‘I am pursued with blasphemies, cries of despair and appalling hatred. I hear those dreadful sounds called after me as I turn the corners of the streets; they come in the night-time, while I sit in my chamber alone; they haunt me everywhere, charging me with hideous crimes, and – great God! – threatening me with coming vengeance and eternal misery. Hush! do you hear that?’ he cried with a horrible smile of triumph; ‘there – there, will that convince you?’
Sheridan Le Fanu, The Familiar
I’ve been meaning to read In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu for some time. This is a famous collection of five supernatural stories, first published in 1872. I’m a fan of M.R.James, who described himself as a disciple of the Irish writer. I’m also partial to a gothic tale or two, and Le Fanu’s stories also stray into this territory.
Green Tea opens the collection and is easily Le Fanu’s best known ghost story. Quite simply, it’s a magnificently constructed and well written tale. It’s also very scary. It concerns the doomed Jennings, who begins to see a menacing small monkey wherever he goes. This is perhaps a hallucinatory symptom of the green tea he has been overindulging in, or perhaps it is something more sinister. The most chilling aspect of this story is, whether or not the monkey is real or in his disturbed imagination, that he is most troubled by the fact that the monkey appears to relish the fact that he can see him. And only he can see him. What can be worse than being a lonely demon that nobody can see? What can be better than being allowed to suddenly haunt somebody to death? You’d really pull the stops out, wouldn’t you?
In a Glass Darkly is framed by the case notes of one Dr Hesselius and Green Tea is a study of Jennings’ deterioration. Hesselius treats his patient as an interesting specimen rather than as a friend or as a doctor treating a troubled man, but this is also exactly what the reader does. If they are really honest about it. We know that Jennings is a hopeless case. We know the monkey is going to get him. Like the monkey, we relish that fact.
The next two stories, The Familiar and Mister Justice Harbottle, follow similar themes. Both deal with personal hauntings with inevitably gruesome endings. Both follow men with guilty secrets, men responsible for the death of others who will get their comeuppence. In The Familiar, Barton is haunted by a menace that only he can see and one, like in Green Tea, that will claim its victim in the end.
The longest story in the collection is A Room at the Dragon Volant. Here Le Fanu can take his time to establish atmosphere and subtle menace, a menace so slight it’s like a nagging itch. At times it is difficult to see where this story is going; the exciteable narrator relates more of a mystery tale than supernatural or horror and it’s nowhere near as disturbing as Green Tea or The Familiar. Still worth a read though, as is the final story Carmilla. This is notable for being an early vampire story, and the tale influenced Le Fanu’s fellow Dubliner Bram Stoker for Dracula. Carmilla is the story of a lesbian vampire, predating such Hammer classics as The Vampire Lovers and Twins of Evil by a century:
I stood at the door, peeping through the small crevice, my sword laid on the table beside me, as my directions prescribed, until, a little after one, I saw a large black object, very ill-defined, crawl, as it seemed to me, over the foot of the bed, and swiftly spread itself up to the poor girl’s throat, where it swelled, in a moment, into a great, palpitating mass.
If you’re a disciple of the ghost story or the gothic tale, even a Hammer Horror or two, it’s worth spending some time with Sheridan Le Fanu.
This is the first in a new regular series. I enjoy writing about stories that I love reading. With novels, there can be a slow turnaround. So something to keep me posting more regularly…
I have a mini library of ghost story collections. Great Ghost Stories, published in 1960, features ten such stories – perfect for this occasional simply chilling series. And it features one of my favourites. But more of that another time. The book is edited by Herbert van Thal, with illustrations by Edward Pagram. The first two stories are Running Wolf by Algernon Blackwood and The Haunted and the Haunters by Lord Lytton.
Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was an English writer of ghost stories. I’ve seen clips of the appearances he made in the early days of television, an urbane old gentleman in an ill-fitting suit. Reading Running Wolf directly after The Tenderness of Wolves is a strange coincidence. Like Stef Penney’s novel, it’s also set in a remote part of Canada, concerning an isolated individual who encounters both an enigmatic wolf and American Indian culture. Unlike Penney, Blackwood did spend some time in Canada, but although suitably atmospheric Running Wolf is a much slighter work. Penney also has the advantage of a modern and sympathetic perspective; there’s a whiff of disregard for the Indian culture in Blackwood’s writing. This aside, Running Wolf quickly establishes a tremendous sense of mood, it’s protagonist spooked and intrigued in equal spoonfulls.
Troubled by a pair of watching eyes in the night, a camper discovers he is being observed by a wolf. Eventually befriending the creature, he makes a strange discovery…
I don’t know if this short story is typical of Blackwood or not, but I’ll certainly be investigating more of his work.
Chill Factor: 4/5
Lord Lytton (1803-1873) is most famous for coining the phrase the pen is mightier than the sword in his play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy. He was also a writer of occult and science fiction stories. His novel The Coming Race shares the distinction for being possibly the first ever sci-fi novel with the notoriety for being influential in Nazi thinking.
The Haunted and the Haunters is a typical haunted house story. Hearing of one such house, a man is over eager to spend the night there. He takes with him, as usually happens in this type of 19th Century yarn, his faithful servant. The story offers no surprises, and lurches from the usual haunted goings on, mysterious footfalls, discovered bundles of letters, a slaughtered dog, to cumbersome attempts at trying to describe what a ghost might actually be.
I’m keeping Lytton at arms length, although The Coming Race does intrigue me…
Chill Factor: 1/5
‘It is Number 13, you see,’ said the latter.
‘Yes; there is your door, and there is mine,’ said Jensen.
‘My room has three windows in the daytime,’ said Anderson with difficulty, suppressing a nervous laugh.
‘By George, so has mine!’ said the lawyer, turning and looking at Anderson. His back was now to the door. In that moment the door opened, and an arm came out and clawed at his shoulder. It was clad in ragged, yellowish linen, and the bare skin, where it could be seen, had long grey hair upon it.
Anderson was just in time to pull Jensen out of its reach with a cry of disgust and fright, when the door shut again, and a low laugh was heard.
M.R.James, Number 13.
During the 1970s, the BBC treated viewers to an annual M.R.James adaptation in its Ghost Stories for Christmas series. Thanks to the Internet Movie Database I’ve found it surprisingly easy to catalogue the entire series as well as other James adaptations, although I must confess a lot of the following is culled from memory:
Night of the Demon (1957)
Based on Casting the Runes, this is a cracking British film directed by Jacques Tourneur.
Mystery and Imagination (1966)
Four stories were filmed for this long forgotten TV series: Casting the Runes, Number 13 (as Room 13), Lost Hearts and The Tractate Middoth.
Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968)
Filmed for the BBC’s Omnibus, Michael Hordern stars and Jonathan Miller directs. An eccentric old professor finds an ancient whistle on an isolated beach and gets more than he bargained for. Rarely repeated, probably due to the fact that it was shot in black and white, this is a very creepy and odd little film.
The Ghost Stories for Christmas series:
- The Stalls of Barchester (1971)
- A Warning to the Curious (1972)
- Lost Hearts (1973)
- The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974)
- The Ash Tree (1975)
The Stalls of Barchester and A Warning to the Curious are most familiar to me, possibly because they were the most often repeated, and watching all of the films when they were shown again last year I found A Warning to the Curious by far the best. Watch out for the satisfyingly scary ending.
Although made more than thirty years ago, the films have stood the test of time. The BBC appear to have splashed out a little on the budgets, with a lot of location shooting. The series is also interesting for featuring a host of recognisable British actors, including Peter Vaughan, Robert Hardy, Michael Bryant and Clive Swift.
The series moved away from James with Charles Dickens’ The Signalman in 1976 and a new story the following year, Stigma. Lawrence Gordon Clark, who had directed all of these films, offered his final James story in 1979 with a contemporary version of Casting the Runes.
La Chiesa (1989)
This obscure Italian film by Michele Soavi is an adaptation of The Treasure of Abbott Thomas.
Christopher Lee’s Ghost Stories for Christmas (2000)
Christopher Lee took an undeserved credit here as he was actually playing M.R. James, recreating the Christmas Eves where he would read his stories aloud to his students at Cambridge. The Stalls of Barchester, The Ash Tree, Number 13 and A Warning to the Curious were featured.
BBC Four to the rescue
Last Christmas, the BBC revived their James adaptations with a classy film of A View From a Hill. This year they screened a new version of Number 13 starring Greg Wise.
In Number 13, the guest in hotel room fourteen notices that he is adjacent to room twelve. What’s particularly disturbing for him is that room thirteen mysteriously appears between the two rooms only at night-time, squeezing the roomspace so that only two windows face the bed instead of three. Other ghostly goings on begin to occur surrounding the rather unusual inhabitant of the new room which are played out only in muffled noise and shadow.
I’m still digesting the new adaptation of Number 13 after just watching it, but I found Wise excellent in the title role, and although some liberties have been taken with the text, this is still pleasingly good and very much in the spirit of James. And the BBC do justice to that terrifying arm…
Next to Charles Dickens, the other master of the classic ghost story is M.R.James. Like Dickens, James enjoyed reading his stories aloud and his tales are best enjoyed with this in mind. Imagine the open fire, a room full of attentive and eager students and James holding court. In The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, he delivers another of his warnings to the curious:
I believe I am now acquainted with the extremity of terror and repulsion which a man can endure without losing his mind. I can only just manage to tell you now the bare outline of the experience. I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it, and of several – I don’t know how many – legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body.
This is the story of Mr Somerton, who cleverly deciphers the riddle set by the Abbot, although unwisely chooses to follow it through. I can imagine James reading the more disturbing passages with relish, as well as reading out the different character parts, such as Somerton’s servant Brown:
So I looked up, and I see someone’s ‘ead looking’ over at us. I s’pose I must ha’ said somethink, and I ‘eld the light up and run up the steps, and my light shone right on the face. That was a bad un, sir, if I ever I see one! A holdish man, and the face very much fell in, and larfin’, as I thought.
Whether you’re an antiquary, an archaeologist, a humble servant or just generally curious minded, watch out for James. He’ll haunt you, for in his world some things are best left untouched.
The recent mystery ghost story was The Signalman by Charles Dickens. His brilliant writing style really makes it the classic it is, and something that can be read again and again even when you know the terrible outcome.
Next to Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol is probably Dickens’ best known work. Like The Signalman, you can hear the story and pass it on, with the result that people are telling the story who haven’t necessarily read it. I would say that the majority of people more or less know the basic story of Scrooge, but far fewer have actually read the original. Familiarity with A Christmas Carol comes from the countless film, stage and television adaptations over the years.
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