The Third Ghost Book - Lady Cynthia Asquith

 

A classic collection from 1955, this is very much about comfortable, middle class ghosts.  The writers reek of middle-classness, their prose overdone and their imagination limited.  Lady Cynthia herself is by far the worst.  There are, however, some gems amid the dross - a story by Robert Aickman I hadn't come across before ("Ringing the Changes"), Marghanita Laski's solitary classic ("The Tower"), and one by a writer unknown to me ("The House in the Glen" by John Connell).  Otherwise, I'm afraid to say, not worth the bother.

Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories - Robert Aickman (ed)

 

Inevitably in a collection like this, there are going to be old friends.  For me, these included Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Squire Toby's Will' and William Hope Hodgson's 'The Voice in the Night'.  A personal favourite, Robert Aickman's 'The Trains' was also here.  I had read D H Lawrence's 'The Rocking-Horse Winner' and Algernon Blackwood's 'The Wendigo', both so long ago that I had no real memory of them.  Both were better than expected, true classics of the genre, though neither was about ghosts.  The revelation among the others was, for me, Walter de la Mare's 'Seaton's Aunt'.  De la Mare has cropped up a lot in my research recently but indirectly, and I had not realised how effective his creepy fiction can be.  'Seaton's Aunt', again not a ghost story, reminded me strongly of Kipling at his best.

The Model - Robert Aickman

 

The Model is a novella, left by Aickman when he died in 1981 and published in 1988.  It is now a Faber Find and I got the ebook.  Aickman told a friend he thought it was his best work.  I wouldn't go that far but it is different and it is always great to see a dying man branching out into a new field.

What we have is a grim fairy tale, set in Tsarist Russia sometime in the second half of the Nineteenth Century.  Elena is a young girl who lives a very sheltered life in a remote town.  Her mother is an invalid, her father the local lawyer.  A visiting couple leave her a book about ballet which inspires Elena to build a model theatre.  A very strange man then pays a flying visit and gives her toy dancers.

Elena is on the verge of puberty and her parents start pressing her to look to the future.  Her mother wants her to become a nun which, she has been told by God Himself, will keep the mother alive a little longer.  Her father, however, wants Elena to become the 'companion' to the local nobleman's mysterious son and, all being well, to marry him.  But Elena is set on becoming a ballerina and takes herself off to the nearest town with an opera house.  She travels alone through the bleak Russian winter.  Along the way she meets a talking bear and a prince who wants to be a revolutionary.  She makes her debut her first night in town, but is taken in by a strange brown lady with simian servants, only to be rescued by a distant cousin of one of her friends back home - a young woman posing, for reasons vaguely connected to her university studies, as an officer in the hussars,

The Model is, in short, a triumph, very different to Aickman's other work (much of it reviewed elsewhere on this blog).  It is beautifully written, full of colour and imagination, and strongly recommended.

The Beetle - Richard Marsh

There are many reasons for adopting a pseudonym.  One of the best has to be Bernard Heldman.  He had a reasonable reputation as a writer but then, in 1884, he was sentenced to eighteen months for issuing dud cheques.  Since many of the recipients had been literary people, Heldman wisely took the name Richard Marsh on his release, and it was as Marsh that he published the hugely successful The Beetle in 1897.

How successful was The Beetle?  Initially it outsold Dracula, published the same year.  That is not the case today and I had never heard of Marsh until I came across Penguin's shortlived yellowback horrors in 2011.

It's perhaps the first Revenge-of-the-Pharoahs chiller.  A mysterious Arab pitches up in London.  He (or perhaps an entity he brought with him) takes control of a homeless man who is sent to burgle the house of the rising star of Parliament, Paul Lessingham.  Lessingham captures the burglar in the act but rather than tackle him or summon a constable, he is overcome with horror.  This, we eventually learn, is due to a youthful misadventure Lessingham suffered in Egypt.  In the meantime inventor Sydney Atherton bumps into the naked burglar (yes, there is a phenomenal amount of male and female nudity here - no wonder it sold well) in the street outside Lessingham's house.  Atherton and Lessingham are already at loggerheads because both are enamoured of Marjorie Linden.

Marsh uses Wilkie Collins' technique of multiple narrators - we have Holt (the homeless man), Atherton, Marjorie, and finally and least successful, the account of the Hon Augustus Champnell, confidential agent.  Champnell fails to engage us because he is not caught up in the main narrative and because he seems to have too much pre-knowledge.  His involvement starts when Lessingham consults him on the very last day of the story yet Champnell doesn't bat an eyelid when he's told there is a gender-bending Egyptian priest(ess) on the loose in London whose party trick is to transform into a giant scarab beetle.  I wondered if Champnell is a Holmesian super-detective, perhaps carried forward from another strand of Marsh's prolific output.

Nevertheless The Beetle ends with a train chase, and you can't get more Victorian than that.  Marsh also cleverly leaves many key questions unanswered.  Perhaps he intended to write a sequel.  In the end Heldman/Marsh died relatively young (58).  His grandson, interestingly, was that master of the supernatural short story, extensively reviewed on this blog, Robert Aickman.

The Unsettled Dust - Robert Aickman

The third of the Faber Finds collection I bought earlier this year and which have informed my reading (and a good slice of my writing) ever since.  There is a fourth, traditionally published by Faber on the back of the Finds success, which I will be treating myself to as a reward for surviving Christmas.

Overall, I found The Unsettled Dust  most satisfying of the three collections.  "The Cicerones" is well known, following a TV adaptation a couple of years ago which did much to stimulate a new interest in Aickman, certainly in my case.  "The Unsettled Dust", "The House of the Russians" and "The Stains" are equally disturbing in a similar way - the unexplained, peripheral horror; an almost feral nastiness always waiting to pounce.

What will I do when I've read the fourth and final collection?  I shall have to seek out the stories that missed the cut.

Cold Hand in Mine - Robert Aickman

The second of my Aickman Faber Finds but I suspect originally published before Wine Dark Sea.  Again, we have eight short stories.  The settings are as varied as ever, with many of the same tropes.  Again, the tales work best when they are truly strange.  I absolutely love it when something extremely strange happens - and that's it: no explanation, no consequences.

Take for example the opening story, 'The Swords'.  A young travelling salesman has his first sexual experience with a woman off the fair, a woman who can be pierced with swords without lasting injury or apparent pain.  The fact that the setting is somewhere in the West Midlands at the height of its grime and squalor only enhances the overall seediness.  Then something happens - I won't say what, save that it's strange, and disturbing and ever so slightly revolting.  Our hero pays off her pimp - somewhere else in the lodging house someone screams - and that's it.  Brilliant.

Something similar happens in 'The Hospice'.  Another commercial traveller, this time seemingly in the 1960s, runs out of petrol and spends the night at the titular establishment.  The meals are absolutely enormous.  They offer him a bed.  He has to share - everyone shares at the Hospice, by choice apparently.  In the night his room mate disappears and locks our protagonist in.  He returns later.  In the morning they carry out a body,  We don't know whose.  And they generously offer our hero a lift to the nearest petrol station ... in the hearse.

These and 'The Same Dog' were my favourites.  'Meeting Mr Millar' was enjoyable, and 'Neimandswasser' reminded me of D H Lawrence's 'The Prussian Officer'.  Some stories are better than others but there are no duds.  I'm really enjoying the range Aickman manages to achieve within quite a limited genre, and the depth of characterisation.  These are what make him a master.

The Wine Dark Sea - Robert Aickman

With Aickman, the great Faber Finds print on demand service comes into his own.  By issuing three of his strange story collections as Finds, Faber were able to build sufficient interest to republish another collection in traditional form.

I had heard of Aickman, who is popular with cult writers like Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson, and who was the grandson of the great Victorian horror writer Richard Marsh (author of The Beetle, 1897), but whose books are very hard to come by. This seems to be because he was a truly awkward sod.  Then I walked into my local Oxfam and there, on the classics shelf, were all three Faber Find collections, which I am now working my way through.

First off, Aickman has a unique flavour.  His stories are long - 30 pages or more, perhaps best defined as mini novellas - and not especially horrific.  Instead they are strange, just like he said they were.  His characters tend to be loners, outsiders, and we see generally see the world through their eyes.  The locations are incredibly varied - Greek island, Venice, industrial Yorkshire, Sweden, and that's just in this volume. There is often a thread of present-versus-past in which the present tends to come off worst.

There are eight stories here.  The first is the title piece - a tourist goes to a Greek island despite being warned off by the locals and finds himself embroiled in elemental forces personified.  To me it was obvious, not sufficiently strange and certainly nowhere near adequately erotic, albeit we have to remember Aickman died in 1981, in his mid-sixties, so "Wine Dark Sea" might have been hot stuff in its day.  The next story, "The Trains", was my favourite - two postwar young women hiking in Yorkshire have to take refuge in an isolated house.  The twist with the butler was very strange indeed, and I loved that Aickman doesn't bother explaining it.  The butler is called Beech, a tribute to the butler of the same name in Wodehouse's Blandings series - the stories are dotted with such little touches, which only increase the enjoyment.

Then it's "Your Tiny Hand is Frozen" about lonely people and the telephone, followed by "Growing Boys", exactly what it says on the tin and hugely enjoyable.  "The Fetch" and "The Inner Room" both feature hopeless fathers, which seems to be another Aickman trope.  The latter didn't quite work for me, albeit I loved it right up to the point at which it was supposed to become disturbing.  On the other hand, the woman who turned out to be the titular fetch was deeply disturbing and lingered round the back of my mind for some days.

Finally 'Never Visit Venice' and 'Into the Woods' were both English-abroad stories in which the locations play a key role.  Venice has become too associated with weird goings-on since Aickman wrote his contribution, so it has lost some of its force.  Again, though, the writing is good and engrossing.  'Into the Woods' is extremely strange and unsettling.  Such an odd idea to begin with - an asylum for insomniacs - which Aickman then builds on with a masterly touch.

The introduction is by Peter Straub.  He was big news in 1988 when this edition was first published.  He isn't now, and the introduction isn't worth the paper it's printed on.