A Natural History of Ghosts - Roger Clarke

The title is a play on Pliny, the man responsible for so much of the world's nonsense, including (probably) ghosts. Roger Clarke is himself a ghost-hunter, but the vast majority of the cases he reports here are fake, up to and including Most Haunted on Living TV in the Nineties and Noughties.

Books like this used to be a staple when I was young - by names like Peter Underwood and Hans Holzer - but it seems the scandals that killed off Most Haunted and Living TV also put paid to the genre for a while.  That's a shame because many literary greats either wrote the occasional ghost story (Daniel Defoe, Henry James and, of course, Dickens) or even specialised (M R James and Sheridan le Fanu).

Clarke has been diligent in his research and has found cases I knew nothing about. It is a shame the proof reading wasn't to the same level of diligence. You can forgive a self-published text but this is from Penguin for Pete's sake. I enjoyed it all the same.

The Turn of the Screw - Henry James

The original, the classic, freaky children horror story. Yes, not one but two malicious brats conjuring up the ghosts of their dead governess and factotum, who may also (it is heavily implied) have been their abusers. Strong stuff for 1898; extremely strong stuff for the sexless aesthete Henry James. Atypical, definitely, but perhaps that's why The Turn of the Screw is his best known work.


Being a Penguin Classic, this edition comes with a pompous introduction by a Yale professor (David Bromwich) and James's own, even more pretentious introduction to the New York edition of 1908. I didn't bother pursuing either. James was a writer - everything he needed to say should be there on the page. I also did not require two pages of asinine notes from Philip Horne of UCL. I hope Phil didn't get paid for his labours.


Enough sounding off - time for the good news. The Turn of the Screw is a mini masterpiece. More than that, it can be seen as a turning point in English language ghost fiction. Before James, the stock phantom tended to be an unquiet soul needing its wrongs to be righted, or a personality-free memento mori in the manner of Dickens. These ghosts are very much personalities. Peter Quint and his disgraced lover, the former governess Miss Jessell, are completely aware of what is going on at Bly House. Whatever they got up to in life - and it was bad enough to corrupt their appearance post mortem - young Miles and sickly sweet Flora were fully involved with it. The implication is that Miles has been expelled from school for telling his friends the lurid details. When the new governess - our unnamed narrator - tries to drive them off, Quint and Jessell fight back. The final confrontation is horrific, and the last line, which I won't give away here, has to be one of the most chilling last lines in occult fiction ever.


The problem with James, to the modern reader, is his verbosity. He writes in a rhetorical style. Famous orators like Churchill, Kennedy and Obama, spoke emotively and effectively about absolutely nothing. Most of what they said, transcribed onto the page without the speaker's personality and performance, is utter nonsense. James does the opposite. He desperately piles up the words in search of every last nuance. In later life, as the notes on the 1908 edition demonstrate, he made matters worse, adding more verbiage long after the fire of creation had gone out. Unfortunately what Penguin gives us is the 1908 edition.


Nonetheless, The Turn of the Screw is the key text in the development of modern literary occult fiction. A must-read for every aspirant practitioner.

The Complete John Silence Stories - Algernon Blackwood

Blackwood was nudging forty when he made his name with the 1908 short story collection John Silence - Physician Extraordinary. He lived for another forty-three years, became a voice on radio and a skeletal face on early TV, but the first decade of the Twentieth Century was his most productive.

The 'extraordinary' thing about John Silence is that he is a psychic doctor. The tendency has been to class him as a psychic detective like Hodgson's Carnacki (interestingly commissioned by their mutual publisher when it became obvious no more Silence material would be forthcoming) but that is not the case. In some of these stories Silence is little more than a bit-part player, brought on at the end to cure the occult affliction. He is really a therapist, showing victims how to cure themselves, or a consultant brought in to take drastic action. To solve a mystery as a detective is to discover the truth; John Silence, adept in the occult arts and practices, already knows the answer.

The original five stories from Physician Extraordinary are all here in the original order, plus "A Victim of Higher Space" which may have been written alongside the others but which wasn't published until Day and Night Stories in 1917. One thing should be stressed, these are not short stories. They are all around 40 pages save for 'The Camp of the Dog' which is nearly 60. This is important because the long form allows Blackwood to build his horror in layers. Nothing in itself is especially shocking but the cumulative mass really gets into the reader's psyche.

Two of the stories particularly enthralled me, 'Ancient Sorceries' and 'Secret Worship'. Silence is the protagonist in neither; he is just someone who the protagonist confides in. This is good because Silence is a bit of a superhero - hugely wealthy and impossibly learned. He can never be in much jeopardy, so to hook the reader someone else has to be. In 'Ancient Sorceries' it is 'little Vezin ... a timid, gentle, sensitive soul' who finds himself marooned in a rural French town where the locals celebrate the titular sorceries and transform themselves into cats. In 'Secret Worship' it is Harris, a silk merchant,  who decides to visit the school he hated as a boy. The school is in southern Germany, run by monks. Harris is made welcome, which turns out to be a very bad thing for poor Harris.

To us, the idea of Victorian tradesmen being educated in Germany seems odd, but it is Blackwood's personal story. He was a perpetual traveller from childhood and is perhaps best known today for tales like 'The Wendigo' which brought Gothic horror to the vast open spaces of Canada, where Blackwood spent much of his twenties. Here, Canada is the setting for 'The Camp of the Dog'. Blackwood was also a member of the Golden Dawn, with Yeats and Mathers, Crowley and Arthur Machen, hence his taste for ancient ritual and, indeed, devil worship. Given the extraordinary nature of the author's life - the first half of it, anyway - S T Joshi's introduction to the collection is essential.

The book is a curiosity, but it is essential for anyone interested in that singular period between roughly 1890 and 1914 when occultism and ritual magic were actually fashionable.

Ghost Stories - M R James

Why is it I didn't take to the stories of Thomas Ligotti (see below) but fell instantly under the spell of M R James?  They have much in common - James is obviously a key influence on Ligotti.  Both writers tend to use the same type of narrator - learned, single, often a writer - and both use distancing devices such as "this is the story as someone told it to me."  I have thought about it for some days now, and have concluded that the difference is the attitude of the narrator/protagonist.  Ligotti's are inert, accepting, and thus alienate us; James's academic old buffers, on the other hand, rebel against their disturbing experiences and strive to put the world back in order.  That makes them appealing.  They do what we would hope to do in their position.

This selection, for Vintage Classics, includes an introduction by Ruth Rendell.  I like Rendell but hate it when publishers feel they need to add a 'name' to a classic.  This introduction is amiable enough but in the end it is piffle.  It tells us nothing about James and even less about his works.

On to the stories themselves, there are thirteen of them, naturally, and the best for me was the story "Number 13".  Can I say why I preferred it?  Well, to an extent.  It is odd, as hotel rooms tend to be odd, especially old hotels which have been converted from something else.  Hotel rooms strive to be comfortable, to be a temporary home from home, but they always fail because most of us can never be truly comfortable away from home.  We never fully have our bearings because there's always somewhere else, staff areas and other people's rooms, which we cannot access.

As always with ghost stories, it depends what you find frightening.  If you have a problem with spiders, then James is definitely the boy for you.  Personally, it's the oddness rather than the apparition which unsettles me.  The flapping sheet on the beach in "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad" is, for me, much scarier than the attack on Parkins by his bedsheets.  But even if the thing itself in a particular story doesn't raise your gooseflesh you can always enjoy the sheer mastery of James's writing.  James, of course, was far more learned than any of his protagonists; that means he does not need to show off, and he doesn't.  Instead his pen flows like Picasso's line, effortless and yet magnificent.

Carnacki the Ghost-Finder - William Hope Hodgson

Hodgson was killed in action in 1918.  He had never known huge literary success but was instantly forgotten in death.  The mighty Lovecraft tried to revive interest after more than a decade, and he succeeded insofar as August Derleth, king of horror pulp, continued to extol Hodgson's work.  Dennis Wheatley referenced him in The Devil Rides Out (in exactly the same way I reference him in my forthcoming short story on www.smashwords.com) but it was Hugh Greene who finally rescued him in his Rivals of Sherlock Holmes collections in the early Seventies.  Obviously Carnacki was not a detective as we like to think of Holmes, but actually the Holmes stories aren't that clever, they just seem so, and actually Carnacki would be entirely at home in The Hound of the Baskervilles or 'The Speckled Band'.  Anyway, Hodgson's works returned to print and have remained so.  This particular edition came out in 1980 and includes all the original Carnacki tales from 1913 and a couple of additions of dubious quality and/or pedigree.

To deal with the latter first. 'The Find' is crud, has nothing to do with ghost-finding and was probably abandoned by the author.  That author, though, was undoubtedly Hodgson, which is more than can be said about 'The Hog'.  This is a good story but much longer than the others and may well be the work of the aforementioned Derleth.  I am unsure.  If it is a pastiche or continuation it's a good one.  Perhaps Hodgson was trying to write a full-length Carnacki but couldn't get past a novella.

For the undoubted originals, the premise is always the same.  Carnacki invites four male friends round to his flat in Cheyne Walk, gives them supper and then regales them with an account of an investigation.  Some are paranormal, others fakes.  The best, 'The Horse of the Invisible', is both, a clever trick indeed.  I also liked 'The Whistling Room', which features a type of entity I've never come across before.  Hodgson's style is of its period.  He first published the stories in The Idler magazine in 1910, which gives me a chance to include an image from the magazine---

---and the house literary style is used.  It wasn't actually Hodgson's usual style.  An ex-seaman himself, his forte was the eerie sea yarn, more often than not written in oo-ar-matey style.  I reacquainted myself with Hodgson recently through his Sargasso Seas series.  There is one such here, 'The Haunted JARVEE', which is probably my third favourite.

In summary, then, definitely a classic of its genre, and inspirational, in my case at least. 'Carnacki: The Saiitii Manifestation' will shortly be available for free download.

PATASOLA