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 Lair of the White Worm - Bram Stoker

 It's not really a secret that Bram Stoker never equalled anything like the success of Dracula, even though Dracula wasn't that big success in his lifetime.  However, Lair of the White Worm is very disappointing.  You feel the inky thumbprint of Dracula all over it: ridiculously trite love affairs; the Byronic or Irving-esque anti-hero; the arrow-straight man of action from overseas.  The main interest is Lady Arabella March of Diana's Grove, who has set her cap, for financial reasons, at the newly returned Edgar Caswell of Castra Regis, who is, perhaps wisely, more interested in the gigantic kite he flies to scare off birds.

The setting is also of interest: the Vale of Cheshire, which has a deep a history as Dracula's Transylvania.  It is contemporary Cheshire and thus railways play a major role.  It was a rare highlight when the gigantic serpent chased the train most of the way to Liverpool.  Mainly, though, it is very silly and not at all frightening.  The monster is absurd, its linkage with Arabella not thought through, and there are far too many deferred conversations, conveniently putting off gobbets of key information.

It's interesting, particularly for devotees of the genre, but not much more.  It would have fared much better as a novella than as a novel.

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!

The Monk - Matthew Lewis

 

The Monk is the transitional novel between the High Gothic of Walpole and Beckford and the Romantic Gothic of Polidori and Mary Shelley.  The fanciful foreign setting is retained - in this case Madrid - but here it is particularly apposite.  The man turned monster is Ambrosio, the prodigy recently appointed as head of his order and the sensationalist preacher at the cathedral.  His end is partly at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition.

The Monk is a multiple narrative, two intertwined stories told in several voices.  This works surprisingly well and was no doubt an influence on Stoker when he produced Dracula almost a century later.  Essentially, Don Lorenzo and Don Raymond are two young men about town, heirs to great fortunes and noble titles.  Raymond has already fallen for Lorenzo's sister Agnes and Lorenzo meets young beauty Antonia at one of Ambrosio's packed sermons.  Both are good, religious girls.  Agnes, indeed, is on the verge of becoming a nun.  Raymond, nevertheless, gets her pregnant.  Ambrosio, meanwhile, has been seduced by one of his novices, a woman disguised as a monk.  She is a very naughty woman and uses demonology to enable Ambrosio to murder Antonio's mother, drug, kidnap and ultimately rape Antonia.  Meanwhile Agnes's pregnancy has been discovered and the domina of the Order of St Claire has her immured in a secret sepulchre.

Yes, it's that level of Gothic.

Everything about The Monk was sensational when it was published in 1796, not least that it's first-time author was only twenty and already a Member of Parliament.  Lewis later had some success on the stage but was forever 'Monk' Lewis.  Despite bans and edits and withdrawals from circulation The Monk was a runaway success and has continued for more than 200 years as an underground classic.  Most people have heard about it (let us not forget that Lewis visited Byron and Shelley and their establishment at the Villa Diodati immediately before the creation of The Vampyre and Frankenstein) but not everybody has read it.  They really should.  It is better than it has any right to be.

Late Victorian Gothic Tales

It's a great idea to anthologise the late Victorian Gothic. This, after all, is the Gothic everyone knows today, the Gothic of Dracula and the Mummy as opposed to the original Gothic of Otranto and Vathek. Inevitably, though, you are going to end up with a mixed bag.

The first story, for example, is 'Dionea' by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). 'Dionea' is very much in the neo-baroque mode of Walpole and Mrs Radcliffe. It is nevertheless very effective. 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime' on the other hand is a spoof, clever enough but not especially funny and I'm afraid I long since tired of Wilde's juvenile precocity.  'Sir Edward Orme' by Henry James is beautifully written but not in any way disturbing. We then come to Kipling's 'The Mark of the Beast' which is both exquisitely written and profoundly disturbing. 'The Dak Bungalow at Dakor', by Kipling's fellow Raj writer Mrs Croker, is sludge not worth anthologising.


Then we have two stories by Conan Doyle at the height of his Sherlock Holmes success - 'Lot No 249', a mummy story, perhaps even the first mummy story, in which the characterisation of the mummy's owner is far more creepy than the mummy itself, and 'The Case of Lady Sannox', which so affected me that I am currently writing a direct follow-up for my own amusement. The thing with 'Lady Sannox' is Doyle's extreme contempt for the titular woman. Is this misogyny or puritanism? The mutilation inflicted on her reminded me strongly of Freud and Fliess's treatment of Emma Eckstein's nose, which has always seemed to me to be more about their sexual fetishes than hers.


Grant Allen's 'Pallinghurst Barrow' has a powerful theme but is poorly written. Two brief contes cruelles by Jean Lorrain have the opposite problem, strong and effective writing about nothing very much. 'The Great God Pan' by Arthur Machen is really a novella, an important distinction in that the fractured narrative he uses would not be practicable in a short story. It is one of Machen's better known works and the first I have read. I like it very much. I especially enjoy the way the horror is suggested and then cut away from, leaving it to the reader's worst imaginings. This of course is the technique later used to great effect by Val Lewton in his 1942 movie Cat People.


The final offering, M P Shiel's 'Viala', is another novella first published, like 'Pan', in The Bodley Head's notorious Keynotes series. Shiel is another pioneer of the macabre who I have heard about but never previously read. He is another I will have to pursue further, albeit he is totally different to Machen. Where Machen goes for subtlety and suggestion, Shiel is anything but. He is so wild and extravagant that often his language cannot keep up. His Viala is the Castle of Otranto remodelled by Vathek and transplanted to the Far North. Significantly for me, as a researcher into William Hope Hodgson, I'm pretty sure I now know where the idea of The House on the Borderland came from. As Roger Luckhurst notes in his introduction, 'Viala' is 'genuinely unhinged' - and that, it turns out, is by no means a bad thing.


To end with the Introduction... It will not be news to regular visitors to this blog, that I tend not to be a fan of the form in general. I have just bought a collection of ghost stories with an introduction of no more than 500 feeble words by some non-entity that made me want to get my money back. In this case, however, the Introduction and Notes are essential and add hugely to the experience of reading the book. Luckhurst knows whereof he speaks and can be trusted as a source for others. Well done to him and to Oxford World's Classics for producing this gem.