those volumes. This does suggest a healthy ego, but at least history has justified Aickman's judgment.) As I'm not, with a few exceptions, much of a fan of the pre-20th century ghost story, I had expected to find the contemporary stories more involving. But the opposite was true. Although a few of the earlier stories are more technically interesting than frightening, most can still bring on a shiver, and they've stood the test of time better than the newer pieces, which are solid but far from great ghost stories.

I had high hopes for the opening story, "The Four-Fifteen Express," as its author, Amelia B. Edwards, is one of the few ghost story writers prior to M. R. James whose work I've enjoyed. But this story is short on eerieness and long on the gradual working-out of things that an alert modern reader will already have guessed. The narrative structure is by now so commonplace that it would take a more developed atmosphere than Edwards provides to overcome the sense of familiarity. That's even more true of Sir Walter Scott's "The Tapestried Chamber," an oft-reprinted story whose outline-- the houseguest, the disused chamber, the terrible experience, the corroborating discovery-- is by now so well-worn that the only way to find any interest in it is to foist onto it a psychosexual interpretation. A few other stories likewise roll along capably but without much interest.

But the older stories that fail to inspire are outweighed by those that offer at least a flash of the real thing. Richard Middleton's "On the Brighton Road" is another frequently-reprinted tale, but it has enough concentrated creepiness and contemporary relevance to overcome the curse of familiarity. "The Whittakers Ghost" by one G.B.S. manages to turn the lack of explanation common to a "true" ghost story into a virtue rather than a vice, creating an air of mysterious doom around what is really a standard haunting. Mystery also drives Guy de Maupassant's "An Apparition." One cannot say why that ghost should want what it does, and that makes the already disturbing request even more urgently terrifying. F. Marion Crawford's "The Dead Smile" is really more a Gothic tale than a ghost story, but it's a good one, with Gothic flourishes that are milder than usual, and all the more creepy for that. Two comic ghost stories, by John Kendrick Bangs and Jerome K. Jerome, balance the horrors nicely.

The 20th-century stories tend to feel disposable by comparison. Ramsey Campbell's "The Ferries," while perhaps a trifle overlong, is pretty spooky, but the rest lack both the pure chill of classic stories and the psychological or philosophical complexity of the best modern work. As Stephen Jones notes in his foreword, Stephen King's "The Reaper's Image" was, as a story by the bestselling author not previously published in Britain, quite a coup at the time of its Fontana Book appearance. But a few decades on, and after its republication in King's collection Skeleton Crew, "The Reaper's Image" is more a curiosity than anything else. Considering the author's youth (he was twenty-one at the time), its by-and-large competent crafting is impressive, but that doesn't make it a great ghost story, or even a particularly good one. Brian Lumley's "Aunt Hester," more Lovecraftian than ghostly, proceeds gamely towards its obvious conclusion, which it describes with an overdose of italics and exclamation points! Sydney J. Bounds' "The Night Walkers" is so rudimentary in its concept and execution that I can barely understand why it was chosen for the original Fontana Book, let alone for this later culling.

Other stories are engaging, quite successful as products of their time, but lack the heft that would make them memorable. Those who (as I do) admire Steve Rasnic Tem's psychologically intense horror fiction will appreciate "Housewarming," but it's not one of his more powerful or surreal stories. Tina Rath's "The Fetch" involves a macabre scheme and a final twist that wouldn't be out of place on The Twilight Zone, but its cleverness replaces rather than complements anything truly frightening. Chetwynd-Hayes' own "She Walks on Dry Land" features a less-than-fully-successful pastiche of Regency style that nonetheless brings a cruelly ironic charm to another thoroughly traditional haunting.

In the end, I think Great Ghost Stories falls short of its title. Only a few of its stories can really be called great. But greatness in the ghost story is, after all, a rare commodity. Robert Aickman's contention that there were only a few dozen examples in the English language was too pessimistic, but not by much, and many of the best examples have been so endlessly reprinted as to lose much of their effect. And as a sample of ghost stories, especially pre-modern ones, that exist just below the level of greatness (as so many fine stories must), this anthology is well worth reading.

Tartarus Press updates

2011-11-03T10:20:00.001-04:00

Reggie Oliver's Mrs Midnight and Other Stories, which was already out of print when I reviewed it a few days after publication, will be reprinted and made available in an e-book edition. It's not clear whether the reprint will be a second hardcover edition or a trade paperback, though most of Tartarus' reprints of its contemporary titles have been the latter. [Later update: Oliver himself has apparently confirmed that the reprint will be a paperback.] The e-book, if priced in the same range as Tartarus' other e-releases, will mark the first time a collection of Oliver's fiction has been available at a cost likely to appeal to the casual, non-limited-edition reader. The other piece Mrs Midnight news is that the book has received a prestigious starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Also praised by Publishers Weekly was Michael Reynier's Five Degrees of Latitude, which Tartarus recently made available as an e-book, both direct from the publisher and at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. One of the benefits of e-publication, aside from affordability and availability to a new audience, is the inclusion on Amazon of a sample of the title, allowing readers to get a taste of the author's style and decide whether they're interested enough to buy the e-book, or even the print edition. I don't often read e-books myself, but I've been known to make an exception when it's by far the cheapest way to read something, and I'm currently debating whether to buy the e-edition of Five Degrees of Latitude so I can use it to decide whether I want the hardcover. Although its stock-in-trade has always been and will continue to be its handsome print books, Tartarus is to be commended for taking steps into the realm of electronic publishing, which can be a rewarding one for both publishers and readers.

To follow Tartarus updates for yourself, keep an eye on their news page.

Halloween II

2011-11-02T15:29:00.000-04:00

I'm not a big fan of Halloween (mass-produced scary doesn't do it for me, and I eat too much candy year-round anyway), but this year, rather than repeat last year's scrabble for something appropriate to read or watch, I decided to make up a reading and viewing list ahead of time. It seemed like a good opportunity to reread some stories by favorite authors that I'd been thinking about for a while, but hadn't gotten around to because there was also something new to read. I spent a while looking at the catalog of my books on LibraryThing, made a list of authors I admired, and found stories by some of them that I wanted to reread. There was quite a bit of adding and subtracting, but after a while I ended up with a vaguely-appropriate count of thirteen stories, which I read more or less in order of their original publication.

1. H. P. Lovecraft, "The Festival"

I have an odd relationship with Lovecraft these days. Much as I hate to sound like the purveyors of mainstream disdain for his work, more and more I find the style distracting, not because it's baroque or febrile or whatever you want to call it, but because the constant stream of negative superlatives detracts from the intricacy of the narrative structure, at which Lovecraft was a genius. You can't gradually build an atmosphere of weirdness if each individual element is ghastly beyond belief. Sometime in the not-terribly-near future I hope to reread all of Lovecraft and see how true this impression holds. For now, I mostly reread his earlier work, which, even with these qualms, I find satisfying and disturbing in a way the more famous stories aren't. My favorite of these at the moment is "The Music of Erich Zann," but I reread that one pretty recently and it's not, for all its decadent charm, of such substance that I'm eager to go back to it. So I went for "The Festival" instead.

Then beyond the hill’s crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming; snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder time.

"The Festival" opens strongly with this evocation of a village out of time and its tilted, twisting architecture, images that have always appealed strongly to me as symbols of the weird and the pessimistic. (One finds similar motifs throughout Lovecraft and in later writers like Ligotti, whose "The Sect of the Idiot" is, I think, an under-appreciated modern classic of the Lovecraftian.) The protagonist, called to his ancient hometown for a ritual observed once a century, finds something more monstrous than he had expected. Well, of course he does; he's a Lovecraft narrator. To be honest, it's not the ritual itself that draws me to this story; that section, though admirably structured, is I think too emphatically about the physically noisome, which doesn't impress me much. What I like is the opening: the description of the village, of the house at which the narrator rests before the ritual begins, and of its elderly inhabitants. I suppose that in many ways what I like about the story is what is least genuinely Lovecraftian about it, a Gothic horror of more nineteenth-century vintage, but I think Lovecraft's prose lends it a sharp, sickening intensity that traditional Gothic language could never convey.

2. M. R. James, "A Vignette"

An odd choice from the James canon, perhaps, as it's one of the minor stories he wrote near the end of his life, in fact the very last; it was published a few months after his death. But I've always been fond of it. It was the final story in the first James collection I read, the oversize hardcover, with appropriately subtle pencil illustrations by Rosalind Caldecott, that appeared under the imaginative title The Ghost Stories of M. R. James. At that time I was very impressed by the story, and though I can no longer see why, it still interests me as something that is evidently autobiographical. (I recently acquired a tatty but solid copy of the story in that first magazine appearance, and it's become one of the more cherished items in my supernatural fiction collection.) The very lack of complexity and satisfying explanation that make it a minor piece of fiction render it fascinating when considered as a "true ghost story," one that, perhaps, partially explains a devout, hardworking, widely-liked academic's lifelong devotion to frightening fiction.

Do not press me with questions as to how I bore myself when it became necessary to face my family again. That I was upset by something I had seen must have been pretty clear, but I am very sure that I fought off all attempts to describe it. Why I make a lame effort to do it now I cannot very well explain: it undoubtedly has had some formidable power of clinging through many years to my imagination. I feel that even now I should be circumspect in passing that Plantation gate; and every now and again the query haunts me: Are there here and there sequestered places which some curious creatures still frequent, whom once on a time anybody could see and speak to as they went about on their daily occasions, whereas now only at rare intervals in a series of years does one cross their paths and become aware of them; and perhaps that is just as well for the peace of mind of simple people.

Admirers of Lovecraft have sometimes dismissed James by claiming that, while the former wrote deeply philosophical stories that confronted the nature of the universe, the latter wrote cozy entertainments that weren't about anything. James himself perhaps contributed to this impression, by writing about his stories in a dismissive way that is easy to take at face value, but should perhaps be read instead as polite self-deprecation. Shane Leslie reports that M. R. James did believe in ghosts, replying when asked, "Depend upon it! Some of these things are so, but we do not know the rules!" Nor do James' characters know the rules, and they are punished, sometimes fatally, for minor transgressions. If one takes these stories seriously, not as literal outlines for things in which James believed, but as fictional elaborations of the sort of capricious forces he understood to exist, then they become genuinely dark in a way that even Lovecraft is not. Cthulhu may be a metaphor for the cosmic, but Count Magnus is both a metaphor and a dangerous sort of thing in and of itself. My point here is not that James is "better" than Lovecraft, only that there is a way of understanding the endurance of James' fiction that goes beyond the notion (however satisfying it may be in and of itself) of "a pleasing terror." In "A Vignette," his last fiction, James may be reaching back to the root of that body of work, describing with hints of the style that had made him famous-- the light social comedy, the simple and elegant evocation of nature, the barely-sensed apparitions-- something that generated in him a far from pleasing terror.

3. T. E. D. Klein, "Petey"

Widely praised yet frustratingly unprolific, Klein has, over the course of a nearly four-decade career, published only a single novel, five novellas (one later incorporated into the novel) and a scattering of brief short stories. His "Children of the Kingdom," which mixes Lovecraftian creatures with the racial tensions of 1980s New York City, is one of my favorite horror novellas, but this year I went instead for "Petey," a novella that has more to do with M. R. James. Set at a housewarming party and rich in dialogue that reflects the affluent materialism and catty envy of the partygoers, it gradually hints at the secret the house's former owner, now bound and gagged in an insane asylum, is desperately trying to reveal to one of his attendants. The slow tightening of the noose, as the wandering guests come across clues that the reader can synthesize but they cannot, is ingenious, and the social anxieties of such an event are conveyed with such ease that the infinitely readable novella barely seems to have a style at all. The story ends at a point where a writer more concerned with visceral shocks would begin, but there's a delicate terror all the same, one helped along by a device that was, if I recall correctly, a conscious homage to one from James. This time around I found myself analyzing the story more than enjoying it, but either way I recommend the experience.

4. Ramsey Campbell, "The Voice of the Beach"

This Lovecraftian novelette is often described as a high point in its distinguished author's career of high points, and though on rereading it I found the narrator's interjections of nervous foreshadowing intrusive rather than atmospheric, the eventual vision of dissolution that awaits a horror writer who has retreated to a beachside bungalow in the wake of illness does capture the true essence of Lovecraftian terror: the sense of something so impossibly different that it cannot be understood, that it might destroy all of humanity without malevolence simply because we exist on an utterly distinct level of reality. Campbell's talent for writing about psychological instability also makes the depth of the narrator's paranoia, and of his friend's enthusiastic embrace of the presence on the beach, unsettling in a way that the awestruck tone of Lovecraft's own narrators rarely achieved.

A hint of a grimace twitched his cheek; my comment might have been an annoying fly-- certainly as trivial. "You can read the pattern out there if you try," he mumbled. "It takes all day. You begin to get a sense of what might be there. It's alive, though nothing like life as we recognize it."

I could only say whatever came into my head, to detain him until the doctor arrived. "Then how do you?"

He avoided the question, but only to betray the depths of his obsession. "Would an insect recognize us as a kind of life?"

5. Thomas Ligotti, "Conversations in a Dead Language"

Up to this point I hadn't been getting as much out of my evening's reading as I'd hoped; all the stories had had their strong moments, but I wasn't feeling the shiver down the spine I'd been looking forward to. That changed with this Thomas Ligotti story, by coincidence one of two on my reading list actually set at Halloween. Ligotti is, I hardly need to tell most readers of this blog, known for stories that lay out a pessimistic worldview with images of decay, instability, and disorder, the nightmare collapse of things that seemed solid. Though his work is therefore intensely psychological, its psychology is usually of a kind that runs parallel to those concerns; his characters are attuned to problems deeper than run of the mill human misery. "Conversations in a Dead Language" is a little different. Its protagonist's mind still opens onto the abyss, but that mind's workings are twisted in a way more reminiscent of what is typically called "psychological horror." The local mailman enjoys passing out candy on Halloween, but his pleasure in the experience seems less than wholesome. We begin with a description of a common ritual, carefully calculated to emphasize its strangeness:

After changing out of his uniform, he went downstairs to search the kitchen drawers, rattling his way through cutlery and cooking utensils. Finally he found what he wanted. A carving knife, a holiday knife, the traditional blade he'd used over the years. Knifey-wifey.

First he carved out an eye, spearing the triangle with the point of his knife and neatly drawing the pulpy thing from its socket. Pinching the blade, he slid his two fingers along the blunt edge, pushing the eye onto the newspaper he'd carefully placed next to the sink. Another eye, a nose, a howling oval mouth. Done. Except for manually scooping out the seedy and stringy entrails and supplanting them with a squat little candle of the vigil type. Guide them, holy lantern, through darkness and disaster. To me. To meezy-weezy.

There's an intermittent element of stream of (uneasy) consciousness here and throughout that is, alongside language closer to Ligotti's usually style, disquietingly suggestive of the protagonist's bifurcated mental state. The nature and sources of that bifurcation, also horrific in a way less common in Ligotti, I leave for those new to the story to discover.

6. Glen Hirshberg, "Struwwelpeter"

At first I felt I ought to read Hirshberg's "Mr. Dark's Carnival," a story set at Halloween. But it was another one I'd reread pretty recently, so I decided on "Struwwelpeter" instead, and quickly realized that it too was a Halloween story. One of the nice things about rereading is that, knowing the plot in advance, you can focus on other aspects of the story, without being distracted by the question of what's going to happen next. "Struwwelpeter" haunts the first-time reader with a deserted house and a bell that's rumored to raise the dead, but its true genius is the milieu, a lonely, decaying fishing village in the Pacific Northwest, and the title character, a gifted young man, by turns cruel and kind, indifferent and hungry for approval. Like much of Hirshberg's fiction, the story is suffused with tragic melancholy, a sense of impotence that's all the more powerful because it's reflected in the small actions and inactions of the characters rather than projected as a philosophical topic. Rich in classical spookiness and enhanced by an unexpected twist of very modern and human horror, "Struwwelpeter" is one of the finest stories by perhaps the single finest contemporary writer of American ghost stories.

Back then, we still gathered after-school afternoons at the Anderszs' house, because it was close to the locks. If it wasn't raining, we'd drop our books and grab Ho Hos out of the tin Mr. Andersz always left on the table for us and head immediately toward the water. Gulls spun in the sunlight overhead, their cries urgent, taunting, telling us, you're missing it, you're missing it. We'd sprint between the rows of low stone duplexes, the sad little gardens with their flowers battered by the rain until the petals looked bent and forgotten like discarded training wheels, the splintery, sagging blue walls of the Black Anchor Restaurant where Mr. Paars used to hunker alone and murmuring over his plates of reeking lutefisk when he wasn't stalking Market Street, knocking pigeons and homeless people out of the way with his dog-head cane. Finally, we'd burst into the park, pour down the avenue of fir trees like a mudslide, scattering people, bugs, and birds before us until we hit the water.

7. Mark Samuels, "The Impasse"

This story comes from Samuels' collection The White Hands and Other Weird Tales, which I was ambivalent about, but "The Impasse" is, as I said in that review, unquestionably a very fine piece, in the manner of Thomas Ligotti's corporate horror stories but not a mere stylistic pastiche. Its effect is a simple yet potent one, of ordinary corporate eccentricity tilted just a little, then a little further, then further still, until the full insanity is revealed.

For his interview a week previously he had traveled on a deserted mid-morning train. At first he had been alarmed by the state of the Organization's headquarters, with its air of impending abandonment. It did not look to him as though they would be able to offer him a position with any future. But the interview seemed to have gone well and he was promised a better salary than he had expected. The two interviews had been somewhat vague figures, and neither had asked him any particularly probing or awkward questions. He could remember little of them except that they sat in the shadows at the back of the room. They had not elaborated on the exact nature of his duties, but had intimated that they would be concerned with an area with which he was familiar, intellectual property rights, although he was not told in which particular sphere he would be required to operate. Despite being au fait with various publishing and broadcast media in which such rights are usually exploited, Cohen had not heard of the Ulymas Organization. When, before his interview, he had undertaken background research he had been unable to find the company listed in any trade publication.

8. China Miéville, "Reports of Certain Events in London"

Miéville's novels blend horror, fantasy, and science fiction in inventive ways, and the stories in his collection Looking for Jake show a similar range. I suppose you could call "Reports" a fantasy, but to my mind it's reminiscent in an unusual way of Lovecraftian horror. It's concerned with incursions into our reality by large, mysterious forces that come and go as though time has no meaning, forces humans investigate at our great peril. The narrative structure, doling out revelations by means of a carefully-arranged series of evidently disordered pieces of information, is also similar to Lovecraft, though Miéville uses a device Lovecraft didn't: the epistolary format.

On the 27th of November 2000, a package was delivered to my house. This happens all the time-- since becoming a professional writer the amount of mail I get has increased enormously. The flap of the envelope had been torn open a strip, allowing someone to look inside. This also isn't unusual; because, I think, of my political life (I am a varyingly active member of a left-wing group, and once stood in an election for the Socialist Alliance), I regularly find, to my continuing outrage, that my mail has been peered into.

I mention this to explain why it was that I opened something not addressed to me. I, China Miéville, live on ---ley Road. This package was addressed to a Charles Melville, of the same house number ---ford Road. No postcode was given, and it had found its way, slowly, to me. Seeing a large packet torn half-open by some cavalier spy, I simply assumed it was mine and opened it.

What this fictional Miéville finds is a baffling, frustratingly incomplete collection of documents related to an organization studying a rare and inexplicable phenomenon. What that phenomenon is I would not dream of saying, not least because outside the context of the story it might seem laughable. But as revealed in these reports there's nothing funny about it, and by the time "Miéville" himself is caught up in the paranoia and secrecy surrounding the "VF," the eerie sense of a war occurring mostly, but not entirely, outside our perception makes for weird fiction at its absolute best.

9. Reggie Oliver, "The Babe of the Abyss"

He owned a chalet, high in the mountains of the Haute Savoie to which, in the long summer vacations, he would invite groups of undergraduates on "reading parties." That is to say, the undergraduates would come with their books which during the morning they studied by themselves, either indoors or out on the lawn in front of the chalet with its transcendent views of forest and mountain. In the afternoon they would go for long walks through idyllic Alpine landscapes. The food was plentiful but plain, the beds on the hard side, the only hot water available had to be boiled in kettle or copper; yet many remember their chalet days as a little glimpse of Eden when it was bliss to be alive, and "to be young was very heaven." I went once, in the year 1920, the last year that Panter held one of his chalet reading parties. It was as a result of certain events which occurred during this reading party that Panter was forced to leave the college in ignominy.

I haven't written about "The Babe of the Abyss" before, but much of what I said about the way Oliver's latest collection combines the pleasures of the English ghost story with a keen moral and psychological insight is true of this story as well. Its setting is the early 20th-century academic world of M. R. James, and its supernatural creature has a chilling subtlety and an origin that smack of the antiquarian "warning to the curious." But the novelette is also a reflection on psychological theories of violence and repression, on human nature, and on the bloodiness of the society that produced the two great wars. The unexpressed desires that drive it would have horrified James, although he may not have been as immune to them as his placid exterior has lead many scholars to believe. In many ways "The Babe of the Abyss" is unlike "Struwwelpeter," but both are ghost stories concerned with the nature of human frailty, reminders that that form, when approached in the right spirit, is one of the profoundest tools for the expression of tragedy.

10. R. B. Russell, "Llanfihangel"

I wrote about this story on reviewing Russell's collection Literary Remains a few months ago, and to what I wrote then I can only add that the story's maintenance of its ambiguity is perfect, from an opening conversation that might reflect either the fallibility of memory or the skillful manipulation of a con artist, to a deserted house that might be haunted or might be empty of everything save the protagonist and his guilt, to a final revelation that, in piling yet another possibility onto the multiplicity of readings these events might be given, causes reality to teeter with something verging on nausea. This is one of those stories where I can't quote a tantalizing passage because the story's power is purely cumulative. The protagonist's thoroughly human petty jealousies and fears round out what is not, given the brevity and narrative complexity of the story, a deep character in other senses, and enhance both the reader's sympathy and the sense of psychological precariousness.

11. Stephen King, "N."

Like "The Voice of the Beach," this novella heightens the focus on the protagonist's obsessive psychology; like "Reports of Certain Events in London," it uses the epistolary format. But where those stories were comparable primarily to Lovecraft, "N." is traced by its author to Arthur Machen, specifically "The Great God Pan." I've read woefully little Machen, but I think his influence can be seen in the dual nature-- the beauty and terror-- of the story's central landscape.

The day was fading. The sun was a ball of red gas, flattened at the top and bottom, sitting above the western horizon. The river was a long, bloody snake in its reflected glow, eight or ten miles distant, but the sound of it carrying to me on the still evening air. Blue-gray woods rose behind it in a series of ridges to the far horizon. I couldn't see a single house or road. Not a bird sang. It was as if I'd been tumbled back four hundred years in time. Or four million. The first white streamers of groundmist were rising out of the hay-- which was high. Nobody had been in there to cut it, although that was a big field, and good graze. The mist came out of the darkening green like breath. As if the earth itself was alive.

I think I staggered a little. It wasn't the beauty, although it was beautiful; it was how everything that lay before me seemed thin, almost to the point of hallucination. And then I saw those damned rocks rising out of the uncut hay.

Those damned rocks-- are there seven of them? or eight?-- are the source of the obsession, the obligation or delusion, that drives "N." The title character becomes convinced that something is waiting in Ackerman's Field, a monstrous presence that twists our reality to make a door for itself and, once noticed and granted access, can only be held at bay by a ritual confirmation of the solidity of this world. This terrible knowledge preys on the mind as it often did on Lovecraft's protagonists, but with a new angle: the instability takes the form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. After a middle section in which the sense of incursion is described in fine classical style, the climax, in which the compulsion claims a new victim, shifts to a series of journal entries in which the mental decline is foremost. King's gift for lunatic, paranoid prose, in which spelling, grammar, and continuity are disconcertingly shredded, serves him particularly well here, and the result is a story that, like so much else I read on Halloween, pays homage to tradition while respecting the power of the modern.

12. Caitlín R. Kiernan, "Pickman's Other Model (1929)"

I have never been much for the movies, preferring, instead, to take my entertainment in the theater, always favoring living actors over those flickering, garish ghosts magnified and splashed across the walls of dark and smoky rooms at twenty-four frames per second. I've never seemed able to get past the knowledge that the apparent motion is merely an optical illusion, a clever procession of still images streaming past my eye at such a rate of speed that I only perceive motion where none actually exists. But in the months before I finally met Vera Endecott, I found myself drawn with increasing regularity to the Boston movie houses, despite this longstanding reservation.

Endecott, Pickman's other model, has a shadowy past in one of those decayed New England towns so beloved of Lovecraft, but her future lies in Hollywood, and this story extends the forbidden art motif of "Pickman's Model" to the world of early film. As in much of Kiernan's fiction one finds dreams, meditations on art and reality, and Fortean collection of data, but there's much more going on here than I can describe without making this essay far longer than it already is. The lingering impression, however, is of the mercifully unexplained, from the lost film of which only a tantalizing fragment remains, to the scandalous, fatal party that destroyed Endecott's career, to the ultimate fate of a woman the briefest glimpse of whom suggests an extraordinary presence. Kiernan combines many Lovecraftian themes and motifs in a story that is at once a fine sequel and homage, and something distinctive and original.

13. Quentin S. Crisp, "Ynys-Y-Plag"

Another story I first read pretty recently, but I've been wanting to get back to it ever since I called it "a contemporary masterpiece of long weird fiction." By the time I started this very long story it was 1:00 AM, and exhaustion kept threatening to make me put the book aside. But whenever it did, I'd come to a striking or spine-chilling passage and read on, excited and terrified all over again. There were times when I felt that rarity of rarities: a fiction-induced fear that was so profound it went beyond the pleasing, and became genuinely upsetting. After finishing, even though I was still bone-tired, I had to put on a sitcom rerun so I wouldn't be alone with the silence, and with thoughts of the bwg, which sends a little shiver up my spine even twenty-four hours later.

Yes, this account of a photographer's experiences in a remote Welsh village frightens me in a way that not many stories can. But what makes it a new classic is that it also deals with many of Crisp's recurring themes: isolation, victimization, social awkwardness, and the numinous quality of certain places and times. Not a million miles removed, despite major difference in superficial style and genre, from Crisp's novel "Remember You're A One-Ball!", "Ynys-Y-Plag" deserves every single one of my (rather limited) stock of superlatives, but instead of unloading them I'll express my fervent hope that this novella will one day be reprinted somewhere a larger audience can experience and appreciate its scope and brilliance.

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In addition to all that reading, I also did a little viewing. This isn't really a TV or film blog, but I can make the occasional exception, I suppose. As I did last year, I watched the Dr. Seuss animated special Halloween is Grinch Night, of which I've always been fond. There's something inherently spooky about a lot of Seuss' images (as a child I was thoroughly terrified of the pants with no one inside them from "What Was I Sacred Of?"), and the bizarre architecture and creatures of this special, while not remotely frightening to an adult, have a Gothic charm. And the opening song is irreparably lodged in my mind.

Then I watched the 1978 Halloween. By coincidence I'd watched the original Friday the 13th a few days before, and it's thoroughly obvious how much the latter film attempts to copy the success of the original, only without the directorial skill, sense of subtlety, and acting talent. (They both have great music, though.) I don't want to overstate the differences-- they're both low-budget horror, they both feature some terrible acting (Annie and Lynda in Halloween, virtually everybody in Friday the 13th), but Halloween, however rough-hewn, has some ambition, where Friday the 13th is plainly a machine for providing audiences with a certain number of dead teenagers. Nothing wrong with that, if it's what you're in the mood for, but most of the time I'd rather watch a movie that can do more.

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So that, plus a little time spent checking on the bowl of candy I'd put on the porch for trick-or-treaters, was my Halloween. And with this post, I mark a year since the start of this blog, which began on November 2, 2010 with an introductory post and a discussion of last year's Halloween. A year is hardly a long time in blogging terms, but it's the longest I've maintained a blog that wasn't a whining-about-school, here-are-pictures-of-my-cat deal, and in the past year I've gotten about 20,000 pageviews, so I'm definitely satisfied. Thanks to all of you out there in the readerly ether for making it possible.

Accounts of Some Mercilessly Brief Visits to the House of Pain: Thomas Ligotti's Gothic Tales

2011-10-28T16:22:00.000-04:00

Although he's best known for traditional short fiction, Thomas Ligotti's writing encompasses several other forms, from long and short non-fiction to poetry to brief prose pieces of the type usually called vignettes or sketches. A few of these sketches appeared in the author's third mass-market collection, Noctuary, and several others remain uncollected, but to date, the only volume devoted entirely to them is The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales. First issued as a 1994 limited edition from Silver Salamander Press that currently goes for ridiculous prices on the secondhand market, the collection has now been reissued by Centipede Press. As these pieces are quite brief, running only a few hundred words each, and the book includes only 19 of them, The Agonizing Resurrection is not a substantial volume. Its 98 pages of small print won't take even the slowest reader more than a couple hours to get through, and the price, which works out to about $1 a page at best, will put many readers off. But those sufficiently devoted to Ligotti's work to make the investment are likely to find that the peculiar effect of these pieces, and the high production quality of the book, negates the possibility of buyer's remorse.

Despite the difference in form, I think the work of Ligotti's to which these "Gothic tales" can most readily be compared is his collection of death poems. While his longer fiction features a stylistic and structural complexity that creates an unreal, philosophically-charged atmosphere, the diction and content of the death poems and the Gothic tales is simple, almost banal. The result of that directness in works that present, just as his more elaborate ones do, a profoundly pessimistic worldview and a preoccupation with despair is irony so dark that it's almost entirely devoid of humor; the mordant chuckles that some of these tales and poems elicit have nothing to do with amusement.

The juxtaposition is heightened in the present case by the details of these stories, most of which take their inspiration from classic horror tales. An illuminating preface by Ligotti, original to the Centipede edition, establishes that these pieces begin with the idle contemplation of ways in which one might heighten the horrific or pessimistic climax of certain major works, might offer, to quote Henry James, a further turn of the screw. Many of these pre-modern classics are written in a style that, however it was regarded at the time, now seems formal or elevated; Ligotti's comically exaggerated titles, such as "One Thousand Painful Variations Performed Upon Divers Creatures Undergoing the Treatment of Dr. Moreau, Humanist" and "The Unnatural Persecution, by a Vampire, of Mr. Jacob J.," are a reflection of this distinction. The difference between the prose of the originals and that of these reimagined versions, suggesting that these further turns of the screw call for the loss even of grandeur of tone, demand a reduction to the terror of the prosaic, increases the mood of pessimism.

But it's not only tone that loses its grandeur in these gothic tales. Many of them extend the original narratives by reducing the dignity of the protagonists, literally adding insult to injury. Classic horror stories, in which darkness is a much a stylistic concern as a philosophical one, often end with moments of tragic beauty, where the aesthetic resolution outweighs the bleakness. With The Agonizing Resurrection this is negated. In "The Heart of Count Dracula, Descendant of Attila, Scourge of God," Dracula's final moment is no confrontation with vampire hunters, but a fate far more ignominious for one who, as the story points out, was in his monstrous way a great man. Other pieces torture their heroes and heroines with that commonest of fates worse than death: life. In a tragic horror story the protagonist's existence is often so painful that death provides only an escape from it, but in pessimistic horror there can be no escape, no paying off of debts with the bad check of mortality. Victor Frankenstein's resurrection is indeed agonizing, bitterly ironic, and a monument to existential loneliness.

Mixed in with the extensions of familiar stories are some original vignettes, including "The Scream: From 1800 to the Present," a spin on tales of ghostly vengeance. Despite the absence of source material to be deconstructed, the deflating effect of these pieces is just as powerful. To communicate that effect I feel I must return to the language of the collection, in which the clinical clearness I've noted in other Ligotti fiction, the contemporary vocabularly and diction, and the need to summarize the classics before they can be twisted result in something with the feel of subdued mockery. The opening to a variation on Poe's "William Wilson" is typical:

William Wilson has a namesake who looks exactly like him, walks like him, and is his equal in any game of wits. They first meet at Dr Bransby's school for boys, in England. There Wilson's namesake is constantly thwarting his designs, challenging his superior status among their peers, and on the whole making things difficult for him. Hounded beyond all human endurance, William Wilson one night takes leave of the school, aborting his academic career but at least ridding himself of his obnoxious twin.

Perhaps, without the rest of that piece and the context of its fellows, that looks like unexceptional language, but I think it has a disguised satirical ruthlessness that hums throughout The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales, a curious collection whose reinventions of the classics are not jeux d'esprit but exercises in laconic pessimism. They are, like most poetry, brief, and as is the case with poetry, that brevity is a sign not of the disposable but of the carefully-crafted, of writings that demand to be reread so one can understand the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which they work. The two hours' traffic of these pages is only the beginning of the process of appreciation.

At the risk of writing a review that's longer than the book, I'll take a minute to note the gorgeous design of the new edition. From the gold-lettering-on-black spine and black slipcase to the soft-cloth covers to the new illustrations by Harry O. Morris, this slim, tall hardcover, signed by both author and illustrator, is a delight to examine and to touch, the unusual dimensions emphasizing its distinctiveness without making either reading or contemplation awkward. Whether a particular limited edition is worth its price is surely a subjective question, but as ever, Centipede Press has provided visible value for the added cost.

The added cost of its publisher price, anyway. Yes, The Agonizing Resurrection, published this month, is already out of print, and from a little rudimentary searching it seems that price inflation on the secondhand market has already begun. This is, as ever, a regrettable side effect of the small press limited edition business model, and I see no use in complaining too much about it. I do wish, though, that these pieces, and various other Ligotti odds and ends that are uncollected or impossible to acquire inexpensively, could find their way into print in an affordable format. Prices on Ligotti's mass-market books have fluctuated and are a little ridiculous, but they do tend to be available secondhand at prices that aren't horrifying even to collectors, and it would be nice for the poetry, the rest of the vignettes, and scattered stories to be likewise. Well, I can dream, can't I?

The Orphan Palace

2011-10-24T22:57:00.001-04:00

One often hears the fiction of certain writers praised as poetic, but the effects those writers produce actually have little to do with poetry. What makes their work so striking is a mastery of the rhythms of prose, so that their sentences fall with an elegance that may be simple or extravagant but is always orderly. Truly poetic language is another matter; largely the preserve of experimental writers, it awkwardly yet beautifully occupies the space between prose and poetry, can often be read either way depending on the moment and one's mood. Chomu Press has published a number of writers who explore this territory-- Brendan Connell and Michael Cisco come to mind-- but their latest release, Joseph S. Pulver Sr.'s The Orphan Palace, is the most mind-bending hybrid yet. The blurring of the line between prose and poetry is only the beginning; Pulver's sharp, dark narrative mixes Lovecraftian cosmicism, noir fiction, psychological horror, and urban squalor so seamlessly that it's hard to remember they ever worked separately. To say a book like this is "not for everyone" is a massive case of stating the obvious, but for the right reader, it's an awe-inspiring, mind-bending experience.

There's a plot. Of course there's a plot. "Plotless" is a word that's thrown around pretty often, but how many books really fit the label? Here, as is often the case in novels with such emphasis on style, the plot works around the demands of the language rather than vice versa. To quote Roger Ebert, it's the rhythm section, not the melody. The protagonist, Cardigan, twisted by terrible years in a children's home under the attentions of the cold Dr. Archer, is an arsonist and murderer, but in the world of The Orphan Palace, where inexplicable and unsatisfied yearnings are the only things you can be sure of and happiness is something to be observed from outside but never possessed, his insanity is simply a fact. Neither pathetic nor monstrous though his behavior can be both, Cardigan is simply who he is because he's incapable of being otherwise. His latest dangerous compulsion is a desire to head east, toward Dr. Archer and the unresolved past, even though he knows nothing good is likely to come of it.

Cardigan's journey, a series of small encounters with contemporary anomie and ennui punctuated by violence and by memories of his tragic childhood, is as marked by repetition as the mysterious, nearly-identical pulp novels he finds in a chain of worn-out hotels, but Pulver's language is never quite the same thing twice. At times it has the staccato quality of noir; at others a superficially similar style is so abbreviated and rhythmic that it becomes poetry; at yet others the poetry is far from spare, an ecstatic, irrational medley of morbid images that don't cohere on the literal level but have, when approached in the right spirit, the rolling intensity of revelation. No quotation can be representative, and the range of styles means that most readers will encounter some they don't care for. This is one of those books you can never quite get a grip on. After finishing it I halfway wanted to start again from the beginning, reading more slowly to appreciate the style, and halfway knew I couldn't reimmerse myself in the paranoid chill of Cardigan's world so soon. The cosmic terror of mythos creatures (most notably the Hounds of Tindalos) fits perfectly within the mental disorder of troubled children, and both align with the fatalism of noir and the serial killer's overwhelming perception of crawling good and evil. In a fittingly Lovcraftian touch, explanations are suggested but finally withheld, although their general nature is as obvious as Cardigan's insanity. There are bounty hunters, ghouls, elderly authors, and a talking rat, but somehow instead of feeling thrown together they're each as inevitable as the next note in a melody. If it's anything, The Orphan Palace is an extended song, one without music, or with a music that exists only as part of the altered state of consciousness its twisting language generates inside a reader's head. Some readers will, it must be reiterated, find this formless and ridiculous, and those who have no experience with Pulver's style are advised to sample it before making a purchase. But some who open themselves to it will find unexpected rewards. My own early uncertainty, born of disdain for what I perceive in most contemporary poetry and songwriting as disconnected and unsubtle imagery, melted into the appreciation offered here. What can I say? Perhaps Cardigan's madness is catching.

This is the twelfth book from Chomu Press, and like all their fiction, offers something you can't get from any other publisher. What's all the more remarkable is that its releases provide the truly distinctive without sacrificing quality: whether new writers or established names in the small press, Chomu authors use language so carefully and inventively that even the occasional misstep is less disastrous than one would expect in newly-launched unconventional publishing. There is no easy category in which to place Chomu's releases; the closest thing I can come up with is "disturbing fiction," where "disturbing" is more than an elite way of saying "frightening." It means breaking up, if only temporarily, the way one looks at the world, providing a new and baffling perspective on the reality we all inhabit but rarely observe. Whether that perspective is the absurdism of Rhys Hughes, the subtle moral philosophy of Reggie Oliver, or the discordantly poetic bleakness of Joe Pulver, it's always idiosyncratic and unexpected. Publishing being the business it is, presses that can maintain such a vision are rare, and those, like Chomu, that manage it deserve all the support that readers who genuinely appreciate the unique and the memorable can give them.

Haunts

2011-10-22T14:33:00.000-04:00

When my copy of this new ghost story anthology arrived, I showed it to my mother, who reads Stephen King and likes a good ghost story but otherwise isn't much interested in horror. She promptly laid claim to it, and because I already had enough horror piled up to be getting on with, I let her take it. I share this domestic interlude not because I've mistaken this review for a LiveJournal entry but because my mother's perspective on the anthology is quite different from mine, making me wonder if my standards are too exacting. Whatever the reasons, she liked every story in the roughly half the anthology she read before I borrowed it back, while I, having read the whole thing, find it decidedly uneven, with a number of dated or uninspired stories. There are enough worthy reprints and original gems to earn the anthology a hesitant recommendation for adherents of the ghost story, but its frustrating variations in quality prevent Haunts from creating the consistent atmosphere of unease that permeates a truly successful horror anthology.

After a striking reprinted poem by Richard L. Tierney, the anthology's first story is its only famous reprint: the M. R. James classic "A Warning to the Curious." I've recently written about some of the reasons this story works so well; a one-line summary might be that James' prose is deceptively simple, disguising a mastery of voice behind a unstylish exterior. There are, unfortunately, a couple stories in Haunts that show what you get when such methods are used by writers with less of a gift for them. R. Chetwynd-Hayes' "The Door" and Basil Copper's "Ill Met By Daylight" both use antiquarian narrative devices reminiscent of James, but their language is less simple than crude, utterly failing to create the crescendo of terror on which his brand of subtlety depended. These stories, while satisfying on a basic level, lack both the spark of originality that memorable fiction generally requires and the excellence of style that can sometimes stand in for originality.

If there's a consistent problem in Haunts, it's that lack of ambition. Too many entries build on the tropes of the ghost story, offering at most a single insignificant twist on old formulas, or seem content only to elicit a mild scare rather than true terror or a more complicated response. Reggie Oliver's recent stories have built on his interest in human psychology and its moral consequences, but "Hand to Mouth" is a thoroughly traditional Gothic ghost story. Its account of a haunted chateau and a narrow escape is successful enough on those terms, but its horrors are fairly superficial. Another original, Christopher Fowler's "Poison Pen," feels like a leftover from the era of EC Comics. The freakish deaths of a wealthy man's boorish relatives as they greedily squabble over his will are not a subject that allows for much nuance, and the story's morality is heavy-handed and rather cruel in the way that supernatural revenge stories can be if their authors take them too seriously. The final sequence, while ludicrous, is at least unexpected, and thereby more powerful than anything that has preceded it.

The logic behind editor Stephen Jones' decisions on which stories to reprint escapes me. Again, there's nothing outright bad, but given the 40-year span on which he draws, it's hard to believe there wasn't anything more substantial. Stories like Richard Matheson's "Two O'Clock Session" and John Gordon's "The Place" are so slight that despite being well-crafted they rapidly fade from the mind. No one could accuse Karl Edward Wagner's novella "Blue Lady, Come Back" of being insubstantial, but that's only because it's a rambling, unfocused piece whose ghost story elements are dwarfed by uninsightful descriptions of the protagonists' hard-drinking lifestyle.

Two of the reprints that do work well are baffling because they're recent stories that have already been reprinted in very visible anthologies. "The Mystery," a Peter Atkins story that by declining to explain itself gives its traditional concept a genuinely uncanny spin, was reprinted in the 2010 Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, while John Gaskin's "Party Talk," rendered eerie by style in a different but equally powerful way, appeared in Jones' own Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 21. Obviously not all readers of Haunts will be familiar with those anthologies, but are there really so few recent ghost stories worth reprinting that these two had to be chosen?

Other stories, both reprints and originals, deserve unambiguous praise. Kim Newman's "Is There Anybody There?" from 2000 at first seems to have nothing to go on but an inventive high concept, but it develops in an unexpectedly dark direction, and its different take on the ghost is welcome after so many traditional stories. In the 2005 story "City of Dreams," Richard Christian Matheson enlivens a Hollywood ghost story with a compelling narrative voice that's wry yet wounded and yearning. The two best stories here, both originals, are Conrad Williams' "Wait" and Robert Shearman's "Good Grief," very different takes on husbands in freefall after the sudden deaths of their wives. Shearman offers his usual brand of very dark comedy, which in this case is simultaneously creepy and laugh-out-loud funny, while Williams brings to the table a reality-breaking psychological surrealism similar to that of Steve Rasnic Tem. The weirdness, in all sense of the word, of these two stories provides a powerful contrast to the classical ghostliness of many other selections, and makes them stand out from those surrounding efforts.

To return to my original question: am I underwhelmed by so many of these stories, including several I haven't mentioned because I can find absolutely nothing to say about them, because I've read too many ghost stories for my own good, gotten used to demanding too much? Perhaps. But I'm hardly alone in that. Every form has its borderline-snobby connoisseurs. I admire ghost stories that innovate, that pursue intensity of effect, that explore the ambiguous depths of the human mind. Some of the tales in Haunts have that level of ambition, but most are more direct. If you're like my mother and can wholeheartedly enjoy that approach, then by all means give this anthology a spin. If you're more like me, you might want to be more cautious about investing your time and money, but there's still plenty here to enjoy.

Some Features of Narrative Voice in "A Warning to the Curious"

2011-10-19T15:43:00.000-04:00

I've been reading Haunts, a new ghost story anthology edited by Stephen Jones that mixes reprints and originals. Happily, most of the reprints are recent or obscure material rather than the familiar classics that everyone knows. The one exception is M. R. James' "A Warning to the Curious." While reading the story (for what must be the fourth or fifth time) I was struck, as I often am when reading James, by how effective it was, and how difficult it was to tell precisely how that effect was achieved. James described his own aesthetic of the ghost story in an often-quoted essay; in fact, a section from it appears in Haunts' introductory note to "A Warning to the Curious:"

Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo… Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.

This is a valuable principle, and one can track its application in many of James' stories, but in the case of "A Warning to the Curious" I'm not sure it's relevant in any obvious way. Although the hints of it have the innocuous tone that inspires a grim yet pleasant knowing-ness in the alert reader, the ominous thing remains, as far as I can see, at a consistent level from near the beginning of the story until near the end. Although there is something of a crescendo, it lacks the careful and delicate gradation of those in other major M. R. James stories. The difference here, I think, is that the subject of the haunting knows from his first appearance in the story that something terrible is happening to him. He describes the development of that certainty, but with a hindsight that most James protagonists lack.

What, then, makes "A Warning to the Curious" work? Obviously there can be no simple, all-encompassing explanation of how any piece of fiction succeeds or fails. For the purposes of this essay I'll focus on certain features of narrative voice, an aspect of his fiction for which James, perhaps because of the deceptive simplicity of his language, has received little credit, although many have commented on his related talent for pastiching the diction of different times, places, and social classes. "A Warning," like many of James' tales, features a frame narration by a unspecified person, perhaps intended to be James himself, who is not directly involved in the action. That this creates an emotional distance allowing for subtle, carefully-crafted descriptions of terrible experiences, and for the humor with which James leavens his terror, should go without saying. In the case of "A Warning," however, the narrative situation is even more complex. The person who is telling the story to the primary narrator is himself not at its center, and the person who is recounts his story to the secondary narrator. Thus we have a tale within a tale within a tale. (The fact that Paxton in turn recounts what he is told by various locals further complicates things, but this essay doesn't go into that added layer.) The remarkable thing about this is that, although the three narrators are not rounded characters in a literary sense, each has a slightly different approach to story-telling, and the interplay of their voices, effortlessly realistic even as it weaves a story of ghostly fear, creates an atypical crescendo of its own.

The first of the narrators, who disappears after the first two pages of the story, is the closest of the three to James' usual voice. At once formal with James' ingrained erudition and conversational from the origin of many of his stories in readings for friends, it serves here primarily to set the scene by nostalgic descriptions of Seaburth that have the elegant, suggestive simplicity by which James manages atmosphere. The story begins:

The place on the east coast which the reader is asked to consider is Seaburgh. It is not very different now from what I remember it to have been when I was a child. Marshes intersected by dykes to the south, recalling the early chapters of Great Expectations; flat fields to the north, merging into heath; heath, fir woods, and, above all, gorse, inland. A long sea-front and a street: behind that a spacious church of flint, with a broad, solid western tower and a peal of six bells. How well I remember their sound on a hot Sunday in August, as our party went slowly up the white, dusty slope of road towards them, for the church stands at the top of a short, steep incline. They rang with a flat clacking sort of sound on those hot days, but when the air was softer they were mellower too. The railway ran down to its little terminus farther along the same road. There was a gay white windmill just before you came to the station, and another down near the shingle at the south end of the town, and yet others on higher ground to the north. There were cottages of bright red brick with slate roofs...

These recollections are, for readers with a sense of the potency of memory and the power of well-hewn direct language, a small delight, but James' self-deprecating sense of humor is not far behind. Immediately after the above ellipses comes:

but why do I encumber you with these commonplace details? The fact is that they come crowding to the point of the pencil when it begins to write of Seaburgh. I should like to be sure that I had allowed the right ones to get on to the paper. But I forgot. I have not quite done with the word-painting business yet.

This is as charming in its own way as "the word-painting business" itself, and as a literary tactic it has the advantage of agreeing with both those who like such details and those who do not. Its very gentility sets up, despite the absence of characters, the opening placidity for which James had called, while the humorous description of the act of writing, as breezily postmodern as any of the contemporary games that earn that label, also creates the impression of truth, of reality reported rather than fiction crafted. We might be reading an elderly gentleman's privately-printed reminiscences

Shortly the second narrator, also unnamed, begins his account. Because his voice is, like the first, not lugubriously stylized, readers may not consciously observe its distinctive features, but they are obvious from the first paragraph on.

I know all that country more or less (he said). I used to go to Scaburgh pretty regularly for golf in the spring. I generally put up at the 'Bear', with a friend - Henry Long it was, you knew him perhaps - ('Slightly,' I said) and we used to take a sitting-room and be very happy there. Since he died I haven't cared to go there. And I don't know that I should anyhow after the particular thing that happened on our last visit.

I've called the James-voice "conversational," but this one is far more so, or rather its conversation is less refined and academic, with a casual air; its turns of phrase-- "more or less," "pretty regularly," "I don't know that I should anyhow"-- are far more offhand. Perhaps the distinction is that the James-voice's conversation is rehearsed, with the tone of a prepared after-dinner speech, whereas this voice is more genuinely of the moment. But it's also more brusque: its eventual description of Paxton, the third narrator, as "rather a rabbity anemic subject" would be impossible for the James-voice. (Contrast the introduction of Parkins in "Oh, Whistle" to see how that voice describes a similar type.) A slightly later passage reinforces the character of the second voice.

After some remarks, which I forget, he became rather confidential. 'You'll think it very odd of me' (this was the sort of way he began), 'but the fact is I've had something of a shock.' Well, I recommended a drink of some cheering kind, and we had it. The waiter coming in made an interruption (and I thought our young man seemed very jumpy when the door opened), but after a while he got back to his woes again. There was nobody he knew in the place, and he did happen to know who we both were (it turned out there was some common acquaintance in town), and really he did want a word of advice, if we didn't mind. Of course we both said: 'By all means,' or 'Not at all,' and Long put away his cards. And we settled down to hear what his difficulty was.

From the almost-mocking bluntness of "which I forget" and "he got back to his woes again" to the robust non-nonsense attitude of "a drink of some cheering kind," to the patronizing inclusiveness of "our young man," this is a noticeably different personality to that of the first narrator, not so much less intelligent as less scholarly about its intelligence.

The third narrative voice, Paxton, is something of a hybrid of the first two, sharing the intellectual edge of the first and the chattiness of the second:

'It began,' he said, 'more than a week ago, when I bicycled over to Froston, only about five or six miles, to see the church; I'm very much interested in architecture, 'and it's got one of those pretty porches with niches and shields. I took a photograph of it, and then an old man who was tidying up in the churchyard came and asked if I'd care to look into the church. I said yes, and he produced a key and let me in. There wasn't much inside, but I told him it was a nice little church, and he kept it very clean, "But," I said, "the porch is the best part of it." We were just outside the porch then, and he said, "Ah, yes, that is a nice porch; and do you know, sir, what's the meanin' of that coat of arms there?"

It is difficult to imagine the second voice being interested in church architecture (as, of course, James himself was), and equally difficult to imagine the first referring to "one of those pretty porches with niches and shields." But the most distinctive quality of Paxton's voice is the edge of despair built into it. His desperation has a nicely-managed crescendo of its own, rising from asides along the lines of "I wish this hadn't happened" to a very long paragraph that I feel compelled to quote in full.

Then it all came out: Paxton looked over his shoulder and beckoned to us to come nearer to him, and began speaking in a low voice: we listened most intently, of course, and compared notes afterwards, and I wrote down our version, so I am confident I have what he told us almost word for word. He said: 'It began when I was first prospecting, and put me off again and again. There was always somebody - a man - standing by one of the firs. This was in daylight, you know. He was never in front of me. I always saw him with the tail of my eye on the left or the right, and he was never there when I looked straight for him. I would lie down for quite a long time and take careful observations, and make sure there was no one, and then when I got up and began prospecting again, there he was. And he began to give me hints, besides; for wherever I put that prayer-book - short of locking it up, which I did at last - when I came back to my loom it was always out on my table open at the flyleaf where the names are, and one of my razors across it to keep it open. I'm sure he just can't open my bag, or something more would have happened. You see, he's light and weak, but all the same I daren't face him. Well, then, when I was making the tunnel, of course it was worse, and if I hadn't been so keen I should have dropped the whole thing and run. It was like someone scraping at my back all the time: I thought for a long time it was only soil dropping on me, but as I got nearer the - the crown, it was unmistakable. And when I actually laid it bare and got my fingers into the ring of it and pulled it out, there came a sort of cry behind me - oh, I can't tell you how desolate it was! And horribly threatening too. It spoilt all my pleasure in my find - cut it off that moment. And if I hadn't been the wretched. fool I am, I should have put the thing back and left it. But I didn't. The rest of the time was just awful. I had hours to get through before I could decently come back to the hotel. First I spent time filling up my tunnel and covering my tracks, and all the while he was there trying to thwart me. Sometimes, you know, you see him, and sometimes you don't, just as he pleases, I think: he's there, but he has some power over your eyes. Well, I wasn't off the spot very long before sunrise, and then I had to get to the junction for Seaburgh, and take a train back. And though it was daylight fairly soon, I don't know if that made it much better. There were always hedges, or gorse-bushes, or park fences along the road - some sort of cover, I mean - and I was never easy for a second. And then when I began to meet people going to work, they always looked behind me very strangely: it might have been that they were surprised at seeing anyone so early; but I didn't think it was only that, and I don't now: they didn't look exactly at me. And the porter at the train was like that too. And the guard held open the door after I'd got into the carriage - just as he would if there was somebody else coming, you know. Oh, you may be very sure it isn't my fancy,' he said with a dull sort of laugh. Then he went on: 'And even if I do get it put back, he won't forgive me: I can tell that. And I was so happy a fortnight ago.' He dropped into a chair, and I believe he began to cry.

This is our closest glimpse at the story's ghost, but what really makes it unsettling is the psychological disorder and dissolution hinted at by its air of distraction and interjection. Paxton's chronological account of events rises and falls erratically in intensity; even as he attempts to make his problem clear, he is forced by the sheer strangeness of his situation into ominous vagueness and abrupt changes of subject from the eerie to the banal that underline his confusion and fear: "all the same I daren't face him" followed by "Well, then, when I was making the tunnel," or "he has some power over your eyes" followed by "Well, I wasn't off the spot very long before sunrise." These "wells" and "you knows" have the usual effect of empty conversational filler integrated into dialogue, making the speech seem ragged and the speaker at loose ends. That James presents this monologue as a single paragraph increases this impression of unstructured thought.

Lacking depth of characterization, James' stories often depend on the reader's projection of himself or herself into the place of the protagonist (the "this could happen to me" effect), but Paxton's ramblings, with the pathos of the culminating "And I was so happy a fortnight ago," make him more an object of genuine and intense sympathy than virtually any other victim of the supernatural in the Jamesian canon. He's also unlike the James protagonists who meet terrible fates in that we see his end from a much closer perspective, that of the second voice, who even on the basis of a limited acquaintance knows and cares about Paxton far more than the narrators of "The Ash-Tree" and "Count Magnus" care about Richard Fell or the hapless Mr. Wraxall.

The notion of Paxton running after - after anything like this, and supposing it to be the friends he was looking for, was very dreadful to us. You can guess what we fancied: how the thing he was following might stop suddenly and turn round on him, and what sort of face it would show, half-seen at first in the mist - which all the while was getting thicker and thicker. And as I ran on wondering how the poor wretch could have been lured into mistaking that other thing for us, I remembered his saying, 'He has some power over your eyes.' And then I wondered what the end would be, for I had no hope now that the end could be averted, and - welI, there is no need to tell all the dismal and horrid thoughts that flitted through my head as we ran on into the mist.

Here, and in the ensuing description of the aftermath of Paxton's death, the second narrator's brusqueness, threaded through with sympathy, adds to the sense of disquiet and tragedy, making Paxton's grisly end less the structurally-required conclusion of a supernatural revenge story and more a disturbing occurrence in its own right. The final sentences-- " Paxton was so totally without connections that all the inquiries that were subsequently made ended in a No Thoroughfare. And I have never been at Seaburgh, or even near it, since"-- have a laconic and pessimistic finality, and it is no surprise that the James-voice, with its comic asides and delicate word-painting, does not return for a curtain call. Perhaps M. R. James' last great story, "A Warning to the Curious" is a masterwork of narrative voice. Other stories show his ability to work in wildly different voices-- "The Residence at Whitminster" comes immediately to mind-- but "A Warning" seems to me the finest use of that gift in the structuring of a ghostly tale.

A Book of Horrors

2011-10-17T16:55:00.000-04:00

The new non-theme horror anthology from acclaimed editor Stephen Jones comes with a mission. As Jones' introduction puts it, "the time has come to reclaim the horror genre" from an "avalanche of disposable volume aimed at the middle-of-the-road reader." These disposable volumes, it transpires, are the non-horror monster and supernatural stories that are in vogue at present, which Jones-- sounding, it must be said, too much like a cranky old man-- notes are not your father's Creatures of the Night. Despite the contempt implicit in "middle-of-the-road reader," Jones claims that the popularity of these books would not be a problem, "if publishers and booksellers were not usurping the traditional horror market" with such books.

He never gets around to providing evidence for this usurpation (are major publishers actually releasing less "real" horror than they did before the rise of the horror-lite category? are sales of "real" horror particularly lower than they have been since the collapse of the mainstream horror market in the late 1980s?), simply assuming that the success of these two types of fiction is part of a zero-sum game. The introduction ends with the rather grandiose claim that "if you enjoy the stories assembled within these pages, then you can say you were there when the fight back began." Whether A Book of Horrors will have anything like the success and influence necessary to back up that assertion, it's a very fine anthology, one that will delight readers already acquainted with the genre and give fans of paranormal fiction a sense of what "real" horror has to offer.

It begins with an author who reminds us that some horror fiction, at least, still sells pretty well: Stephen King, whose novels still top the bestseller lists even in the days of Harry Dresden and Sookie Stackhouse. Alas, the most popular author in the anthology turns in its weakest tale. "The Little Green God of Agony" has promising if traditional elements: a billionaire who, in the aftermath of a horrible plane crash, turns away from modern medicine for relief of his unbearable pain. As his skeptical nurse watches, a Christian faith healer explains that the billionaire's pain is not a byproduct of injury, but a force unto itself, and can be removed with the right tools. As sometimes happens with King's fiction, its sheer earnestness works against it, crushing thematic subtlety. Eventually the nurse delivers an impassioned speech about how some patients flee their pain rather than confront it; this is followed by an impassioned speech from the minister about how some nurses become inured to suffering and lose sight of the pain their patients are in. The learning of lessons is palpable. The story picks up a little near the end, but cuts off just as one senses the potential for something truly interesting, and truly scary. I admire the intention behind this, but it doesn't really work, and readers hoping for terror of the type for which King is known will be disappointed. Happily, there's another story here that almost out-Kings King, to which we'll come in a moment.

Before that, though, there's Caitlín R. Kiernan's "Charcloth, Firesteel and Flint." Labelled original to this volume but actually a reprint from Kiernan's Sirenia Digest, this encounter between a mysterious hitchhiker and the young man who picks her up has many hallmarks of its author's work: characters with heavy emotional burdens, evocative use of weird, often Fortean historical or scientific details, and the presence of powerful, ageless forces whose capacity for destruction is somehow awe-inspiring. Kiernan is a writer whose style calls up a weird atmosphere even before inexplicable events occur; there is something in how she casts her sentences that's bewildering and diminishing in just the right way. "Charcloth, Firesteel and Flint," devoid of superficially horrific events or images, is a welcome demonstration that supernatural fiction is a broad church, and can disturb its readers on many different levels.

It's "Ghosts with Teeth," by Peter Crowther, that feels very close to something Stephen King might have produced; it's even set in King's (and my) home state of Maine, although King's characters would presumably not use British idioms, and he would know that there is no place in the state that's a half-hour's drive from both Portland and Bangor, unless that drive is undertaken at criminal speed. Nitpicks about the setting aside, "Ghosts with Teeth" is an excellent novella. What begins as a quietly eerie story of odd behaviors and minor glitches in communication takes a nasty turn, revealing a monster whose lunatic sadism is creepily compelling. For those who like their horror visceral without being crude, dark without being intrusively psychological, this is a real winner.

"The Coffin-Maker's Daughter," by Angela Slatter, imagines a world where the making of coffins is an art, one whose rituals are the only way to lay the spirits of the dead to rest. After her father's sudden death, the title character takes on his profession, but her commission to build a coffin for a wealthy man is complicated by a flirtation with his daughter, and by her father's mocking ghost. Barely ten pages long, the story conjures a complicated, flawed character, sympathetic yet hard-edged, and the cruel fairy-tale world in which she lives. As with Kiernan's contribution, this is more dark fantasy than horror, and the contrast between their work and the more down-to-earth monsters of King and Crowther increases the effect of all four stories.

In the psychologically harrowing "Roots and All," Brian Hodge uses a rural community devastated by the spread of methamphetamine, a prison guard driven toward extremes of cynicism by his profession, and a legendary creature known as the Woodwalker to explore forms of personal and communal degradation. Lesser writers might have used these elements in a pat, simplistic story of supernatural justice, but Hodge presents no trite resolution, only a sorrowful and pessimistic look at a miserable situation. Dennis Etchison's "Tell Me I'll See You Again," whose young protagonist has a tragic past and a strange gift, is equally harrowing, with the air of the unstated and unexplained that distinguishes the author's stories of solitude, regret, and failure.

Next is Let the Right One In author Karl Ajvide Lindqvist's first short story written for an English-language market, "The Music of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer." At first it seems that the title has given too much away, removing any suspense from a traditional story of good and evil ghosts in a haunted house. But the trouble that ensues when a widower encourages his distant, computer-addicted son to take up the piano is no safely familiar story of restless spirits: it turns unexpectedly into a dark meditation on obsession and the lengths to which people will go to escape their grief, not unlike Lindqvist's novel Harbor, but even more morally ambiguous and forceful, with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Another horror master, Ramsey Campbell, shows that his talent hasn't ebbed in the course of a nearly fifty-year career, with a grim morality play about the consequences of "Getting it Wrong." Mr Edgeworth is a friendless middle-aged man, using his DVDs of classic films to escape a dull, dispiriting job at a modern megaplex. When a co-worker phones to get his help with a radio quiz show, he suspects a practical joke, but what he can't see may very well hurt both of them. Edgeworth at first seems an arrogant old coot, but like most of Cambell's protagonists, he's soon in so far over his head that pity becomes the more appropriate response. It's never quite clear what the consequences of a wrong answer are, but Campbell's occasional hints are more sardonically upsetting than straightforward description could be.

Like all Robert Shearman's stories, "Alice Through the Plastic Sheet" begins as a surreal dark comedy whose universal emotional themes become newly affecting through the bizarre narratives in which they're contained. But, fittingly for this anthology, the darkness eventually overwhelms the comedy in this unexpectedly upsetting story of new neighbors, very loud Christmas music, a sick dog, and the perils of social conformity. Shearman may satirize the hapless Alan, his assertive wife Alice, and their his suburban existence, but underneath is his usual sympathy for those who can no longer navigate the bewildering regulations of contemporary life.

Lisa Tuttle's contribution is one whose resolution provides that sense of grim supernatural logic, of cause and effect being twisted according to some dark design, that distinguishes a particular variety of strange story. A young wife uncertain about the future of her marriage to a loving but easily angered husband tries to enjoy her new house, but the experience is spoiled by a sense of something looming over the desolate landscape, a sense that began on the journey to the house, when she was sure she saw the corpse of "The Man in the Ditch." A visit to a psychic whose enigmatic pronouncements signal the psychological undercurrents at work is a highlight of this uncanny tale.

Set on a nineteenth-century English estate, Reggie Oliver's "A Child's Problem" may generate expectations of a pastiche of the antiquarian ghost story, a form Oliver has several times shown his mastery of. But "A Child's Problem" is, like "The Look" from his recent collection Mrs Midnight, so much a story of human evil, of the eccentricities that guilt and fear breed, that the eventual emergence of explicit supernatural vengeance is practically beside the point. The heart of the story is the coming of age of its young protagonist as he discovers the secrets of the ill-tempered uncle with whom he has been forced to live, and learns unpleasant but useful lessons about human relationships and their hierarchies. Like much of his recent work, this novella shows Oliver, always a skillful horror writer, evolving into a "literary" writer of great subtlety and complexity.

The two penultimate stories in A Book of Horrors deal with grieving husbands. The one in Michael Marshall Smith's "Sad, Dark Thing" is drifting through pointless days and nights after being abandoned by his wife and daughter, until a drive through the woods leads him down a side road toward a tiny tourist attraction that will bring about a permanent change. The story reaches for a deep melancholy, but despite Smith's effective prose the protagonist isn't well-drawn enough for his suffering to have much weight, and on the whole the story is overshadowed by Elizabeth Hand's "Near Zennor." Here the husband has suddenly become a widower, and while going through his wife's things he finds a series of letters she once wrote to a beloved children's author, whose books were "like Narnia, only much scarier". Feeling compelled to investigate this mysterious one-sided correspondence, he plans a visit to an old friend of his wife, and winds up exploring the title locale, a ruin-littered countryside where time moves oddly and technology fails. Reminiscent of the classical weird tales of Sarban and Machen, this novella is redolent of the uncertainty of liminal states both physical and emotional, and of the powerful atmosphere of its isolated rural fields and valleys.

Following "Near Zennor," the longest story in the anthology, is "Last Words," its shortest. As a rule ending an anthology with a long story and then a short one is a bad idea; the two can mutually overshadow each other and end the volume with a whimper. Here, though, master of very short horror fiction Richard Christian Matheson crafts a story of madness that, in its vastly different way, has as much impact as the novella that preceded it. Capturing the voice of insanity and arranging his simple plot in just the right way, Matheson gives readers a profound chill that ends the anthology on an intense note, reminding the reader of just how scary, in a variety of ways, all the stories have been. Loss and loneliness, whether brought on by death, disappearance, abandonment, rural life, or the rejection of society, link most or all of them, a reflection perhaps of the fact that the primal fear, one that drives many others, is the fear of being alone; but the forms this fear takes are countless, and Stephen Jones' authors explore fourteen of them without any sense of overlap or repetition.

Back at the beginning of this review, untold paragraphs ago, I took issue with the editor's implication that paranormal romances, mysteries, and thrillers have somehow usurped the market that belongs to horror fiction. But whatever the cause, I agree that horror, once too big for its own good, is now depressingly small, too much a market of small presses whose books go unnoticed and quickly become unavailable. Major writers and editors can still get horror released by large presses, but surnames other than King and Hill have less luck, especially when it comes to short fiction. I'm not sure there's any solution to this problem, but a top-notch anthology with contributions from a variety of major names can hardly hurt. A couple are less powerful than others, but most of the stories in A Book of Horrors would be standouts if they were scattered across lesser anthologies. Together, they show those who might have been inclined to doubt that, whatever its market share, horror fiction is as robust and vibrant now as at any point in its long history.

A Book of Horrors hasn't been released in the U.S. yet that I know of, but you can buy the Kindle edition from Amazon.com (linked below), or import the UK hardcover from a site like The Book Depository.

House of Fear

2011-10-14T14:22:00.000-04:00

The new haunted house anthology by Jonathan Oliver has an uninspiring title: the hopelessly generic House of Fear, which sounds like it ought to be attached to a bad 1980s horror flick. (It doesn't help that the title is printed in a red-orange font that likewise belongs on a movie poster, or that the back cover, in the same font, offers what could be that movie's tagline: HOME IS WHERE THE HORROR IS.) But issues of presentation aside, this is a very strong anthology in which major names offer a variety of spins on the haunted house. None of the stories are less than solid, and while a few have minor imperfections that limit their effect, another few are top-notch, making on the whole a very readable set of tales.

Mark Twain once observed that "The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." Small differences can also have major consequences for the ghost story, in which the creation of atmosphere and other effects is a perilously delicate process. Stories that fall short in these mild ways are by no means bad; it's only that they bring on a sense of "Almost..." that can, in the moment, be as frustrating as larger failure. It is in that spirit that most of my quibbles with various stories in House of Fear are offered.

Stephen Volk's "Pied-a-terre," for example, about a real estate showing in which events take an unexpected turn, does a fine job of generating unease through the very claustrophobia and unattractiveness of the house, enhanced by small moments of oddness. But the story's thematic point, intended to be subtle, is made too blatant by a characterization that, while far from crude, is nonetheless easy to interpret given how familiar it is. Adam L.G. Nevill's "Florrie," in which an apartment has an unusual effect on its new resident, has a similar problem: the changes in the protagonist aren't gradual enough to build an eerie mood or keep the reader from guessing right away what's happening, and the power of everything that follows, including an excellent final image, is diminished.

It's the story's final moment that's the problem in Christopher Fowler's otherwise excellent "An Injustice," where amateur ghost hunters, including an obnoxious buffet-style student activist, find something more than they bargained for in an abandoned London house. The final line disrupts what has been a suggestive atmosphere and a subtly-made point with an unnecessary bluntness that's a distraction rather than a capper. The distraction in Terry Lamsley's strange story "In the Absence of Murdock" is wooden dialogue that turns its characters into ciphers, while in Garry Kilworth's "Moretta" the language has a directness that's more appropriate to a story for preteens than one aimed at adults.

Other stories struck me as more roundly successful, with flaws that mattered less in the scheme of things. Rebecca Levene's "The Windmill" describes its prison milieu and the drug dealer who moves smoothly within it with such effortless, unsensational realism that its supernatural manifestation has an added impact, and even the conventional explanation that follows can't diminish it. Another unnecessary explanation, which reaches for emotion but doesn't achieve it, follows the haunting faced by a college student in an abandoned farmhouse in Joe R. Lansdale's "What Happened to Me." This story is more Lovecraftian than ghostly, but for sheer terror nothing else in the anthology can match it. Another real chiller is Weston Ochse's "Driving the Milky Way," in which the lengths to which a lonely man will go to find the friends he lost decades before add a definite jolt to what has been a gently nostalgic story.

Three great stories come in a row near the middle of the anthology. Chaz Brenchley's "Hortus Conclusus" has a simple concept, but the gift for achingly melancholy language demonstrated in Brenchley's other ghost stories makes its haunted garden a genuinely tragic one. There's also a garden in Robert Shearman's "The Dark Space in the House in the House in the Garden at the Centre of the World," but it's the Garden of Eden... more or less. This time the residents are Cindy and Steve, and God is given to speaking in long monologues that Shearman brings off with a delightful comic flair. Like much of the author's work, "The Dark Space..." is an ironic and moving dark fantasy in which bizarre events symbolize the pain of ordinary life. The editor's introduction to "The Muse of Copenhagen" by Nina Allan correctly observes that it has something of the flavor of Robert Aickman; its skewed suggestiveness and mysterious femme fatale could have come from several of his stories.

There are other striking stories in the anthology, including Nicholas Royle's surreal "Inside/Out," in which an unrequited crush and the social isolation of a Briton in Japan are abstractly linked to a mysterious house. In fact, none of the stories are poorly written or utterly without interest, which is enough of a rarity in the world of the horror anthology to make House of Fear worth a recommendation on that point alone. That several of the stories are brilliant only reinforces that recommendation. Jonathan Oliver may not (yet) have the profile of major horror editors like Ellen Datlow and Stephen Jones, but he's produced an anthology that's on par with their work, and shouldn't be missed by their readers.

John Harwood: THE GHOST WRITER and THE SEANCE

2011-10-12T15:10:00.000-04:00

The reading room of the British Museum is not, I think, the first place in which most of us would seek refuge from a consuming grief, especially not in winter, when fog creeps into the great dome and hangs like a damp halo about the electric lamps. Nor are ones fellow readers always the most desirable company, some being less than fastidious in matters of dress and personal cleanliness, whilst others, seemingly on the verge of madness, conduct whispered conversations with phantoms, or crouch motionless for an entire afternoon, glaring at the same unturned page. Others again lie sprawled in attitudes of abandoned despair or exhaustion, snoring away the hours with their heads pillowed upon priceless volumes until the attendants come to turn them out. There are of course many industrious souls deep in concentration or copying busily, so that the dome seems to echo, at times, to the faint sound of a hundred nibs scratching in unison, but to a troubled mind that sound can too easily suggest the fingernails of prisoners clawing upon stone.

So begins "The Gift of Flight," one of four stories within the story of John Harwood's debut novel The Ghost Writer. Devotees of the nineteenth-century ghost tale will perhaps recognize in this passage the conversational tone and light social comedy of M. R. James, but "The Gift of Flight" evolves into an allusive, suggestive psychological tale more reminiscent of the other James, or perhaps of other classical practitioners as Onions and de la Mare. In the final analysis, fictional author "V. H." is no narrow pastiche of a particular style, but a voice all its own, credibly nineteenth century but with the timeless quality of all great ghostly fiction.

I begin with the stories inside the story because they are slightly more accomplished and resonant than the main narrative of The Ghost Writer. But in a way this is a false distinction, as the interplay between the levels of fiction creates much of the off-kilter mood that renders this superficially uneventful novel so compulsively readable. The Ghost Writer is the story of Gerard Freeman, the Australian son of an English mother whose dull life is enlivened by two things: his relationship-by-correspondence with a wheelchair-bound English girl named Alice, and his curiosity about his mother's past on the beautiful family estate she fled for reasons she refuses to elaborate. The novel's opening sequence, juxtaposing Gerard's experience of his hot, dry, insect-ridden Australian hometown with his image of the delicate beauty of the English countryside, amply demonstrates Harwood's gift for generating atmosphere on classicist terms, with simple but elegant images and without linguistic pyrotechnics.

To give away too much of the plot would be to deny the reader the experience of its gradual unspooling. Suffice it to say that Gerard quickly discovers a connection between the fiction of V. H. and his mother's hidden past. In addition to being fine ghost stories in their own right, these pieces, which make up just under half the novel's length, capture the ways in which autobiography is transformed at a certain remove into fiction, and create a powerful set of recurring images. It's not only V.H.'s reworking of personal history that causes those images, however; unnatural and seemingly impossible coincidences will suggest to the attentive reader that some subtle supernatural force is at work, and make the ghost stories part of the larger narrative rather than entertaining diversions from it.

It must be said that certain aspects of the plot will become obvious to an attentive reader before Gerard begins to suspect them; the book employs a particular device that can hardly be kept from raising audience suspicions (he said vaguely). Nonetheless, Gerard is more than a hapless hero, and he combines other pieces of the puzzle as rapidly as the reader will. The last two-fifths of the novel, in which a, abandoned mansion of the traditional variety makes a pleasantly spooky appearance, are the sort of thing that demands to be read in one sitting, and the final sequence, in which long-standing expectations are confirmed, manages to attain supernatural heights of eerieness despite superficially non-supernatural events. No fan of the period ghost story or of historical family mysteries should miss The Ghost Writer, which is that rarity of rarities: a perfectly-crafted debut.

Harwood's second novel, The Seance, has obvious general similarities to The Ghost Writer, but is also profoundly different. Instead of the present-day setting and single narrator of that novel, The Seance is set entirely in the Victorian era, and features a series of linked narratives. It begins with Constance Langton, whose grief-stricken mother and indifferent father make her home life a miserable one. Desperate to ease her mother's pain at the loss of younger daughter Alma, Constance becomes involved in the spiritualist movement. A reader might suspect the set-up for a novel of spiritualism and skepticism, not dissimilar to Sarah Waters' Affinity or a number of other works exploring the connections among grief, nineteenth-century rationalism, and gender roles. But events quickly take a startling turn, and before long Constance finds herself in possession of an unexpected inheritance and an unusual collection of documents. The first of those documents, an account by solicitor John Montague, is the second narrative strand; its opening will suggest what sort of novel The Seance really is, and provide another example of Harwood's mastery of Victorian prose:

I have at last resolved to set down everything I know of the strange and terrible events at Wraxford Hall, in the hope of appeasing my conscience, which has never ceased to trouble me. A fitting enough night for such a decision, for it is bitter cold, and the wind howls about the house as if it will never cease. I shrink from what I must reveal of my own history, but if anyone is ever to understand why I acted as I did-- and why else attempt this?-- I must not withhold anything of relevance, no matter how painful. I shall feel easier in my mind, I trust, knowing that if the case is ever reopened after I am gone, this account may help uncover the truth about the Wraxford Mystery.

This, then, is at once a haunted house story and a sensation novel, and intimations of murder, blackmail, child-switching, and fraud will run parallel to accounts of events yet more bizarre. Montague's narrative, with the suggestion of shadowy research into ancient texts, plays out as an antiquarian ghost story written with scholarly distance, after the manner of M. R. James or the more stylistically subtle works of H. P. Lovecraft. A third narrator returns to some of the characters from Montague's account, but the events detailed this time offer another spin on spiritualism. Eventually Constance Langton comes back to the fore in a lengthy section that integrates the varied elements in a satisfying and largely surprising manner. Unreliable narration of an especially tricky kind is involved here, but there are enough hints that the device doesn't feel cheap.

Although the novel's primary focus is not on seances of the type that have captured the popular imagination, its thematic concerns are not far removed from what the opening might have led one to suspect. He goes about it subtly enough that readers caught up in the story may not notice, but Harwood is at pains to capture the precarious state of women in upper-class Victorian society, dependent on male relatives-- fathers, brothers, husbands-- for their financial security and ever susceptible to the threat of poverty or forced institutionalization. Acknowledging both the hope that spiritualism could give to a society riven by premature death and rationalist skepticism, and the frauds that were often perpetrated to create that hope, the novel refuses to offer a simple verdict on the question of the supernatural. Anything might exist, and the existence of common trickery cannot rule out real cases of the inexplicable. As with The Ghost Writer, this is a novel whose ambiguities are irrelevant to its remarkable atmosphere: haunted or human, its settings and characters are unsettling. The resolution is rather too abrupt, and a certain twist on the traditional formula of such novels doesn't have enough impact, but these are quibbles: The Seance is another masterpiece from one of the finest 21st century practitioners of the ghostly novel. One can only hope that a third John Harwood novel will not be long in appearing.