Five Degrees of Latitude

I recently read Five Degrees of Latitude, Michael Reynier's debut collection and part of the Tartarus Press  Contemporary Fiction line. I recommend it highly to all admirers of the classical supernatural tale. Reynier's prose is uncommonly polished for a debut author, and his style is perfectly suited to the mode in which these five novellas work. The tales are reminiscent at one time or another of Machen, Blackwood, M. R. James, Edith Wharton, Le Fanu, Hawthorne, Lovecraft, and others, not because Reynier's work is fundamentally derivative but because he is a new and distinctive writer working in that distinguished tradition. United though they are by their elegantly suggestive approach to the supernatural, these tales are each slightly different in tone.

"Le Loup-Garou" may, as its title suggests, be a werewolf story, but it's also a story about the power of the natural landscape to dominate a human community, and about the psychological struggles that occasionally erupt from beneath that community's surface. A disordered chronological structure creates an impression of eerie timelessness parallel to the mental dislocation of those who live in the forest-shadowed village of La-Chapelle-aux-Trois-Vallons, and also allows the plot to come together at an appropriate pace. That plot is made up of some traditional Gothic elements, but they are used well to create a story of old-fashioned psychological weight; it is here that the comparison to Hawthorne is strongest. And the very final scenes add that frisson of the numinous that distinguishes great supernaturalism.

"No. 3 Hobbes Lane," though as elegantly written as the others, is perhaps the weakest of these novellas. There is a disconnect between its ambitious themes, too bluntly stated in a key final scene, and the narrative devices to which that scene is tied, those of the charming but philosophically flimsy ghostly story. Unlike "Le Loup-Garou," which manages to be supernatural and psychological at once, "No. 3 Hobbes Lane" would be better without its shadowy creatures, relying on on the almost Dickensian drama of Ezekiel Hobbes. But there is a great pleasure to be had in unraveling along with the protagonist the mystery of a house that is turned entirely aware from the grand view toward which all its neighbors face. I do wish, though, that the local dialect had not disappeared from that character's speech just when it became necessary for him to narrate events in a more formal style...

"The Rumour Mill" is perhaps the most unusual of these novellas, and has no supernatural element, though it relies on and uses effectively the familiar device of discovered papers, in this case those belonging to a professor who has since disappeared in the course of experiments that grew out of a children's party game. It isn't terribly difficult to guess the direction in which the story is tending, and once a particular character appears the subsequent course of events is obvious. But there is a note of light comedy to the story that at first entertains and then, given subsequent events, disturbs, and as is often the case in such stories, the arrival at the expected ending still manages to satisfy.

"Sika Tarn" is, to my mind, the most chilling tale in Five Degrees of Latitude, and all the more so because in some sense it ought not to work. At first one seems to be reading a tale of alien presences in a remote landscape; there is an echo, intended I think, of "The Willows." But what haunts this isolated lake turns out to be something entirely different, on a smaller scale, and yet every bit as terrifying and sad as if it had had cosmic implications. What might otherwise have been commonplace devices are deployed in just the right way to make a massive impression, as in Edith Wharton's "Afterward," and the themes at work, similar to those of "No. 3 Hobbes Lane," feel much more natural than in that story, and contribute to the mood. "Sika Tarn," like Quentin S. Crisp's "Ynys-Y-Plag," is one of the finest contemporary novellas in the weird tradition.

"The Visions of Lazaro" demonstrates that it isn't only the tropes of fantasy and horror that make for atmospheric supernatural fiction. The trappings here are those of science fiction, but the effect of this "found manuscript" story is as dislocating and ominous as those of the other four. The inclusion of a fictional "Editor's Note" that clarifies certain plot points is, I feel, a miscalculation; not since The Ring has a genre work explained and explained and explained in a way that sucks out the atmosphere. Some subtle connections that I had missed were revealed, but it's better for such things to be discovered gradually on re-reading and contemplation than to have them handed to you. Still, "The Visions of Lazaro" is a fine piece of weird science fiction, with an almost bittersweet air of pessimism running throughout.

Tartarus Press' primary output is handsome hardcover limited editions, but many of its titles are also available in ebook, either from Amazon sites or direct from the publisher, and it was in that format that I read Five Degrees of Latitude. Although the experience of a Tartarus hardcover is not to be missed for aesthetes of the physical book, quality fiction transcends format: these novellas are every bit as evocative on a screen as they are on the page, and the ebook is more readily affordable for readers on a budget. However it happens, Five Degrees of Latitude deserves to be read by any fan of authors like those mentioned in the first paragraph of this review. Michael Reynier has enormous gifts, and I'm very much looking forward to his next work.

Mrs Midnight and Other Stories

'You people always want an explanation, don't you?' said Mr Pigsny. 'Well, what if there isn't an explanation? Or what if there is one, but I couldn't make you understand it, not in a million years? What if there just aren't words in the poxy English language to express a meaning, you bone-headed little shit?'
--Reggie Oliver, "Mr Pignsy"

The stories in Reggie Oliver's first collection, The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and Other Strange Stories, demonstrated a mastery of the traditional English ghost story, most especially the antiquarian variety associated with M. R. James. Oliver's settings and characters showed a remarkable range of knowledge and understanding, but his diction and his particular form of subtle supernaturalism were classically ghostly. In subsequent collections, however, the style of his work has evolved, encompassing other approaches to the supernatural: the ambiguous, the absurd, even on occasion the physically revolting. The title of his fourth collection promised Madder Mysteries, for as the publisher observed, these stories travel "even deeper into his own bizarre territory." Now Oliver's fifth collection has been published. The thirteen tales in Mrs Midnight and Other Stories are frequently eccentric, frequently terrifying, and always erudite and well-observed. As a proof of the author's insight and versatility, this collection can scarcely be bettered.

In the introduction to Masques of Satan, reprinted in altered form in the omnibus Dramas from the Depths, Oliver writes, "The stories that follow may contain humour and artifice, but they are essentially serious. They are not divertissements... My ideas derive from some tiny fragment of experience or research. When these fragments connect with some problem or passion that has been exercising me, a story is born." This is an important consideration, for Oliver's choice of mode (the ghostly tale) and prose style (straightforward language, not poetic in the lugubrious sense of the word) might lead one to suspect that his work is mere entertainment, as M. R. James (perhaps not sincerely) claimed of his fiction. In fact Oliver is a deeply literary writer, if we take that word to suggest concern with human behavior and its moral consequences. Because he is never didactic or dogmatic, this is easy enough to miss, but such a failure grossly underestimates Oliver's writings.

What distinguishes this literary vision is its sense of moral precariousness. Oliver is very aware that small decisions may have large consequences, that people who are basically good may make terrible choices, that evil is not an obvious thing. It is perhaps misleading to bring up M. R. James again-- both are Etonians and masters of pastiche, but Oliver is hardly James in modern dress-- yet two comparison spring to mind. As Oliver observed in an essay on James, outright evil is rare in the latter's work, typically kept "offscreen" in favor of characters whose flaws are more mundane. So it is with Oliver: even characters who have done horrible things are not cartoonishly monstrous. James, in expressing a preference for ghost stories with a reasonably contemporary setting, once wrote, "A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: "If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!'" James was, at least superficially, referring only to the possibility of being caught up in a supernatural nightmare. But in Oliver's work, this sense of a vortex extends to moral choices more generally. It is trite to say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but as with many trite sayings its very familiarity can make one forget that it is quite true. In Oliver's fiction, the hell at the end of the road is often real rather than metaphorical, but one need not agree with him that such things exist, or that belief in them is necessary to the construction of a satisfactory ghost story, to appreciate his gift for addressing moral topics.

Part of what makes Oliver's evocation of human frailty so keen is his eye for eccentricity. In the ghost stories of Robert Aickman, eccentricity creates social awkwardness, distancing the reader from the eccentric and generating an atmosphere of unease that supernatural events will soon heighten. In Oliver, however, eccentricity is more gently observed; his protagonists neither gape nor judge, and eccentricity does not overpower the humanity of his unusual characters. In fact it increases it; we are all, in our own ways, eccentric. The flipside of this, of course, is that while eccentricity is not a mark of vice, neither is it a sign of virtue. Seeming harmless is not being harmless, and colorful people may have unimaginable secrets and weaknesses.

I dwell on these issues because I am convinced, now more than ever, that Oliver is, like a number of other "horror" names, a writer of the first order irrespective of genre. But I don't want to lose sight of the fact that, while they are not mere divertissements, Oliver's stories are terrifically diverting. This begins with the milieux in which they are set. The theater is, as ever, a common backdrop, but the times and places in which these theaters can be found are remarkably varied: contemporary England, to be sure, but also 1970s Kenya, or the Black Sea in 1919. Scholars and clergymen, contemporary or nineteenth-century, reflect Oliver's debt to the antiquarian ghostly tradition, but readers will also find a reality TV star, an exiled Balkan king, a young boy, and a First World War soldier within the pages of Mrs Midnight.

Oliver has mastered the classical ghost story's air of gradual revelation, as signs of darkness settle around characters who, unaware they are trapped within a ghost story, fail to recognize them.  This is most obvious in "The Giacometti Crucifixion," which includes the tale within a tale "Quieta Non Movere," a Jamesian piece attributed to a fictional analogue of MRJ. An ancient tomb, an unheeded warning not to disturb it, mysterious sights and sounds: Oliver shows again that he knows just how these features are to be applied. But the larger narrative of "The Giacometti Crucifixion," a wry tale in which a seemingly-parallel events plays out in the present day, serves as a reminder that something more than mere pastiche is at work here.

If "The Giacometti Crucifixion" reaches back to where Oliver began, the collection's title story shows where he has arrived. Some of the elements here may sound traditional: an abandoned music hall, a half-seen figure whose omnipresence the narrator fails to notice, research into credibly-pastiched historical documents that reveal its origin. But the cross-dressing animal comedian "Mrs" Midnight is hardly a traditional specter, and "her" secret is too bizarre, too viscerally disturbing, for the old school. (MRJ, touchy as he was, would have been disgusted.) While the story's narrator, a reality show host with a sharp tongue and a chip on his shoulder, represents one of Oliver's few partial failures of voice, his complex but perhaps not redeemable personality is keenly observed, and  "Mrs Midnight" is an especially chilling story.

Presented as extracts from the journals of a young nineteenth-century clergyman, "The Brighton Redemption," which I previously discussed in my review of Bite Sized Horror, is another piece with a classical feel. But its supernatural manifestation is (even) more suggestively uncanny than one might expect, and the story's thematic observations are especially acute. Rich with echoes of the Constance Kent case and of Lord Longford's relationship with Myra Hindley, it reflects wisely on the nature of self-delusion and the ambiguities of social uplift. For sheer elegance of construction, "The Brighton Redemption" is one of its author's masterpieces.

"The Look," original to this collection, is barely a supernatural story at all; its ghost is, compared to its strange, rather pathetic human protagonists, barely worth thinking about. Encouraged to visit an old friend of his father while performing at a theater in Nairobi, the narrator finds himself caught up in the lingering effects of a decades-old murder, and the active yet hollow lives of its survivors. And yet the ghost, if ghost you call it, punctuates the story, makes manifest its understanding of a particular brand of darkness:

The same mist that I had seen the previous night had gathered itself on the veranda, about five yards away from me, but this time the upper part of it had assumed a recognizable form. The form was a face, a mask with eyes, no more than that; the rest was vague. It was a young woman's face framed by a suggestion of pale, lustrous hair. The features were well-chiselled, the lips sensuously curved, the eyes heavy lidded, but it was the look that held me. Tilted downwards it seemed to stare at something that would have been at its feet if it had had them. The look itself was very particular, but hard to describe: a kind of hungry fascination, I suppose you might call it, with a slight smile on the lips as if pleasure were being taken from something that pleasure should not be taken from. The look had a certain beauty, because the features were those of a beautiful woman, and there was a rapture in it, but it filled me with fear and despair.  I realize that I have been avoiding the use of the word "evil" because I do not know what it would mean in this context. It is too general. This was a look that belonged to a particular person at a particular moment, a moment of ecstatic degradation.

Another original, "A Piece of Elsewhere," reminds one that Oliver's talent for pastiche involves more than the prose styles of the distant past; the ghost of a club comedian performs a unexpectedly revealing monologue in which garish, hackneyed patter acquires a disturbing, lunatic edge. As if that weren't enough, there's also a darkly ironic reflection on how children see things that adults, whose suspicions are too often misplaced, fail to recognize.

Each of the stories in Mrs Midnight is a gem; I haven't even mentioned "Meeting with Mike," an allegory of the demands cult makes on their members, or "The Mortlake Manuscript," a long story of forbidden knowledge that's indirectly linked to The Scholar's Tale, the first novel in Oliver's Dracula Papers tetralogy. But the collection's true masterpiece is "Minos or Rhadamanthus," in which a soldier returned from the trenches meets his former headmaster and reflects on the man's petty and pathetic existence. Touched by the numinous yet intimate with the squalid details of human cruelty, keen in its judgments yet tempered with pity, "Minos or Rhadamanthus" is haunting in the profoundest sense of the word.

Although Mrs Midnight and Other Stories was only published a few days, early demand has been so strong that the book is already out of print at the publisher. Readers who wish to own a copy of this handsome hardcover, which, like Oliver's other collections, includes fine black and white illustrations by the author, are advised to seek it out from supernatural fiction dealers as soon as possible. Three of Oliver's first four collections are now out of print from their respective publishers, and command prices in the middle three figures on the secondhand market. There's no reason to suppose Mrs Midnight won't reach the same heights, and sooner than you might imagine. I came to the party late, paid a grand total of $750 for the three, and felt I'd gotten a good deal. If you're not careful, something of that kind may happen to you.

Update: As of January 2012, Mrs Midnight is in print once again, as a trade paperback and an e-book. Click here to order. The first 200 copies of the paperback are signed and numbered by the author, so order quickly if you want Oliver's signature. I'll try to update this post when I hear the signed copies are gone.

The Old Knowledge and Other Strange Tales

The eight stories in this first collection by Rosalie Parker, co-proprietor of Tartarus Press and editor of that publisher's Strange Tales anthologies, tend, at least on first glance, toward the traditional end of the supernatural fiction continuum.  Two stories feature contemporary city dwellers running afoul of the traditional ways of rural villagers; another deals with the possibly haunted house a group of siblings inherits from their late father; two more may, or may not, feature infamous creatures from literature and film.  This air of familiarity, and a tendency toward sudden, vague resolutions, leaves some of the stories feeling too insubstantial, but the total effect of the collection is pleasantly unnerving.

Ambiguity in the supernatural tale is itself a phenomenon of ambiguous value.  When well-executed, it can capture and reflect the fearful uncertainties of human existence, generating an unease greater than any form of explication could achieve.  Less successful attempts lead to stories that seem to stop just on the point of becoming interesting, or to have chosen ambiguity because neither a supernatural nor a non-supernatural explanation would be particularly interesting.  The Old Knowledge demonstrates both these virtues and these faults.

"Spirit Solutions" is for much of its length a well-written story of four siblings, the subtle tensions that separate them, the snow building up outside the house whose fate they must decide, and the signs of a presence haunting that house.  The enigmatic e-mail messages from the titular detective agency are especially effective.  But the story's conclusion is a shade too abrupt, too evasive, to pay off the atmosphere that's been generated.  "Chanctonbury Ring," on the other hand, has a satisfying plotline, but despite a fine description of encroaching mist reveals too little about its ancient monument and the unexpected person met there for those events to acquire the necessary weight of atmosphere.

Other stories may at first seem unsatisfying, but on further consideration show hidden depths and demonstrate the particular type of covert effect for which the less successful tales also strive.  The first and longest story in the volume, "The Rain," initially reads as a stock effort: a vacationing urbanite, taciturn locals, signs of an imminent threat.  It is only on further consideration that one can see how subtly Parker undermines those tropes, producing a story in which straightforward, unassuming prose belies a keen psychological insight.  "The Cook's Story" likewise plays with readers' expectations, leading to a climax that, while not a million miles removed from what would have occurred in a more traditional story, attains surprising force simply by the roundabout way in which it is reached, and the suddenness with which it arrives.

Two shorter pieces, "In the Garden" and "The Supply Teacher," are not so much ambiguous as slyly ironic, demonstrating anew how the most innocuous subject can provide cover for darker impulses.  That is, perhaps, the keynote for this slim collection: the trickiness of expectations.  Sometimes, classical stories of the supernatural provide just what they promise.  At other times, events play out on terms one would never have suspected, leading to a very different answer, or no answer at all.  Old knowledge is never without its secrets and mysteries, and neither is The Old Knowledge.

Out of print from The Swan River Press, The Old Knowledge and Other Strange Tales is now available as an e-book from Tartarus Press.

Father Raven and Other Tales

While reading this collection of supernatural, fantastic, and absurdist stories by A. E. Coppard, I struggled to identify another writer, any writer, to whom he can easily be compared.  I was about to give up in despair when I noticed an advertisement for another book on the back inside flap of the jacket for this.  Of Rhys Hughes' Stories from a Lost Anthology, the copywriter says, "Hughes is a latter-day, post-Modern A. E. Coppard."  I read that, and thought, Yes, exactly.

Although Hughes' stories are (even) more whimsical and wide-ranging than Coppard's, like so much of the best contemporary literature more playful in their structure, the two share a tendency to interlock different levels of the bizarre and the unlikely in ways that should fail, but are instead delightful.  Even some of Coppard's story titles suggest the delightful skew of his imagination: "Arabesque-- The Mouse," "Clorinda Walks in Heaven," "Piffingcap," "Crotty Shinkwin."

The opening paragraph of the last-named story offers a useful example of one of the modes Coppard often employs, that of the idiomatic Irish storyteller:

This was a little man I'm telling you, Crotty Shinkwin, a butcher once, with livery eyes and a neck like a hen that was not often shaved.  He knocked out a sort of living by the coast of the cliff and the sandy shore of Ballinarailin, a townful of Looneys, Mooneys and Clooneys, the Mahoneys, Maloneys, the Dorans, Horans and Morans, but if you were to ask what was their scheme of life it could only be said they were seen gathering weeds from the sea and stones from the shore, which is poor stuff anyway to be passing the time of day on.

As you might expect, this story and others like it are tall tales, though less about heroism than about passing encounters with the subtly disturbing (as in "Crotty Shinkwin," where a mishap with an anchor causes a journey to an unusual island) or the numinous ("Marching to Zion," a yarn of a journey with an uncertain purpose alongside larger-than-life companions).  The conversational brogue in which these stories are narrated is not an easy one for any writer to adopt without descending to patronizing cliche, but Coppard threads the needle, producing funny, engaging, and not infrequently poignant tales.

There are thirty-one stories in this 301-page book, which might make a reader imagine that many or most of them are insubstantial, but Coppard is so matter-of-fact about the fancies he weaves that he can pile them on top of one another, to the point where (as Mark Valentine notes in his introduction) some compress a novel's worth of plot into about a dozen pages.  These miniature worlds are so diverse that I'd have to describe each story at some length to do justice to all of them, but here are a few of the elements that go into a few of the stories:

* A cemetery where the spirit of the last to die is forced to serve all the other "residents";

* A very strong man whose good nature forces him to accede to all requests for help whether he wants to or not... until a leprechaun makes him invisible;

* A trio of giants who menace a futuristic London, and the unlikely hero who defeats them;

* A man who at first seems to have become a ghost without realizing it, but who's actually experiencing something even stranger;

* And an almanac maker who has to find Father Christmas to save the world from a goblin named Old Moore.

Many of the stories in Father Raven are light-hearted and comical, but very few are pure escapism, and several are visionary, dark, or melancholy.  In "Arabesque-- The Mouse," for example, an everyday encounter with a household pest leads to an inescapable, upsetting chain of memories and associations focusing on loneliness and the cruelty of the world.  "Polly Morgan" and "Ahoy, Sailor Boy!" are ghost stories, one deeply ambiguous, the other simultaneously psychological and viscerally frightening; both feature young women whose seemingly small failings leave them tragically isolated.  And the final story in the collection, "The Gruesome Fit," is a vivid portrayal of a life-destroying maniacal obsession.  Coppard's storytelling brio and wild imagination should not lead readers to dismiss his body of work as a mere diversion.

In the introduction to Father Raven, Mark Valentine lists several notable writers and literary experts who esteemed Coppard's work highly, from Walter de la Mare to Elizabeth Bowen to Ford Madox Ford.  To that list we can add Herbert van Thal, who in the 1940s identified Coppard as among "living masters of the short story," one of three writers who "are vital, and distil for you more sheer essence than you will find in any average and laborious novel."  And indeed, Father Raven, although a comparatively slim collection of brief stories, has the richness of many a lesser writer's entire oeuvre.

The Sacrifice and Other Stories

Because of the eccentric but logical way I buy books, I am coming at the works of Sarban in reverse.  After Discovery of Heretics, a collection of unfinished stories and excerpts from unpublished novels, I've now arrived at The Sacrifice and Other Stories.  Like Discovery of Heretics, this is a posthumous volume issued by Tartarus Press; unlike it, this contains complete, polished work that could easily have been published in its own right, had Sarban been a slightly more ambitious and assertive writer.  As it was, however, he left them among his papers, and it is only through Tartarus' interest in the author and the efforts of his daughter, the late Jocelyn Leighton, that these four novellas are available at all.  Not yet having read the short novels and stories published during Sarban's lifetime, I can't compare the contents of The Sacrifice to those works, but taken on their own terms these pieces are well-crafted, quietly atmospheric tales of the supernatural that compare favorably with other examples of mid-twentieth century supernaturalism.

The title story is perhaps the finest.  I found its tale of an artist on holiday who becomes fascinated with a woodland pool in the village where she's staying, and with the unusual statue that watches over the pool, pleasantly similar to Robert Aickman's "The Unsettled Dust," although the relative dates of publication mean that neither story could have influenced the other.  In both stories, a visiting narrator becomes privy to a tragic story from a family's past that has left an eerie, inscrutable pall hanging over the present.  Both also have a strong psychological element, as those past tragedies lead to present instabilities.  One thing that sets the two apart is that "The Sacrifice" is more straightforward, more coherent on first reading than most of Aickman.  Indeed, its final image brings on a terrible clarity.

The descriptive language of this story, and of the others in the collection, is not as stylized or as vivid as that of some writers; like the prose of M. R. James or Forrest Reid or J.R.R. Tolkien, it tends to be clear, unostentatious, and to allow the images to have their own effect once fully formed in the reader's mind, as in this passage:

Frances crossed the lawn and took at random a mossy path between the beeches.  The air was still, and very warm, for all the shade of the leaves.  Once out of sight of the lawn there was nothing to indicate that she was in the grounds of a private house; the woodland was as rough and wild as it must have been in the days before the Chase was enclosed...  The path Frances followed had been little used.  The undergrowth here and there almost blocked it and so few feet had gone over it that in places the moss was a continuous carpet from verge to verge.  The way sloped down after a while and Frances could hear water running somewhere on her right hand.

If "The Sacrifice" is a story of non-European influence on a bucolic English landscape, "The Sea-Things" is a story of Europeans out of place, and (pardon the pun) out of their depth among the dangers of the Red Sea.  The first line is "'I know an Arab who's seen a Mermaid,' said Stanislaw," but the creatures that give this tale its title are nothing so familiar or pleasant as beautiful half-fish, half-women.  The rough narrative outline of "The Sea-Things" is similar to many tales of its type.  What makes it stand out is the mood generated by its climactic scene, one redolent of the vulnerability that surrounds us at all times, but of which we're only intermittently aware.

It is strange to feel a ship stationary far from land... There's a queer, helpless feeling about the thing... With the engine silent and the water sucking and gurgling with a different note round her still hull, she feels, oddly, more a live thing than she does when she's chugging on: she's held alive, helplessly bound, waiting for what the sea will do to her... I felt for the first time since our grounding that we were in danger.  I felt a danger in the blank elements round us; the ship suddenly felt small and lost and I was aware of the drear, dark waste of hostile waters encompassing us behind and beneath that wan curtain of haze.

The third novella, "Number Fourteen," returns to an English setting encroached upon by the foreign, in this case a crippled girl who belongs an obscure South American sect, and forms a close relationship with a beautiful, talented young dancer.  The only possible ending given the elements in play rapidly becomes obvious, and in general the story is longer than it needs to be; possibly if it had prepared it for final publication Sarban might have trimmed it.  In any case, the strange intensity of the young girl and her taciturn mother is psychologically potent, and the story flows smoothly enough toward its resolution.

To my mind, "The King of the Lake," the longest of the novellas, is also the weakest.  Its structure, in which a great block of largely-plotless description is followed by a long storytelling session, is awkward, and it is only near the end that the fantastic dimension of the story becomes relevant to its thinly-drawn protagonists.  However, the evocation of the unlikely oasis in which two English girls take refuge is well-written if not all that evocative, the mythic narrative of the story-within-a-story is done in briskly effective fairy-tale language and the resolution has a grim cruelty that is no less potent for having been foreseen.  It's also more than a trifle prurient, especially when considered in light of what his life and work suggest about Sarban's psychology and personality.

The Sacrifice and Other Stories is now out of print, but Tartarus Press plans to reissue it in the near future.  (Sarban's three other books, two of which are currently in print from Tartarus with the third also to be reprinted, have recently been made available as e-books.)  Of these four stories, I would say that "The Sacrifice" is a classic of its type, while the others, whatever their minor flaws, are generally quite strong, well worth reading for fans of otherworldly fantasy and subtle horror.  Though he worked at various things for much of his life, in terms of completed fiction Sarban was hardly prolific, and The Sacrifice and Other Stories is a welcome and substantial addition to his oeuvre.

Discovery of Heretics: Unseen Writings by Sarban

Discovery of Heretics, a collection of early writings, incomplete drafts, and excerpts from unpublished novels by Sarban, was only made available in a slipcase with Mark Valentine's biography of that author, Time, A Falconer.  At first, this might seem an odd decision, as one could imagine readers who enjoy Sarban's work but aren't interested in his life story.  Reading the book, however, makes the logic behind the decision quite clear.  In the first place, Time, A Falconer provides insight into the origins, composition, and development of the writings in Discovery of Heretics, which as presented in that volume are simply large blocks of text with minimal context.  Second, and more important, the proximity of the biographical study underlines the reality that the primary interest of these "Unseen Writings" is in what they reveal about the author's mindset and personality.  Although the prose is invariably well-crafted and there are some striking passages, only some of the material in Discovery of Heretics is enjoyable as fiction in its own right.

That is, however, no reason to suggest that the book is a failure or ought not to have been published.  In fact, approached in the right spirit, its contents are fascinating.  The volume begins and ends with atypical work: a non-supernatural story and a short play on the one hand, and a few poems on the other.  This is the only complete and finished material in Discovery of Heretics, and it's all competent but unexciting.  The short story is one of those darkly ironic, highly-coincidental pieces that are associated with the likes of O. Henry and Saki, though stylistically it's not much like either.  Even at this early stage, Sarban was capable of fine, clear prose without even minor flaws, and had mastered the manner of his material.  The same is true of the play, "Their Blood Cannot Die," a drearily ideological piece in which characters extol the virtue of Marxist revolution through implausibly long and stilted speeches.  For the kind of literature this is, Sarban approaches it very well, but even at ten pages the thing is hard going.  The poetry is more enjoyable; he would never have been a great poet, but he was capable of working in rhyme without descending into sing-song doggerel, and a couple of the pieces are genuinely atmospheric.

The bulk of the remaining material is several different approaches to writing about a gynocratic society.  There are five versions of this concept, ranging in length from eight to one hundred eleven pages and in date from the late 1940s to the early 1970s.  In some ways, this idea seems to have been Sarban's "Silmarillion."  The scope of the material and the time spent working on it is of course smaller, but the desire to examine these themes, and the closeness of the concept to the author's heart that that desire suggests, are much the same.  The earliest version, "Agorit," is mostly about a misunderstanding in an African airport and a meeting with a mysterious woman; like many items in Discovery of Heretics, it cuts off just as the fantastic aspect of events seems likely to become clearer. 

The next attempt, The Gynarchs is a substantially complete novel, of which the present volume includes only selected chapters, comprising 30-40% of the total length.  Even with that selectivity, The Gynarchs is a draggy affair, more a dogged exploration of a milieu than a narrative.  As Mark Valentine observes in Time, A Falconer, the characters are rather coldly observed; one seems not to be expected to sympathize with or care about them, and indeed it's not clear what, if any, position the author is taking on the society he's created.  Writing compellingly about a utopia is, for obvious reasons, difficult at best, and Sarban's vision, dependent on essentialist attitudes about male and female attributes that I have trouble taking seriously, is neither credible nor terrifically interesting.  (The invented language of the milieu is particularly ugly and unevocative.)  The primary fascination of the material is the way Sarban's play with gender roles, his masculine women and feminine men,* suggests certain aspects of his own psychology.  This is where Time, A Falconer is particularly valuable, as Valentine examines these issues thoughtfully, without drawing pat conclusions.  Apart from that borderline-prurient interest, there are some fine descriptive passages in The Gynarchs, redolent of the South American landscapes that evidently informed the work, and an eerie sequence near the end set at a spider temple.

A more striking yet still frustrating refashioning of the concept comes under the title "The Artemists."  This fragmentary work dates from the 1970s, and changing times had allowed Sarban the freedom to be more explicitly sexual in certain ways, though the story is by no means crude.  Unlike The Gynarchs, which was set in a post-apocalyptic future and had no hint of a modern perspective, "The Artemists" brings contemporary young women into its utopia, which they find somewhat less than it's cracked up to be.  Unfortunately, a large chunk of missing text seems to cover the most eventful sections of the fragment, and what's left is mostly made up of two long expository speeches.  The hints of what has been lost, and what was never written at all, suggest a darker, more complicated vision than that of The Gynarchs, and one wishes Sarban had continued with this version.

From around the same time there are two shorter attempts to re-explore the gynarchy, both of which also feature contemporary protagonists, and both of which link the concept to ideas from other unrealized fiction by Sarban.  "The Herbs of Miss Aran" features a intriguing wise-woman figure who, perhaps inadvertently, leads the narrator toward her alternate realm, though again the story breaks off just as he's about to get there.  "Aunt Rachel" is very short, and atypically for Sarban has a female narrator.  Her story of a mysterious imaginary brother is tantalizing, but no more.

A strange sibling also features in "Never Go Back," perhaps the most successful of the works in Discovery of Heretics.  This piece, which runs to about 30,000 words and is only just getting warmed up when it stops, was clearly informed by the collapse of Sarban's marriage and his own frustration with his later life.  It's not autobiographical in the narrowest sense-- the narrator's inability to function in the world is clearly exaggerated beyond Sarban's own-- but there is nonetheless a force and poignancy to the fragment that suggests real experience.  Despite the advice of the title, he returns to his childhood home, and foreshadowing throughout the non-supernatural opening suggests a connection to another plane of existence.  Once again, the fragment ends before we get there.

"The Papers of Henry Sugden," which dates from around the same time as Sarban's three published books, also hints of visitors from another realm.  It too is already at novella length when it breaks off, and the preliminary material, a possibly over-elaborate framing narrative, has only just concluded.  There are ingredients here for a fine tale of classical visionary supernaturalism-- a mysterious young woman, an isolated school, an idealistic young master, the manuscript of a madman-- and as with "Never Go Back," one can only wish it had been completed.

"Fergus Aran" is not, despite what the title (which, like many of the titles here, was devised by the publisher for material left titleless by Sarban) directly linked to "The Herbs of Miss Aran."  However, both stories do deal with unusually close male-male friendships.  Like the assertive or dominant female characters of his other work, these relationships suggest the complexity of Sarban's emotional and sexual attitudes, and "Fergus Aran" seems likely to have developed into another story of non-human incursion into our own world.  The narrator's loneliness is well-described.

A male-male friendship is also at the heart of "Discovery of Heretics," which extracts the opening chapters of an unpublished novel of the same name.  That novel is also known as Paul Wenzel, after the narrator's friend, who he meets during a lonely and dull diplomatic assignment in Cairo.  The descriptions of their life together, exploring area landmarks and discussing Islamic history, are effective, and the dry language nonetheless evokes something of British life in Cairo in the 1930s.  The events of the end of that decade force a separation between Wenzel and the narrator, and their parting has an understated melancholy.  The supernatural and the esoteric appear in these excerpts in distant discussion only, but as a literary story, it works fairly well.

In spite of the individual virtues of some of these pieces, their total effect is somewhat wearying.  Most are either excerpts from novels or fragmentary pieces that would have grown into novels if finished, so the pace is slow, and across several different works grows tiresome.  However, for readers interested in Sarban, the intellectual interest that the book provides, both in terms of Sarban's imaginative world-building and his own revealed lifestyle, will more than make up for that.  Indeed, although I've described The Gynachs and Paul Wenzel in less than enthusiastic terms, and would certainly accept Mark Valentine's belief that they are uneven works, I still hope that complete publication of one or both will eventually become viable.  When you're dealing with a writer of sufficient stature, even early, incomplete, or unsatisfying work becomes worthwhile, and so it is with the unseen writings that make up Discovery of Heretics.

*"Masculine" and "feminine" being used here in terms of their traditional meanings rather than to suggest actual inherent characteristics.

Three Miles Up and Other Strange Stories

After We Are for the Dark, her collaboration with Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote only a single further tale of the supernatural, "Mr Wrong," first published nearly a quarter century later.  In 2003, Tartarus Press brought those four tales together in Three Miles Up, a small, elegant hardcover that has just recently gone out of print at the publisher, though as of this writing it is inadvertently still listed on their page of in-print titles.  A few copies remain available at reasonable prices from various dealers, and interested readers might wish to make their purchases sooner rather than later: although the stories may be or become available in other formats, one is unlikely to find the four so handsomely presented within one set of covers.  The cover illustration by R. B. Russell is an especially nice example of his striking black-and-white style, and the introduction by Glen Cavaliero, while not one I entirely agree with, is an intelligent, defensible consideration of Howard's supernatural fiction.

The title story is perhaps the most famous of the four, often reprinted; I first read it in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories but was too immature to appreciate it.  (The same is true of de la Mare's "The Quincunx.")  It is, on a psychological level, a deft account of how close quarters and the presence of a woman in whom both are interested can drive men rapidly back and forth between friendship and frustration.  That young woman, whom they came across when it seemed their bickering was insurmountable and might force an end to the expedition, is mysterious, inscrutable, her dialogue perfectly crafted to seem just odd enough that one suspects she's not what she seems, just ominous enough to tickle the spine.  The travelers' two encounters with the people of the area they're sailing through are likewise disturbing, reversing expectations in ways that heighten the eerieness of it all.  The ending, while open in some ways, suggests not an end to the strangeness but a new, more dangerous phase.

"Perfect Love" is the closest of the four tales to the strange stories of Robert Aickman, not dissimilar in theme, as someone has observed, to his later "The Visiting Star" and "The School Friend."  It generates the same sense of confusion as his stories, and like them, demonstrates on careful (re)reading a coherence one would never have suspected.  It also employs the older technique, of which M. R. James was the master, of using disparate sources, innocuous in themselves, to construct a more complete picture that's chilling.  A meditation on love, on the eccentricity of artists, and on what people give up for the sake of their dreams, it remains my favorite of Howard's ghost stories.

The most frightening, however, remains "Left Luggage," which is, I think, the only story to demonstrate quite the degree of coherence and directness Cavaliero attributes to all four.  It is also the closest of them to a simple, traditional ghost story: an isolated, dry, scholarly protagonist, an inheritance from an eccentric relative, a series of strange events increasing in intensity toward a truly ominous threat.  There is, perhaps, a light satire on fear of intimacy, but more than anything else "Left Luggage" is a chilling yarn.

And then one comes to "Mr Wrong," which is a horse of a different color.  Indeed it is so different in mode and atmosphere from the others that I would not call it a strange story at all.  I might say conte cruel, but it is mostly the word "cruel" that makes that label an attractive one.  This is as, Cavaliero remarks, a story full of unsatisfied characters, unable or unwilling to connect with one another, so that the protagonist is left alone to face the trouble brought on by her secondhand car.  The world of "Mr Wrong" is not so much strange as harsh, sparse, devoid of beauty and burdened with a sense of imminent threat.  (A.S. Byatt's non-supernatural "In the Air" has a similar potency.)  In addition to its haunting this story offers a human evil whose banal yet menacing presence clashes somewhat with the ghostliness.  The conclusion of the story is, as it aims to be, profoundly upsetting, and yet it is the only thing that could have happened in the grim urban modernity of its milieu.  Dissimilar to the others though it may be, "Mr Wrong" is every bit their equal in craft and power.  And Three Miles Up is a gorgeous collection, making available a body of work that might, due to its slimness, otherwise have been unjustly neglected.

Powers of Darkness

Very good horror writers often demonstrate that ordinary life can be horrific and tedious at once for the sensitive person, and one suspects it was so for [Robert] Aickman. [Peter Straub, in his introduction to The Wine-Dark Sea]

In Powers of Darkness, Aickman's second solo collection, he demonstrates that continuum between tedium and terror in six stories of the absurdity of modern life.  From "Your Tiny Hand is Frozen," in which technology, namely the telephone, is simultaneously baffling and monstrous, to "The Wine-Dark Sea," the tale of a fleeting escape from the contemporary, his protagonists navigate a world in which the mundane frustrations of society, culture, and politics can at any moment turn into something darker.  The precise narrative mechanics of these transitions may remain obscure, but Aickman's philosophy and voice-- world-weary, intellectual, mordantly witty-- is clear, and constant.

Powers of Darkness has recently been rereleased by Tartarus Press in a durable, elegant hardcover edition of 350 copies, as part of a serious of Aickman reissues.  In addition to the pleasure of its handsome yet reserved design, part of the Tartarus aesthetic and a perfect match for Aickman, there is a new introduction by Mark Valentine, which, like all Tartarus introductions, is succinct and valuable.  Valentine comments aptly on the author's traditionalism and the relationship between aspects of his biography and his stories, as well as making intriguing suggestions regarding writers with similar sensibilities.

"Your Tiny Hand is Frozen" was the first Aickman story the present reviewer ever read, sitting at a worn and graffitied desk on the lowest level of his university library.  He blushes to admit that he didn't make much of it at the time.  This is especially baffling as it is, in fact, one of Aickman's more frightening tales, with a climax that is simple yet horribly vivid.  Edmund St Jude lives in his fiancee's apartment, waiting for her return and doing minor translation work to get by.  When his lonely existence is disrupted by a series of mysterious telephone calls, he finds himself drawn into a powerful yet dangerous obsession.  St Jude is a sensitive man, unable to summon up the force of personality necessary to deal with the faceless bureaucracy of the telephone company, and the headaches caused by the strange calls suggest that Aickman viewed the telephone, and perhaps much modern technology, as more trouble than it was worth: an innovation we would be better off without.

And so, he seems to have thought, was democratically-elected representative government.  The protagonist of "My Poor Friend" expresses a preference for hereditary rule, and Aickman shared that preferece, or at least claimed to do so.  From M. R. James such a statement would seem unthinking conservatism, part of what A. C. Benson not unreasonably identified as a an almost aethetic traditionalism, lacking in ideas or principles.  From Aickman, though, it is clearly the product of thought and bitter experience.  "My Poor Friend," in which an advocate of local electricity befriends a noble, doomed Member of Parliament, rings with authentic detail, drawn, one assumes, from Aickman's encounters with politicians on behalf of the Inland Waterways Association.  The eccentricities of government become almost Gothic as the cynicism of Parliament swallows the narrator's poor friend.  There is a passage that, I think, captures the futility of public attempts to influence government as well for America of the 2010s as it did for Britain of the 1960s:

Generalisations such as these [about hereditary versus representative government] are common talk.  What upset me was how it works in practice.  Government has been carried on less and less visibly for a long time; but the critical thing in Britain has been the swift development of official public relations.  Every public authority that knows its business now has what may be termed a paddock for its critics and opponents, not excluding those inside Parliament.  Quite rapidly it has become almost impossible to be a rebel.  Today the rebels are put in a paddock and then built into the structure.  They are patiently listened to, when they have made themselves assertive enough.  They are pressed to deliver their ideas in writing.  They are invited to serve on Joint Committees.  It is implied to them that if they keep their criticisms 'constructive', they may even become O.B.E.'s.  'Look at our splendid collection of rebels.  It proves how strong, important, and on the right lines we are.'  The Speaker's Corner technique, one may call it: intensely British, brilliantly adaptable, utterly null.  Faced with it, Bessemer [the head of the local electricity organization] emerged, quite unawares, as a mere nineteenth-century evangelist; not only incapable of planting his petards deep enough, but incapable of even seeing that he was paddocked, that his ostensibly critical notions were being applied, Judo-wise, to the actual strengthening of his opponents.  It is sadly true that only the power to inflict actual damage of some kind holds any hope of surmounting the official techniques.

 Tea Partiers and liberals alike take note.

In "Larger Than Oneself" it is not political but religious organizations that take a hit.  Mrs Iblis, despite her apt name, is entirely out-of-place at a gathering of contemporary spiritual authorities, having shown up by mistake after a letter postponing her visit to an eminent journalist failed to arrive.  Aickman perfectly captures the isolation and misery of a party at which one knows nobody and is interested in nothing, and Mrs Iblis' silent suffering is conveyed with a very British restrained irony that makes this one of Aickman's funniest tales.  Beneath the humor, however, is a wise commentary on the futility and the danger of using religion as a crutch, attempting to assign to it a meaning it cannot offer if one lacks inner strength.  Look too hard for something larger than oneself, Aickman suggests, and you may be swallowed by it.

"The Visiting Star" offers irony of a darker sort, as a celebrated actress' visit to a regional theater has unfortunate consequences for a number of area residents, including the author of a book on lead and plumbago mining with whom she shares some disturbing information.  Thematically reminiscent of "Perfect Love," written by Aickman's one-time lover Elizabeth Jane Howard for her collaboration with Aickman in We Are for the Dark, the story is surely a metaphor for the regrets and demands of any difficult, past-her-prime performer.

Aickman often begins to generate unease through awkward social scenarios, typically involving eccentric strangers, where the stomach-twisting quality of embarrassment merges with the stomach-twisting quality of the inexplicable.  In  "A Roman Question," the narrator and his wife must deal with the elderly couple whose house they are staying in during a dull conference, and with the odd young woman also sharing that home.  When the young woman suggests a strange ritual that may help locate the elderly couple's missing son, the five are drawn into something much more interesting, but much less pleasant, than any conference.

"The Wine-Dark Sea" was the second Aickman story this reviewer ever read, and he must confess that on rereading he likes it even less than he did then.  A better title might be "Never Visit Greece," for, like "Never Visit Venice" but thankfully to a lesser degree, it features a world-weary traveler disappointed to find that the foreign country he visits has a lot of stupid, degenerate natives in it.  As in that story, the protagonist finds pleasant distraction in the form of sexually available but mysterious women, and the self-pity is so overpowering, the imagery so bare and straightforward, that the total effect is rather distasteful.  One supposes that the story was, for the author, a powerful expression of principles, but the aphoristic dialogue of the three women is unduly pompous, and the protagonist feels more like a spoiled aristocrat on holiday than a person of any depth.

But the story nonetheless offers flashes of interest, and its flatness is an exception in what is otherwise a fine collection, comparable to Sub Rosa as a top example of the author's early work.  Although Aickman's stories are both viscerally and philosophically unsettling examples of supernaturalism, he should not be overlooked as an observer of and commentator on ordinary life.  From the small details of an uncomfortable reception to larger questions of character, morality, and survival, he is a thoughtful and erudite chronicler of the less gentle aspects of the human condition.  Happiness, many an Aickman story suggests, is possible, but only fleetingly, and at great cost.  It's a notion that deserves more attention than the modern world seems inclined to give it.

Time, A Falconer: A Study of Sarban

The obscurity of many twentieth-century practitioners of supernatural fiction has not only limited the reprinting of their works, but also hindered biographical and critical analysis of that wor.  So it is that Sarban, author of three well-regarded volumes, including the famous dark alternate history The Sound of His Horn, should only recently have received a preliminary study.  This brief but thorough and thoughtful volume, by writer and scholar Mark Valentine, is fortunately a model of its type, and will be of interest both to fans of Sarban and those who have yet to encounter his fiction.

Valentine draws on Sarban's archive, including an autobiographical timeline put together by the author for his daughter, to offer a brisk description of his life, from childhood in the industrial town of Mexborough to education at Cambridge to a career as a diplomat in Northern Africa, Western Asia, and South America.  The external details of Sarban's life are, it must be said, not of surpassing interest despite the diversity of these assignments.  What makes this study powerful is Valentine's careful consideration of the author's personality as reflected in his private life and his fiction.

Without being prurient or psychologically pat, Valentine observes the recurrence of certain themes in Sarban's fiction, both published and unpublished, and compares these to the concerns expressed in his diaries and to events in his life, including a doomed relationship with a younger woman and his marriage to Eleanor Riesle.  A portrait emerges, perhaps lacking vividness but nonetheless real and sympathetic, of a private, contemplative man, scrupulous in his duties but not truly occupied by them, interested in the natural world and in the range of gender dynamics.  These interests were reflected in his fiction, which Valentine describes and analyzes, quoting contemporary reviews and remarking on influences, sources, and recurring images.  He has the gift of capturing the essence of a story without vitiating its effect, so that one is eager to read what has been described and doesn't feel it has been spoiled.  Time, A Falconer, which is available from the publisher, is a handsome volume with numerous illustrations, and a welcome addition to any library of scholarship on the supernatural.

Uncle Stephen

There are books whose greatness is attention-grabbing, inspiring the reader (especially this one) to flights of superlative description, and there are books more quietly impressive, books that do several things well and thoughtfully without initially inviting rhapsodic response.  Forrest Reid's Uncle Stephen falls into the latter category.  Written in a well-honed but direct style that perfectly defines aesthetic classicism, it is at once a novel of a sensitive (and likely homosexual) young boy's experience of the world, a meditation on the simple beauty of nature, and a supernatural story about the complicated relationship between youth and age.  The author was a friend of Walter de la Mare, and as in his supernatural tales, effects are achieved by allusion and suggestion rather than explication.  The result is a book that reads easily and yet is tremendously involving on levels both emotional and intellectual.

The title character is the uncle of Tom Barber, whose father has just passed away, leaving him with a stepmother who is indifferent to him, two stepbrothers who feel nothing but contempt for him, and a stepsister who likes him, perhaps in a way he is incapable of reciprocating.  Uncle Stephen is in fact his great-uncle, and Tom has never met or heard from him, but nonetheless he comes to believe that this distant relative will provide a better home than his stepfamily ever could.  So he runs away.

Unathletic, interested in books and the beauty of nature, Tom is like many a sensitive child in literature (and life).  What sets him apart is that the people he encounters are not the unfeeling ogres of such stories.  Tom Barber is not a radiant spark hidden under a bushel, but a human being, as responsible as anyone else for his difficulty in relating to the mass of humanity.  His interactions with those who can't understand him ring true, and the range of Reid's sympathy, like Tom's, includes many characters lesser writers would dismiss or stereotype.  Uncle Stephen is not primarily a psychological novel, but it deftly captures the complexity of human relationships.

Reid has a particular gift for describing landscapes in an unadorned manner that nonetheless avoids cliche and syrupy sentimentality.  It helps that the world he describes is as haunting as it is beautiful, always on the edge of something strange and possibly unwelcome.

Chequered bands of golden fire splashed on the moss-dark sward.  A stilled loveliness breathed its innocent spell.  Then suddenly a hare bounded across the path, and the trilled liquid pipings of hidden thrush and blackbird broke on his ears like the awakening of life.  The music came to him in curves of sound.  All the beauty he loved best had this curving pattern, came to him thus, so that even the rounding of a leaf or the melting line of a young human body impressed itself upon him as a kind of music.  The avenue turned, widened, a house was there.

Uncle Stephen is rumored to be some sort of a magician, and his household carries with it the same potent air of mystery as many a haunted estate.  For much of the book the supernatural is offered only hintingly, as in the first few pages of a ghost story, and the fantastic events that are ultimately revealed are as much psychologically symbol as eerie.  Tom has much to learn about trust, faith, and kindness, but the novel is never one-sided or didactic, always acknowledging what is lost as well as what is gained by any change.  Despite a certain rueful wisdom, it remains hopeful, envisioning a better world, perhaps, than can ever exist:

He could not remember the rest of the story, but he knew everybody had been happy because nobody had asked questions.... The earth might be a kind of heaven!  It wasn't really impossible.  Happiness depended on kindness and understanding and-- and-- on not insisting that everybody should have the same feelings and thoughts.... (ellipses in original)

The socio-political connotation of that paragraph is not terribly difficult to work out, but like all the homoerotic elements of Uncle Stephen it remains latent, implicit; the novel could be interpreted without reference to homosexuality, though some aspects of it would become very odd.  Its scope is in any case wider, taking in all manner of sensitivity and social awkwardness, and reaching beyond even that.  This novel, with its disarmingly simple language concealing great depth, is a small masterpiece.

*          *          *

Originally released in 1931, Uncle Stephen was republished by Tartarus Press in 2001.  That edition is out of print, but copies are available at reasonable prices, including at least one from Realms of Fantasy Books for a mere $18 plus shipping.  The novel is also available in inexpensive secondhand paperback editions, as are Reid other two Tom Barber novels.

Strangers and Pilgrims

The obscurity of so many great twentieth-century ghost story writers is one of the tragedies of contemporary supernatural fiction.  M.R. James has never been out of print, and justifiably so, but what of H.R. Wakefield?  Oliver Onions?  Robert Aickman?  They turn up in anthologies from time to time, but if not for the attention of small publishers like Ash-Tree and Tartarus, they would scarcely have modern collections at all, and the limited printings required by the economics of book production mean that many readers will never come across those volumes.  But slim opportunity is better than none; one can only celebrate what availability there is for these nigh-forgotten masters.  And there is much to celebrate about Strangers and Pilgrims, Tartarus' hardcover collection of supernatural tales by Walter de la Mare.

First, there is the production of the book.   £35/$60 (including shipping) may seem like a lot to pay for a hardcover, but every aspect of its design is attractive but not needlessly flashy: "rich, not gaudy."  From the light yellow jacket to the durable grey covers with gold stamping, from the thick, solid paper stock to the soft ribbon marker, the book is a joy to behold, and larger even than its count of 510 pages might suggest.  This is a book to admire as well as to read, and its understated elegance is the perfect complement to the stories within.

De la Mare is, one gathers, best known as a poet and a writer for children; only his often-anthologized story "Seaton's Aunt" has attained particular fame as supernatural fiction.  That tale, with its evocation of awkward visits to an acquaintance's house and its ambiguous hints of ghosts and emotional vampirism, is indeed a masterpiece, but it is by no means de la Mare's unparalleled triumph.  Like Robert Aickman, he is masterful with the overlap between eccentricity and the inexplicable.  In a story like "Mr Kempe" or "The Recluse," it almost does not matter if the disagreeable figure who hosts the lonely traveler is haunted by anything more substantial than his own quirks of personality, and the insistent verger of "All Hallows" may simply be a lonely old man with an overactive imagination.  The air of unease is the same.

Strangers and Pilgrims is arranged chronologically, which means that the most effective stories come in the middle, bookended by less successful early and late efforts.  But even minor de la Mare has its virtues, and the atmospheric language of a "The Moon's Miracle" or a "Bad Company" prevents their simple plots from becoming a disappointment.  Likewise, de la Mare's stories for children, which often have a simplicity absent from his adult tales, are so charmingly crafted that older readers will be spellbound as well, whether by the elderly lady of "Alice's Godmother" and her deserted house, or by the lonely child and inviting fairy of "Miss Jemima."

De la Mare's skill as a poet serves him well in several of the collection's eeriest tales, including "The Green Room," in which he credibly evokes the evolving style of a young poet as her life ranges from joy to despair, and "Winter" and "Strangers and Pilgrims," two stories that deal with gravestone inscriptions and capture the pregnant stillness and strangeness of burial-grounds with nary a rattling chain or winding sheet on display.

Although, as Mark Valentine observes in his thoughtful introduction, all de la Mare's stories share a sense of the numinous potential on the edges of everyday life, they are so diverse that to call them all "ghost stories" is to do them an injustice.  "The Riddle" is either a tale of unidentified menace or a poignant metaphor for growing up; "The Bird of Travel" is not so much about a family curse as it is about an emotionally-fraught meeting and the meaning of travel.  "A Revenant" is almost an essay-in-fiction, with a lecture on Edgar Allan Poe attended by an unexpected visitor.  And then there are "'What Dreams May Come'" and "The Guardian," two late, enigmatic stories that are alike only in offering that bewildering, inexplicable satisfaction that the best weird tales provide.

Although he was, chronologically speaking, a contemporary of M.R. James, de la Mare writes an entirely different kind of story, one whose supernaturalism is a matter of mood, more subdued even than the terrifying suggestions of MRJ.  More psychological and philosophical, they're nonetheless rich in atmosphere, quietly haunting and disturbing.  Strangers and Pilgrims is a book like no other, and not to be missed.

The Collected Connoisseur

I have long nurtured an irrational bias against detectives of the supernatural.  I'm not thinking here of the Anita Blakes and Harry Dresdens of the world; them I don't care about one way or the other.  Instead I mean the more classical breed of investigator; Martin Hesselius, Carnacki, and so on.  I felt that the presence of a recurring character who not only survived a given esoteric manifestation, but could claim to have studied and learned something about it, was inimical to the atmosphere I prefer in supernatural fiction.  I was always vaguely aware that this was a ridiculous thing to believe, but I clung to it, as people will.  It was only appreciation for the prose of Mark Valentine, and desire to read more of his work without paying limited edition prices, that led me to purchase The Collected Connoisseur, which features all twenty-three adventures of the title character, Valentine's own "sleuth of the singular."

Of those twenty-three stories, many are, in narrative terms, slight affairs; vignettes, as Valentine mentions in his introduction, often similar in general structure to one another and to the supernatural literature of the early 20th century, to which the Connoisseur and his world are a conscious homage.  I usually don't enjoy imitation of the styles of turn-of-the-century writers, simply because almost no one is good at it.  The attempts of well-meaning devotees typically feel forced, overly formal, and anachronistic.  Mark Valentine is a blessed exception.  His use of language is both elegant in itself and pitch-perfect in capturing the tone of his forebears.  Here, picked at random, is the opening of one Connoisseur story:

'You may think I have had more than my share of encounters with the extraordinary,' observed The Connoisseur, on one of my visits to his rooms in a quiet byway of the old cathedral city, 'you may even sometimes suspect me of a certain literary embroidery in my account of these events: but the truth is not that I have seen so much but that I have seen so very little.  What we seek, and what we also half-fear, is all around us, always, had we the necessary calm intentness to discern it.  I do not have this, but for certain rare glimpses: yet I believe I have known others who have drawn closer, much closer.'

He paused here, then reached into his quaintly carved escritoire, and added: 'Take this book and see if it helps you to follow my meaning.'  He handed me an elegant volume bound in green morocco with a silver clasp.  Thoughtfully, he continued: 'I suppose you may feel free to copy out and publish the passages I have taken from the letters she sent to me.'  I opened the book and found that it consisted of manuscripts in a fine, rather spiked hand, written in dark ink on ash-grey paper: jagged extracts had been pasted onto the thick soft pages of the album.  I was about to question my friend about the book, but found that he had turned away and was lost in his own reflections.

I think I can do no better than follow his suggestion and set out below, in the same order, some of the writings he had so carefully preserved.

You can probably tell already whether this is the sort of thing you like or not.  These stories are not so much horror fiction as visionary fantasy, though some have their darker moments.  They are concerned with the suggestiveness of the natural world, and of fine art; with the atmosphere of exaltation that a place, an image, a memory can stir up; with, in a word, the numinous.  I am myself immune to such effects in the physical world, about which I am doggedly materialistic; it is, ironically enough, only from fiction that I can gain a fleeting hint of this sensibility, which I believe to be inaccurate in a crudely literal sense, but so marvelous a lie that it is worth pursuing all the same.  The paragraphs quoted above come from "The Secret Stars," which was the final story of the first Connoisseur collection, In Violet Veils; here is the paragraph immediately following, the first selection from those letters.

I seem to find that so many things here are the simulacra, the echo or murmur of other possibilities.  I hold a cold stone in the palm of my hand and at once it makes me think of it as an amulet that gives entrance to an elsewhere that I can hardly define.  It is a dim dun pebble in which thin streaks of quartz almost seem to compose the paths on a chart of an unknowable, unrecognizable terrain.  Or I find a bleached spar of driftwood and it suggests to me the whittled limb of some form still only a potentiality, some as yet uncreated being.  The thick webs of seaweed are to me the spoor of a vast, dark shifting thing, so vast that it cannot be witnessed.  Tussocks of the harsh grass are the green hair of half-buried alien maidens.  And the torn tamarisks haunt the shore with their bitten, brittle, whispering presence.

Such descriptions, finely-hewn and atmospheric without cod-poetic bombast, are to be found throughout The Collected Connoisseur.  Many of the tales follow the same pattern: the Connoisseur is visited by his nameless friend, brings out an artifact associated with one of his unusual experiences, and explains how he brushed up against something startling.  A detective he may be, but there is rarely space for the Connoisseur to do any investigating; solutions tend to present themselves to him without much trouble.  The longer stories that offer exceptions to this rule are often among the best, as in "The Hesperian Dragon," which pulls together several seemingly disparate encounters with the bizarre in a highly satisfying manner; "The Prince of Barlocco," in which the Connoisseur's initial solution to a family's ancient mystery may not be the correct one; and "The Descent of the Fire," the collection's closing piece, which, as Valentine's introduction memorably puts it, features "perhaps the grandest piece of devilry he has to face."

"The Descent of the Fire," like five other Connoisseur stories, was co-written by Valentine and John Howard.  There is a discernible change in the tone and style of these six collaborations.  The settings are more likely to be continental, rather than the British environments of the solo stories, and the prose is, if no less recondite and atmospheric, slightly less refined, with flashes of awkwardness that would have been unthinkable in the earlier efforts.  And yet the change is refreshing rather than disheartening.  After seventeen straight stories in the delicate, almost spiritual manner of the early Connoisseur, the slight broadening of focus and coarsening of expression is quite welcome, and ends the collection on a strong note.

The Collected Connoisseur is certainly not for every reader.  It is a curiosity, a kind of throwback, though its philosophical concerns are timeless.  Those in search of novelty are advised to look elsewhere.  But those for whom the supply of authentic classical supernaturalism can never be enough, those who yearn for lost tales by the likes of Machen, de la Mare, and Dunsany, should consider purchasing this attractive, inexpensive trade paperback at once; unlike so much modern imitation, it won't disappoint.

Morbid Tales

When reading a single-author short story collection with an introduction or foreword by another writer, I usually leave the foreword until after I've finished all the stories.  When I'm just beginning a book, the substantial claims and effusive appreciation of the introducer can seem wildly overblown and be tremendously off-putting; by the time I reach the end, I'm often inclined to agree with them.  So it was with Quentin S. Crisp's Morbid Tales, of which Mark Samuels writes, "His work is quite simply literature of the highest quality."  Indeed it is.

I shouldn't have been surprised by this, I suppose.  I had described Crisp's novel "Remember You're A One-Ball!" in rapturous terms, as "a literary novel of the first order," which indeed it is.  And yet I wasn't sure what to expect from his collection, even though it was published by Tartarus Press, the standard-bearer for classic and contemporary supernatural fiction.  But as I read the first of the eight stories in Morbid Tales, the novella "The Mermaid," I realized I was once again at the beginning of something truly special.

What distinguishes "The Mermaid" is not its plot outline, which is familiar from many a similar supernatural tale, but its combination of fantasy world-building and psychological depth.  Like many of Crisp's protagonist, the first-person narrator is somewhat at odds with the world, a searcher after beauty and purity of a type that is difficult if not impossible to find.  The titular creatures are the object of his particular obsession, and given the sort of book this is, it will come as no surprise that he eventually finds one.  What ensues is at once a classically eerie tale and a deft portrait of sexual repression and something not unlike pedophilia.  All this is brought across by Crisp's prose, which has a visionary quality and contains but is not confined by the vaguely formal voice of much 20th-century British fiction.

Moments after I had swallowed the powder I experienced a strange, rippling disturbance of my senses.  I heard the bubbling of an underwater world, the great wash and drag of currents through a reef, like the eerie, stifled workings of the inside of a body.  I saw the rush of bubbles, twists of light dissolving, drowning and beneath, and around, the restless swelling shadows of ocean, a phantasmagoria distorted by the constant motion of waves, stirring as furtively as the tentacles of an octopus.  Then I began to hear the chattering of voices in a language unknown to me.  It seemed a language as sad and cold and ancient as the dripping, silvery waves themselves, a language like the forgotten treasure of a sunken ship.  And the voices-- they were shrill, almost human, like the cries of gulls.  I do not know how to describe them except to say that they brought to my mind, without me knowing why, certain very distinct images, such as the fins of fish spread thin and elegant, and fish bones, and sea storms, and fresh, dark, dripping blood, cold and salty.

 "The Mermaid" is the longest of these morbid tales, and perhaps the finest, but there are several other small masterpieces, including "Cousin X," in which a childhood visit from a strange and mysterious cousin opens up a young girl's sense of the world, with far-reaching and rather disturbing consequences; "The Two-Timer," in which a Twilight Zone-style supernatural talent becomes the basis for a meditation on cruelty, unhappiness, and the loss of transcendent innocence; and "The Tattooist," a hypnotic story about pain, sexuality, nostalgia, and joy that I cannot possibly describe simply by listing its plot elements; its success is all in atmosphere and language, the unearthly calm of its engimatic central figure and the paradoxical beauty of the landscapes with which he is associated.

Of the four long stories in the collection, the only one that I don't think succeeds is "The Lake."  The psychology of its protagonist is less clear than in other stories, and as a result the manifestations of supernaturalism, while individually striking, feel disconnected and fail to contribute to a larger whole.  On the level of sentence-by-sentence craft the story is a joy to read, but its conclusion lacks the weight for which it seems to strive.

Of shorter pieces, "The Two-Timer" has already been mentioned.  The relatively brief "Far-Off Things" retells a lesser-known fairy tale in a literary language that captures the underlying cruelty of the story's moral universe, creating a storyteller's distance and then smashing it to great effect.  "Ageless," the shortest of these stories, is a well-crafted evocation of a particular moment, but that moment and ones like it are so much a common thread in Crisp's work that the story feels like a side-note, a variation on a theme rather than something meaningful in itself.  And then there is "Autumn Colours," the final tale in this collection.  It takes up some of the same motifs as others, but approaches them in a different way, resulting in a story that is closer to traditionally-defined contemporary literature, and yet has an effect unlike anything else I've ever read.  (It may, from an allusion within the text, bear some similarity to Japanese literature, with which I am woefully unfamiliar.)  It is not a pleasant reading experience, and after first finishing it I wasn't sure the story was a success.  But I now think that was a kind of shrinking away from its truth rather than an honest critical response.  "Autumn Colours" is, in its own way, as fine a tale as "The Mermaid."

Unfortunately, Morbid Tales was released only in a 300-copy hardcover edition, now out of print and commanding high prices on the secondhand market.  By my own judgment, it is well worth what you'll pay for it, but I know I'm more accustomed than many to paying high prices for quality fiction.  I can only reiterate my recommendation that anyone who comes across this blog entry read Crisp's affordably-priced novel "Remember You're A One-Ball!", and, if you admire that book as much as I did, seek out a copy of Morbid Tales or the (for the moment) in-print limited edition collection All God's Angels, Beware!  It will provide entry to a particular world of beauty, terror, and eccentricity that no other writer can access.

Postscript: After writing the above I discovered that "The Tattooist" is available as an online PDF through the publisher's website.  It, too, would be an excellent way to determine your appreciation of Crisp's work.

Further postscript: it seems that Tartarus Press hopes to issue a paperback reprint of Morbid Tales later this year. Need I say that I encourage you to buy a copy once it's formally announced?

Dark Entries

The more I read of Robert Aickman, the more I realize how thoroughly unfathomable his stories are.  I'm forced to wonder whether their depths have a bottom, or whether their mystery extends forever, meaningless.  This ought to matter, some part of me is insisting, but I know full well that it doesn't.  The reason I read the six stories in Dark Entries in a single, nausea-inducing sitting, even after finishing two other books the same day, was not that I was doing the literary equivalent of a crossword puzzle, but that I was caught up in the workings of a particular kind of mind, a machine where product is irrelevant and pleasure exists simply in watching the gears turn.

This was Aickman's first solo collection of strange stories, and what strikes me about it is how fully-formed his sensibilities were.  These stories are no less suggestive, elaborate, and baffling than those included in his later collections.  There is no sense that Aickman, like other writers of the strange and the weird, went through an early imitative phase before developing his voice.  Perhaps this has something to do with the fact he became a published writer at mid-life; he was in his thirties when his first collaborative collection appeared.  It may be that the lesser efforts never saw the light of day.  Whatever the case, I felt as I read that a full-length biographical study of Aickman is much to be desired.  From what little I know, he doesn't seem the sort of person to be easily got at, but any light would be a help.

The stories themselves number only six, but most are quite long.  The first, "The School Friend," remains as wonderfully confusing to me as it did after I first read it in the reprint collection Painted Devils.  I can see how the story's epigraph, Elizabeth Bibesco's remark that "To be taken advantage of is every woman's secret wish," must have something to do with it, and it's perfectly possible to decode the story as a metaphor for the restrictions society sets on women's achievement.  (Given the slightly lascivious attitude toward women in many of his stories about male characters, it's somewhat surprising how sympathetically Aickman treats female protagonists.)  But that sounds terribly reductive, and as Glen Cavaliero notes in his introduction to the Tartarus Press edition of Dark Entries, there is much tangible detail in the story, so much that I feel treating it purely as metaphor would be a great mistake.  However one reads it, "The School Friend" offers that gradually mounting sense of disorder, leading to a final moment of inexplicable terror, that one hopes for in any strange story.

With "Ringing the Changes," one of Aickman's best-known stories, I feel on slightly firmer ground.  Metaphor is not the only thing at work here, but I marvel that on first reading I missed the connection between the honeymooning protagonist's mundane anxieties and the horrifying supernatural events that threaten to engulf him.  This is something that has often happened to me with Aickman, I must admit.  I read a story once, think it's rambling and pointless, then read it again and realize how tightly structured and clever it is.  That's not to say I understand everything about "Ringing the Changes."  I haven't yet grasped what, if anything, is the deeper spring of the wonderfully-named Commandant Shotcroft and his actions.  But again, that doesn't matter.  What makes the story-- and many of Aickman's others-- memorable is the way it turns events that are ordinary, if deeply atypical, into something with a collective effect that's menacing or uncanny.  Drunken hoteliers, a melancholy guest, a town where church bells ring all night and the beach is hard to find in the dark-- nothing sinister there, and yet...

"Choice of Weapons" was the only story in Dark Entries I hadn't previously read, so I was delighted to see that it was long, the longest in the volume in fact.  For most of its length it seemed (for Aickman) unusually comprehensible, and it was only when I came to the ending, which seems abrupt and which I am utterly unable to interpret, that I realized I had been skimming along on the surface, enjoying Aickman's description of unrequited love and decayed gentility without thinking enough on the larger intentions of the story.  For now, then, I can only admire the characters, lovestruck Fenville, seemingly-guileless Dorabelle, and the friendly yet somehow disturbing Doctor Bermuda.

"The Waiting Room" is rather short and straightforward; like his much longer "The Unsettled Dust," it's about as close as Aickman ever came to writing a traditional ghost story.  There is little enough to say about it, except perhaps that the most salient feature of Pendlebury's dream is a reminder of one of Aickman's recurring themes: that our only hope for an escape from the wearying dailiness of life may be a heightened existence that is equally ghastly in its own way.

That theme is even more prominent in "The View," one of at least four Aickman stories in which a world-weary man travels to a new place, meets an attractive woman/women, forms a sexual relationship with her/them, achieves something like an epiphany, and then discovers the consequences of these actions.  (The others are "The Wine-Dark Sea," "Never Visit Venice," and "The Stains.")  "The View" is the earliest of the four, and I think possibly the best.  The motif of changing and unchanging patterns is used to great effect, and the final revelation makes sense in a way that is beyond logic.

With "Bind Your Hair," the final story, I found a third stage in my Aickman-reaction pattern.  I had found the story impenetrable on first reading, but this time I thought I was understanding it as a metaphor for, almost a kind of satire on, certain anxieties in the protagonist about her future and its potential limitations.  But, again, the details defeat me.  I know it to be an excellent story, but... What do the children mean?  The pigs?  The maze?  Lateness?  Even as I type these words a new theory is forming in my mind, but it feels so preposterous that I hesitate to set it down.

I know I will have to read these stories, and Aickman's others, 13 of which are still unknown to me, many times more.  Not, as I say, in the hope of finding "the answer;" I'm not sure it exists.  But, just as Aickman's characters stumble through strange landscapes in the possibly vain hope of finding clarification and safety, so must his readers.  It can be a frustrating journey.  Even now, as a deeply committed Aickman reader, there were times when I wanted to say "This means nothing!" and toss the book aside.  But instead I read on, and was entranced by a strange detail, a new nuance, a possible symbol that made it all worthwhile.  The Aickman reader may have to bind his hair before entering the maze, but as it may not have been for Clarinda, what he'll find there is worth the trouble.

The White Hands and Other Weird Tales

When I reviewed Mark Samuels' excellent collection, The Man Who Collected Machen, I mentioned that I had a copy of his earlier book The White Hands on the way, but that it hadn't arrived yet.  Yesterday it came (along with three other lovely books from Tartarus Press, and there was much rejoicing), and last night I read it.  That has something to do with the slimness of the volume, but more to do with Samuels' prose, which is never less than eminently readable, and conveys deep philosophical issues with great clarity.  That alone would be enough to make this collection worth reading in spite of any other virtues and flaws, both of which, fortunately and unfortunately, it has.

In my TMWCM review, I agreed with Reggie Oliver's comment that Samuels was able to acknowledge influences while keeping his own voice dominant.  With the stories in The White Hands, however, that's less true.  It's very easy to find echoes of Thomas Ligotti in several of these stories, and the less Ligottian stories are reminiscent of classical weird tales.  It's no bad thing to be influenced by the best, but when one's own voice isn't strong enough, the resulting stories can feel overly familiar or second-rate, absolutely enjoyable but not quite memorable or distinguished.  Several of the stories in The White Hands left me thinking, "Well, that didn't do anything particularly wrong," when I was hoping for a "Wow!"

"Mannequins in Aspects of Terror," for instance, is very well-crafted, but, with its solitary, brooding protagonist and the decaying office tower/mannequin-based art installation to which he's drawn, echoes so many of Ligotti's motifs that it feels more like an echo than anything else.  "Colony," in which a man is irresistibly drawn to a decayed neighborhood, is likewise a piece of familiar music, the kind of thing you hear on the radio and vaguely like while recognizing its debt to better work. "The Grandmaster's Final Game" has a clever (both literally and intellectually) final twist, but up to that point its world-weary priest and malevolent chess-playing spirit are more like stock figures than interesting or frightening characters.  And the title story reminds one of Machen and Poe without capturing the intensity of either writer, despite a few fine character descriptions.

So about half of the stories were less than satisfying.  But others are classic Mark Samuels, which as I've said, means they're very good indeed.  "The Impasse" is somewhat similar to Thomas Ligotti's corporate horror stories, but Samuels offers enough distinctive imagery that the piece succeeds in its own right.  There are what might be echoes of Ligotti in "Vrolyck," about an author whose horror stories have a special mission, but the story also feels a little Lovecraftian, and features Samuels' own recurring motif of language as a virus.  In this case, the play of influences produces the distinctive voice I associate with Samuels' finest fiction.  And "Apartment 205" is likewise original; although there's something classical about its general outline: a mysterious disappearance, an empty apartment, an ancient organization, and unbearable but mesmerizing secrets revealed at great cost.

I had mixed feelings about the last two stories in the collection.  "The Search for Kruptos" has more excellent language as virus/obsession imagery, and up until the last two pages I was quite enjoying it.  I'm not sure, though, that the coda (and the material elsewhere in the story leading up to it) is necessary or appropriate.  It's hard to discuss without giving things away, but as a rule I'm touchy about genre fiction dealing with this particular topic, and in the specific instance I don't think the story gains much from that element.  But it may be that I've failed to understand the point Samuels is making. "Black as Darkness," on the other hand, I admire for its late twist, but I'm not sure the story is fully developed enough to make that twist relevant to the (striking) horror imagery that's wrapped around it.  There's a tiny link back to "The White Hands," which is nice, but only underscores my feeling that the elements of this story aren't fully integrated.

The White Hands, then, is a curious collection.  It contains work by one of the contemporary masters of the weird, but to me that work feels transitional, slightly tentative, whereas his recent work satisfied me more.  On the other (white) hand, this collection was praised in its own right by many famous names, such as Thomas Ligotti himself, Ramsey Campbell, and T.E.D. Klein, and I can't deny that Samuels' prose is invariably polished in a way that few writers can manage.  It's likely that most readers will find a least a couple stories to treasure in The White Hands, and on that basis I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.  But if you want to see Samuels working at full power, I'd go for The Man Who Collected Machen first.
*          *          *
The White Hands is in print from Tartarus Press as an inexpensive paperback.

Sub Rosa

Travel is a good thing; it stimulates the imagination.  Everything else is a snare and a delusion.  Our own journey is entirely imaginative.  Therein lies its strength.

This quote from Louis-Ferdinand Celine, used as the epigraph for Robert Aickman's novelette "Never Visit Venice," could also serve for the entire collection in which it appears.  Seven of the eight stories in Sub Rosa features some form of travel.  Whether it's a business trip to Bedfordshire or a vacation to Belgium, Aickman's characters leave home and encounter ghosts and other mysterious phenomena.  Aickman called his work "strange stories," which is as good a label as any for the elusive and allusive feel of his fiction.  It's difficult to describe the nature of his work, or its likely effect on any reader.  His sensibility either appeals or it doesn't.  As Neil Gaiman once said,

I think that Aickman is one of those authors that you respond to on a very primal level. If you're a writer, it's a bit like being a stage magician. A stage magician produces coin, takes coin, demonstrates coin vanished... That tends to be what you do as a fiction writer, reading fiction. You'll go, "Oh look. He's setting that up."...Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully. Yes, the key vanished, but I don't know if he was holding a key in the hand to begin with.

 For myself, I think Aickman wrote some of the greatest ghost stories of the 20th century, but also produced some real clunkers, fiction in which his motifs and preoccupations are tedious or even offensive rather than chilling or psychologically potent.  Sub Rosa, fortunately, is much more tilted toward the former than the latter, including a number of my favorite Aickman works, and only one real clunker.

Because the original British editions of Aickman's collections are rare and rather pricey, I first read his work in the slightly-cheaper American collections.  Only one of those, Cold Hand in Mine, is a straight reprint of a British version; the other two, Painted Devils and the posthumous The Wine-Dark Sea, mix stories from several of his British collections.  As a result, when I received a copy of the handsome new Tartarus Press edition of the British collection Sub Rosa, I had already read seven of its eight stories.  However, that was no bad thing; Aickman's stories often feel so different on rereading that it's like encountering a whole new story.  In more than one case I liked a story much more after finishing it the second time than I had the first.

A case in point would be the opening tale, "Ravissante."  At a party, the narrator meets an ex-artist who now collates soulless books of reproductions.  They become friends, and after the ex-artist's untimely death, the narrator inherits a first-person account of the artist's meeting with Madame A, the widow of a famous symbolist painter.  As is often the case in Aickman, the events of that meeting are just unusual and baffling enough that it seems they must have been supernatural, even if each individual aspect can be explained by eccentricity or psychological breakdown.

The first time I read "Ravissante," I wasn't sure what to make of it.  It seemed to me that the opening section with the narrator went on too long, and that the artist's encounter with Madame A was too random to be frightening or disturbing.  But this time the meeting seemed much simpler and more symbolically potent, and as for the opening... Well, as R. B. Russell observes in his introduction to the Tartarus edition, in Aickman's stories "that which is left imperfectly explained haunts the more imaginative reader, who will go over the story for clues and hints."  Although I'm never sure whether meaning in Aickman is real or an illusion, I do find myself forming theories about just what's going on.  When it comes to "Ravissante," I can't escape the feeling that there may be some connection, literal or symbolic, between Madame A and the wife and later widow of the artist, a shadowy figure who appears prominently in the opening but is absent from the flashback.  And yet, what's the evidence for that idea?  Why, none at all.

"The Inner Room," the next story, features a dollhouse, which is a potent device for a ghost story, as any reader of M. R. James's "The Haunted Doll's House" can attest.  But, while there are a few skin-crawling moments here, mostly to do with the suggestive rather than the explicit, "The Inner Room" is as much about guilt, neglect, and the power of the unconscious as it is about spirits.  I liked this story a lot when I read it in The Wine-Dark Sea, and I enjoyed it even more in Sub Rosa.  It is, I think, one of Aickman's more straightforward works, to the extent that that word is ever applicable to his "strange stories."

I think it most certainly is applicable to "Never Visit Venice," a story in which devices Aickman uses well elsewhere fall apart entirely.  Driven by a recurring dream, the world-weary Henry Fern travels to Venice in the hope of some revelation, only to find it a cheap, tawdry disappointment.  Aickman's overlong description of Venice rather reminds me of Nathaniel Hawthorne's from his overlong romance The Marble Faun: it would be nicer, they both seem to think, if only there weren't so many filthy Italians in it.  By the time Fern takes a gondola ride with a mysterious woman, my patience has been exhausted, and what follows is no help.  The symbolic significance of the black-clad woman isn't real hard to work out, and Fern's sexual encounter with her feels like crude wish fulfillment.  Generally when Aickman writes about characters disappointed by ordinary life, his creations are detailed enough that they feel like people rather than a loud authorial voice, but Henry Fern is thin, and feels like a self-pitying device whether he is or not.  There's no substance to "Never Visit Venice," and the fact that it's well-crafted on a basic level doesn't make up for that.

With its silent spectre and its inexplicable layers of lingering dust, "The Unsettled Dust" is the closest thing to a traditional ghost story in Sub Rosa, but the real driving force of this story is shattered, dysfunctional human relationships.  Mr Oxenhope works for the Historic Structures Fund, which buys British country houses from their occupants and allows them to continuing living there in exchanging for maintaining the houses as museums.  Staying at Clamber Court for a nearby project, he meets the Brakespear sisters, whose covert feuds make for a series of uncomfortable evenings, and disrupt the sexual tension between the narrator and one of the sisters.  And then, one night in his room, he sees a mysterious figure...  "The Unsettled Dust" also tilts more toward the straightforward, but the characters are so richly drawn, and their pathetic conflicts and desires so real, that the story is a triumph anyway.  The only sour note is that project Oxenhope is working on.  He says that he won't focus too much on it because it's irrelevant to his story, which it is, but he says rather a lot about it anyway.  This may be a subtle piece of characterization, but the portrayal of Oxenhope's antagonist on that project is so one-sided that I wonder if Aickman, who worked for a similar organization at one point, is working out some real-life issue in fiction.  Either way, this material drags the story down somewhat.

"The Houses of the Russians" is also more traditionally ghostly, to the point where I can't find much to say about it, except that it is, as with Aickman's best work, allusive and chilling, mining a real landscape and real history for ghostly effect, and sending a shiver down the spine even though I don't know what, if anything, the events described actually mean.

"No Stronger Than a Flower" is the one story in Sub Rosa that doesn't deal with travel, but with another sort of new world: marriage.  It's also the story I hadn't previously read, so I'm hesitant to analyze it too much, lest I come back to it in the future and realize how stupid my initial interpretation was, but on one reading I found it an intriguing story of psychological warfare that goes farther than anyone could have guessed, with a realistic, aptly-observed newlywed couple and an ending that is literally absurd but makes perfect surreal sense-- another Aickman trademark.

In the brief but invaluable story notes unearthed for the Tartarus edition of Sub Rosa, Aickman remarks that the events "The Cicerones" happened to him, "(almost) precisely."  And indeed, John Trant's experiences at the Cathedral of Saint Bavon could almost have happened to someone, and yet they are also uncanny and deeply disturbing.  I admire this story, but I can't escape the feeling that there's something about it I don't quite understand.  Maybe if I researched the paintings described at the Cathedral I would be less in the dark.  Or is that only an illusion?

The collection ends with its longest and, to my mind, best story, "Into the Wood," one of my two of three favorites among the Aickman I've read.  Set at a sanatorium for insomniacs in Sweden, it mines the phenomenon of insomnia for all its disturbing value, observing that those who can't sleep can, in a certain light, seem almost like vampires.  But, like many of Aickman's best works, it also addresses the ambiguous nature of metaphysical revelation.  Molly Sawyer, the American who finds herself at the sanatorium with a decision to make, may be saved if she ventures into the wood, or damned.  Or the two may be the same thing.  This is another story that brilliantly blurs the line between ordinary eccentricity and the supernatural.

I wasn't sure at first whether it would be worth buying the new edition of Sub Rosa.  It's pricey, and I already owned most of its content in other editions.  But I received a copy for Christmas, and now I'm glad I did.  The stories work very well collected in this order, as intended by Aickman, and being spurred to reread them has made me admire his work all the more.  The Tartarus edition of another collection, Dark Entries, is forthcoming soon, and although there is once again only story I haven't read, I definitely intend to buy it.  If you're a ghost story fan and you haven't experienced Aickman yet, do yourself a favor and try to find one of his collections in your library system.  Whether you enjoy it or not, you'll be having a literary experience like no other.