Victorian Secrets

Gaslit Nightmares: An Anthology of Victorian Tales of Terror (1988): edited by Hugh Lamb, containing the following stories:

• The Undying Thing (1901) by Barry Pain
• The Serpent's Head (1886) by Lady Dilke
• The Phantom Model(1894) by Hume Nisbet
• The Black Reaper (1899) by Bernard Capes
• The Accursed Cordonnier (1900) by Bernard Capes
• The Vengeance of the Dead (1894) by Robert Barr
• The Beckside Boggle (1886) by Alice Rea
• Maw-Sayah (1893) by Charles J. Mansford
• In the Court of the Dragon (1895) by Robert W. Chambers
• The Old House in Vauxhall Walk (1882) by Charlotte Riddell
• The Drunkard's Death (1836) by Charles Dickens
• Luella Miller (1902) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
• A Psychological Experiment (1900) by Richard Marsh
• The Mystic Spell (1899) by Dick Donovan
• The Late Mr Watkins of Georgia (1898) by Joel Chandler Harris
• The Ghost in the Mill (1870) by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• A Derelict (1895) by J. A. Barry
• The Haunted Mill (1891) by Jerome K. Jerome
• An Unexpected Journey (1893) by J. H. Pearce
• The Pride of the Corbyns (1875) by Isabella Banks
• The Page Boy's Ghost (1896) by The Countess of Munster
• Mysterious Maisie (1895) by Wirt Gerrare.

'Late Victorian Tales of Terror' would be more accurate, as the 1836 story by Charles Dickens is an outlier by nearly 40 years. This is the sort of anthology that I think would appeal more to someone with a historical interest in the horror genre. The stories aren't great for the most part, but I had only encountered four of the 22 stories before (oddly enough, those include the two worst stories in the anthology, by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Jerome K. Jerome, and the best, Mary Wilkins-Freeman's terrific all-timer "Luella Miller").

There's no general introduction, but editor Hugh Lamb is generous with the introductions to the individual stories, giving brief bios of the writers and publication information. You might be surprised how rare both those things are in anthologies. 

Some stories are barely vignettes masquerading as 'true' stories, representing the vast array of such ghost stories that appeared during the Victorian era, especially once the whole medium craze kicked off in the second half of the 19th century and ghosts were everywhere, pretending to be real.

Other than "Luella Miller," which is a great and unusual and under-stated vampire story that deservedly gets reprinted a lot, my favourite stories tend towards the pulpy and baroque. "Mysterious Maisie" by Wirt Gerrare(!) is fast-paced and pulpy as Hell, filled with monsters, a monstrous medium, and a 4-foot-long crocodile guarding the kitchen. It's the sort of story in which the ghost is the good guy. Or good girl, in this case.

I also enjoyed "The Pride of the Corbyns," a somewhat racist story set in the Barbados that involves angry white people rising in their mausoleum to protest the burial of mixed-race bodies among them (!!). "The Undying Thing" isn't quite as great as its title, but it still works. "The Accursed Cordonnier" is a bit of an oddity, dealing as it does with the Wandering Jew. Or is it the Anti-Christ? This being 19th-century England, we first encounter him in a Gentleman's Club.

If you're looking to be consistently scared, I'd probably look elsewhere. But if you're interested in a wide variety of approaches to horror, some excellent and some a little stinky, Gaslit Nightmares is well-worth seeking out. As should be the case, a decent number of female writers are represented here, as ghost stories were one of those genres in which women writers could successfully seek publication during the Victorian era. Oh, and that Dickens story, written when Dickens was a young writer, still packs quite a wallop. Recommended.

This House is Haunted by John Boyne (2013)

This House is Haunted by John Boyne (2013): A quick look around the Internet shows how wildly divisive John Boyne's ghost story is, whether the reviewers are the denizens of Goodreads or singer Josh Ritter in the New York Times (seriously). I enjoyed the novel. Is it great? No. Was I entertained? Yes.

For all the novel's other influences, many of which it wears on its sleeve or perhaps even on its chest like sponsor logos on a NASCAR driver's chest, This House is Haunted really comes down to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. This novel is almost programmatically the anti-matter opposite of James' famous (and famously ambivalent) ghost story. Boyne's set-up is very similar: a governess, two children (a girl and a boy), an absent guardian, and two ghosts.

How does it reverse James? Rather than a first-person narration nested inside a frame narration some fifty years after the events of the story, we instead get a first-person narrator still somehow in the thick of things. The girl is the older child, and the one most in peril from at least one spectral presence. The female ghost is the most dangerous one. The male ghost is benevolent. There's no coyness about whether or not a haunting is involved: from the title to the first overtly spectral act, there really is no doubt. This house really is haunted. Really, really haunted.

The choice of title -- a simple declarative sentence -- offers one of the interesting counterpoints to James' novella. James' chosen title has to be explained by the story itself for its true meaning to be understood. The screw that's being turned is the screw of suspenseful narrative, as discussed around a fireplace near the beginning of a novella. A ghost story with a child in peril represents an extra turn of the screw from a ghost story without an imperiled child. It's a title that springs from a discussion of narrative theory. Contrast this to 'This house is haunted.'

Further mirrored images proliferate. Certain signs and portents and bits of ghostly business dead-end, in opposition to the architectural tidiness of James' novella. The prose is mostly plain style, not Jamesian. While both the character and the works of Charles Dickens play a role in the novel, the prose is not "Dickensian," as some reviewers oddly claim.

What do you get? A fairly short ghost story set in 1867 England (London and Norfolk, to be exact), with a plucky governess, endangered children, family secrets, angry animals, and a lot of very physical ghost business. While The Turn of the Screw seems to be the primary mirror, the secondary homages and allusions are legion: Rebecca; Jane Eyre; A Christmas Carol; "The Fall of the House of Usher;" and The Uninvited are just a few. 

Moreover, This House is Haunted counters more than a century of somewhat misogynistic theorizing about the governess in The Turn of the Screw. Critics who claim that the ghosts in James' story are the products of the governess' mind have generally done so while claiming that this derangement is a sort of hallucination caused by sexual frustration linked to the governess' crush on the absent guardian of her two charges. This is both pretty sexist and psychologically loopy: scientifically speaking, people don't generally suffer from full-blown audio and visual hallucinations simply because they need to get laid.

Boyne's protagonist instead consciously and vocally fights against Victorian-era sexism at every turn. And a scene in which an unhelpful Anglican minister suggests to an enraged Eliza Caine that the ghosts are simply the product of the weak female mind strikes me as being a very direct rebuke to The Turn of the Screw's misogynistic interpreters.

Are there problems? A few. Anachronisms occasionally pop up in the language of the narrator. The loose ends may irritate readers who want everything in a story to be a version of Chekov's Gun. And the climax seems about 50% too cinematic, not so much a nod to "The Fall of the House of Usher" as a superhero battle between two invisible adversaries. The ghosts are almost absurdly powerful, though I do think that's part of the Mirror: Henry James' ghosts were almost entirely non-physical in their malign effects. For me, in any case, recommended with a few caveats. But I'll be damned if I understand how this novel made so many people so bloody angry.

Several Pounds of Horror Stories

The Giant Book of Ghost Stories (Edited version of The Mammoth Book of Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories): edited by Richard Dalby (Original version 1995/This version 2005), containing the following stories::

Ghosts (1887) by Anonymous; Schalken the Painter (1851) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; M. Anastius (1857) by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik; The Lost Room (1858) by Fitz-James O'Brien; No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman (1866) by Charles Dickens; Haunted (1867) by Anonymous; The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868) by Henry James; John Granger (1870) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon; The Ghost in the Mill  (1870) by Harriet Beecher Stowe; The Ghost in the Cap'n Brown House (1870) by Harriet Beecher Stowe; Poor Pretty Bobby (1872) by Rhoda Broughton; The New Pass  (1870) by Amelia B. Edwards; The White and the Black (1867) by Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian; The Underground Ghost (1866) by John Berwick Harwood; Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk (1889) by Frank Cowper;  Dog or Demon? (1889) by Theo Gift; A Ghost from the Sea (1889) by Dick Donovan; A Set of Chessmen (1890) by Richard Marsh; The Judge's House (1891) by Bram Stoker; Pallinghurst Barrow (1892) by Grant Allen; The Mystery of the Semi-Detached (1893) by E. Nesbit; Sister Maddelena (1895) by Ralph Adams Cram; The Trainer's Ghost (1893) by Lettice Galbraith;  An Original Revenge (1897) by W. C. Morrow; Caulfield's Crime (1892) by Alice Perrin; The Bridal Pair (1902) by Robert W. Chambers; The Watcher (1903) by R. H. Benson; The Spectre in the Cart (1904) by Thomas Nelson Page; H. P. (1904) by Sabine Baring-Gould; and Yuki-Onna (1904) by Lafcadio Hearn.

Enjoyable and wide-ranging anthology of 19th and early 20th century ghost stories selected by the always reliable Richard Dalby. One will run across this volume and a few others with a fair bit of regularity, as it's an edited-down version of an earlier anthology, created by Barnes&Noble as an "instant remainder."

Dalby goes for breadth as well as non-typical selections in many cases -- while the Dickens story is oft-anthologized, entries from Fitz-James O'Brien, E. Nesbit, Robert W. Chambers, Amelia Edwards and other stalwarts are much less typical, which is to say I haven't come across them before.

Among the stand-outs are Grant Allen's "Pallinghurst Barrow", a fascinating entry in the Sinister Hidden British Race sub-genre that Arthur Machen would make his own, and "Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk" by Frank Cowper, which has one of the greatest titles ever. "Schalken the Painter" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is my top pick of the bunch, an early effort by the fine and prolific Mr. Le Fanu that actually gave me a nightmare after I read it the first time.

There are a few piffles here, many from the better-known writers. The Nesbit story, for example, is almost a fragment. In all, though, and even truncated by the last eleven stories of its original version, the anthology offers a solid overview of time and writers, with an eye towards reprinting stories by the legion of female ghost-story writers that dominated the genre in the 19th century. Recommended.

Masters of Horror & the Supernatural: The Great Tales (Edited version of The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural): edited by Bill Pronzini, Martin H. Greenberg, and Barry N. Malzberg (Original version 1981/ This version 2010), containing the following stories:

"Man Overboard!" (1899) by Winston Churchill; A Teacher's Rewards (1970) by Robert S. Phillips; Bianca's Hands (1947) by Theodore Sturgeon; Black Wind (1979) by Bill Pronzini; Call First (1975) by Ramsey Campbell; Camps (1979) by Jack Dann; Come and Go Mad (1949) by Fredric Brown; Hop Frog (1849) by Edgar Allan Poe;  If Damon Comes (1978) by Charles L. Grant; Namesake (1981) by Elizabeth Morton (aka Rosalind M. Greenberg); Passengers (1968) by Robert Silverberg; Pickman's Model (1927) by H. P. Lovecraft; Rappaccini's Daughter (1844) by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Sardonicus (1961) by Ray Russell; Squire Toby's Will (1927)by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [as by J. Sheridan Le Fanu ] Sticks (1974) by Karl Edward Wagner; The Crate (1979) by Stephen King; The Doll (1980) by Joyce Carol Oates; The Explosives Expert (1967) by John Lutz; The Fly (1952) by Arthur Porges; The Girl with the Hungry Eyes (1949) by Fritz Leiber; The Hand (1919) by Theodore Dreiser; The Jam (1958) by Henry Slesar; The Jolly Corner (1908) by Henry James; The Middle Toe of the Right Foot (1890) by Ambrose Bierce; The Mindworm (1950) by C. M. Kornbluth; The Oblong Room (1967) by Edward D. Hoch; The Party (1967) by William F. Nolan; The Roaches (1965) by Thomas M. Disch; The Road to Mictlantecutli (1965) by Adobe James; The Scarlet King (1954) by Evan Hunter; The Screaming Laugh (1938) by Cornell Woolrich; The Squaw (1893) by Bram Stoker; The Valley of Spiders (1903) by H. G. Wells; Transfer (1975) by Barry N. Malzberg; Warm (1953) by Robert Sheckley; You Know Willie (1957) by Theodore R. Cogswell; and Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (1943) by Robert Bloch.

With three stories removed from its previous edition as one of the Library-Ubiquitous Arbor House treasuries of the early 1980's, Masters of Horror & the Supernatural: The Great Tales remains a bit of a Frankenstein's Monster of an anthology.

Co-editor Bill Pronzini's background was primarily in mystery and suspense at the time, while Martin H. Greenberg and Barry Malzberg worked primarily in the science fiction field. How this got them a gig editing a comprehensive horror anthology is anyone's guess. Well, actually my guess would be that they worked on other Arbor House treasuries as well.

So many of the selections aren't, in my appraisal, actually horror. Instead, they're short thriller and suspense stories. They shouldn't be in a horror anthology. One of these mis-selected stories is by Pronzini himself ("Black Wind"), which doesn't increase my appreciation of the selection criteria. Two other slight, very slight, selections come from Malzberg ("Transfer") and Greenberg's wife Rosalind ("Namesake"), the latter appearing under a pseudonym. Apparently, Rosalind Greenberg has only published three stories in her life. One of them is here! And it's sort of pointless!

There are some worthy entries here, from perennials like Stoker's "The Squaw" and Henry James' "The Jolly Corner" to re-discoveries like Theodore Dreiser's "The Hand" and to then-recent stories like Jack Dann's haunting "Camps". For an anthology dedicated to the prolific and influential Cornell Woolrich, however, its Woolrich selection is completely baffling. "The Screaming Laugh" is an overlong mystery story; its one horror element has been seen before and since in much better stories, including Ray Russell's "Sardonicus," reprinted in this same anthology!

As this book seems to have been created as an instant remainder (it's a mainstay of the ChaptersIndigo Remainder pages, anyway), it shouldn't set a person back much in the purchasing. The selection is odd and self-serving, but there are many fine stories here. There's also Stephen King's "The Crate," adapted by King and George C. Romero for the movie Creepshow but never included in any of King's prose collections. Lightly recommended.