Horror for People Who Don't Like Horror

The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986): edited by Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert, containing the following stories:

⦁ The Tapestried Chamber (1828) by Sir Walter Scott
⦁ The Phantom Coach (1864) by Amelia B. Edwards
⦁ Squire Toby's Will (1868) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
⦁ The Shadow in the Corner (1879) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
⦁ The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford
⦁ A Wicked Voice (1890) by Vernon Lee
⦁ The Judge's House (1891) by Bram Stoker
⦁ Man-Size in Marble (1886) by E. Nesbit
⦁ The Roll-Call of the Reef (1895) by Arthur Quiller-Couch
⦁ The Friends of the Friends (1896) by Henry James
⦁ The Red Room (1896) by H. G. Wells
⦁ The Monkey's Paw (1902) by W. W. Jacobs
⦁ The Lost Ghost (1903) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
⦁ "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" (1904) by M. R. James
⦁ The Empty House (1906) by Algernon Blackwood
⦁ The Cigarette Case (1910) by Oliver Onions
⦁ Rose Rose (1910) by Barry Pain
⦁ The Confession of Charles Linkworth (1912) by E. F. Benson
⦁ On the Brighton Road (1912) by Richard Middleton
⦁ Bone to His Bone (1912) by E. G. Swain
⦁ The True History of Anthony Ffryar (1911) by Arthur Gray
⦁ The Taipan (1922) by W. Somerset Maugham
⦁ The Victim (1922) by May Sinclair
⦁ A Visitor from Down Under (1926) by L. P. Hartley
⦁ Fullcircle (1920) by John Buchan
⦁ The Clock (1928) by William Fryer Harvey
⦁ Old Man's Beard (1929) by H. Russell Wakefield
⦁ Mr. Jones (1928) by Edith Wharton
⦁ Smee (1929) by A. M. Burrage
⦁ The Little Ghost (1922) by Hugh Walpole
⦁ Ahoy, Sailor Boy! (1933) by A. E. Coppard
⦁ The Hollow Man (1933) by Thomas Burke
⦁ Et in Sempiternum Pereant (1935) by Charles Williams
⦁ Bosworth Summit Pound (1948) by L. T. C. Rolt
⦁ An Encounter in the Mist (1949) by A. N. L. Munby
⦁ Hand in Glove (1952) by Elizabeth Bowen
⦁ A Story of Don Juan (1941) by V. S. Pritchett
⦁ Cushi (1952) by Christopher Woodforde
⦁ Bad Company (1955) by Walter de la Mare
⦁ The Bottle of 1912 (1961) by Simon Raven
⦁ The Cicerones (1967) by Robert Aickman
⦁ Soft Voices at Passenham (1981) by T. H. White


Lengthy reprint anthology with numerous flaws, including the annoying omission of biographical information and publication dates for the individual stories at the beginning of each story.

There's also a certain nebulousness to the volume's construction of an "English ghost story." It's not necessarily written by an English-person. It isn't necessarily set in England. And it doesn't necessarily involve a ghost.

The editors' introduction does indicate where they come down on the issue of graphic violence in horror -- they're against it. Huzzah! I'll tell you, if nothing else, the introduction comes across as almost parodically upper-class-academic English. Blah blah, woof woof.

There are some excellent stories here. There's also an awful lot of time-wasting with stories that are very polite with their ghosts and don't seem to have any interest in scaring anbody. We get a few sentimental stories of sad, lost ghosts. We get a lot of one-twist stories in which the twist is, there's a ghost! Oh my heavens! That character is actually a ghost? Really? I did not see that one coming.

Thankfully, there are also some old stand-bys. "The Upper Berth" by F. Marion Crawford is a genuinely great story in one of my favourite horror sub-genres, that of the story in which someone gets into a fist-fight with a ghost. "The Cicerones" is one of horror-master Robert Aickman's shortest stories, and one of his most enigmatically potent.

"A Visitor from Down Under" by L. P. Hartley contains one of the most sinister (yet morally justified) ghosts in the genre, deployed in a story that has its droll moments (the ghost takes public transit) amidst the awfulness. And the short, very short, "The Clock" by  William Fryer Harvey is a neglected masterpiece of brevity and ghastly wit, with one of the more remarkably quick-witted and quick-moving protagonists in the history of ghost stories.

The editors really aren't all that interested in ghosts stories after about 1950. The entry by the usually fine de la Mare is neglible. The entry by T.H. White that closes the book was actually written in the 1930's, meaning that the editors don't bother with any writers of ghost stories between 1967 and 1986, the time of the greatest horror boom in publishing history. Nice work, boys. Recommended for many of the stories but not all of them, and what a lazy bit of editing and scholarship this book turns out to be. Editorial hackwork.

Screwed

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898): One of the great horrors of a lot of first-year university English courses is The Turn of the Screw. It's really not something that should be inflicted on anyone below third-year English. And besides the complicated sentence structures of Henry James, there's a cruel tease in handing students a ghost story that's too attentuated to be viscerally scary.

So it goes. The striking things about the story have nothing to do with horror, and everything to do with a realistically imagined reaction to horror. It's one of the first psychological examinations of the workings of terror on the human mind. For actual scares, James' admirer Edith Wharton was much more forthright and reliable. Her ghosts stories would be fine first-year texts. James, not so much.

The distancing effects of the text play into its very title, which is, as explained in the story, a metaphoric description of the effects of a particular type of narrative, the ghost story itself. In the narrative, the revelation of the events of the story of the governess comes as a result of a bout of fireside ghost-story telling. The typical ghost story elicits certain reactions: to imperil children in such a story represents a further "turn of the screw" to increase the emotional and horrific "pressure" on the audience.

The two schools of thought on The Turn of the Screw roughly divide up into 'There are ghosts' and 'there are no ghosts.' The latter requires narrative duplicity on the level of The Usual Suspects: pretty much everything in the main part of the story that describes the struggle between a young governess and two malign ghosts for the souls of her two young charges must either be confabulation on the part of the governess or, at a further remove, confabulation on the part of the frame character who has ostensibly set down her narrative.

The former requires suspension of disbelief, something the average reader will accept but that many academics are incapable of accepting. There are no ghosts in the real world; hence, the ghosts in James' story must be fiction. If there are ghosts, though, what then? We know they did something to the young girl and young boy when they were still alive. What?

James isn't necessarily going to answer such questions. There's a reticence born of his own sensibilities and the sensibilities of the time. That reticence occurs within the story-world as well: the governess is at all points constrained by what is or is not proper to talk about, by what is or is not mentionable in polite company. Within that story-world in which there are malign ghosts, propriety allows those ghosts much more free rein than they might have in other circumstances.

But the genius of the story lies in the aforementioned psychological examination of the effects of terror on a human mind. The governess' mind must circle, returning again and again to its own reactions to things others cannot see, forced to deal again and again with feelings of horror the source of which only she seems to see. How much do the children see? How many of the children's actions constitute clever play-acting? What do the ghosts want now?

Around and around we go. The chills here are almost entirely of a philosophical or existential nature: how does the mind in isolation react to that which should not be? How can action be taken against incorporeal beings that never really act against one, but instead appear and disappear, trailing clouds of malevolence? How complicit is the governess in what happens? And why does she write exactly like Henry James? Highly recommended.