Great Ghost Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tartarus Press updates

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

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

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

Halloween II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Glen Hirshberg, "Struwwelpeter"

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

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

7. Mark Samuels, "The Impasse"

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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



10. R. B. Russell, "Llanfihangel"

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


11. Stephen King, "N."

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Orphan Palace

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

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

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

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

Haunts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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