The Ghost Slayers - Mike Ashley (ed)

 Thrilling tales of occult detection...  Yes!   Ghost-finders - my absolute fave.   And favourite amongst them, John Silence and Thomas Carnacki, both prominent in this compilation of classics by Mike Ashley for the British Library.   My second faves, Aylmer Vance and Flaxman Low, both appear, too.   The Silence and the Carnacki were both familiar to me - Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson both only wrote one collection each and I have long had both - but I was reminded how superior Blackwood was with Ashley's choice of 'A Psychic Invasion.'   Sadly, 'The Searcher of the End House' is to my mind one of the lesser Carnacki tales.

New to me were the tales by Bertram Atkey, Dion Fortune, Moray Dalton, Gordon Hillman and Joseph Payne Brennan.   The latter two were especially effective.   'Forgotten Harbour' (1931) by Hillman is a tale of spooky doings at a fog-bound lighthouse, absolutely dripping with menace.   Brennan's story, 'In Death as in Life' is by far the most recent of the tales, dating only from 1963, but his ghostfinder, Lucius Leffing, is a Victorian out of his time, and the ghost when it manifests is literally dripping, truly horrible, and squishy.   Brennan's real stroke of genius is to make himself Leffing's Dr Watson.

A fantastic collection, essential for any fan of the sub-genre.

Plays 3 - Steven Berkoff

 Steven Berkoff entered the theatre about the same time I began training for it.   He has therefore always figured in my theatrical consciousness, though I have never seen his work and, for some reason, none of it has joined my vast collection of plays - until I picked this up earlier in the week.

The collection here is of his minor work, two of which have never been performed (though there has been an acted-out reading of The Messiah).   That does not mean they are neglible.   All three appeal to me largely because they happen to be subjects which I have researched: the blood libel of Jews in medieval England, Jesus the man, and the Oedipus myth.

Ritual in Blood is the fully realised play, given at Nottingham Playhouse in 2001.   I wish I had been involved with theatre at that time - I would have loved to see it.   The piece is ambitious, dozens of characters coming and going, and Berkoff and I come to same conclusion: it's all, always, about money.  The Messiah naturally deploys similar devices - Berkoff famously developed idiosyncratic, highly personal forms of acting and writing.   I feel sure he would have reworked some elements of this text had it gone on to be fully staged.   I have considered the same twist or explanation for the miracle but did not find it entirely satisfactory here.

Oedipus I thought was excellent.   Firstly we are not dealing with the same level of reality here.   It has always been a myth and Berkoff's style is brilliantly 'mythic'.   Like Sophocles, he makes the action continuous - one unbelievably awful episode - and breezily ignores or overrides the obvious problems involved.   Indeed, it is the pace which gives the piece its power.   I especially enjoyed his device for a couple of necessary flashbacks: instead of dull narration, characters act out the incidents as if they were there, witnesses to things happening now, before their eyes.

Fascinating and intriguing.

The Unknown - Algernon Blackwood

 Another excellent collection from the sadly defunct Handheld Press.   The idea here is to demonstrate Blackwood's range beyond the usual suspects, 'Wendigo' and 'The Willows'.   Editor Henry Batholomew four key topics - Canada, Mountain, Reincarnation and Imagination - and illustrates each with three examples, an essay or article, and two short stories.

I was especially taken with the Reincarnation section, which firstly demonstrates how Blackwood came to view the topic, then follows with 'The Insanity of Jones' from 1907 and 'The Tarn of Sacrifice' from 1921.   'The Insanity of Jones' was my favourite in the book, a tale of ancient revenge carried out in the present.   The third wheel as it were, the spirit who sucks the meek clerk Jones into his act of revenge, was truly scary.   I would also single out the story 'By Water' in the final Imagination section, largely because it is the story Blackwood talks about writing in the essay 'The Genesis of Ideas' which immediately precedes it.

Highly recommended.

Downward to the Earth - Robert Silverberg

 Interesting concepts abound here.   A decade after the planet was restored to its sentient people, Edmund Gundersen feels a compulsion to return to Belzagor to put things right on his own account.   A former worker for the colonial power, Gundersen was peripherally involved in some of the misdeeds that went on.   He encountered the notorious Kurtz (yes, Kurtz) who shared snake venom with one of the two sentient people, the elephantine nildoror.   Gundersen once saw Kurtz, venomed up to the gills himself, dance with the nildoror.   Gundersen's time on Belzagor wasn't all bad, though.   He met and fell in love with the beautiful Seema.

But now Seema is partnered up with Kurtz.   Kurtz, she says, is off on an expedition, but her sulidor (the sulidoror are the other sentient people on Belzagor, giant ape-like people) tells Gundersen that Kurtz is hidden away on the compound, ill.    Gundersen sees him - and is horrified.

It is rare for a planet to have two sentient races, particularly two races so strikingly different.   Both have speech, both are said to have souls.   The land is divided between them.   The nildoror have the fertile plains, the sulidoror occupy the misty uplands.   The nildoror are vegetarian grazers, the sulidoror omnivore hunter-gatherers.   There is no emnity: the two races come and go across one another's territory   Both have seemingly come to terms with their colonial past in which the sulidoror were servants, the nildoror transport.   They continue to provide these services for human tourists.   Now they do it by consent.

Gundersen has always got on reasonably well with the natives of Belzagor.   He can speak both languages, though he is not so fluent with the gestures that provide nuance.   He politely seeks permission from a senior nildor to go to the hill country.   Permission is granted so long as he brings back Cedric Cullen, who has apparently commited a serious transgression and exiled himself among the sulidoror.   Gundersen wants to find out what happened to Kurtz in the hill country.   Most of all he wants to find out about the rebirth ceremony the nildoror undergo there.   Every twenty years ot so a nildor is summoned to the rebirthing.   This was Gundersen's transgression: he needed nildoror to help repair a breached dam and prevented them going on their rebirthing trek.    So off he goes - into the heart of darkness.

Yes, Downward to the Earth is a sci fi take on the Conrad classic.   The question in both is what has Kurtz found that has turned him into a monster?   'The horror ...  the horror...."    Silverberg's version pays off big time, with a twist that I absolutely didn't see coming.   This is the first time I have read any Silverberg.   I was very impressed.

New Worlds 8 - (ed) Hilary Bailey

 New Worlds magazine was founded before WW2 and taken over by Michael Moorcock in the sixties.   With the aid of an Arts Council grant Moorcock turned New Worlds into the monthly journal of the British New Wave in sci fi: Moorcock himself, Ballard, Aldiss etc.   Around 1970 the magazine started to flounder.   Moorcock persuaded Sphere to continue it as a 'quarterly' paperback.   By 1975 when this eighth and last edition came out, Moorcock's wife Hilary Bailey was editor and their close longterm collaborator M John Harrison was literary editor.

Bailey made a good job of editing this one.   The stories appear in descending order of quality.   We start with Harrison's 'Running Down', a Yorkshire-set tale combining his interest in climbing with nature horror.   Then we have 'White Stars', an interlude from Moorcock's long-running and intricate Dancers at the End of Time thread.   I was initially put off Moorcock by Dancers when I was a young teenager, but I thoroughly enjoyed 'White Stars'.   Barrington Bayley's 'The Bees of Knowledge' is different and well-written.   Peter Jobling's 'Building Blocks', which Bailey in her introduction suggests might be a debut piece, is equally interesting but not quite so well written.   The other, shorter, stories did not greatly appeal.

I was fascinated by the two book reviews at the end, one by Harrison, the other by John Clute.  Is this what sci reviews were like in the Seventies?   By way of illustration, I give you title of Clute's ten-page review of Brian Aldiss's novel, The Eighty-Minute Hour: 'I say Begone! Apotropaic Narcosis, I'm Going to Read the Damn Thing, Ha Ha.'   Worryingly, Harrison's marginally shorter review of Thomas M Disch's collection Getting into Death is in similar vein.

John Clute went on to become one of the founders of Interzone, which is in many ways was the successor to New Worlds.   The issue I have just acquired contains work by Harrison and Aldiss and Thomas M Disch.   I'll report on it shortly.

Block 46 - Johana Gustawsson

 Johana Gustawsson is the Queen of French noir.   She was born in Marseilles, lived in London and now lives in Sweden.   This, the first in her series featuring Canadian profiler Emily Roy and London-based true crime writer Alexis Castells, who is Spanish, takes place in Sweden, London, and Germany, specifically in Buchenwald concentration camp in the closing years of World War II; everything else takes place in 2014, which I assume is when the book was written.

Alexis is drawn in when her friend, the jewellry designer Linnea Blix, fails to turn up for her launch party in London.   Her mutilated body is found in Sweden, an out-of-the-way town called Falkenberg.   Emily Roy is the profiler sent to assist the Swedish police.

Then a boy turns up murdered in London, with the same signature wounds.   Is it a copycat, a serial killer with broad tastes, or (as Emily suggests) a pair of killers operating together, one of them dominating the other?

Interweaved with the investigation narrative is the story of young Erich Hebner, a German student sent to Buchenwald as a political prisoner.   He has a measure of medical training and is recruited by the camp doctor, Horst Fleisher, with the gruesome experiments he carries out in Block 46.   After the war, Hebner drifts around Europe, ending up living in the same cul de sac in Falkenberg where Linnea Blix had her hideaway.   That's got to be more than a coincidence right?   I confess I didn't see the final twist coming.

The action moves along at a punchy pace.   The writing is neat, controlled where it needs to be, more expansive where it doesn't.   There's a lot of dialogue which all rings true.   The characterisation is what it needs to be with a series - that is to say, a lot remains to be discovered about Roy and Castells.   On the other hand we get plenty of insight into Erich and other characters involved in the main plot.

I enjoyed Block 46.   I already have the other two Roy/Castells novels on my Kindle and will read them soon.   I was interested in Johana Gustawsson because Thomas Enger collaborates on a series with her as well as Jorn Lier Horst on the Blix/Ramm series.   Wait a minute ...  Linnea Blix and Alexander Blix?   That's got to be more than a coincidence.   Right?

Viriconium - M John Harrison

 Discovering the work of M John Harrison over the last year or so has been a profound experience.   He is by far the best of his genre, though that poses the question: what exactly is his genre?   I'll take a stab at dark imaginative fiction.   It doesn't matter if it has a sci fi setting, an imagined world outside time, or a neglected corner of this world, Harrison always goes further, adding a sense of the inexplicable, which is pure Harrison.

This Unwin paperback from the mid-80s combines two books of the Viriconium series, the novel In Viriconium (1982) and the short stories and associated pieces collected as Viriconium Nights (1984).   There are other Viriconium works, notably The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings.

Viriconium is everywhere and nowhere.   It is not always Viriconium; sometimes it is Uroconium, or Vrico.   It is medieval and sometimes it is fin de siecle Paris.   There is an Artists' Quarter, a High City, and heathland.   The totem of the city, though, is the Mari Lwyd, immortalised by Dylan Thomas's friend Vernon Watkins.  

Characters come and reappear in different contexts.   They have wondrous names and titles.  Ardwick Crome, the Grand Cairo, Morgante who is also Rotgob and sometimes Kiss-O-Suck, Mammy Vooley, Ignace Retz and Dissolution Khan.   One story, 'A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium', is absolutely set in contemporary York and is about how one gets from here to the mystic city via a mirror "in the lavatory og the Merrie England cafe, a little further down New Street than the El Greco, between Ramsden Street junction and Imperial Arcade" in, I think, Huddersfield.   Which feels exactly right.

In Virconium is the most satisfying piece, a sort of love story set in the Artists Quarter during a time of plague.   In this period a pair of demi-gods called the Barley Brothers (Matey and Gog) rampage through the city until they are defeated by the painter Ashlyme.   The stories of Virconium Nights are, by definition, more fragmentary but each has incredible depth, compelling the reader to ask questions and make connections, not all of which are necessarily there.

Fascinating, enthralling, often startling.   M John Harrison is giving my all-time favourite author (the late E L Doctorow) a run for his money.