Boring Ghosts: The Small Hand by Susan Hill

REVIEW

Lovecraft's Book

The World's Greatest Horror Stories (a.k.a. H.P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror): edited by Stephen Jones and Dave Carson (1993/2004) containing the following stories:


Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927/1935) by H. P. Lovecraft: pretty much an essential essay on horror in literature up to the mid-1930's;

The Signalman (1866) by Charles Dickens: understated and almost documentary in its approach, with Dickens striving for an understated realism that works extremely well;

The House and the Brain (1859) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (variant of The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain): haunted house story becomes almost New Age by the end as it moves into occultism and pseudoscience;

The Body Snatcher (1884) by Robert Louis Stevenson: classic and disturbing tale of 'Resurrection Men";

The Spider (1915) by Hanns Heinz Ewers (trans. of Die Spinne 1908): really odd and disturbing tale of suicides caused by... what. exactly?;

The Foot of the Mummy (1882) by Théophile Gautier (trans. of Le Pied de Momie 1840): whimsical dream-journey anticipates similarly themed stories by Dunsany and then Lovecraft ;

The Horla (1886) by Guy de Maupassant (trans. of Le Horla 1887): a really lovely tale of madness and alien invasion by de Maupassant, who was himself suffering from mental illness by the end of his too-short writing career;

The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe: Poe's indispensable tale of rot;

The Damned Thing (1893) by Ambrose Bierce: Bierce's invisible monster in a somewhat slight tale that's not Bierce's best horror story;

The Upper Berth (1885) by F. Marion Crawford: justifiably in the running for Best Ghost Story Ever, a model of suggestion, pay-off, and chilly, water-logged creepiness;

The Yellow Sign (1895) by Robert W. Chambers: Chambers' scariest story helped set the stage for all the mysterious, forbidden volumes to come -- though his forbidden volume, The King in Yellow, is available in finer bookstores everywhere!;

The Shadows on the Wall (1903) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: a fine ghost story, subtle and concerned with the quicksand of family grudges;

The Dead Valley (1895) by Ralph Adams Cram: Wow! I hadn't read this concise voyage into a very bad place, and it's a doozy;

Fishhead (1913) by Irvin S. Cobb: A weird bit of American regional horror that looks ahead to Lovecraft's own squirmy human/fishmen hybrids;

Lukundoo (1907) by Edward Lucas White: Africa Screams. Not so much scary as inevitable;

The Double Shadow (1933) by Clark Ashton Smith: one of Smith's many, many great dark fantasy stories isn't so much scary as it is disturbing in its description. Smith's wizards were always doing something arrogantly stupid.;

The Mark of the Beast (1890) by Rudyard Kipling: A showcase of Kipling's attention to description of foreign lands (in this case India) and the British men stationed there. As in a lot of his work, the natives are much more sympathetic than many of the British;

 Negotium Perambulans (1922) by E. F. Benson: The description of place here is top-notch, though horror is somewhat absent due to both a sort of inevitable schematicism and a refusal to make the threatened parties sympathetic in any way -- they're really just sorta dumb;

Mrs. Lunt (1926) by Hugh Walpole: OK, this is a really solid ghost story with what seems to be an extraordinarily interesting psychological study of homophobia and masculinity;

The Hog (1915/1947) by William Hope Hodgson: Hodgson's gonzo masterpiece of cosmic forces manifesting as a giant, deadly, spectral hog, with only ghost-finder Carnacki and his crazy-ass ghostbusting technology to oppose that force, at least at first;

The Great God Pan (1894) by Arthur Machen: One of the all-time ten or 20 great horror novellas;

Count Magnus (1904) by M. R. James: Almost all of James' ghost stories are terrific, and this is one of the four or five best, with its mysterious undead Count and its hapless travel-book writer.

The entire anthology: H.P. Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" covers so much ground that one could easily assemble a dozen different anthologies by following its lead. This is one such anthology, and Jones and Dave Carson (who also illustrates) have done a fine job of mixing much-anthologized necessities with several stories that I haven't seen before (and I've read a bloody awful lot of horror stories). Each story comes with a relevant quotation from Lovecraft's essay, which is also reprinted in its entirety at the beginning of the book. Highly recommended.

Scary Antiquary

Canon Alberic's Scrap-book and other stories by M.R. James, containing the following stories: "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book", "The Rose Garden", "The Mezzotint", and "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" (This edition 2010): Nice little entry in Penguin's 50th anniversary Modern Classics series collects four of early 20th-century ghost-story master M.R. James' ghost stories.

James continues to resist becoming dated, and his ghost stories remain a model of economy and terror at their best. Three of the stories here are major, while "The Rose Garden" is a curious inclusion. It's not bad, it's simply not among his best, as it comes to an oddly sputtering end after a terrific start. It is emblematic of one of James' fictional concerns, however -- the dangers that a lack of specific knowledge can bring when one starts mucking about.

Of the other three, "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book" is the scariest, and is one of the finest examples of James' technique of gradually introducing a supernatural menace. It's also the most antiquarian of the stories included here (James titled his first collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary). The protagonist encounters Something Awful as a direct result of his interest in an old, small-town French church.

"The Mezzotint" and "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" follow similar paths into the past, with an old Mezzotint and old journals, respectively. "The Mezzotint" offers horror at one remove, as the protagonist views the past through the eponymous object in far more detail than is usual for a mezzotint.

"The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" wouldn't be out of place in a revenge-oriented horror comic book of the 1950's. While it involves a supernatural event of the distant past pieced together by a contemporary protagonist from a box of papers and letters, the story still manages some of James' most effective creep-out moments. As we learn in ghost story after ghost story, if you don't know who's at the door, don't invite them in. Highly recommended.

Endure or Avoid

Madame Crowl's Ghost: written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, edited and introduced by M.R. James (Original edition 1923; this edition 2006) containing the following stories: Madam Crowl's Ghost, Squire Toby's Will, Dickon the Devil, The Child That Went with the Fairies, The White Cat of Drumgunniol, An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street; Ghost Stories of Chapelizod, Wicked Captain Walshawe, Sir Dominick's Bargain, Ultor de Lacy, The Vision of Tom Chuff, and Stories of Lough Guir.

Mid-to-late 19th-century Irish Protestant writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu is really the second giant with a career output mostly in what we'd now call horror, dark fantasy, and the supernatural (or even Weird) fiction, after Edgar Allan Poe. It's a testament to his skill and vision that this is a fantastic collection, even though it omits the two horror stories he's best-known and most-anthologized for, the seminal vampire novella "Camilla" and the psychological chiller "Green Tea."

Dracula's Bram Stoker clearly knew Le Fanu's work, as Dracula borrows mightily from "Camilla" (which remains a far superior story) and from Le Fanu's recurring occult investigator Dr. Martin Hesselius, the latter in the person of Professor Van Helsing.

The stories collected here span the 1840's, 50's, and 60's, but for all their period-appropriate language and narrative approach, they are nonetheless imaginatively modern on the topic of ghosts. Le Fanu's ghosts seem to obey certain nebulous rules, even as to who they can or cannot appear to. They are not, however, easy to get rid of. Mid-19th-century Great Britain may have been a more Christian place than it is today, but there are no exorcisms here, and no deus ex machina endings. Ghosts are things to be either endured or avoided.

The Fairie also appear in some stories, most strikingly in "The Child That Went with the Fairies." They aren't nice. Really, really, really not nice, and this story really works as an epitomal tale of stolen children, a recurring trope in traditional stories of the Fairie in the British Isles. One calls them The Good Folk or The Kind Folk in the hopes of flattering them, not because they are.

Throughout the stories, Le Fanu deftly establishes setting and regional dialect, regardless of where the story is set. There are both urban and rural tales of the supernatural here. There are disturbingly fluid spectres, at least one Devil, ghosts whose touch corrupts and kills, innocent lives stolen or ended by all manner of unearthly beings, and terrible discoveries behind hidden doors.

Le Fanu has what would be now called a "cinematic eye" at points -- there are some marvelous visual descriptions in "Squire Toby's Will" of strangely mutating, threatening shadows that resolve into figures but dissolve when closely regarded; this skill manifests in several other stories as well. Some of Le Fanu's ghosts resemble those 3-D posters that suddenly resolve into an image when looked at the correct way. Except the posters aren't out to kill you.

M.R. James originally selected and introduced this collection in the 1920's, which is fitting given James' place as perhaps the most accomplished and influential writer of ghost stories in history. All in all, an excellent collection. Highly recommended.

Goin' Down the Road...to Hell!

The Shrine: written by Jon Knautz, Brendan Moore, and Trevor Matthews; directed by Jon Knautz; starring Aaron Ashmore (Marcus), Cindy Sampson (Carmen), Meghan Heffern (Sara), and Trevor Matthews (Henryk) (2010): Surprisingly well-made Canadian straight-to-DVD cheapie ($1.5 million budget according to IMDB, less than the cost of one episode of an hour-long American drama TV series). It's another Bad Road Trip movie, though in this case the road trip has a point: an ambitious, up-and-coming journalist (Carmen) wants to discover what happened to a vanished, young American traveller somewhere in Poland.

Things are a bit rough for the first 20 minutes, but pick up once we leave America (well, America as played by Pickering, Ontario) for the rural wilds of Poland (well, the rural wilds of Poland as played by Pickering, Ontario). The people doing the accents and the Polish sound pretty convincing to this non-Polish speaker.

More importantly, there's real cleverness at work with the set design, make-up, and props. There's a dreadful mask-thing whose purpose only becomes completely clear at the end of the film. There's also some nice moments inside a fog bank, and a great scene involving a demonic statue. The film also plays with subjective POV in a relatively sophisticated way.

The ending, while undermined a bit by too much footage of prosthetics that look less and less real the longer the camera lingers, ultimately satisfies and makes sense of the proceedings. My only major caveat is that the prologue gives away things that would better be discovered as the narrative unfolds. The actors are convincing, and while their lines don't sparkle, they get the job done. There are echoes of Robert E. Howard's classic horror story "The Black Stone" here, among others. And the film-makers restrain themselves from offering too lengthy an explanation for the goings-on. As in, one spoken line! Recommended.

Night of the Demon (aka Curse of the Demon): written by Charles Bennett, Hal E. Chester, and Cy Endfield, based on the short story "Casting the Runes" by M.R. James; directed by Jacques Tourneur; starring Dana Andrews (Dr. John Holden), Peggy Cummins (Joanna Harrington) and Niall MacGinnis (Dr. Julian Karswell) (1957): It's too bad there's no way to see the pure Charles Bennett version of this movie: producer Hal E. Chester added some unfortunate bits (including the infamous demon close-up which doesn't frighten anyone) and probably subtracted others.

What's left is still a fine horror movie with outstanding performances throughout. It isn't patricularly faithful to the M.R. James short story it adapts, though most of the logic of the supernatural is kept intact. Niall MacGinnis is a stand-out as the mostly malevolent magician, who nonetheless dotes on his mother and seems to be mostly, charmingly harmless unless you disagree with him.

The long-shots of the demon are relatively effective, though its more sinister manifestations remain, in master horror-director Tourneur's hands, shadows and fog and noises off-screen. One of the oddities of Chester's decision-making with the demon lies in the fact that it's smaller than a man in James' story but a looming, King-Kong-sized giant here. Sometimes less is more, especially when it comes to horror. Recommended.

The Wine of Violence

Adrian Ross

The Hole of the Pit by Adrian Ross (1914; reprinted in Uncanny Banquet, 1992):

"Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the LORD: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged." Isaiah 51:1.

Ramsey Campbell unearthed this hitherto never-reprinted gem of a novel and had it serve as the capstone to his 1992 horror anthology Uncanny Banquet. It is, figuratively and somewhat literally, one hell of a novel. Ross, who primarily wrote librettos for operettas, wrote this one horror novel as a tribute to contemporaneous ghost-story giant M.R. James. Indeed, many of James's stylistic trademarks -- especially a strict attention to suggestion rather than showing, and the framing of the horror within a narrative from the past -- are fully at work here.

However, as Campbell notes in his introduction to the novel, The Hole of the Pit seems more comparable to the horror works of equally contemporaneous William Hope Hodgson, whose monsters and spirits tended to have some sort of quasi-scientific (or at least rationalized supernatural) underpinning. Did Ross read The Ghost Pirates or The Night Land?

But to the novel itself.

The narrator is one Hubert Leyton, a Puritan scholar living during the English Civil War of the 17th century between the Cavaliers (those loyal to the King) and the Roundheads (those loyal to Oliver Cromwell). The narrator abhors violence and has stayed out of the conflict, though he knows Cromwell. A resident of his cousin the Earl of Deeping's lands shows up on his doorstep one day to ask Hubert to attempt to stop the Earl and his men from plundering the supplies of his tenants.

The Earl, a Cavalier, is being pursued by the Roundheads and has taken up residence -- along with several dozen soldiers and one peculiar Italian witch -- in his ancestral home, a castle set on a small island in the midst of a tidal inlet and some pretty treacherous marshes.

Hubert goes in the hope that he can avert further bloodshed. Soon, though, he's captive in his cousin's castle along with the late countess's cousin Rosamund. Actually, everyone's a captive to the tides, the approaching Roundhead force...and something that's come boiling out of 'the Hole', a mysterious underwater cave. Both Hubert and his cousin know that a bit of prophetic doggerel predicts that the Earl of Deeping will be destroyed by some supernatural punishment sent by the Devil. Neither believed such a thing -- until now.

One of Ross's great triumphs here is the first-person characterization of Hubert, who really is a good man, which is not the same thing as being a man without a backbone. Ross manages to make Hubert sympathetic in part by making Hubert sympathetic -- to the criminals and mercenaries fighting alongside the Earl, and to the violent, murderous, but also honourable Earl himself. Hubert is no stranger to violence -- indeed, he's a much better swordsman than anyone else in the Castle, thanks to fencing lessons -- but he abhors it nonetheless, and takes no joy in the deaths that begin to pile up. Because there is something awful stalking the inhabitants of the castle, kept mostly off-screen by Ross.

I don't know how accurate Ross's depiction of the time and place is, but the novel's verisimilitude seems to me to be unassailable. The creature, or thing, or whatever, gains dramatic heft by Ross's parsimony in using it and showing it. Many of its most sinister actions occur unobserved, with only the startling aftermath attesting to its presence and its malevolent powers and intent. All in all, this really is a gem of a historical horror novel. It's a shame Ross didn't write more of them. Highly recommended.

Waking Nightmares by Ramsey Campbell

Waking Nightmares by Ramsey Campbell (1991) containing "The Guide" (1989) "Next Time You'll Know Me" (1988) "Second Sight" (1987) "The Trick" (1980) "In the Trees" (1986) "Another World" (1987) "Playing the Game" (1988) "Bedtime Story" (1986) "Watch the Birdie" (1984) "Old Clothes" (1985) "Beyond Words" (1986) "Jack in the Box" (1983) "Eye of Childhood" (1982) "The Other Side" (1986) "Where the Heart Is" (1987) "Being an Angel" (1989) "It Helps If You Sing" (1989) "The Old School" (1989) and "Meeting the Author" (1989): This mid-career collection from Campbell contains a lot of dandy stories published over the space of ten years and written over the space of about 20.

　

It opens with one of the odder 'inspired by a true story' horror stories I've ever read, "The Guide", which takes the fact that British ghost-story writer M.R. James also wrote a guidebook to the Lancashire area of England and uses that starting point in one of Campbell's most Jamesian, antiquarian horror stories. It closes with a tale of a disturbing children's book writer, a disturbed child, and a story in which the presence of the supernatural remains ambiguous throughout, "Meeting the Author."

　

In between are some fairly horrifying meditations on childhood horrors ("The Trick", "Eye of Childhood", "Bedtime Story", "The Old School"), zombies ("It Helps If You Sing"), religious nutjobs ("Another World"), writers with major problems ("Beyond Words", "Next Time You'll Know Me"), supernaturally altered landscapes (the increasingly malign nature trails of "In the Woods"), guardian angels ("Being an Angel"), and what appear to be a possessed raincoat ("Old Clothes"), a sinister-yet-familar board game ("Playing the Game"), and a malign pub washroom ("Watch the Birdie").

　

Throughout, Campbell's eye for telling detail and sympathetic characterization shines. The endings of many of the stories may be ruthless, but the impact of many of them relies on Campbell's ability to elicit sympathy for a character within the confines of a few thousand words. Highly recommended.