Tag: M.R. James

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First blood to Rampo

 

© Tuttle

 

And another Halloween-inspired post…

 

Japanese writer Hirai Taro, who lived from 1894 to 1965, was such a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, America’s doyen of macabre and mysterious fiction, that he used the penname ‘Edogawa Rampo’.  English-language names sound somewhat stretched and distorted when converted to the syllable-systems of Japanese – my own name is pronounced ‘Ee-an Sumisu’ – and Taro’s penname was basically a Japan-ised version of ‘Edgar Allan Poe’.  Say ‘Edogawa Rampo’ quickly a few times and you’ll find yourself reciting the name of Baltimore’s greatest man of letters.

 

Accordingly, during his literary career, Rampo wrote in similar genres to Poe.  He didn’t merely pen horror stories.  Poe’s name is now so synonymous in the West with tales of terror like The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), The Masque of the Red Death (1842), The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Pit and the Pendulum (1842), The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) and so on that it’s often forgotten how innovative he was working in other genres.  In particular, he helped create the detective story with his trilogy of stories about crime investigator C. Auguste Dupin, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Maire Roget (1842) and The Purloined Letter (1844).  And it was largely in detective and crime fiction that Rampo made his name.  He even helped to found the Japanese Mystery Writers’ Club.

 

Rampo’s Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1956) is an English-language collection of nine of his best short stories.  Not only does it take its name from Tales of Mystery and Imagination, described by Wikipedia as ‘a popular title for posthumous compilations of writings by American author, essayist and poet Edgar Allan Poe’, but it combines stories from those two genres Poe helped to popularise in the early 19th century, the horror and the detective / mystery ones.  It has to be said the two styles mesh together nicely in this collection.  There’s a weirdness in Rampo’s detective fiction that ensures it doesn’t feel that different, tonally, from his morbid horror stories.

 

Among the crime stories, you get villains attempting to commit the perfect murder with schemes that involve living a double life as an invented character (The Cliff), impersonating someone who looks exactly like them (The Twins) and the fear of sleepwalkers that they might do something ghastly whilst moving in a trance-like state (Two Crippled Men).  All three have a last-minute twist wherein the main characters get their come-uppance from someone who’s even smarter than they are, or by a small but fatal act of negligence – the sort of minor blunder that would have Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo swooping down like a hawk.  Talking of Falk’s beloved shabby-but-canny TV detective, The Psychological Test is a very Columbo-esque tale of how a pair of investigators use an ingenious method to get a suspect in a murder case to incriminate himself.

 

Meanwhile, The Red Chamber takes a trope popular in 19th and early 20th century English fiction, that of a comfortable, wooden-panelled gentlemen’s club where the tweedy members congregate after dark and, with the lights turned down, proceed to tell each other scary stories.  In Rampo’s gentlemen’s club, however, things get shaken up when the evening’s storyteller, a newcomer, boasts about being responsible for “the murder of nearly a hundred people, all as yet undetected’ and proceeds to explain how he did it and got away with it.  Several harrowing twists later, it’s no surprise that the story’s narrator, a long-term member of the club, concludes: “…we unanimously agreed to disband.”

 

The other four stories in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination are macabre ones.  They possess the same oddness and intensity of his crime stories, but cranked up to higher levels.  The Hell of Mirrors is about a man who becomes obsessed with optics, with ‘anything capable of reflecting an image… magic lanterns, telescopes, magnifying glasses, kaleidoscopes, prisms and the like’ and with mirrors: ‘concave, convex, corrugated, prismatic.’  Typically with Rampo’s fiction, this obsession spills over into another obsession, a sexual one.  The protagonist is soon using telescopes to pry through the windows of his female neighbours and using periscopes to ‘get a full view of the rooms of his many young maidservants.’  The story reaches its climax when he devises a mirrored, optical device so depraved it ultimately induces madness.

 

The Traveller with the Pasted Rag Picture, on the other hand, is the one Rampo story in this collection that veers off into the supernatural.  It reminded me very slightly of the M.R. James story The Mezzotint, though the picture in that story was a spookily lifelike one that recorded a horrific event.  In Rampo’s story, a similarly lifelike picture serves as a testimony to a sad, doomed and one-sided romance.

 

That leaves two stories, The Human Chair and The Caterpillar, which I think are masterpieces.  The Human Chair concerns an ugly and reclusive craftsman who makes a living fashioning luxurious chairs, whilst getting a perverse kick out of imagining ‘the types of people who would eventually curl up’ in them.  Eventually, driven insane by his desire to get intimate with the folk who’ll acquire and use his chairs, he designs a bulky one containing a secret, human-sized cavity, inside which he hides himself.  The chair and its maker end up in a hotel lobby, where the latter gets his jollies from feeling the bodies of the guests rest on top of him.  No one “suspected even for a fleeting moment that the soft ‘cushion’ on which they were sitting was actually human flesh with blood circulating in its veins – confined in a strange world of darkness.”

 

The story is told in the form of a confession, sent as a letter to a famous lady novelist.  While she reads it, she begins to wonder about the suspiciously large and comfy chair she’s seated in, which has found its way to her study after being in a hotel.  There comes a final twist that nullifies what’s happened before – or perhaps doesn’t.

 

The Caterpillar, written in 1929, is an early, literary example of ‘body horror’.  The central character is an unfortunate young army officer so maimed and mutilated in battle that he comes home resembling the larval-form insect of the title.  This puts understandable strain on the officer’s wife, upon whom, totally helpless, he depends for care and attention.  In fact, The Caterpillar is more about the wife than the husband, with the hideous situation gradually pushing her into the realms of madness – of sadistic madness, because she starts taking her woes out on her husband, who can’t do anything to defend himself.  The story works both as a feminist tract, showing the plight of women whom society expects to be wholly devoted and subservient to their husbands, and as a horror story exploiting male fears of emasculation.  It’s a grim and powerful read, packing as much of a punch as it did when it first appeared, nearly a century ago.

 

I think the original Edgar Allan Poe would approve of Rampo’s tales.  They’re deliciously dark and twisted, and frequently ingenious, and sometimes funny too – a lot of the humour derives from how his villains, when telling their stories, like to revel in their own cleverness and degeneracy.  It’s just a pity that Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination is the only English-language collection by Rampo I’ve come across.  I’d really like to read more of his stuff.  Unlike a certain character played by Sylvester Stallone, I wouldn’t mind seeing a Rampo 2, Rampo 3, Rampo 4 and Rampo 5.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Mainichi Graphic

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Seven reasons why Robert Burns still rocks

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ron Waller

 

This is a revised and expanded version of a piece I had published one January 25th in the Arts section of Concrete, the students’ newspaper at the University of East Anglia, where I did a Master’s Degree many years ago.

 

Tonight, whisky will be guzzled, haggis devoured, bagpipes blasted and Scots-language poetry recited with gusto at thousands of special suppers and get-togethers around the globe.  This is because today, January 25th, is the 265th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national bard and one of its most popular contributions to international culture.

 

Why, more than two-and-a-half centuries after he died at the age of 37, is Robert Burns such big deal?  Here are some reasons.

 

One.  Burns was a champion of the common man.  Born in humble circumstances, as one of seven children to a farmer in Ayrshire, he was much more in tune with the ordinary masses than any of his literary contemporaries.  The American poet Waldo Emerson described him as the poet of ‘the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity’.  The fullest expression of his egalitarian instincts was the song A Man’s a Man for a’ That (1795), which was adopted as an anthem by the anti-slavery abolitionist movement.  That, however, highlights an uncomfortable fact…

 

In 1786, Burns came within a hair’s breadth of travelling to Jamaica and taking up a job-offer as a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation – run on slave labour.  Burns’ defenders argue that as a young man at the time, pre-fame, facing destitution, and desperate to get out of Scotland, he probably didn’t consider the hideous moral implications of the job he was about to undertake.  Also, by 1792, he seemed aware enough of slavery’s horrors to pen The Slave’s Lament, which begins: “It was in sweet Senegal that my foes did me enthral / For the lands of Virginia-ginia, O.“  But the issue is murkier still, because Burns’ authorship of The Slave’s Lament has been disputed.

 

Anyhow, later, socialists claimed Burns as one of their own.  A 1929 translation of his works into Russian sold a million copies and the Soviet Union honoured him with a commemorative stamp in 1954.  However, Burns obviously had appeal for capitalists too, for there are allegedly more statues of him in North America than of any other writer.

 

Two.  Burns was a songwriter too.  Indeed, if anything, he is more pervasive as a songwriter than as a poet.  In addition to A Man’s a Man…, he put Auld Lang Syne on paper in 1788 – which, by virtue of being belted out at New Year celebrations everywhere, is arguably the most universally-sung song in the world.  In Japan it is played at everything from high school graduation ceremonies to evening closing-time in department stores.

 

Three.  Burns wasn’t afraid to criticise the moral and religious mores of his time.  His contempt for the censorious regime of Scotland’s Presbyterian Church was expressed most famously in Holy Willie’s Prayer (1785), wherein a supposedly pious pillar of the church prays to God and unwittingly reveals himself as a scheming, bitter, drunken hypocrite.  Particularly pathetic are his pleas to be forgiven for his lechery, which has targeted ladies by the name of Meg (“And I’ll ne’er lift a lawless leg / Again upon her”) and ‘Leezie’s lass’ (“…that Friday I was fou / When I cam near her”).  John Betjeman was so impressed by the conceit that he borrowed it for his 1940s poem In Westminster Abbey.

 

Four.  Burns has a massive cult that keeps his memory alive.  The first Burns societies began to congregate in his honour in about 1800, four years after his death. In 1859, the first centenary of his birth, almost 900 events were staged – 60 of them taking place outside Britain and the US.  Today, Burns societies are to be found everywhere from Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo and from Winnipeg to Jakarta.

 

It’s claimed that the Russians have more such societies than even the Scots do.  Well, in the unlikely of event of Vladimir Putin sticking his head into a Burns supper this evening, I hope he’s regaled with Burns’ 1792 rewrite of the song Ye Jacobites by Name, whose anti-war lyrics include: “What makes heroic strife? / To whet th’ assassin’s knife / Or hunt a parent’s life, wi’ bluidy war?”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Melissa Highton

 

Burns suppers on January 25th are marked by lusty recitals of his greatest poems, speeches and copious consumption of whisky and haggis.  Praised as the ‘great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race’ in Burns’ Address to a Haggis (1786), haggis is surely the only offal-based foodstuff to have a piece of world-class literature written in its honour.  No other writer is commemorated by a yearly celebration on this scale.  Dublin’s James Joyce-themed Bloomsday on June 16th doesn’t come close.

 

Five.  Burns invented the concept of the doomed, decadent romantic poet.  Long before Byron and Shelley were painting the towns of Europe red and proving themselves mad, bad and dangerous to know, Burns had earned himself a mighty reputation for dissipation, both in the pub and in the bedchamber.  His love of strong drink is obvious in poems like John Barleycorn (1782) while his promiscuity led to him siring at least a dozen children with at least four different women – a common jibe at the time was that you could see his face in every pram on Edinburgh’s Princes Street.

 

Six.  Burns is controversial.  And no doubt the arguments that have raged about him over the centuries have helped keep his fame alive.  Much debate has centred on whether or not someone with Burns’ obvious character flaws deserves such veneration.  At the beginning of 2009, just before the 250th anniversary of his birth, right-wing Scottish historian Michael Fry caused a storm when he denounced Burns as a ‘racist misogynist drunk’ who didn’t deserve to be presented to people as a role model.  Fry sounded a bit like a rock-and-roll era parent expressing concern about the examples the likes of Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Liam Gallagher, Pete Docherty, Amy Winehouse, etc., set for young people.

 

Seven.  Burns’ work has had a considerable influence on the English language and on English-language culture.  Here are a few examples:

 

Proverbs:

  • The best laid plans of mice and men will go astray (‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley’ / from 1785’s To a Mouse).
  • To see ourselves as others see us (‘To see ousel’s as ithers see us’ / from 1786’s To a Louse).
  • There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing (attributed to Burns).

 

Phrases:

 

Burns-inspired titles:

  • John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men (1937).
  • R. James’ short story, reckoned by some to be the greatest ghost story in English literature, O, Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad (1904) – which is also the title of a 1793 Burns poem.
  • Ken Loach’s film, Ae Fond Kiss (2004) – which is also the title of a 1791 Burns song.
  • The Vin Diesel car-chase / street-racing movie The Fast and the Furious (2001) – ‘fast and furious’ was a phrase Burns coined in Tam O’Shanter.

 

All right, with that that last example, the producers may not have been aware of the Robert Burns connection when they chose the title.

 

© National Trust for Scotland / Robert Burns Birthplace Museum

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10 scary pictures for Halloween 2023

 

From pixabay.com / © socialneuron

 

It’s Halloween today.  In keeping with tradition on this blog, I’ll celebrate the occasion by displaying ten pieces of macabre, spooky or unsettling artwork that I’ve come across and liked during the past year.

 

To start on a musical note…  Here’s a flutist painted by the late Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski, whose work suggested Hieronymus Bosch combined with H.R. Giger and frequently depicted apocalyptic hellscapes populated by wraith-like figures.  By Beksinski’s standards, this is a fairly sedate and playful piece.  Its ochre-bathed figure is characteristically skeletal, but what impresses is how its multiple fingers, knuckles, joints, bones and tendons fuse chaotically to the flute and become a grotesque mechanism that’s an extension of it.

 

Beksinski met a tragic end in 2005 – after a traumatic few years during which he’d seen the death of his wife and the suicide of his son, he was murdered in a dispute over a small sum of money.  Still, interest in his art has burgeoned since his death and there’s now a host of stuff about him on YouTube.

 

© Zdzislaw Beksinski

 

Moving eastwards from Poland to Ukraine – yes, a place that’s suffered plenty of real-life horror in the past two years.  Yuri Hill is a Kiev-based artist who specialises in digital painting and whose work often depicts things worryingly pagan and primordial lurking in the forest.  This piece is particularly good.  As you study its crepuscular grey-blue murk, more and more details filter into view – not just the drooping, feathery branches of towering conifers, but the strange, bestial furriness of the figures and the Herne-the-Hunter-like antlers sprouting from their heads.  The fact that they’re moving about on stilts just adds to the strangeness.  For those of you wanting to see more of his work, Hill’s Instagram account is accessible here and his page on artstation.com here.

 

© Yuri Hill

 

From folk-horror to J-horror, i.e., Japanese horror, whose psychological, supernatural and urban-myth-derived traditions clearly inform this painting.  Entitled Red Laugh, it’s the work of Yuko Tatsushima, who’s been described as both a ‘rockstar’ and an ‘outsider’ in Japanese painting.  Even before we get to the grotesque subject matter, with the face missing an eyeball and some prominent, autopsy-like stitches running up its throat, the scratchy paint-strokes almost make you wonder if the artist did it with broken, bloody fingernails.

 

Indeed, the composition has a howl of rage about it that’s common in Tatsushima’s work.  It frequently addresses sexual oppression, harassment and assault, things Japanese society – all societies, for that matter – often tries to look away from and things the artist has been a victim of herself.  Such is the Francis Bacon-style intensity of Tatsushima’s creations that this YouTube film about her comes with a warning that its images might be ‘too disturbing for more sensitive viewers’.

 

© Yuko Tatsushima / From sugoii-Japan.com

 

That seems far, far removed from my next picture, which celebrates the cosy tradition of classical British horror fiction, set in wooden-panelled Victorian and Edwardian drawing rooms and populated by crusty, tweedy gentlemen.  It’s by Charles W. Stewart, one of the few people who can claim to have been born in the Philippines but brought up in Galloway in Scotland, and whose enthusiasm for illustrating was apparently matched for his enthusiasm for ballet and costume design.  Stewart, clearly a man of many interests, selected the stories and did the illustrations for a 1997 collection entitled Ghost Stories, and Other Horrid Tales, which was published four years before his death.  The volume includes fiction by Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lafcadio Hearn, Vernon Lee, M.R. James and Walter de la Mare.

 

Stewart’s illustration here, which shows an antiquarian discovering he has unexpected company whilst engaged in some nocturnal research, is presumably for M.R. James’s Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book.  The story ends with the fictional equivalent of a cinematic jump-scare: “…his attention was caught by an object lying on the red cloth just by his left elbow…  Pale, dusky skin, covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength; coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down, grey, horny and wrinkled…”

 

© Folio Society

 

One of the greatest early scares in film history occurred in the 1925 silent version of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, which starred the remarkable Lon Chaney Sr in the title role.  The mysterious masked phantom gets unmasked whilst playing at his beloved organ.  Unable to stop herself, the singer Christine (Mary Philbin) whips the mask off from behind. The audience is confronted by the phantom’s horribly gaunt, stretched and skull-like face in the screen’s foreground – at this point, supposedly, some 1925 audience-members fainted.  Then he turns around and the audience is traumatised a second time as they see Christine reacting in horror to his deformed visage too.  Anyway, here’s a regal portrait of Chaney Sr’s Phantom of the Opera, sans mask, courtesy of Pittsburgh artist Daniel R. Horne, who’s painted a number of classic movie monsters.

 

© Daniel R. Horne

 

There were scares a-plenty in the films of director Alfred Hitchcock.  Indeed, he was perhaps cinema’s greatest practitioner in the genres of suspense and horror.  So popular was Hitchcock among the public in his heyday that he licensed his name to dozens of collections of crime, mystery, thriller, espionage and horror short stories, whose titles ranged from Alfred Hitchcock’s Coffin Break (1974) to Alfred Hitchcock’s Hard Day at the Scaffold (1967), from Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum (1965) to Alfred Hitchcock’s Sinister Spies (1966).  These had introductions purporting to be written by the great man himself, but they were actually penned by publishing-house editors.

 

I’m partial to this cover illustration from the collection Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbinders in Suspense (1967), which includes Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds (alongside the likes of Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game, Roald Dahl’s Man from the South and Robert Bloch’s Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper).  Hitchcock, of course, filmed The Birds in 1963.  The cover’s artist isn’t identified, but with those brutally-pecky gulls, and the victim’s screaming face, he or she does a good job of capturing the directness of du Maurier’s grim, claustrophobic original.  Hitchcock’s treatment of it is more mannered and expansive, though still brilliant.

 

© Lions, London

 

While many modern artists have taken their inspiration from the cinema, the American painter and illustrator Burt Shonberg could boast that his work turned up in movies. Most notably, Shonberg provided the disturbingly dark-eyed and corpse-faced portraits of former members of the Usher family, which Roderick Usher (Vincent Price) shows to Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon) in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptation House of Usher (1960).

 

Acclaimed as ‘the premier psychedelic artist of Los Angeles’ from the 1950s until his death in 1977, Shonberg’s work extended beyond hippy-era psychedelia and he flirted with cubism and did some fine pen-and-ink drawings.  Here, however, I’m showing a languid, sultry composition entitled Magical Landscape or Lucifer in the Garden, which depicts an unsettlingly youthful version of Auld Nick.  Obviously, representations of the Devil abound throughout the history of art, but what makes this one memorable are those particularly long pasterns and the strange little sphinx resting on his lap.

 

From cvltnation.com

 

In these art-themed Halloween posts, I also like to honour the festival that comes straight after Halloween – Mexico’s Dia de Muertos, the Day of the Dead, at the start of November, which features skulls and skeletons as a major theme.  This next picture gets straight to the point.  It’s by David Lozeau, a San Diego artist who’s dedicated much of his career to creating Day of the Dead-inspired artwork, and it shows two skeletons raucously celebrating…  Day of the Dead.  I assume that yellow stuff in the señorita skeleton’s bottle is reposado tequila, which acquires its colour from the oak barrels it matures in.

 

© David Lozeau

 

There’s also an admirable directness about this picture, of a vampire lady, by Argentinian artist Hector Garrido, who passed away in 2020 when he was in his nineties.  Put Garrido’s name into Google Images and you’ll be assailed by countless pictures of G.I. Joe toy-packaging, which he designed back in the 1980s.  However, his main work was creating book covers, most popularly for gothic and romantic novels and for the series about the wholesome juvenile sleuths Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.  But Garrido’s CV includes covers for the likes of John Brunner, Ramsey Campbell, Agatha Christie, John Christopher, Robert A. Heinlein, Richard Matheson and Robert Silverberg too.

 

This one comes from a book called A Walk with the Beast, actually a collection of ‘vintage tales of human monsters and were-beasts’ edited by Charles M. Walker.  The stories include one by Vernon Lee, who also appeared in Charles W. Stewart’s Ghost Stories, and Other Horrid Tales.  ‘All fun’ says the book’s single reviewer on amazon.com, so evidently it ‘does what it says on the tin’.

 

© Avon Books

 

And finally, for my final picture, it’s back to Japan for something similarly fun and schlocky – not the cover of a book but one of a Japanese comic-book.  This effort by the late manga-artist Marina Shirakawa is wonderfully sinewy and eye-catching.  It’s full of typical manga-style details – see those simultaneously hideous and gleeful ghouls in the background – and peculiarly Japanese ones, such as the heroine’s sailor-suit school uniform.  Its colour scheme of dark, blue-grey hues, with smudges of blood-red at the back, is memorable too.

 

© From monsterbrains.blogspot.com

 

And that’s it for another year.  Happy Halloween…

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The power of Friedkin compels you! (Part 2)

 

© Hoya Productions / Warner Bros. Pictures

 

William Friedkin’s most influential movie arrived two years after The French Connection.  This was his horror masterpiece about a demonically-possessed child, The Exorcist (1973), which achieved two things the mainstream  film industry had previously thought impossible.  Firstly, it showed that horror movies could do big box-office business (something reinforced by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws two years later).  Secondly, it proved that horror movies could be as hard-hitting and adult in tone as anything coming from the New Hollywood Generation, who shook up American filmmaking in the 1970s and included Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Schrader and John Milius.  Mind you, the idea of serious horror movies had diminished again by the 1980s.  That was when many horror filmmakers decided it was more fun to tell stories about horny teenagers being murdered in inventive ways by homicidal maniacs in hockey masks.

 

The Exorcist was released in cinemas around the time I first saw The Night They Raided Minsky’s on TV.  My family was living in Northern Ireland then and I remember a young guy called Lawrence Timlin, who worked for my dad, telling me about how he’d seen The Exorcist twice.  The first time was during his wanderings in London and the second time was after he’d returned home to Northern Ireland.  The version he’d seen in a Northern Irish cinema, he said indignantly, had had many things cut out of it, no doubt from fear of what Northen Ireland’s sizeable communities of religious nutcases (both Catholic and Protestant) would say if they were left in.  Mind you, that didn’t stop those nutcases picketing cinemas when the film opened in the province anyway.

 

A decade later, when I finally saw The Exorcist, it wasn’t in ideal circumstances.  I was at college and staying in a hall of residence.  The hall’s residents’ committee organised a showing of it one Sunday afternoon.  As a result, I saw it in a common room with about 40 other people, all of us squinting at a TV set, on which it was playing from a VCR.  Definitely not a big-screen experience.  Still, I was lucky that I saw it at all.  For, in a decision that highlights yet again the cultural idiocy of Maggie-Thatcher-era Britain, video sales of The Exorcist were banned by the British Board of Film Classification in 1988.  They were afraid of the effect it might have on ‘young people’ who saw it at home: “At the cinema it had been relatively easy to ensure that young people would be excluded, but video was another matter.”  Home video sales of The Exorcist remained illegal in the UK until 1999.  At least in 1998 I managed to catch it in a cinema, on a big screen at last, during a special release marking its 25th anniversary.

 

I have misgivings about The Exorcist’s philosophy.  I find facile its depiction of evil as an opportunistic, external force – when the idea that evil is something internal, that potentially resides inside every human being and can be activated by the right combination of circumstances (especially weakness of character), is more disturbing.  Even more facile is the idea that the Catholic Church is the line of defence holding evil at bay.  That seems laughable today, given that in the half-century since 1973 it’s become clear that the church’s cassocked ranks have harboured far more threats to young people than video sales of The Exorcist could ever have posed.

 

But those are issues I’d blame on the movie’s script and source novel by William Peter Blatty.  Its performances and Friedkin’s direction can’t be faulted.  He handles the famous set-pieces – rotating heads, projectile vomiting, the manifestation of the demon Pazuzu to Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) in Iraq – with aplomb.  And von Sydow’s arrival at the residence of Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) and possessed daughter Reagan (Linda Blair), when he stands silhouetted in mist, his outline delineated by a glowing streetlamp mixed with a shaft of light from an upstairs bedroom-window, is absolutely magical – perhaps the most seminal image of the horror genre.  The insertion of music from Mike Oldfield’s classic prog-rock album Tubular Bells (1973) during an early scene works brilliantly too.  And I say that as someone who normally hates progressive rock.

 

© Hoya Productions / Warner Bros. Pictures

 

Seven years later, Friedkin generated more controversy with his 1980 thriller Cruising.  This has Al Pacino playing a New York cop who goes undercover in the city’s gay S&M scene, in order to track down a serial killer who’s murdering gay men.  I didn’t see Cruising until the 1990s and I watched it at the insistence of an ex-girlfriend who was enthralled by the film.  Maybe she got turned on by seeing Al Pacino in a tableau of gay sex and S&M.  The film was condemned by New York’s gay community, who felt that by focusing on the city’s ‘leather bars’ it was linking all gay culture with violent sex.  In the film’s defence, Pacino claimed that it concentrated only on one sub-culture and could no more be accused of slandering the whole gay community than a film that dealt with the Mafia could be accused of slandering the whole Italian-American community.  Maybe so, but in 1980 mainstream America was a lot more aware of and at ease with its Italian-American component than it was with its gay component.  It might be able to distinguish between the specific and general in the former community, but could it do so in the latter?

 

Whatever – despite the issues about what it portrayed and how it portrayed it, I think Cruising is a pretty good thriller.  Though I obviously didn’t get the kick out of it that my ex-girlfriend did.

 

It was also in the 1990s that I saw a Friedkin movie that made me wonder if, creatively, he’d fired his last bolt.  This was the 1990 horror movie The Guardian, which has Jenny Seagrove playing an angelic English nanny who’s actually a dryad.  She abducts the children entrusted to her care and sacrifices them to the gnarly old tree that she’s an extension of.  Seagrove had form playing mythological creatures, having turned up in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983) as a mermaid who bewitches Peter Capaldi.

 

Horror movies about trees are generally not good – see From Hell It Came (1957), The Woman Eater (1958), Maneater of Hydra (1967) or the anthology movie Tales That Witness Madness (1973), which has an episode where Joan Collins is spurned by her husband because he’s become obsessed with a weirdly human-female-shaped tree trunk he’s found out in the woods.  (No jokes please about the tree trunk being a better actress.)  The Guardian unfortunately doesn’t buck the trend.  About the nicest comment about it was made by Time Out magazine, which chortlingly described it as: “A severely flawed but not unamusing venture from a director who should know better.”  The film was co-scripted by the estimable Welsh writer Stephen Volk.  It was Volk, apparently, who got Friedkin hooked on the tree angle – the film’s source novel, Dan Greenburg’s The Nanny (1987), has no such material in it.  However, once Volk had shown Friedkin the 1904 short story The Ash-Tree by M.R. James, the director was adamant.  His movie had to have a killer tree!

 

© Universal Pictures

 

But happily, Friedkin enjoyed a renaissance in the early 21st century.  This was largely thanks to an association with the playwright Tracy Letts.  First came the claustrophobic and entomophobic Bug (2006), based on Letts’ 1996 play of the same name and starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon.  Many people reacted to Bug by hailing it as an accomplished horror movie, which caused Friedkin to grumpily complain that it was no such thing.  For him it was ‘a black comedy love story.’  Well, I consider Bug to be both a pretty smart horror movie and an unsettling character study, with its two lead actors playing the messed-up protagonists with wonderful intensity.

 

Then in 2011 we got Killer Joe, an adaptation of Letts’ 1993 play, again of the same name.  This is about a family of Texan trailer trash hiring the titular hitman (Matthew McConaughey) to rub out their estranged wife / mother so they can get their hands on her life insurance policy.  A flamboyantly unhinged character, Joe agrees to the job, but only if he gets custody of the family’s youngest daughter, the simple-minded Dottie (Juno Temple), as a down-payment for it.  An unhealthy relationship soon develops between Dottie and the forty-something Joe.  “How are you gonna kill my mama?” she asks him at one point. “That’s not appropriate dinner conversation, Dottie,” he chides her.

 

From there, things become even darker and there’s a simultaneously horrific and hilarious finale that involves the family’s devious stepmother (Gina Gershon) being forced to do some unspeakable stuff with a chicken drumstick.  Killer Joe is an excellent slice of ‘Southern Gothic’ and benefits hugely from a barnstorming central performance by McConaughy.  When he warns, “If you insult me again, I will cut off your face and wear it over my own – do you understand?”, you believe him.

 

There are still Friedkin movies I haven’t seen but would like to.  I hear that 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A. with William Petersen and Willem Dafoe is very good, and I’d also like to catch up with his 1968 film version of Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party with Robert Shaw, Dandy Nichols and Patrick Magee.  The latter film was produced by Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky, whose company Amicus Productions was better known for making horror films.  I doubt if it’s a coincidence that images from Rosenberg and Subotsky’s first-ever horror venture, 1960’s City of the Dead, appear on a television screen during a scene in Killer Joe.

 

So… William Friedkin was a filmmaker who brought us harrowing tales of serial killers, deranged hitmen and psychotic cops.  He raced cars against elevated trains and coaxed explosives-laden trucks across flimsy rope bridges.  He consorted with monstrous woodland entities, with the devil, and with Norman Wisdom.  He even managed to make progressive rock sound cool – twice.  Truly a man of many achievements.

 

© Voltage Pictures / LD Entertainment

Posted on

Wordsworth’s ghosts

 

© Wordsworth Editions

 

I’ve just realised that two-and-a-half weeks from now it’ll be Halloween.  Therefore, as I usually do at this time of year, I’ll be posting a few entries on this blog about the dark, the spooky, the supernatural and the macabre.  To begin with, here’s something I originally wrote in 2019 about three collections of ghostly tales by three forgotten writers of yesteryear.

 

I’ve read a lot of 19th century ghost stories recently.  These have featured in collections published by Wordsworth Editions in its series Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural, which I’ve picked up in various library clearance sales and second-hand bookshops.  The last time I checked, Wordsworth’s Mystery and the Supernatural series consisted of 80 different titles and they’re an admirable balance between works by authors who are well-known, like H.P. Lovecraft, M.R. James, Edgar Wallace, Edith Wharton and Henry James, and works by authors who aren’t – or, in some cases, were famous once but have now disappeared off the reading public’s radar.  By acquainting modern readers with writers in the latter category, the series performs an invaluable service.  It was through reading one of its books a few years ago, for instance, that I discovered the excellent but now neglected writer May Sinclair, about whom I wrote here.

 

Anyway, I’ve just finished reading Wordsworth collections by Amayas Northcote, Gertrude Atherton and J.H. Riddell.  How do their ghost stories measure up?

 

Amayas Northcote is the most elusive figure of the three.  His Wikipedia entry merely states that he was the seventh son of the First Earl of Iddesleigh, who was Benjamin Disraeli’s Chancellor of the Exchequer; he was a businessman in Chicago at one time and a Justice of the Peace in Buckinghamshire at another; and he “wrote ghost stories in the line of those of M.R. James, which were compiled in his only book, In Ghostly Company.”  One likely reason why Company was Northcote’s only book was because it was published in 1921 and he died soon afterwards in 1923, before he had much chance to follow it with further fiction, ghostly or otherwise.

 

I have to admit that while I found Northcote’s stories enjoyable, most of them feel a bit run-of-the-mill.  Often, as in the case of Mr Kershaw and Mr Wilcox, The Late Earl of D., The Steps and The Governess’s Story, they involve manifestations of the supernatural linked to murders, untimely deaths and disappearances.  The two most interesting stories are those that stray furthest from the formula.  The Downs deals with a secluded stretch of British countryside that, one night a year, becomes the scene of a haunting on a spectacular scale; while The Late Mrs Fowke strays unexpectedly into the realms of devil worship and reads like a prototype for the occult potboilers that Dennis Wheatley would start writing little more than a decade later.

 

© Wordsworth Editions

 

Considerably greater in range and ambition are the stories of American author Gertrude Atherton collected in The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories, originally published in 1905.  These are tales that are by turns grisly (The Striding Place), phantasmagorical (The Dead and the Countess) and imbued with a psychological intensity reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe (Death and the Woman).

 

Some aren’t supernatural at all but are grim character studies.  A Monarch of a Small Survey is about a sad and frumpy lady’s companion who suffers the double misfortune of being cut out of her employer’s will and becoming futilely besotted with a younger man.  Similarly, The Tragedy of a Snob looks at the gulf between the haves and have nots, chronicling the efforts of a man of limited means to gain access to the world of high society.  And The Greatest Good of the Greatest Number is about a physician who convinces himself that by eliminating the life of one worthless person he can improve the lives of all the decent people who’ve been blighted by her – but finds the execution of the deed harder than he’d expected.  Simply but compellingly set up, The Greatest Good feels like a Roald Dahl story with a stern moral conscience.

 

I have to say, though, that my respect for Atherton was diminished by the inclusion of A Prologue, which is presented as the first part of an unfinished play.  It’s a brooding, gothic piece set on a West Indian island about to be pulverised by a hurricane and is slightly reminiscent of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).  It’s also racist, with a household’s black slaves cowering and wailing pathetically on the floor while their white owners stomp around, cursing them for their superstitious uselessness and trying to secure the premises without their help.  Yes, I know the work simply reflects the attitudes of white people towards slaves and slavery back then and  should be taken as being ‘of its time’.  But it still left a bad taste in my mouth.

 

I’d been looking forward to J.H. Riddell’s Night Shivers, a volume that contains 14 short stories and is rounded off with a short novel, The Uninhabited House, which was first published in 1875.  This was because Riddell originated in Northern Ireland, like I did.  She was born in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, in 1832 and lived there until 1855, when she and her mother moved to London.  She remained in England until her death in 1906 and during the intervening years established herself as a prolific author.  Her Wikipedia entry lists some 40 novels and a half-dozen short story collections.

 

I’d been hoping that Ms Riddell’s ghostly fiction would have a strong Irish flavour and, occasionally, it does – to good effect.  The Last of Squire Ennismore sees a dissolute Irish landowner come to an infernal end for his misdeeds, through the agency of a mysterious stranger with ‘an ambling sort of gait, curious to look at’ who leaves cloven hoof-prints on the sand of the local beach.  Hertford O’Donnell’s Warning features that most Irish of supernatural creature, the banshee, though in the incongruous (but effective) setting of a Victorian London hospital.  And Conn Kilrea features another Irish family haunted by a spectral, though non-banshee, harbinger of death.

 

However, most of the stories take place in England and, because I’ve read countless other English ghost stories over the year, their scenarios seem very familiar and they have the same generic feel as Amyas Northcote’s work.  Riddell enjoys presenting her ghosts and supernatural phenomena as puzzles that the living characters have to solve.  Invariably, they turn out to be traces and echoes of nefarious incidents – usually murders – that once upon a time occurred in the ‘real’ world.

 

One thing I like about Riddell’s fiction is her depiction of unusually (for the era) feisty and unconventional female characters, even if they come across as somewhat grotesque. The most notable of these are Miss Gostock, the hard-working, hard-bargain-driving and hard-drinking landlady in Nut Bush Farm; and the formidable Miss Blake, ‘the child of a Scottish-Ulster mother and a Connaught father’ who ‘had ingeniously contrived to combine in her person the vices of two distinct races, and exclude the virtues of both’, in The Uninhabited House.

 

Also, I like how she portrays the main character in Walnut-Tree House.  He’s an unpretentious fellow who comes into possession of a haunted property in London after spending years as a ‘digger’ in the Australian goldfields.  The snobby Londoners he has dealings with disdain him as ‘a rough sort of fellow’ who’s ‘boorish’ and has ‘never mixed with good society’.  But when he encounters the ghost in his house, that of a child, he doesn’t react as characters normally do in these stories and cringe or flee in terror.  Instead, he feels sorry for the poor child’s ghost and resolves to find a way to make it rest in peace.

 

© Wordsworth Editions

Posted on

A Lee-centennial

 

© British Lion Films

 

The British actor Sir Christopher Lee, who was born on this day exactly 100 years ago, was a man who embodied evil to generations of film-goers.  He played Lord Summerisle, Dracula, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, Scaramanga, Comte de Rochefort, Frankenstein’s monster, the mummy, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Blind Pew, Saruman, Count Dooku, the Jabberwocky, the Devil and, in the 2008 adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, Death himself.  But up until his passing in 2015, I didn’t so much regard him as the embodiment of evil as one of the coolest people on the planet.

 

Lee did a lot during his 93 years and not just in terms of acting – though his movie resume was awesome, with some 275 titles to his name by the time he entered his tenth decade.

 

He was, incidentally, an incredibly literary actor too, because his massive film and television CV contained adaptations of stories by Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Roald Dahl, Alexandre Dumas, Rider Haggard, Washington Irving, H.P. Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake, Edgar Allan Poe, Sax Rohmer, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Jules Verne.  In real life, he was step-cousin of James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming; and by the time Peter Jackson got around to filming the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2002-2004), he could boast that he was the only member of the movies’ cast and crew who’d actually met J.R.R. Tolkien.  He was also good friends with Robert Bloch, author of Psycho (1959), the fabulous Ray Bradbury, and posh occult-thriller-writer Dennis Wheatley, whose potboiler The Devil Rides Out Lee would persuade Hammer Films to adapt to celluloid in 1968.  And he was one of the last people alive who could claim to have met M.R. James, the greatest ghost story writer in English literature.  As a lad Lee encountered James, who was then Provost of Eton College, when his family tried, unsuccessfully, to enrol him there.  Lee obviously didn’t hold his failure to get into Eton against James because in 2000 he played the writer in the BBC miniseries Ghost Stories for Christmas.

 

Before getting into acting in the late 1940s, Lee did military service during World War II, which included attachments with the Special Operations Executive and the Long Range Desert Patrol , the forerunner to the SAS.  He kept schtum about what he actually did with them.  Decades later, though, he may have unintentionally dropped a hint about his secret wartime activities to Peter Jackson when, on set, he discreetly advised the Kiwi director about the sound a dying man would really make if he’d just had a knife planted in his back.

 

His first years as an actor did not see much success, due to his being too tall (six-foot-four) and too foreign-looking (he had Italian ancestry).  During this period he at least learned how to swordfight, a skill he drew on when appearing in various low-budget swashbucklers.  During the making of one such film, 1955’s The Dark Avenger, the famously sozzled Errol Flynn nearly hacked off Lee’s little finger; although later Lee got revenge when, during a TV shoot with the same actor, a slightly-misaimed sword-thrust knocked off Flynn’s toupee, much to the Hollywood star’s mortification and no doubt to everyone else’s amusement.  Incidentally, I love the fact that Lee could boast of being the only actor in history who’d conducted sword fights with Errol Flynn and Yoda.

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

And I’ve read somewhere that when he made the swashbuckler The Scarlet Blade for Hammer Films in 1963, Lee taught a young Oliver Reed the basics of sword-fighting.  I’m sure fight-choreographer William Hobbs and the stunt crew who worked on The Three Musketeers a decade later quietly cursed Lee for this.  (Lee starred alongside Reed in the film, playing the memorably eye-patched Comte de Rochefort.)  From all accounts, the ever-enthusiastic Ollie threw himself into the Musketeers’ sword-fights like a whirling dervish, and eventually one stuntman had to ‘accidentally’ stab him in the hand and put him out of action before he killed someone.

 

In 1956 and 1957 Lee got two gigs for Hammer films that’d change his fortunes and make him a star – playing the monster in The Curse of Frankenstein and then, on the strength of that, Bram Stoker’s famous vampire count in Dracula.  Apparently, Hammer wanted originally to hire the hulking comedic actor Bernard Bresslaw to play Frankenstein’s monster.  I suppose there’s a parallel universe out there somewhere where Bresslaw actually got the job; so that the man we know as Little Heap in Carry On Cowboy (1965), Bernie Lugg in Carry On Camping (1969) and Peter Potter in Carry On Girls (1973) went on in that universe to play Count Dooku in the Star Wars movies and Saruman the White in the Lord of the Rings ones.

 

Playing Baron Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein and Van Helsing in Dracula was the legendary Peter Cushing and he and Lee would hit it off immediately, become best mates and make another 18 films together, in which for much of the time they did bad things to each other.  As a mad-scientist-cum-asylum-keeper in The Creeping Flesh (1972), Lee brought a monster to life and then, after the monster had attacked Cushing and driven him insane with terror, he coolly incarcerated Cushing in his asylum.  Whereas in The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) Cushing chased him, as Dracula, through a prickly hawthorn bush – hawthorns are apparently harmful to vampires and the experience, Lee recalled in his autobiography Tall, Dark and Gruesome (1977), left him ‘shedding genuine Lee blood like a garden sprinkler’ – before impaling him on a sharp, uprooted fence-post.  Meanwhile, the 1972 British-Spanish movie Horror Express featured a decomposing ape-man fossil that’d come back to life, was possessed by an alien force and had the power to suck people’s brains out through their eyeballs.  It was such an evil motherf***er that Lee and Cushing had to join forces, for once, to defeat it.

 

© Granada Films

 

Lee was famously uncomfortable about being branded a horror-movie star and about being associated with Dracula, an association that might thwart his ambitions for a serious acting career.  He did, though, play the character another six times for Hammer, and an eighth time in the Spanish production El Conde Dracula.  Tweeting a tribute to him when he passed away, Stephen King said, “He was the King of the Vampires.”  So sorry, Sir Christopher, but when the man who wrote Salem’s Lot (1975) says you’re the King of the Vampires, you’re the King of the Vampires.

 

As Dracula, he got to bite Barbara Shelley, Barbara Ewing, Linda Hayden, Anouska Hempel, Marcia Hunt, Caroline Munro and Valerie Van Ost.  Last-minute interventions by Peter Cushing in Dracula AD 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) prevented him from biting Stephanie Beacham and Joanna Lumley, which must have been frustrating.  Meanwhile, the 1965 movie Dracula, Prince of Darkness was the first really scary horror movie I ever saw, on TV, back when I was eight or nine years old.  I’d watched old horror films made by Universal Studios in the 1940s, like House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), in which everything was discreetly black-and-white and bloodless, so I wasn’t prepared for an early scene in Dracula, Prince of Darkness where Lee / the count is revived during a ceremony that involves a luckless traveller (Charles Tingwell) being suspended upside-down over a coffin and having his throat cut.  The sight and sound of the blood splattering noisily onto the supposedly dead vampire’s ashes traumatised me.

 

© Warner Pathé / Hammer Films

 

Thanks to Hammer’s success in the horror genre, the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s saw a boom in British, usually gothic, horror filmmaking.  And during that boom, Lee did many memorable, often evil, things.  He drove his car into Michael Gough and squidged off Gough’s hand in Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors (1965).  He forced Vincent Price to immerse himself in a vat of acid in Scream and Scream Again (1969).  He turned up as a snobbish senior-civil-servant type and tormented Donald Pleasance in Deathline (1972).

 

Lee was probably Britain’s most linguistic actor, speaking German, French, Italian and Spanish and also knowing a bit of Swedish, Russian and Greek.  Thus, he also found it easy to find employment making horror movies on mainland Europe, where the gothic tradition was raunchier, more lurid and looser in its plot logic than its counterpart in Britain.  He worked with the Italian maestro Mario Bava in 1963’s The Whip and the Body and on several occasions with the fascinatingly prolific, but erratic, Spanish director Jess Franco.  Despite Franco’s cheeky habit of shooting scenes with Lee and then inserting them into a totally different and usually pornographic movie – something Lee would only discover later, when he strolled past a blue-movie theatre in Soho and noticed that he was starring in something like Eugenie and the Story of her Journey into Perversion (1970) – Lee held the Spaniard in esteem and championed his work at a time it wasn’t fashionable to do so.  Since his death in 2013, Franco’s reputation has improved and art-house director Peter Strickland’s movie The Duke of Burgundy (2014) is a tribute, in part, to him.

 

Franco directed the later entries in a series of movies about Fu Manchu that Lee made in the 1960s, in which he played Sax Rohmer’s supervillain in un-PC Oriental makeup and spent his time barking orders at Chinese minions, who were usually played by Burt Kwouk.  As well as retaining some of the racism that was prominent in Rohmer’s books, the series generally wasn’t up to much in terms of quality.  However, the film’s endings have always haunted me.  Invariably, Fu Manchu’s secret headquarters would blow up and then Lee’s voice would boom imperiously through the smoke, “The world will hear of me again!”

 

© Eon Productions

 

In the early 1970s, Lee finally got opportunities to make the sort of films he wanted to make, including Richard Lester’s two Musketeers movies (1974 and 1975); the ninth official Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun (1975), in which he taunted Roger Moore, “You work for peanuts – a hearty well-done from Her Majesty the Queen and a pittance of a pension.  Apart from that, we are the same.  To us, Mr Bond.  We are the best…  Oh come, come, Mr Bond.  You get as much fulfilment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?”; and Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), regarded by many as the best attempt at bringing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s deerstalker-wearing super-sleuth to the screen.

 

In that latter film, Lee played Holmes’s snooty brother Mycroft.  Lee also played Sherlock Holmes himself several times, including in a couple of early-1990s TV movies with Dr Watson played by the impeccable Patrick Macnee, whom decades earlier had been Lee’s schoolmate at Summer Fields School in Oxford.  And he played Henry Baskerville in the 1959 Hammer adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which had Peter Cushing in the role of Holmes.  But for some strange reason, nobody ever thought of casting Lee as Professor Moriarty.

 

In 1973, he also played Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, a film that needs no introduction from me.  Actually, next year is the film’s fiftieth anniversary.  I trust the Scottish Tourist Board will celebrate this fact on May 1st, 2023, by lighting lots of wicker men, with lots of sanctimonious, virginal, Free Presbyterian policemen inside them, along the coasts of Scotland.

 

Later in the 1970s, no longer so typecast in horror movies and with the British film industry on its deathbed, Lee decamped to Hollywood.  He ended up appearing in some big-budget puddings like dire 1977 disaster movie Airport 77 and Steven Spielberg’s supposed comedy 1941 (1979), but at least he was able to rub shoulders with icons such as Muhammad Ali and John Belushi.  And he didn’t, strictly speaking, stop appearing in horror movies.  He was in the likes of House of the Long Shadows (1982), The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985), The Funny Man (1994) and Talos the Mummy (1998).  Amusingly, Lee usually explained this by arguing that these weren’t really horror films.  The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf wasn’t a horror film?  Aye, right.

 

© New Line Cinema / WingNut Films

 

Though he never relented in his workload, it wasn’t until the 1990s that Lee experienced a late-term career renaissance – no doubt because many of the nerdish kids who’d sneaked into cinemas or stayed up late in front of the TV to watch his old horror movies had now grown up, become major players in the film industry and were only too happy to cast him in their movies: Joe Dante, John Landis, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Peter Jackson and Tim Burton.  Hence his roles in two of the biggest franchises in cinematic history, the Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings / Hobbit ones, plus five movies directed by Burton.

 

When he was in his eighties, Lee must have wondered if there were any territories left for him to conquer – and he realised that yes, there was one.  Heavy metal!  He had a fine baritone singing voice but only occasionally in his film career, for example, in The Wicker Man and The Return of Captain Invincible (1983), did he get a chance to show it off.  In the mid-noughties, however, he started recording with symphonic / power-metal bands Rhapsody of Fire and Manowar and soon after he was releasing his own metal albums such as Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross and Charlemagne: The Omens of Death, which had contributions by guitarist Hedras Ramos and Judas Priest’s Richie Faulkner.  He also released two collections of Christmas songs, done heavy-metal style.  The festive season will never seem the same after you’ve heard Lee thundering his way through The Little Drummer Boy with electric guitars caterwauling in the background.

 

© Charlemagne Productions Ltd

 

Obviously, the heavy metal community, which sees itself as a crowd of badasses, was flattered when the cinema’s supreme badass – Lord Summerisle, Dracula, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, etc. – elected to join them and they welcomed Lee with open arms.  They even gave him, as the genre’s oldest practitioner, the Spirit of Metal Award at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods ceremony in 2010.

 

So: singing heavy metal, speaking eight languages, being perhaps the 20th century’s greatest screen villain and, probably, bayoneting Nazis to death.  Was there anything this man couldn’t do?  Well, it seems the only thing he couldn’t quite manage was to live forever.  Mind you, for someone who spent his cinema career dying – even when he penned his autobiography in his mid-fifties, he reckoned he’d been killed onscreen more than any other actor in history – but kept coming back, it feels a bit odd to be writing about Christopher Lee in the past tense.

 

Actually, if anybody wants to congregate in a Carpathian castle after dark and perform a blood-soaked ritual to resurrect the great man, I’m up for it.

 

From the Independent

Posted on

Kingsley goes green

 

© Penguin Books

 

And here’s another re-posting in anticipation of Halloween, one that originally appeared on this blog seven years ago.  This time, I offer my thoughts on Kingsley Amis’s ghostly novel of 1969, The Green Man.

 

I can claim to be neither an expert on nor a fan of Kingsley Amis.  While I’ve enthusiastically worked my way through the fiction of several of his contemporaries – Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Graham Greene – until recently I’d read only a couple of Amis’s short stories and one of his books, Lucky Jim.  The latter was an early (1954) example of the literary sub-genre now known as the ‘campus novel’ and I have to say I found it pretty dated and unfunny.

 

I suspect the main reason for my aversion to Kingsley Amis, though, is the persona he projected when he was alive.  He didn’t seem like a nice piece of work and so I rarely felt an urge to dip into his writing.  In the 1950s he trumpeted his support for the Labour Party but by the 1980s he’d become an enthusiastic fan of Mrs Thatcher.  He seemed to me pretty typical of people whose politics undergo a severe rightward turn during their lifetimes.  Socialist egalitarianism and liberal permissiveness are great things when you have youth, and a lack of material possessions, on your side.  But when you reach a point in your life when you’re too old, and too moneyed, to benefit from them  any longer, and when a younger, upstart generation arrives on the scene with their own ideas about how to do things, it’s time to change into a reactionary old fart and whinge about other people being radical in a way you once were yourself.

 

But far worse than Amis’s Conservatism was the fact that in later years he seemed unashamedly anti-Semitic, racist and misogynistic.  I’ve read an interview with his long-suffering second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard in which she, rather gallantly, blamed much of that nastiness not on Amis but on his fondness for alcohol.  In other words, his odiousness was really just the drink speaking.  However, I can’t help thinking of an old saying they have in Northern Ireland: “If it’s not in you when you’re sober, it won’t come out of you when you’re drunk.”

 

Still, I have one reason for liking Amis, and that’s because unlike nearly everyone else in Britain’s snobbish literary establishment at the time, he didn’t look down his nose at genre writing.  He was openly supportive of it and occasionally dabbled in it himself.  For example, Amis was one of Ian Fleming’s most heavyweight admirers and it’s fitting that, after Fleming’s passing, he was the first person to write a non-Fleming James Bond novel, Colonel Sun, which he published in 1968 under the pseudonym Robert Markham.

 

Amis was also a big fan of science fiction and in 1960 he wrote a critique of the genre, New Maps of Hell.  As J.G. Ballard noted, New Maps of Hell was important for science fiction’s development because Amis “threw open the gates of the ghetto, and ushered in a new audience which he almost singlehandedly recruited from those intelligent readers of general fiction who until then had considered science fiction on par with horror comics and pulp westerns.”  Predictably, though, the curmudgeonly Amis went off science fiction in the 1960s when younger sci-fi writers like Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison and Thomas M. Disch started going all experimental and New Wave-y on him.  Before long, he was raging at how those whippersnappers had contaminated his beloved science fiction with horrible things like “pop music, hippie clothes and hairdos, pornography, reefers” and “tricks with typography, one-line chapters, strained metaphors, obscurities, obscenities, drugs, Oriental religions and left-wing politics.”

 

Amis seemed too to be interested in supernatural stories and in 1969 he tried his hand at writing one, a novel called The Green Man.  This has long been a neglected entry in Amis’s oeuvre, overshadowed by more prestigious books like Jake’s Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986), out of print and near impossible to find in bookshops.  It was, however, adapted into a three-part drama serial by the BBC in 1990, with the script written by none other than Malcolm Bradbury, an author whose own books like Eating People is Wrong (1959) and The History Man (1975) were examples of the campus novel that Amis had helped pioneer with Lucky Jim.  The TV version of The Green Man starred the splendid Albert Finney and it began with a memorable and grisly sequence that didn’t evoke Kingsley Amis, or Malcolm Bradbury, so much as it evoked Sam Raimi’s 1981 classic schlock-horror movie The Evil Dead.

 

© A&E Television Productions / BBC

 

Anyway, I enjoyed the televisual The Green Man so much that I made a mental note to set aside my prejudices against Amis and hunt down the original novel of The Green Man. It wasn’t until nearly a quarter-century later, however, that I noticed a new edition of The Green Man sitting on a shelf in a bookshop, bought it and finally got around to reading it.  So here are my thoughts about this particular foray by Kingsley Amis into the realms of the paranormal and macabre.

 

The Green Man is narrated by the fifty-something Maurice Allington, the character played by Albert Finney in its TV adaptation.  He owns and runs an inn of some antiquity, the titular Green Man, on the way from London to Cambridge.  Living on the premises with his second wife Joyce (his junior by a number of years), his teenage daughter Amy and his ailing father, Allington is unnerved when the hoary old ghost stories associated with the inn over the centuries start to intrude on reality.  In particular, he has several encounters with the ghost of Thomas Underhill, a supposed sorcerer who lived in the building in the 17th century; and he senses the presence of a more monstrous apparition, a demonic creature that Underhill once summoned up from the local woods to destroy his antagonists.  The inn’s name is a clue to this demon’s constitution.

 

Allington eventually realises he’s become enmeshed in a scheme that Underhill has devised to transcend his own death.  However, his attempts to outwit the ghostly sorcerer are hampered by his own failings: his ill-health, his liking for the bottle – to which, of course, his family and friends attribute his strange visions – and the distractions posed by his carnal appetites.  Not only is the lusty Allington engaged in an affair with another younger woman, Diana, who’s the wife of the local doctor, but he’s devised a less-than-noble scheme of his own.  He wants to persuade both Joyce and Diana to participate with him in a ménage à trois.

 

I hadn’t got far into The Green Man before I’d realised that both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness are its characterisations.  Amis does an excellent job of sketching Allington, with his many vices and virtues.  He’s annoyingly conceited, intellectually as well as socially.  Talking about his book collection, he says sniffily: “I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference.  A man has only to feel some emotion, any emotion, anything differentiated at all, and spend a minute speculating how this would be rendered in a novel… to grasp the pitiful inadequacy of all prose fiction to the task it sets itself.”  Allington, thus, is a poetry snob.  “By comparison… verse – lyric verse, at least – is equidistant from fiction and life, and is autonomous.”

 

Actually, his love for the poetic and his disdain for the more mechanical medium of prose remind me slightly of the late 19th century / early 20th century occult writer Arthur Machen, who speculated in his fiction that supernatural phenomena are best perceived by people with receptive intellects and imaginations.  These include the very young, the insane and the poetically-inclined.  Perhaps that’s why, of all the people living, dining and drinking in the Green Man, the verse-loving Allington is the one with whom the supernatural intelligence of Thomas Underhill makes contact.

 

Meanwhile, feminist readers will no doubt feel like strangling Allington on account of his baser musings.  “Ejaculation,” he comments at one point, “as all good mistresses know, is a great agent of change of mind and mood.”

 

And yet as a bundle of contradictory traits – stuck-up, sexist, cynical, drunken, cranky, comical, cunning, occasionally courageous and very occasionally principled – Allington is a believable figure in this story.  He might be an unfortunate mess of vanity, lust and booze, but at the book’s finale, when he rushes out of the inn and into the night to try to save the sleepwalking Amy from the predatory green man, we aren’t surprised that he shows a streak of heroism as well.

 

But on the other hand, Amis is hopeless at drawing believable female characters here.  Joyce and Diana give little impression of having minds of their own.  They seem like manifestations of Amis’s notion of what women should be like – statuesque, well-bred and utterly pliable to the needs of the local Alpha Male.  “Together,” says Allington, “they made an impressive, rather erectile sight, both of them tall, blonde and full-breasted…  Dull would he be of soul that would pass up the chance of taking the pair of them to bed.”  In their speech, meanwhile, they spout irritating upper-class adverb-adjective couplings: “jolly closed up”, “perfectly awful”, “frightfully exciting”, “damn good”.  Late on in the book, Allington’s devious ménage à trois plan backfires and Joyce and Diana get their revenge on him, but this isn’t enough to convince me that they’re anything more than Kingsley Amis’s idea of desirable posh totty.

 

From artinfiction.wordpress.com

 

Elsewhere in the book, predictably, we’re treated to a list of things in the modern (or at least, 1960s-ish) world that the grumpy, ageing Amis finds appalling.  He sounds off against radical students: “First one whiskered youth in an open frugiferous shirt, then another with long hair like oakum, scanned me closely as they passed, each slowing almost to a stop the better to check me for bodily signs of fascism, oppression by free speech, passive racial violence and the like.”  He rails against popular music: “Amy’s gramophone was playing some farrago of crashes, bumps and yells from her room down the passage…  I listened, or endured hearing it…”  He has a go at trendy vicars: “I found it odd, and oddly unwelcoming too, to meet a clergyman who was turning out to be, doctrinally speaking, rather to the left of a hardened unbeliever like myself.”  Readers will either find this aggravating or endearing.  Now that Amis has been dead for a quarter-century and I’m in the process of turning into a grumpy old man myself, I have to confess I found it rather endearing – more so than I would have if I’d read the novel in my youth.

 

Failures in female characterisation aside, I generally enjoyed The Green Man and I had more fun reading it than I had with Lucky Jim.  However, is the novel successful as a ghost story?  In my opinion, for a ghost story to succeed, it needs to convey a degree of believability.  If I can be lulled into thinking, however fleetingly, that this could be happening, I’m more likely to be affected, unsettled, even frightened by it.  On this account, Amis’s book almost succeeds.  For the most part, he convincingly moves the plot from being about a man whose home has some strange old tales attached to it to being about a man who has to deal with the unwelcome, ghostly protagonists of those tales.  To facilitate this jump from the credible to the incredible, Amis adds some persuasive background details.  A section where Allington visits a library at Cambridge University in search of a long-lost journal by Underhill has a scholarly believability that’s worthy of M.R. James.

 

Alas, all is betrayed by a scene near the novel’s climax where Amis goes too far and introduces another supernatural character, the most famous and powerful supernatural character of the lot – guess who that is.  Now any story involving ghosts has implications about the wider scheme of things.  It makes life after death a fact, which raises questions about the design and purpose of the universe and about the intelligence that might be behind it.  However, for the sake of believability, it’s advisable for ghost-story writers to keep things localised and small-scale.  In M.R. James’s celebrated short story Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, my Lad, for example, what’s important is that the hero is being pursued along a beach by a terrifying supernatural entity.  Not that this entity’s existence calls into question our scientific assumptions about the universe – because if it does exist, then scientists are likely wrong and the priests, magicians and shamans of history were likely right.

 

Amis, unfortunately, can’t resist exploring the universe he’s created in The Green Man further than is necessary and so Allington ends up having an unexpected visit from the Big Man Upstairs.  Their confrontation resembles something from the classic 1946 Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger fantasy movie, A Matter of Life and Death.  And that’s what The Green Man promptly becomes, a fantasy rather than a ghost story – a story that’s no longer believable and hence no longer scary.

 

J.G. Ballard once said of Kingsley Amis: “as with so many English novelists he was vaguely suspicious of the power of the imagination: it could be too much of a good thing.  Yet the radical imagination is what we seek in a writer; when we read we want to encounter a very different world that will make sense of our own.”

 

Ironically, the problem with The Green Man is that in the end, and atypically, Amis lets his own imagination run away with him.  The book would have been more effective if, like those English novelists whom Ballard complains about, he had decided that too much imagination here is a bad thing.

 

© David Smith / From the Guardian

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The unsettling Robert Aickman

 

From the Independent

 

Six days before Halloween, here’s another reposting of an old blog entry about one of my favourite writers of macabre fiction.  This time it’s Robert Aickman, about whom I wrote this piece in 2015.

 

Over the years I’ve learned to be sceptical of the publicity blurbs adorning the covers of new paperback books, which usually assure potential buyers that the book in question is an absolute page-turner and can’t be put down.  However, the blurb on the cover of The Wine-Dark Sea, a collection of short stories by Robert Aickman that was originally published in 1988 and republished in 2014, is bang on the money.  It contains a comment by Neil Gaiman, no less, who says of the author: “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.”

 

That’s as good a description as any of the feeling I get when reading Aickman.  You’re aware that he’s going to perform a trick involving some literary sleight-of-hand.  You don’t know what the trick’s going to be, or when he’s going to do it.  Afterwards, you’re not even sure if the trick has been performed, or what the point of it was.  Then you mull it over.  And most of the time, you decide: Wow! That was impressive!

 

I’ve added ‘most of the time’, though, as a disclaimer to that last sentence.  Because, very occasionally, my reaction to an Aickman story has been different: What a load of bollocks!

 

I first came across Aickman’s work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when his stories cropped up in horror anthologies such as The Far Reaches of Fear (1976), New Terrors (1980) and Dark Forces (1980).  Although in those collections they rubbed shoulders with some grisly items, Aickman’s stories didn’t fit comfortably with the ‘horror’ label.  And the claim that some people made about him, that he was actually a ‘ghost’ story writer in the mould of M.R. James, didn’t convince either.  Aickman liked to describe his stories as ‘strange’ ones and ‘strange’ is the adjective I’d attach to them too.

 

It wasn’t just his fiction that seemed out-of-place.  Aickman himself seemed out-of-place in post-war Britain, being a man of old-fashioned views and erudite – some would say ‘elitist’ – tastes.  He was a conservationist who co-founded the Inland Waterways Association and battled to prevent Britain’s no-longer-in-commercial-use canal system from being filled in; a political conservative; and a connoisseur of ballet, opera, classical music and highbrow theatre.  I imagine that by the 1970s, when the UK’s political and cultural landscape was one of Labour governments and frequent industrial action by trade unions, glam rock and bubble-gum pop music, platform heels and loon pants, and cheap, cheerful and massively popular television sitcoms like Man about the House (1973-76) and On the Buses (1969-73), he was not a particularly happy bunny.

 

Inevitably, this sense of alienation appears in his fiction.  His stories feature a lot of discontented middle-aged men (or women) who are set in their ways and don’t do a good job coping with a changing, modern world that seems diametrically opposed to their ways.

 

I found much of Aickman’s work baffling when, as a teenager, I first encountered it.  However, I was impressed by his contribution to New Terrors, a 55-page story called The Stains.  It tells the tale of Stephen, a widowed civil servant, who meets a mysterious, wild-seeming, almost dryad-like girl called Nell whilst rambling on some remote moors.  Stephen becomes infatuated with Nell, with the result that he takes early retirement from his job, abandons his ties with the ‘civilised’ world and attempts to live with her in an empty, tumbledown house on the moors.  Yet the story is no New Age male fantasy.  Aickman steers it in a darker direction.  Nell seems to embody the natural world, but nature soon intrudes on her relationship with Stephen in a more grotesque way.  As their romance progresses, Stephen notices weird moulds, fungi and lichen spreading across the walls and furniture around him.  There are even hints that these agents of decay have manifested themselves on his flesh too, which I suppose makes the story an example of what would later be known as ‘body horror’.

 

The Stains is regarded as one of Aickman’s most autobiographical stories.  Many people see in Stephen’s unpleasantly doomed relationship with Nell a metaphor for Aickman’s love affair with the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard.  After being involved with him, and then with Laurie Lee and Arthur Koestler, Howard married Kingsley Amis in 1965.  Aickman, whose obsession with Howard was described by one friend as a ‘mental aberration’, must have found the thought that she’d chosen the increasingly boorish Amis over him hard to stomach.  Incidentally, like several of Aickman’s stories, The Stains shows that he wasn’t afraid to infuse his work – no matter how fuddy-duddy the characters – with a strong dose of the erotic.

 

© Berkley Books

 

My teenage self was sufficiently curious to seek out more of Aickman’s work and I located two collections of his short stories, Dark Entries (1964) and Cold Hand in Mine (1975).  Predictably, some of those stories bewildered me, and a few irritated me; but several, like The Stains, have haunted me ever since.  By the way, I wonder if a young Peter Murphy got his goth-y hands on the earlier collection and was so impressed by it that he pinched its title for the Bauhaus song Dark Entries, their second single, which they released in 1980.

 

One story I remember well is The Swords, in which a young travelling salesman goes to bed with a strangely blank woman whom he encounters at a seedy carnival sideshow.  Again, this allows Aickman to serve up some disquieting body horror at the story’s close.  Also memorable is The Hospice, a Kafka-esque tale of a motorist getting lost at night and asking for shelter at the titular institution.  Inside the hospice, he notices odd things about how the inmates are cared for.  For instance, in the dining room, he sees that one patient is discreetly shackled to the floor.

 

And in the award-winning Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal, Aickman tackles one of the commonest tropes in horror fiction in one of its most traditional settings.  This purports to be a series of diary entries written by a young woman in 1815 who’s accompanying her parents on a tour of central Europe.  She becomes excited when she discovers that they’re in the same neighbourhood as her secret hero, Lord Byron, who lives there ‘in riot and wickedness’.  And she soon encounters her own personal Lord Bryon in the form of a mysterious gentleman attending a local contessa’s party.  His ‘skin is somewhat pallid’, his nose is ‘aquiline and commanding’ and, most suspiciously of all, his mouth is ‘scarlet’.   You can guess where this is heading.

 

Aickman’s approach to telling creepy stories was subtle, mannered and leisurely.  Often, his stories needed a lot of build-up before they reached their denouements.  By the start of the 1980s, this seemed anachronistic.  The British tradition of horror fiction had been subtle, mannered and leisurely once, in the days of M.R. James and E.F. Benson, but it’d experienced a punk-rock moment in the mid-1970s when James Herbert unleashed a slew of bestselling horror novels like The Rats (1974) and The Fog (1975) that were unapologetically in your face with gore and violence.  And a little later, in the 1980s, Clive Barker’s Books of Blood series (1984-85) would pioneer a style of horror-writing that was in equal parts perverse, visionary and wildly gruesome.

 

So when I read in 1981 that Aickman had died of cancer – which, in his typically obstinate way, he’d refused to have any conventional medical treatment for, preferring instead to rely on dubious ‘homeopathic’ cures – I assumed, sadly, that his work would soon be out of fashion, out of print and out of readers’ memories.

 

© Mandarin-Reed Books

 

Years later, I stumbled across a copy of a posthumously-published collection by him called The Unsettled Dust (1990).  It contained one or two stories that annoyed me, but generally I greatly enjoyed it.  By now I knew what to expect from Aickman and was mature enough to appreciate his elegant prose, his subtle build-up of suspense, his oddball but well-drawn characters and his moments of utter strangeness.  Admittedly, I sometimes wasn’t sure what happened at the stories’ ends.  And even after thinking about them carefully, I still wasn’t sure.  But what the hell?  With Aickman, the pleasure was in getting there.

 

I particularly liked the title story, in which an official stays at a stately home whilst negotiating the transfer of the house’s running from the hands of its aristocratic inhabitants into the hands of the National Trust.  He discovers a peculiar room deep inside the house where, like in a giant snow globe, huge patches of dust are continually and spectrally floating through the air.  This illustrates another of Aickman’s abilities, to convincingly weave into his stories scenes and incidents that are totally outlandish.  So sober is the tone of everything else going on that you readily accept these mad bits as parts of the narrative.

 

Nonetheless, it seemed appropriate that I found The Unsettled Dust in a rack of second-hand books in a corner of a small antiques shop in a village in rural County Suffolk – an obscure place to find an obscure book by an obscure writer.

 

But, happily, I was wrong.  Recent years have seen a revival of interest in Robert Aickman, which reached a peak in 2014, the centenary of his year of birth, when Faber & Faber republished The Wine-Dark Sea, Dark Entries, Cold Hand in Mind and The Unsettled Dust.  His work has been championed by Neil Gaiman; by Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith of the influentially bizarre television show The League of Gentlemen (1999-2002, 2017); and by Dame Edna Everage herself (or himself), Barry Humphries, who in addition to being a comedian and actor is a committed bibliophile with a library of 25,000 books.  And the Guardian, Independent and Daily Telegraph have all printed articles about him lately.

 

I’ve just finished reading The Wine-Dark Sea and it’s possibly my favourite Aickman collection yet.  I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, though.  This being Aickman, there has to be at least one story that gets on my wick.  In this case the offender is Growing Boys, a satiric fantasy about a woman who has to deal with two sons growing at a supernatural rate, to a supernatural size, and becoming criminal psychopaths.  An ineffectual police force, an ineffectual school system and an ineffectual father (more interested in running for parliament as a Liberal Party candidate) do nothing to stop them.  Aickman uses the story to bemoan the delinquency of the younger generation and the inadequacy of Britain’s post-war institutions.  It’s reactionary but, much worse, it isn’t funny.

 

On the other hand, my favourite story here is The Inner Room.  It’s about a haunted doll’s house, which is a staple of many scary stories, most famously one written by M.R. James called – surprise! – The Haunted Dolls House.  Aickman, however, treats the subject with dark humour.  The story’s climax is unexpectedly and phantasmagorically weird, meanwhile, and reminds me a little of the work of Angela Carter.

 

Elsewhere, both Never Visit Venice and Your Tiny Hand is Frozen suggest Aickman taking two of his modern-day bugbears and transforming his indignation at them into horror stories.  Never Visit Venice lays into mass tourism.  Its hero is so disappointed in how the city of the title has been degraded by sightseers that, unwisely, he ends up taking a ride in an infernal gondola that seems to have been punted out through the gates of hell.  Your Tiny Hand is Frozen features an unsociable man who becomes addicted to his telephone, through which he communicates with a strange woman who may or may not really exist.  Telephones were becoming increasingly widespread at the time the story was written, presumably to Aickman’s discomfort.  It’s just as well that he didn’t live to see the situation today when smartphones have practically taken over the world.

 

Incidentally, so in vogue is Aickman now that there’s even a Facebook page and Twitter account devoted to him.  Robert Aickman with a presence on 21st-century social media?  I’m sure he would have loved that.  Not.

 

© Faber & Faber

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The uncanny May Sinclair

 

© Wordsworth Editions

 

Halloween is just ten days away.  In the spirit of the season, I thought I’d repost some old entries about my favourite writers of spooky stories.  I’ll begin with the impeccable May Sinclair, about whom I wrote this piece back in 2014.

 

I’ve just spent a few days reading Uncanny Stories, a collection of supernatural short stories by May Sinclair, a writer, poetess, literary critic and feminist who lived from 1863 to 1946.  During her life, Sinclair was also a suffragette, a volunteer with an ambulance corps that helped wounded soldiers in Flanders during World War I and a member of the Society of Psychical Research.  She was also the first person to use the term ‘stream of consciousness’ when describing the literary device made famous in James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Tragically, her literary career ended in the late 1920s, thanks to the onset of Parkinson’s disease.  By the time of her death a decade-and-a-half later she’d been forgotten by the literary lights she’d once fraternised with, who included the poet Ezra Pound.

 

Uncanny Stories was first published in 1923, a time when the most famous writer of ghost stories in British literature, Montague Rhodes James, was still alive.  I’m a fan of M.R. James, but it annoys me when mainstream literary critics applaud James’s ghostly short stories for their ‘subtlety’ and ‘delicacy’ and ‘understatement’.  If, for example, you’ve read James’s story Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad, whose climax sees a mysterious, primordial thing taking physical form in the linen of the spare bed in the hero’s hotel room, like a self-assembling mummy, you’ll know it isn’t that subtle, delicate or understated.  The story ends with an image that’s terrifyingly in-your-face.  Much of the time, James doesn’t imply his supernatural terrors, as those critics claim he does.  He shows them.

 

However, if you want proper subtlety, delicacy and understatment in your ghost stories, you should read the examples of the genre that May Sinclair pens in this collection.

 

There are ghosts in many of the tales in Uncanny Stories, but usually those ghosts serve to cast light on the psychology of the tales’ living protagonists.   In The Token, the ghost is of a gentle, devoted woman who manifests herself only for as long as it takes her repressed, uptight husband to admit to something he never admitted while she was alive – that he loved her.  Amusingly, Sinclair blames the husband’s problems on his Scottishness.  He “suffers from being Scottish, so that if he has a feeling, he makes it a point of honour to pretend that he hasn’t it.”

 

A dead wife also figures in The Nature of the Evidence, wherein the widowed husband – “one of those bigoted materialists of the nineteenth-century type who believe that consciousness is a purely physiological function, and that when you’re dead, you’re dead” – remarries, not out of love but because he cold-bloodedly recognises his own sexual needs and resolves to satisfy them: “It’s a physical necessity…  I shan’t marry the sort of woman who’ll expect anything more.”  Needless to say, when the ghost of his first wife inconveniently manifests herself, Marston’s rationalism, and his second marriage, take an unexpected hit.

 

In If the Dead Knew the supernatural and psychological tension revolves around a mother-son relationship rather than a husband-wife one.  Meanwhile, The Victim seems for much of its length to be a more traditional story wherein a servant murders his master and then becomes increasingly tormented by the murdered man’s spectre.  But while the ghost in a conventional story would be out for revenge, the ghost here has more complex motives, as are revealed in the story’s unexpected denouement.

 

The Intercessor is the final and most impressive story in the collection, recounting a haunting by a child’s ghost that, gradually, leads the narrator to understand the emotional circumstances of the child’s still-living parents.  The story’s intensity and the unforgiving wildness of its setting – the parents live beyond a field where “(a) wild plum tree stood half-naked on a hillock and pointed at the house”, and the house itself has “a bald gable-end pitched among the ash trees.  It was black grey, like ash bark drenched with rain” – are worthy of Emily Bronte.

 

Not all these tales are about ghosts.  Where their Fire is not Quenched and The Finding of the Absolute both speculate on what the after-life might be like.  In one story the after-life is an idealistic one and in the other it’s positively hideous.  The Flaw in the Crystal is about a female telepath who quietly uses her powers to cure other people of depression and instability.  She’s horrified to discover that the suicidal madness of one of her ‘patients’ is leaking into her own mind and threatening to infect those other people she’s psychically linked with.  The Flaw in the Crystal is the story I found hardest to get through, mainly because of its length.  It’s 50 pages long but could’ve had the same impact with 20 pages less.  Nonetheless, it contains some excellent writing and the scene where the madness begins to corrupt the heroine’s perceptions of the world around her is worthy of H.P. Lovecraft.  The standard of the prose is considerably higher than Lovecraft’s, though.

 

A sad fact of life – and death – is that when people die, they usually leave unfinished business with those around them.  The supernatural aspects of the stories here allow their protagonists, living and dead, a second chance to resolve their business with one another.  Subtle rather than frightening, and not hell-bent on wreaking revenge, the worst that can be said about May Sinclair’s phantoms is that they’re unnerving in their determination to sort things out.

 

From wikipedia.org

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Jim Mountfield hears the patter of tiny feet

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Here’s a plug for another short story by Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for works of horror, supernatural and generally dark fiction, which has been published this month.

 

The story’s called The Four-Legged Friend and it’s featured in Volume 16, Issue 5 of Schlock! Webzine.  It’s set in modern-day Bangkok – well, Bangkok until a couple of months ago, when tourists were still able to go there – and is inspired by a visit I once made to an antiquated surgical museum at one of the city’s hospitals.  My horror writer’s antenna started buzzing (and I started thinking, “Hey, I could use this idea in a story!”) when I noticed how little shrines consisting of flowers, pictures, toys and other knickknacks had been set up around some of the exhibits.  These were in honour of the people who’d donated their bodies, or parts of their bodies, that’d become those exhibits.

 

Surgical museums in the Western world are usually clinical, dispassionate affairs.  With its shrines, however, this one in Bangkok seemed to remind its visitors of two things: that the exhibits had human origins and that there was a spiritual aspect to them too.  What you were looking at in those glass cases once belonged to people who’d had souls.  Indeed, depending on your belief system, you might argue that those souls were still present…

 

As well as being inspired by something I saw in a Thai museum, The Four-Legged Friend is influenced by one of the greatest of all ghost story writers, M.R. James, and in particular by the paranoia that James was able to evoke in stories like Casting the Runes (1911) and Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad (1904).  James skilfully exploited the basic human fear of being followed.  His characters frequently aren’t just haunted – they’re being hunted.    I should say too that after I finished the story and read it through, I was surprised at how much it reminded me of Daphne du Maurier’s masterly, Venice-set novella Don’t Look Now (1971), with the protagonists being tourists, the presence of a child-like apparition and the references to water – some of the action takes place on board Bangkok’s river ferries.

 

A quick word of warning, however, to manage expectations: my story may not be quite as good as M.R. James or Daphne du Maurier!

 

For the rest of June 2020, The Four-Legged Friend can be accessed here.  The main page of Volume 16, Issue 5 of Schlock! Webzine, in which the story appears, is available here.