Following on from my last post I underwent a spot of detective work to investigate if there were any more ghost stories from the pen of H.G.Wells. And I found a classic. Written in 1894, The Red Room is a superb little tale.
“It’s your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm once more.
I heard the sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the passage outside, and the door creaked on its hinges as a second old man entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He supported himself by a single crutch, his eyes were covered by a shade, and his lower lip, half averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying yellow teeth. He made straight for an arm-chair on the opposite side of the table, sat down clumsily, and began to cough. The man with the withered arm gave this new-comer a short glance of positive dislike; the old woman took no notice of his arrival, but remained with her eyes fixed steadily on the fire.
“I said – it’s your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm, when the coughing had ceased for a while.
“It’s my own choosing,” I answered.
The Red Room has a fantastic build up, where the old people who warn the narrator against his wishes to visit a haunted room are as creepy as any ghosts he may or may not encounter. It’s the repetition that makes it work, the endless questioning about whether he really wants to go through with this, by his own choosing. I’m putting it in my top ten of ghost stories.
Another gem I found this week was The Coat by AED Smith. Dating, I think, from the early 1930s, this short story concerns a self confessed loner who embarks on a cycling holiday abroad. Escaping a sudden downpour, he takes refuge in an abandoned house. There, he sees small unsettling details. The orange fungus growing across a carpet, strange patterns in the dust and an old military coat:
I discovered that just below the left shoulder there was a round hole as big as a penny, surrounded by an area of scorched and stained cloth, as though a heavy pistol had been fired into it at point-blank range. If a pistol bullet had indeed made that hole, then obviously, the old coat at one period of its existance had clothed a dead man.
Superb stuff, and Cook has the knack of putting the reader right in the scared man’s shoes…
More Ghostly Goings On
Wednesday October 10, 2007
in ghost stories |
Some more ghost stories for your consideration as I continue with my October thrills.
H.G.Wells wrote The Inexperienced Ghost for The Strand magazine in 1902. The opening of the story is very similar to his classic The Time Machine, with a group of gentleman sitting round a fireside to settle into hearing an intriguing story. The fireside technique is always a good start to a story, the cigars and general good humour settling the reader in before the thrills start, and one I’m sure has been used many times before and since. The Inexperienced Ghost is essentially a comic ghost story, and the tale doesn’t really get serious enough to scare. However, it’s as well written as you would expect and so still required reading for Wells completists.
Eerily, I found the style of The Inexperienced Ghost quite similar to a story by W.W.Jacobs called The Toll House, which I recently found online at Online Literature (some interesting stuff here if you can put up with the awful ads) and which was also written in 1902. It features another group of excitable gentlemen, who this time get exactly what they were bargaining for in an empty, abandoned house. Why do people in ghost stories always elect to spend the night in haunted houses? I suspect for exactly the same reasons that we enjoy reading ghost stories…
And now I’ve settled you in, I’ll just finish with Bram Stoker’s The Squaw. More humour here, although this time not wholly intentional. A man and his wife decide to take a companion along with them, already bored on the second week of their honeymoon. They also decide to do another romantic thing and visit a notorious tourist attraction called The Torture Tower. Black cats feature prominently and some well worn instruments of torture enjoy a new lease of life…
The Squaw has an inevitably gruesome ending, although still satisfying for a horror story and it stands up quite well for one written in 1893. It reminded me of the Amicus films of the 1970s, the portmanteau collections of scary tales that were always worth sitting up for.
Judge for yourself, this one’s also online as a PDF at Horrormasters...
Thinking about Hallowe’en last night, I decided to pull down and dust off my copy of The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries. Published in 1936, it’s something of a mystery in itself how this book came into my possession but there it is and it’s a charming little collection. The short story that caught my eye was His Brother’s Keeper by W.W.Jacobs. Jacobs is most famous for arguably the best ghost story of all, The Monkey’s Paw, one that defies review because it is so perfectly executed. Just go read.
His Brother’s Keeper is a perfect little ghost story too; a man called Anthony Keller kills his rival and is haunted by the fact that the corpse is buried at the bottom of his garden. He can’t sell up, he can’t leave. They are to remain soul mates for evermore. What’s effective about the writing is that Jacobs manages to nag the reader with Keller’s worries, worries that haunt the man so deeply. Strangely, possibly due to the skill of the narration, I pictured the events unfolding in my own garden. Suitably creepy.
One chill a night will normally suffice, although I did go on to read The Seventh Man by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Here’s a writer who can build a comfortably chilling atmosphere:
Within the hut the sick man cried softly to himself. Faed, the Snipe, and Cooney slept uneasily, and muttered in their dreams. The Gaffer lay awake, thinking. After Bill, George Lasman; and after George…? Who next? And who would be the last – the unburied one?
The unburied one – that’s a frightening phrase.
Today I read an irresistible post over at The Pickards, an invitation to write a short story of your own for Hallowe’en. The prospect is scary in itself as I haven’t indulged in any fiction writing for quite some time. But I’m going to give it a whirl, so if anyone else is tempted then please join in…
The air is crisp and there is a definite chill in my bones. It’s my favourite time of year. Soon it will be Hallowe’en.
I don’t need excuses for reading a sinister story. After finishing the mammoth Darkmans I’m already pressing on with a novel almost as long – G.W.Dahlquist’s Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. Before the end of October I hope to present my thoughts on this sinister work of fiction.
I am also dipping into the world of Neil Gaiman to bring you Fragile Things. I’ll be reading some favourite creepy short stories and I hope to feature a review of an obscure yet classic horror film. Or two…
Scary times ahead.
She’d gently questioned Fleet about his ‘project’ (this matchstick structure now took up the best part of their dining table – his bedroom having long since been evacuated because of the leak). She was especially interested in why it was that he hadn’t completed the cathedral itself before moving on to some of the surrounding buildings.
‘But what about this section?’ she’d asked, standing on the cathedral’s south side, where a large hole still gaped, unattractively, at the entrance.
‘It’s not finished,’ Fleet had murmured.
‘Then finish it,’ she’d said.
He’d scowled up at her. ‘It’s not finished,’ he repeated, as if speaking to an imbecile. ‘They haven’t built it yet.’
After finishing the last of its 838 pages, I’m still torn between calling Nicola Barker’s Darkmans either an effectively clever and creepy ghost story or something of a waste of my time. The stumbling blocks are both the book’s incredible length and its sometimes irritating over-confidence. This is a novel that takes a long time to settle in and – if you’re willing – it will eventually begin to get under your skin and appear worthwhile. But I was still having some doubts about it when I reached the halfway mark, which is a disheartening realisation. There is the nagging doubt that if a book takes so long to even hint at taking you anywhere it might not take you anywhere at all. Darkmans does eventually pay off – just about.
For such a long novel, Darkmans doesn’t have an especially huge cast. The number of characters is no greater than a book of a third of its length. Barker does play with them magnificently though, weaving a very intricate set of relationships. And for such a long novel Darkmans doesn’t have an especially complex plot; it just takes time, it rambles, it appears to go off at inexplicable tangents. Most of all it succeeds in perplexing the reader. What it does do, although sadly much, much less than it should, is be at times extremely creepy and unsettling. Darkmans is a modern day ghost story about the past. How the past is always there, turning up unexpectedly, worryingly, surprisingly. How the past can haunt us. For the cast of Darkmans, the shadow of early modern England hangs over them, a time when the English language was getting to grips with itself and the printed word was in its infancy. What the novel does very well is presenting a danger dating from an earlier time that’s recent enough to make some sense, but is distant enough not to fully understand. In other words, imagine a ghost speaking a less refined version of the English language, references, allusions and most of all motives wildly different.
John Scogin is a ghost with a specifically wicked sense of humour. The last of history’s great jesters, Scogin lives on in surviving biographies and, when his remains are interred to make way for a Channel Tunnel rail link, quite possibly in the consciousness of others. These are notably Isidore, dropping normality to run amok in Kent, and his gifted, possibly autistic, son Fleet. The most memorable parts of the book feature Fleet as he slowly reveals his rather unusual and at times disturbing nature. Five years of age, his precocious talents allow him to build an entire catherdral from matchsticks, and to ponder on the Latin root of random words.
Recurring themes link the past with the present throughout the book, most of them weird and unsettling. Sinister black birds and feathers, bells (in the guise of pet collars and mobile phones), fire (as lighters and matches), roofs and tiles, blood, bruising and – strangest of all – feet – are just some of them. Also unsettling is the indecision about whether this is a dark comedy (we witness a Kurdish refugee with an unusual fear of salads and a dysfunctional family who give Mike Leigh a run for his money) or something altogether more disturbing. Barker won’t let you make up your mind, and won’t tell you what’s really going on until right until the end. Or not – I’m still slightly baffled.
Darkmans was my first taste of Nicola Barker’s fiction. She’s an incomparible talent; her characterisations are detailed and convincing and she can unravel a good plot, if at times slightly over-relying on coincidence. The background is convincingly researched and there’s even a mention in there of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, one of the longest novels written in English at 1500 pages. Who knows, Barker might even try to surpass that next time…
I’m glad that this novel is on the Booker shortlist; I’ll be surprised though if it wins. It’s too odd and too experimental and there’s too much left unresolved, but it’s undeniably thought provoking and will give any Booker judge a hard time in justifying their decision about it. Darkmans certainly is extremely baffling and infuriating but – just sometimes – I can accept that as a bold move from a uniquely original author such as Nicola Barker.
Previous Page |
Next Page
