M.R. James at Christmas

I was wondering what to post tonight and then this brand new upload appeared on my feed of 5 Radio 4 adaptations of some of M.R. James' finest stories including 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad', 'The Tractate Middoth, 'Lost Hearts', 'The Rose Garden' and 'Number 13' dating from Christmas 2007.  It features Derek Jacobi as the venerable author alongside folks such as Julian Rhind-Tutt and Susan Jameson.

So, with this cavalcade of ghostly delights Wyrd Britain would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas.




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Uncanny Stories

May Sinclair
Wordsworth Editions

May Sinclair was an innovator of modern fiction, a late Victorian who was also a precursor to Virginia Woolf. In her Uncanny Stories (1923), Sinclair combines the traditional ghost story with the discoveries of Freud and Einstein. The stories shock, enthral, delight and unsettle.
Two lovers are doomed to repeat their empty affair for the rest of eternity... A female telepath is forced to face the consequences of her actions... The victim of a violent murder has the last laugh on his assailant... An amateur philosopher discovers that there is more to Heaven than meets the eye.
Specially included in this volume is The Intercessor (1911), Sinclair's powerful story of childhood and abandoned love, a tale whose intensity compares with that of the Brontës.

 I first came across May Sinclair a few months back in the 'Mortal Echoes' anthology from The British Library which featured her story 'Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched' a truly terrifying tales of a very personal Hell.  Not long after that I watched the TV adaptation of her 'Intercessor' which was a rather beautiful ghost story about loss, blame and guilt.  I was already hooked after the former and by the end of the second I was besotted.  As it happened sat unread on a shelf here I had this collection of her work so I happily waded in.

Following what seems to have been a fairly difficult childhood and a problematic relationship[ with her mother, Sinclair took to writing to support them at a time when she was also becoming an active supporter of the women's suffrage movement.  All these factors have a presence in her stories where independent and sexually liberated women find themselves at the mercy of oppressive control either from family, tradition or religion.

Those two previously mentioned stories bookend this collection and do so in a manner that shows the extremes of her tales; the cruel, inescapable brutality of the former and the poignant delicacy of the latter joined by the quality of the prose.

Between the two reside various shades of fear with the standout moment being the psychic shenanigans of 'The Flaw in the Crystal' that, with it's lead character of a confident and sexually liberated young woman is a real breath of fresh air although that's not to belittle any of the remaining five stories.  Admittedly some, like 'The Token' are a little slight but they don't hang around and make for nifty quick reads between the more developed tales.

Sinclair's supernatural output was small but substantial and it's a shame that she isn't better regarded as stories like 'Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched' have a timeless quality that still resonates.

Buy it here - Uncanny Stories (Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural) (Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural)

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A Child's Voice

Set in ye olde bygone days of radio as the primary source of in home entertainment this late 1970s story by David Thomson tells of popular radio host Ainsley Rupert MacCready (T.P. Mckenna) who reads ghostly tales to enraptured audiences.

"Radio fixes the person, but frees the imagination... and the people most affected by it were those who lived and listened alone."

His latest reading tells of a young magician's assistant who dies trapped inside a vanishing cabinet and whose ghosly voice torments the magician unto death.  It's after telling the first part of this tale that his life begins to mimic his art as he receives a midnight telephone call from a child asking him not to finish the story.

"The Story you are reading. I would prefer you to go no further with it. It troubles me a great deal."

Mckenna is an always reliable presence and the fabulously portentous narration by (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's 'Deep Thought' and Doctor Who's 'The Black Guardian') Valentine Dyall is a real treat. It's a fine low key and affecting tale that uses it's simple premise and obviously minuscule budget well although it does miss it's natural ending and continues on for just a couple of minutes too long.

The poor quality of the film serves, I think, to add to the unsettling ambience of the tale as we're left to decide whether this is the story of something breaking through or of someone breaking down.



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The Wish Dog and Other Stories

Penny Thomas & Stephanie Tillotson (eds)
Honno

The Wish Dog and Other Stories takes you into the realm of the unknown, the ghostly and the gothic, in a colourful kaleidoscope of half-glimpsed shades.
The title story, The Wish Dog conjures up a fetch – a lifetime companion much wanted; Harvest is a haunting reworking of Babes in the Wood; Sovay, Sovay tells of a Grand Guignol actress who loses her head to a dream of romance and returns with a thousand stories to tell to her bewitched audience; in Broad Beach a man who has had a close encounter with death has dreams that seem larger than life – what he wants most is to run, like the athlete he watches at the tideline each day.
Other tales feature a ghostly mansion in a Merthyr park, a lonely soldier permanently on guard, the angel of death and a would-be suicide, a lonely Inuit asleep on a mountainside, a row of small wet footprints on floorboards…
Open the pages if you dare, but don’t forget to look behind you.

There seems a little confusion over themes in this book.  The introduction opens with the question of 'What makes a good ghost story?' and the cover refers to 'Haunting tales from Welsh women writers' and I wonder if this perhaps explains the variety in the stories here with many going down the path of the supernatural while others offer a story with a wider interpretation of the world 'haunting'.

Of those in the latter camp Nic Herrriot's 'Convention is the Mother of Reality...' is the undeniable stand out with it's delicately poignant tale of ageing and friends both real and ... other and Gillian Drake's 'Seashells' is a quick but satisfying story of both person and place finding each other.

Of the former there are a few which go in too heavy handed or are just a bit too clunky to conjure up any chills but in amongst them is the folk horror of Sian Preece's 'Harvest' and the jealous spirit of the 'Caretakers' in Jo Mazelis story both of which provide engaging diversions.

I like coming across unexpected ghost stories and in the case of this unassuming volume it proved to be mostly for the good as there was very little here that I didn't enjoy, much that I did and a few that really shone through.

Buy it here - The Wish Dog: Haunting tales from Welsh women writers

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The Last Steamer and Other Strange Tales

Bob Mann
Longmarsh Press

For several years, Totnes writer and Longmarsh Press founder Bob Mann has given to friends and family a short story at Christmas, instead of a card. These are mainly of a supernatural nature and are firmly rooted in his knowledge of the locality and its history and culture. Now he has decided to share some of them with a wider audience.
The Last Steamer and Other Strange Tales contains weird visions, disturbing ladies, long-vanished music and mysterious time slips, mainly set in recognisable buildings and terrains.

I found out about this collection of folky / ghosty tales via a post by Mark Valentine on his fantastic Wormwoodiana blog.  His write up made this sound like a very enticing prospect with elements of M.R. James and Arthur Machen.  I'm always on the look out for new, interesting things to read so I nabbed a copy.

It is an intriguing read consisting of stories written mostly in the stead of Xmas cards which for the most part feature Bob himself in an almost occult investigator type role reporting on various ghostly visitations, unearthly phenomena or eerie circumstance in and around the area of Totnes, Devon.

There's not much to most of the stories but there are two in particular that stand out.  The title piece is an intriguing little tale of a ride on a phantasmal steamer and the book's longest story, 'Early Music', which aside from some, let's say, clunky sexual politics is a fun story of love expressed across time and recognition achieved.

Mark is certainly not wrong in drawing parallels with James and Machen as each shows a clear influence but in the end it's all a little well mannered and lacking in bite and what we have is a relatively charming collection that offer an insight into one man's hobby.

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Ghost Stories

I've got to admit I wasn't hugely taken by Jeremy Dyson's book of ghostly tales 'The Haunted Book' when I read (some of) it a few years back.  I'm not going to knock it because what I read wasn't bad and he has an obvious love for the genre but the first few stories just didn't really grab me, my interest wandered and I never finished it.  I dislike not finishing a book especially in such a rude and dismissive manner so may have to go back and have another try especially in light of this new trailer for the upcoming 'Ghost Stories' movie written by him
 and Andy Nyman.

Adapted from their play of the same name 'Ghost Stories' tells the story of...

'Phillip Goodman, professor of psychology, arch-sceptic, the one-man ‘belief buster’ – has his rationality tested to the hilt when he receives a letter apparently from beyond the grave. His mentor Charles Cameron, the ‘original’ TV parapsychologist went missing fifteen years before, presumed dead and yet now he writes to Goodman saying that the pair must meet. Cameron, it seems, is still very much alive. And he needs Goodman to find a rational explanation for three stories that have shaken Cameron to his core. As Goodman investigates, he meets three haunted people, each with a tale more frightening, uncanny and inexplicable than the last.'

Now I know you can rarely judge a film by it's trailer - we've all seen amazing trailers for appalling movies and vice versa - but this one has got me really hopeful for something nicely creepy.

Peter Bradshaw reviewing the movie for The Guardian following it's screening at the 2017 London Film festival wrote -

'Ghost Stories is a barnstormer of an entertainment, a fairground ride with dodgy brakes. It’s an anthology of creepy supernatural tales in the intensely English tradition of Amicus portmanteau movies from the 1960s, such as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, or the Ealing classic Dead of Night.'

- which I must admit has me quite excited for the April release date.



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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

A Creepy Company

Joan Aiken
Puffin Books

Here are ten ghastly, ghostly, weird and witty tales from a master of suspense, Joan Aiken. Each macabre story takes readers from the everyday world to the fantastic, creating a collection full of delightful shivers that will hold readers spellbound.

I've a real love for Joan Aiken's stories and have enjoyed several anthologies of her ghostly tales. This one is not going to trouble the best of them but it can sit proudly amongst the rest.

A Creepy Company consists of 11 stories of the supernatural mostly with a young adult audience in mind, as befits the publisher. There are a few stand out stories like the murderous, ghostly children of 'Toomie' and 'Little Nym', the vengeful spirit that condemns a man to a life of tedium and loveless drudgery in 'Die From Day To Day', the gossipy folk horror of 'My Disability' and the obsessive and miserly creature feature of 'They Have Found Out'. There's nothing about the other six to dislike and on a different day I'd probably have listed one or two others as the standouts.

It's always a pleasure to be allowed to take a stroll in the lady's imagination; a place of the most vivid and often unsettling beauty.

A Midwinter Entertainment

Mark Beech (ed)
Egaeus Press

An entertainment consisting of 288 pages; dedicated to short, yellowish days and long nights, to heavy curtains and the cracks and pops of burning logs, to frost-encroached byways and sturdy old inns, to skeletal trees and hungry black birds; and to the ghosts of Ernest Nister & Ernest Dowson.

Featuring many curious pieces, including several newly written stories (amongst them a brand new Connoisseur tale by Mark Valentine & John Howard), a smattering of rarely collected obscurities, a couple of never before translated artifacts and much more.

The full contents are as follows...

Meet Me at the Frost Fair by Alison Littlewood
The Monkey & Basil Holderness by Vincent O’Sullivan
A Matter of Fact by Marion Fox
The Ruddy-Cheeked Boy (A Tale in Homage to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Snow-Image’) by Sheryl Humphrey
Drebbel, Zander & Zervan by Ron Weighell
Second Master by Mark Valentine
Window Widows by Avalon Brantley
The Secret by Anatole Le Braz (first English translation, by George Berguño)
The Longing for Which by Sara Rich
Barefoot Withouten Shoon by Tina Rath
A Winter’s Night by Arthur Symons
How Shall Dead Men Sing? (The Supernatural Affair of Lord Alfred Douglas & Oscar Wilde) by Nina Antonia
Better Than Borley Rectory by Jane Fox
The Harmony of Death (A Pianist's Most Terrible Experience) by Havelock Ettrick
Il va neiger... by Francis Jammes (first English translation, by George Berguño)
The Celestial Tobacconist by Mark Valentine & John Howard
Finvarragh by Nora Hopper
From the Mouth of Mad Pratt by Ross Smeltzer
In St. James’s Park by Hubert Crackanthorpe
Aut Diabolus Aut Nihil by X.L.
Somewhere Snow by Jonathan Wood

Mark Valentine (by R.B. Russell)

When this was first announced last year I gazed longingly at the mailout, positively salivating over the prospect of a brand new 'Connoisseur' story by Mark Valentine and John Howard.  When it finally appeared though the price tag (and this is in no way a criticism, it's a beautifully presented book) was way out of my newly unemployed pockets.  Happily, post Christmas a copy came to light on a popular auction site for a third less than the asking price and so I decided to take the plunge and I'm very glad I did.

The book offers a mix of tales old and tales new, occasional poetry and a long discussion on the relationship between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas.  Of these, poetry isn't my particular bag and whilst there was nothing that made me turn up my nose there was nothing that raised an eyebrow either. Nina Antonia's Oscar Wilde piece was certainly interesting but for someone like me with barely a passing interest in other people's personal lives it was ultimately a distraction from the fictions.

Alison Littlewood

The book opens strongly with Alison Littlewood's elemental tale of all consuming loss, 'Meet Me At The Frost Fair', followed by the body horror of Vincent O'Sullivan's 1895 tale 'The Monkey and Basil Holderness'.  Sheryl Humphrey's 'The Ruddy-Cheeked Boy' had far too much of the folktale about it to fully satisfy but the ever welcome presences of Ron Weighell with his charming tale of books, obsession and alchemical pursuits 'Drebbel, Zander and Zervan' and Mark Valentine with his story of the various holders of the title of 'Master of the Queen's Mysteries' in 'The Second Master', soon get the book back very much on track.

Avalon Brantley's 'Window Widows' is an enjoyable haunted house tale that feels a lot older than it evidently is.  It's followed by a translation of a story called 'The Secret' from 1900 which begins with perhaps the worst opening line I've ever read and doesn't improve from there.

Sara Rich's 'The Longing for Which' reveals itself to be an enjoyable tale of obsession and possession which is followed by Tina Rath's equally readable story of possessions and freedom, 'Barefoot Withouten Shoon'.

With Havelock Ettrick's 'The Harmony of Death' editor Mark Beech finds another intriguing old tale of a pianist subjected to a 'Most Terrible Experience' whilst Jane Fox's 'Better Than Boxley Rectory' is an engagingly written but ultimately disappointing and rather silly story that takes far to long in the telling.

John Howard

And so we arrive at the very welcome return of The Connoisseur in 'The Celestial Tobacconist' as our esteemed aesthete participates in both the finest of tobaccos and a ritual performance to resurrect an ancient pagan sect.  As ever with the duo of Valentine and Howard the tale is beautifully written and enchantingly seductive.

The trio of tales that close out the book begin with the 'Vault of Horror' type twisty demonic shenanigans of Ross Smeltzer's 'From the Mouth of Mad Pratt' whose ending you can see coming from many miles away.  Much more enjoyable is 'Auf Diabolus Auf Nihil' by X.L. and dating from 1895 which despite being written in a style drier than a sand sandwich is alluringly creepy.

The book ends with 'Somewhere Snow' by Jonathan Wood which tells a slightly hallucinatory tale of loneliness and stories that unfolds slowly to give the book the subdued and slightly melancholic close that a book this mesmerically charged deserved.

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Note - As I was typing up this review I learned of the recent death of contributing author Avalon Brantley.  Our thoughts go out to her, her family and her friends and we dedicate this review to her memory in the knowledge that her work will be enjoyed for years to come.

Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural

Algernon Blackwood
Spring Books

Tales include The Doll, Running Wolf, The Little Beggar, The Occupant of the Room, The Man Whom the Trees Loved, The Valley of the Beasts, The South Wind, The Man Who Was Milligan, The Trod, The Terror of the Twins, The Deferred Appointment, Accessory Before the Fact, The Glamour of the Snow, The House of the Past, The Decoy, The Tradition, The Touch of Pan, Entrance and Exit, The Pikestaffe Case, The Empty Sleeve, Violence, and The Lost Valley.

This is the second of these massive anthologies of Blackwood shorts that I've ploughed my way through.  Like the last one this book has lived next to my bed for several months and picked up on occasion when I was between reads or simply needed a fix of the great man, as such much of it's a little lost in my memory.  Looking at it now as I sit down to write this, the over-riding feeling I have of the book is one of nature, of the outdoors and the spirits of place.  A scan through the contents confirms this feeling, at least to a point, as included here are such quintessential Blackwoods as 'Running Wolf', 'The Man Who The Trees Loved', 'The Valley of the Beasts', 'The Touch of Pan' & 'The Lost Valley'.

Amongst the other 17 stories we find Blackwood in full flow.  The skin crawling menace of 'The Doll', the heart tugging poignancy of 'The Little Beggar' and the strangeness and dread of the painting belonging to 'The Man Who Was Milligan'.  Then we have the brief connect with other realms along 'The Trod' and 'Entrance and Exit' other 'people' as in 'The Glamour of Snow' or simply elsewhere in 'The Pikestaffe Case'.

Not everything here works terribly well, 'The Terror of Twins' feels entirely underwritten and 'The Deferred Appointment' is merely a fairly cliched ghost story with little point to it other than a vague impression that a dull life leads to a dull afterlife.  The un-acted upon psychic premonition afforded to the protagonist at the heart of 'Accessory Before the Fact' lends a promising story a rather flat resolution whereas 'The House of the Past' with it's dream imagery and it's psychotic break seem merely to be playing around with one of the great preoccupations (and new occupations) of the times.

The remaining three stories - 'The Decoy', 'The Tradition' and 'The Empty Sleeve' - have little to recommend them, each being fairly run of the mill stories of ghostly weirdness, loss and shapeshifting perfidy.

As with the previous volume a slightly mixed bag of treats but one that definitely erred to the better and with the knowledge that even second rate Blackwood is superior to many of his contemporaries makes this a fun collection to hunt down.

The Travelling Bag & Other Ghostly Stories

Susan Hill
Profile Books

From the foggy streets of Victorian London to the eerie perfection of 1950s suburbia, the everyday is invaded by the evil otherworldly in this unforgettable collection of new ghost stories from the author of The Woman in Black.
In the title story, on a murky evening in a warmly lit club off St James, a bishop listens closely as a paranormal detective recounts his most memorable case, one whose horrifying denouement took place in that very building.
In 'The Front Room', a devoutly Christian mother tries to protect her children from the evil influence of their grandmother, both when she is alive and when she is dead.
A lonely boy finds a friend in 'Boy Number 21', but years later he is forced to question the nature of that friendship, and to ask whether ghosts can perish in fires.
This is Susan Hill at her best, telling characteristically flesh-creeping and startling tales of thwarted ambition, terrifying revenge and supernatural stirrings that will leave readers wide-awake long into the night.

This lovely looking little collection came into my hands only recently but the inclusion of an occult / psychic detective story will always help a book to leap frog it's way up the reading pile.  As it happens that one was probably the least satisfying story of the four.

Opening the collection is the title piece with it's psychic investigator or as I'm going to think of him a 'psychic noticer' because he does little investigating in what is a fairly rudimentary sort of revenge tale with a nice ending but the framing device about the detective is a little pointless.

The second story is kinda lovely but feels entirely underdeveloped as we, perhaps, get to meet 'Boy Twenty One' in a jumble of comings and goings.

The longest story here, 'Alice Baker', again seems slightly lacking in development as a new worker joins a close knit team of office workers.  There's much to like and Hill builds the atmosphere beautifully but the crisis point is confusing (the sudden and rather pointless appearance of the child) and the newspaper revelation ending was just piffle.

The book ends with it's most successful story as a well meaning couple invite his malicious stepmother to live in 'The Front Room' only for things to go bad fast.  It reminded me of some of Joan Aiken's creepier moments as the children feel the full force of her malice.

A mixed reception then for the 4 stories most of which could have benefited from a strong editorial hand but equally none of them stay around long enough to bore - indeed I'd have liked the second story to have stayed longer - and the book itself was a nice accompaniment to a quiet evening with a glass of something tasty.

Buy it here -  The Travelling Bag: And Other Ghostly Stories

Ghost Stories

Various
Cathay Books

Twenty-two exciting stories from the twilight world of haunted houses and hair-raising spectres are contained in this spine-chilling anthology.
Each tale is illustrated with specially commissioned drawings.

The more of these anthologies I read the quicker I get through them.  They're generally a fairly fast read anyway being short stories but in many cases the same stories appear again and again and again.  In the case of this 1984 collection from Cathay Books I already knew 12 of the 22.  Some, like M.R. James' 'A School Story' and Captain Frederick Marryat's 'The Phantom Ship' I skip past on a fairly regular basis but as these things are meant to entice (as opposed to being a warning to) the curious into the charms of the genre that's something that one has to accept.  With that being the case the above are fine inclusions as are other regulars such as Hugh Walpole's poignant 'A Little Ghost', Lovecraft's non mythos short 'The Music of Erich Zann', the unsettling presence of the cupboard in Algernon Blackwood's 'The Occupant of the Room' or Fritz Leiber's sooty city spirit in 'The Smoke Ghost'.

R. Chetwynd Hayes

Elsewhere in the book the unidentified editor has made some fine, if maybe a tad unadventurous, choices.  Charles Dickens is represented by his macabre tale of avarice and murder, 'The Ghost in the Bride's Chamber' wherein a murderer is forced to feel the intensity of his punishment increasing with each passing hour of the night which is far more than the guilty party at the heart (if you'll excuse the pun) of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart' would have ever managed to endure.

The conclusion of Poe's tale signals the start of a run of rather inconsequential stories,  the black magic cat of R. Chetwynd-Hayes' 'The Cat Room', Catherine Crowe's somnambulist clergyman in 'The Monk's Story' and Saki's weakly witty 'Laura' before we hit a rich vein of the standards that I mentioned earlier.

Rosemary Timperley

The book makes another move towards the lesser known with Rosemary Timperley's tale of infatuation and fire, 'The Mistress in Black' and Guy de Maupassant's creepy little oddity, 'An Apparition'.

Undoubtedly the oddest inclusion here is an utterly pointless extract from Penelope Lively's 'The Ghost of Thomas Kempe' but it's easily skipped for the aforementioned Blackwood story and Jerome K. Jerome's practical joking ghost of 'The Haunted Mill'.

Guy de Maupassant

One of the biggest draws here was the opportunity to read something by another of the Le Fanu's.  The venerable Sheridan is here with 'The White Cat of Drumgunniol' but also his daughter Elizabeth who tells of a case of ghostly possession in 'The Harpsichord' which is a fairly told but lacks the invention of her father's work.

Closing the book are two authors who are anthology stalwarts, W.W. Jacobs, who is represented by a story I hadn't read before,'The Three Sisters' which reminded me entirely of 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and finally Joan Aiken's 'Sonata for Harp and Bicycle' allows the book to end on a romantic high even if it's a long way from being one of her best.

Some interesting stories make this a good but not essential anthology unless of course you're a newcomer to the delights of the genre then it's probably one to keep an eye out for.