Mills Of Silence by Charles Wilkinson, Egaeus Press / Through A Looking Glass Darkly by Jake Fior, AliceLooking Books

A new Wilkinson collection is fast becoming something of an event. Again, in the avoidance of showing his roots, he doesn't disappoint in this, his third. 

  In 'The Immaterialists,' the enigmatic Mr Zym was a small publisher of unlogged poetry whose enigma has outlived his work. But, has his enigma outlived him? A literary student investigates, despite his dismissive tutor fearing Zym had "a bubble reputation, long since popped." The revenant figure of a bald-headed man, close to the former's rooms, appears portentous, unavoidably bringing immediacy to his research.

  Oftentimes, such territory is handled with a dryness that doesn't quite succeed in engaging, or displays a colloquial familiarity that too soon dispels the mystery. Wilkinson, however, strikes the perfect balance. The final line devastates.

  The trope of familial psychological breakdown links some of the following tales. 'A Coastal Quest' sees a woman leave behind her husband and children to go in search of a 'happier life.' The quest ultimately reveals her true whereabouts and true role as narrator; as unreliable to herself as to us. 'The Surrey Alterations' – an uncanny tale of State coercion, which has – with the best – meaning beneath it's surface. 'Beyond The Lace' harbours a near-impenetrable ambiguity, where the initial scenario of a stepfather caring for a fantasist stepdaughter in the wake of her mother's death in a car accident gradually shifts as his own perception proves unreliable. Typical of Wilkinson is his ability to implicate so much in so few pages.

  In 'These Words, Rising From Stone,' a male poet appears silently persecuted by the ghostly presence of a female rival and a curse he'd purposely overlooked. 'The Private Thinker' – The precocious godson of a High Court judge invites a related former school 'friend' to make an inventory of his late father's property. When the godson encounters the spirit of the Judge, he also discovers another spirit with what may be an ulterior motive. 'Evening at the Aubergine Cafe' sees a Godot-like scenario where two men – denied their past identities and trapped by absent memory in a prison-like edgeland – live reductive lives around the cafe of the title.

  SF territory redolent of 'A Clockwork Orange' predominate over the following two tales. 'To Sharpen, Spin' sees an abusive familial relationship the lesser of two evils in a society where personal identity is passe. 'Septs' continues this theme, where the featured boy has succumbed, squatting in properties already squatted in, towards a new pagan dawn.

The virtual life is the norm in the society drawn in 'The Migration of Memories.' An ingenious tale, with a domestic take on its legal and personal consequences. A male newly-retired, who finds his domestic life is anything but his own, forms the basis of 'The Horseshoe Homes,' with intimations of both The Prisoner and Animal Farm.

  'Mills of Silence' – a novella – ends the collection. A cloak-and-dagger tale set in Paris, involving missed appointments, a psychotic former philosopher and war reporter, rumblings in the next hotel room, the trail of an elusive walking 'wound,' and the production of miniature wooden guillotines. Derivative it is not. The ambiguous perceptions – Wilkinson's hallmark – pervade the narratives throughout. Speed-reading Wilkinson denies the disturbing effect only achievable through steady progression. The consequence of so doing reveals, in all positive ways, that he's done it again.

* * *

Synchronicity is defined as 'the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.' Whatever the genre, synchronicity is the guiding creative force for writers. More often than not, you must make your own opportunities to advance towards your goal; but, sometimes, fortune – disguised as chance - appears merely in wait for discovery. For Jake Fior – boutique proprietor of Alice Through The Looking Glass, 14, Cecil Court, London – this book grew out of his specialist field of interest: www.alicelooking.co.uk

  As a ruse to avoid her mother, having failed her Maths exam, Fior's Alice Liddell absconds to the High Street charity shops. The last she visits displays, amongst the bric-a-brac, a full-length, antique looking-glass. On getting it back to her room, she discovers a rear label, a former purchaser name, its owner's name of Bishop Berkeley, and its provenance from 'the Dodgson sale of 1898.' It is from here where fact and fiction merge as contemporary objet d'art related to Carroll find linkage to Fior.

  Through a Looking Glass Darkly – subtitled 'a reimagination' – draws upon real-life familial links between Carroll and The Golden Dawn. Interspersing Fior's version of Carroll's second 'Alice' text with darker parallel scenes featuring leadership rivals Aleister Crowley and Samual Mathers in a metaphorical battle to gain ascendency. (Again, based upon an alleged historical event).

  Fior tells me that, 'as an overview I'd estimate that I've retained about 35% of Carroll's original text and the bravura moments almost verbatim.' He adds: 'The text itself has some allusions that don't get explained in the afterword, but I wanted to leave some things ambiguous so that people can find their own meanings in them.' As a reader, I'd have welcomed an additional scene or two featuring Crowley and Mathers, those present being wonderfully evocative; however, as a writer, I understand how one can get sidetracked by scenes parallel to the prioritised body of text.

  This is, perhaps, more an art book than a conventional novel; more so than the original work, in content, while the dark presence of Crowley doesn't deprive the text of its appeal to older children. For any collector, it is certainly worth purchasing for the additions. There feature three entirely new Tenniel illustrations, newly coloured by Kate Hepburn and Fior himself. Images of demons – credited to E.A.P., 1847 - are augmented by a night sky vista from a photograph from the 1880s'. Fior himself re-drew Alice in the cover image of her emerging from the Looking-Glass, hand-coloured, rather than photo-shopped, heightening the contemporary feel.

  'It was quite a meticulous process. There's also been a lot of care in the design. The Mathers / Crowley sections that intersperse the central text have a different typeface headline to introduce them. This is a modern version of the typeface as used on the spine of the first edition of The Wind in the Willows (which is another reason I'm flattered to be included in The Pan Review).' From whichever field of interest you come to this book, the production alone will delight.

  I began by defining synchronicity. You'll note that the first tale of Charles Wilkinson's third collection is called 'The Immaterialists.' I'd never heard the term before and wondered about its definition. In the afterword, about six pages from the end of Fior's book - entirely different in subject matter and content to Wilkinson's - the author not only uses it, but tells me. His theme – eerily enough - is synchronicity.

* * *

Albertine's Wooers

Steve Toase's first collection - To Drown In Dark Water – is out from Undertow; Paul Draper's slender volume of folk horror – Black Gate Tales – is out via Createspace; Sundial Press are about to release a paperback version of their out-of-print hardback classic, the Jamesian The Alabaster Hand; speaking of which, Robert Lloyd Parry's Ghosts Of The Chit-Chat has also been re-released in paperback by Swan River Press; a selected 'best of' of Lisa Tuttle's work – The Dead Hours Of Night – is out from Valancourt; Snuggly Tales Of Hashish And Opium gathers together more themed fin-de-siecle gems – many for the first time in English - by Baudelaire, Gautier, Schwob, Lorrain and others.

The Cold Embrace – Weird Stories By Women, (Introduced and Edited by S.T. Joshi), Dover Publications

Today, an anthology of women writers' feels quite passe. Women are hardly under-represented in the field; least of all requiring of showcasing by a named male editor. Then, I suppose, the state of play in the 19^th and early 20^th century was rather different. This collection of known gems and all too occasional obscurities, is book-ended between an early tale - Mary Shelley's post-Frankenstein 'Transformation' (1830) - and the latest - May Sinclair's excellent 'Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched' (1922).

  In most cases, this is only a worthy collection if you've somehow overlooked, or yet to be introduced to, the cheap and easily available Wordworth Editions Mystery and the Supernatural series. (At least eleven of their nineteen entries are here, in fact). Less often anthologised titles – certainly new to me – are all too few, but include Margaret Olipant's 'The Secret Chamber' (1876), Sarah Orne Jewett's distinctly odd 'In Dark New England Days' (1890), Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's revelatory 'The Hall Bedroom' (1903) and Ellen Glasgow's intriguing 'The Shadowy Third' (1916).

  Re-reading some of the earlier entries reminds me how the sedentary pace and explanatory minutiae, redolent in late Victorian short fiction, so often deflates any sense of approaching menace or threat. For this reason, I now find Vernon Lee's 'A Wedding Chest' (1904) almost unreadable; too many Latin terms crammed into breathless nine-line sentences, misting the reader's focus.

  Even if climaxes are too easily foregrounded, the best of them, here and through the rest of the anthology, concentrate on playing out the plot from the opening page. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon's title tale a love-obsessed young student, a "scoffer at revelation" and "enthusiastic adorer of the mystical" vows that, should fate end their match, one or other of their spirits would return to hold the surviving lover forever. In Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's 'The Hall Bedroom' a landlady relates the journal of one of her former tenants whose extreme sensual experiences at night gradually challenge his earlier, presumably sane, perceptions. A tale that foretells early takes on drug-induced experiments, (such as Crowley's 'The Drug,' previously reviewed here), it is a revelation itself considering its age.

  In 'The Shadowy Third' a nurse is summoned, by a great surgeon, to a country house to look after his bedridden wife. The sudden, unexpected presence of a little girl who may – or may not – be a figment of his ailing wife's imagination, is nevertheless also witnessed by the nurse. When the patient confides in her that her surgeon husband had previously killed the girl, and discovers their mutual connection, the conclusion is made suddenly inevitable. Pleasingly, as with 'The Hall Bedroom,' this is too well written to be a mere shocker.

  Again, this is one of those collections that is passable for those unfamiliar with the form's early highlights. For the rest of us, it is top-heavy with re-runs reprinted elsewhere. I can at least glean some new finds in the latter three that prompt some renewed interest.

The Simon Iff Stories & Other Works by Aleister Crowley, Wordsworth Editions

I had thought the full list of fin-de-siecle fictional detectives who specialised in the strange and uncanny was known to me.   Then Wordsworth trailed this in their catalogue last year; all twenty-three tales of one Simon Iff, penned by Crowley – according to another excellent Introduction by William Breeze – between 1916 and 1919 in a journalistic focused rush.

  Originally published in ‘The International’ literary monthly, they ostensibly represent a further vehicle for Crowley’s notorious, publicity-hungry ego. Yet, they are also a revelation.  In my very first ‘Pan Review’ proper (see ‘The Drug & Other Stories,’ 26^th Feb. 2011) I criticised the man’s callous treatment of women in most of those standalone tales.  Here, however, Breeze reveals many of ‘Iff’s continuing characters Crowley drew from friends and enemies he knew at the time, including a woman journalist, (Jeanne Robert Foster), his ex-wife (Rose Edith Crowley) and ex-lovers (Jeanne Robert Foster, again, and Ratan Devi). While his rather brusque depictions may not exactly atone for those in his standalone tales, they at least achieve a surface acquaintance with credibility and, as characters, stay mostly alive and appreciated.

  The Stories here are divided under the four headings in which they first saw print: ‘The Scrutinies of Simon Iff,’ ‘Simon Iff in America,’ ‘Simon Iff Abroad’ and ‘Simon Iff, Psychoanalyst.’  Iff himself is an old man who lives by his (and, of course, Crowley’s) religious philosophy of Thelema (doing-what-thou-wilt-(being)-the-whole-of-the-Law) with his own brand of anticipatory logic.  Denying himself the usual material acquisitions, he sustains himself on a meagre, health-centred diet and yoga.  Compensation is afforded in the rich feeding of his other senses, surrounding himself with beautiful objets d’are while imbibing a rare old wine and expensive cigar.

  Initially, Iff appears relatively sane although his subsequent eccentric outbursts and callous sense of humour feel forced, cartoonish, and, occasionally, in poor taste.  Since the character is virtually Crowley projecting himself in his dotage, this is perhaps unsurprising.  This is particularly noticeable in the later ‘Scrutinies’ and the American stories, where his transatlantic audience might have been deemed less shock-able.  Madcap might sum them up. 

  ‘Simon Iff, Psychoanalyst’ is of additional historical interest with its then new Freudian perspective, but the two short tales it comprises are also more credibly sober as a consequence and little gems of the mystery genre. 

  As if this wasn’t enough, this release is rounded off with the ironically-titled ‘Golden Twigs.’  Eight non-Iff tales based upon J. G. Frazer’s highly influential tome on comparative religions, ‘The Golden Bough.’  These reveal just what a fine short-story writer Crowley could be when he wasn’t quite so hung-up on the need to lampoon and shock.  Fables of a mythic Europe reside, although, unlike Coachwhip’s recent M.P. Shiel reissue, you won’t require a Latin dictionary.

   Wordsworth helpfully include unobtrusive footnotes throughout and a Notes and Sources sections at the back to enable even the greenest Crowley novice.  Retailing, along with the rest of the Mystery & Supernatural series, at £2.99, this particular imprint only increases in interest and value.

 

 

 

The Drug and Other Stories by Aleister Crowley, Wordsworth Editions

The ‘Mystery and Supernatural’ series of Wordsworth Editions could (were I at all religious) be considered a Godsend.  Over the past five years’ a skeleton staff (naturally) have, admirably, been scouring those lists of 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th Century authors many of us are only familiar with as names from our own scouring of charity bookshops.

  Haven’t we often wondered, half-curious eyes glancing across the shelves over the stained, dusty spines of red, green and blue, what lies behind such ambiguous names as F. Marion Crawford, J. H. Riddell, or the unintentionally humorous Oliver Onions?  All are now available as collected ‘Wordsworths’ to easily discover for ourselves. 

  The argument in favour of releasing such versions is clear.  Bringing to the fore cheap, collected editions of unfairly neglected authors, circumventing high expenditure on POD mock-up, first edition facsimiles for the buyer, can only be applauded.  Yet, occasionally, too much of a good thing can apply.  Such is the case with this new collection of very rare Aleister Crowley.

  Being no authority on The Beast – long ago submerged under mystical bullshit from supporters and detractors alike - I approached with some caution.  Yet, what we find is revelatory.  The best of these tales are short, tightly plotted, character studies where the Baudelaire-tinged, deprecating wit is controlled and not undermining of the stories focus.  Here, Crowley has nothing to declare but the story itself.  These include the title tale, one of the earliest accounts of a hallucinatory trauma; ‘The Testament of Magdalen Blair’; a tale of personality transference akin to ‘The Exorcist’ but grounded more in early psycho-science than Catholicism.  ‘The Bald Man’ is a quite superb, and, for Crowley, surprisingly emotional, World War One horror story; and ‘Black and Silver’; a positive depiction of a woman with strong sexual control over men, sears into the brain its highlighted, contrasting shades.  

  This last is worth noting since Crowley’s depiction of women elsewhere is otherwise shamefully misogynistic.  Usually, one is introduced only to be just as swiftly despatched to bolster the uneventful plots of the other, more inferior tales; too often the staple of much pre-1940s’ supernatural fiction.  We might expect this from Western short stories of the time, where the ‘Indians’ only appeared over the horizon to be casually and horribly slaughtered.  But to treat fifty-per-cent of the human population with such contempt, even in 1913, points to, at best, a lazy immaturity.

  Despite the back cover accolade, it is also one other reason I had little patience for ‘Atlantis’; an overlong, plot-forsaken inventory of satirical pastiche that takes the mystical joke too far and for too long.  Others, such as ‘The Three Characteristics’ and ‘The Stone of the Philosophers’ are of a similar, fantastical setting, equally obscure, and, being more mystifying than mystical, also unlikely to appeal to anyone but the Crowley collector.

  Elsewhere in the collection, and more to his credit, there is the strong sense that Crowley is playing up his contemporary reputation as the ‘wickedest man in England’ as another lampooning target.  This is something of a revelation considering he was still only in his early thirties at the time of their writing.

  Other tales with a contemporary setting, such as ‘The Soul-Hunter,’ ‘Every Precaution’ and ‘The Mysterious Malady,’ turn to insanity as the theme, and enjoyable for all that.  Each foreshadows William Burroughs’s subsequent depictions of science’s faceless amorality; depiction without judgement.  In ‘Felo de Se,’ Crowley suddenly, and pleasingly, appears as himself, (albeit unnamed), justifying encouragement to a prospective younger disciple who intends taking his own life.

  A word on the Foreword by David Tibet and Introduction by William Breeze.  Each is crucially informative and vital for readers coming to this author for the first time to gauge where Crowley himself was coming from. (Somewhere few others had been in England at the time). Not always great, but never less than intriguing, the best of these forty-nine tales (nineteen of which are published here for the first time) may yet fulfil the label, ‘a classic release.’