Prince of Darkness - Ray Russell

 Prince of Darkness  is a collection of Russell's magazine stories from about 1955 to 1970.  Several appeared in Playboy, of which he was for a long time fiction editor.   'The Prince of Darkness' is actually 'The Cage', the title under which it was originally published in 1958 and as which it reappears in 1980's Haunted Castles.

The best story here is 'Domino' (1967), which is almost long enough to be a novella.  It is certainly long enough to allow Russell's 'contemporary' style (very different to his 'gothic' style) to work effectively.  It's the story of Jack Straw, a jaded journalist who is lavishly commissioned to cover the funeral of a South American dictator who has died of meningitis.  Straw is the ideal man for the job because he wrote a book about President Mendoza's previous career as a controversial film director who married his muse, a former nude dancer.  Because of the book, Straw has contacts at the highest level of government in the unnamed Latin nation.  It's a story in which nothing and no one is as they seem.  An expert long short story well worth the lesser work that precedes it here.

Haunted Castles - Ray Russell

 Round this time last year I reviewed Ray Russell's The Case Against Satan on my blog.  On the basis of that I bought Haunted Castles and now I've finally got round to reading it.   What a book!  A masterpiece of Gothic Horror that has somehow fallen from sight.  Thankfully it's now a Penguin Classic endorsed by the great Guillermo del Toro.

Essentially the collected Gothic stories of Russell (who also wrote sci fi and twist-in-tail stories), Haunted Castles comprises three long tales obviously meant to go together from the outset ('Sardonicus', 'Sagittarius', and 'Sanguinarius') and four shorter works in similar style: 'Comet Wine', 'The Runaway Lovers', 'The Vendetta' and 'The Cage' (also known as 'The Prince of Darkness', the opening story in Russell's collection of the same name, which I'm currently working my way through.)

If I have to name a favourite, it's 'Sagittarius'.  I liked 'Sardonicus' a lot, 'Sanguinarius' a little less, mainly because it's Eliabeth Bathory and I think my own novella about her will be scarier; basically, we take totally different approaches to her character.   'Sagittarius', though, is pure Grand Guignol and couldn't be more to my taste.  One of the characters even performs at the theatre of the same name.  Pure bliss.

Overall, I really enjoyed the way several stories are linked by Harley Street physician Sir Robert Congrave and his travelling pal Lord Henry Stanton.  Stanton's letters to Congrave give Russell another story-telling device which adds texture to his narratives.  It helps that the two friends are so completely different in character.

In summary, Ray Russell is a great of horror fiction, up there with Lovecraft and M R James.  I deliberately exclude living masters because they came after.  Stephen King, of course, is a generation later than Russell but broke through at a similar time.   I wonder if King, surely the greatest horror writer of all time, was aware of Russell when he started out? 

The Case Against Satan - Ray Russell

 

A real discovery so far as I'm concerned.  I had never heard of Ray Russell before stumbling across this short novel in the horror section of an online used bookseller.  Russell (1924-99) was an editor at Playboy who published all the greats - Vonnegut, Bloch, etc.  This, and the collection Haunted Castles, which dropped through my letterbox this morning, seem to be the extent of his own published work.  On the one hand it's a crying shame because he is stunningly good; on the upside, he took his time and got his stories as near perfection as possible.

The Case Against Satan came out in 1962, long before The Exorcist, which it clearly influenced.  Here, too, it is a young girl (sixteen years old) who is possessed by a demon and exorcised by her local priest and the diocesan bishop.  It's a long time since I read or saw The Exorcist so I can't remember if the lead priest in that had his doubts about demons.  The priest here, Gregory Sargent, is very modern in his views.  He trusts psychiatry, which the Catholic church in 1962 didn't, and he writes racy articles for magazines not a million miles from Playboy.  Bishop Conrad Crimmings is old school.  The contrast between the clergy, plus Sargent's inner conflicts, mirror the battle for the soul of Susan Garth.  In the non-clerical world we have conflict between anti-Catholic printer and agitator John Talbot and the easy-going precinct police lieutenant Frank Berardi.  And at the root of Susan's possession Russell in no way shies away from the likely cause - which to the best of my recall, The Exorcist goes nowhere near.  All of this in 138 beautifully written pages.  Gothic for grown-ups!