The Ghost Sequences by A.C. Wise, Undertow Publications / The Black Dreams: Strange Stories From Northern Ireland, Edited by Reggie Chamberlain-King, Blackstaff Press / Albertine's Wooers

Editorial: Greetings Panners! So, we come to the last issue of the year. Sadly, it must also be the last issue for the foreseeable future. Yes, a second sabbatical calls. Reason being, a historical novel begun in 2020 has made little progress in 2021. Since I need to ensure I do better than another year of only meagre scribblings, I therefore need to 'get my head down' and commit to the completion of a draft, with no other (or next to no other) writing commitments forthcoming. I can't believe 'Pan' won't return eventually, so I ask my kind readers to keep a look out next year and keep the pagan faith. In the meantime, I hope you all have as good a Yule as is possible in these trying times and as productive a 2022 as I hope to.

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Wise – another new name to me – has had two collections published, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, and The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories, with Lethe Press, and a novella, Catfish Lullaby, published with Broken Eye Books. Her debut novel, Wendy, Darling, was released by Titan Books in last June. Her assuredness across genre – based upon this evidence – impresses. 

Here, for example, she handles the horror folk tale ('The Nag Bride') as well as the SF ('Lesser Creek') and the ghost story. ('How the Trick Is Done'). Five of the best reveal the assured consistency of a novelist. 'How the Trick Is Done' - a stage assistant takes revenge on behalf of her late, love-lorn predecessor against their much feted, but arrogant, magician. 'Harvest Song, Gathering Song' - Soldiers meet after battle as a controlling nectar-like drug takes physical possession for an alien race's future survival.

'Crossing' – A child's early fear is tested by an underwater naiad of ambiguous intent, whose silent eerie presence will play a key role in her chosen path as an adult. 'Lesser Creek: A Love Story, A Ghost Story' – A lovely description of young lost love, eternally played out upon a trestle bridge overlooking the waters at which they met their end.

'The Nag Bride' is a folk-horror classic and the standout tale in an already strong collection. On the night of a Halloween party, a tale told by a boy to a girl resonates later in life, first as a found true crime story, and subsequently as an ongoing curse from the seemingly immortal Nag Bride.

I have to hand it to Alison Wise; the feminist angle of the curse ensures reader sympathy with the title character, rather than any distancing from it, despite her uncanny, supernatural presence. For it is a curse, self-inflicted by the mercenary actions of those who'd so casually used and abused her.

*The cover – alongside that for Kay Chronister's 'Thin Places' – is one of this publisher's best; a pareidolia of a skull upon a jet-black background by Olga Beliaeva. In fact, over the past two years, Undertow's output generally has risen from creditable to something close to essential. Future releases of this quality should ensure a readership deserving of it.

*Since writing, this excellent cover has deservedly won for Undertow Book Cover Of The Year by Electric Literature. My congratulations to Alison Wise, designer Vince Haig, and to cover artist Olga Beliaeva.

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'I don't recall if I saw my first gunman in my childhood nightmares or on my childhood streets. There were plenty in both and they looked very much like each other.'

So opens Reggie Chamberlain-King's introduction to his latest themed anthology; one which, in the annals of western uncanny fiction, perhaps only Lord Dunsany mirrored in his most moving novel, The Curse Of The Wise Woman; as 'The Troubles' act as the ominous, omnipresent background to both rural and urban tales of paranoid hallucination and dread.

Chamberlain-King is a regular contributor to Swan River Press's excellent bi-annual Green Book and the paranormal anthologies Weird Dublin: A Miscellany, Almanack and Companion and White Noise & Ouija Board. Pleasingly, other than Chamberlain-King himself, all contributors to Black Dreams are new names to me.

In Jo Baker's 'Original Features,' a cheap two-up-two-down harbours a door, which seems out of place and only discernible to the young wife moving in. Moyra Donaldson's 'The Woman Who Let Go' sees a woman left distraught by a break-up, finds sanctuary in a remote cottage and her own company.

Jan Carson's 'The Leaving Place' is an eerie tale parallel to 'The Woman Who Let Go' sees a case of incurable pain where the only curative is final. Michelle Gallen's 'The Tempering' has a daughter discovering how death has different meanings and motives after her loving father suddenly suffers a life-changing event.

Gerard McKeown's 'The Quizmasters' presents an 'old, muddy Ford Fiesta' drawing up beside a cyclist and its driver asks him a couple of innocuous questions about the intended destination. When these become relentless, the cyclist realises a wrong answer could hold a darker consequence.

Chamberlain-King's own entry – 'The Missing Girl – Extracts fron an Oral History' – is written as a brief vox-pop account over two young May Queens' mysterious disappearances between the neighbouring but socially isolated towns of Bancarrick and Carrigbawn.

You may glean from these examples that Ireland's recent political history is eschewed, instead utilised as a social backdrop to personal tales. The tales themselves are definitively uncanny, where the encroachment of danger is quietly threatening and undeniable while barely acknowledged. An admirable collection.

Albertine's Wooers

The sainted George Berguno's The Sad Eyes of the Lewis Chessmen is the eighth pocket-sized entry in Egaeus Press's Keynote Editions. Also from this publisher comes Songs Of The Northern Seas, described as “an anthology of thirteen tales of the Arctic north." Undiscovered Territories, an intriguing series of metaphysical fantasies by Robert Freeman Wexler (PS Publishing). Steve Rasnic Tem's eagerly-awaited latest collection Thanatrauma (Valancourt Books) is now available. Editor Daniel Corrick presents Ghosts and Robbers: An Anthology of German Gothic Fiction for Snuggly Books. Zagava are producing Singing and Sighing: Collected Stories Vol 1 by DP Watt. The evergreen Tartarus Press has released The Gypsy Spiders and Other Tales of Italian Horror by Nicola Lombardi (translated by Joe Weintraub), described as “a masterpiece of Italian fiction, and a must for all readers of intelligent contemporary horror. Lombardi’s novelisations of the Dario Argento films Profondo Rosso and Suspiria, are well known." Reggie Oliver's eighth collection for the publisher, A Maze For The Minotaur and Other Strange Stories, has just been released in paperback. Finally, as Pan went to 'press,' the very welcome news came through that the very long-awaited first-time reprint of Flora Mayor's 1935 collection, The Room Opposite, is out next month in limited edition hardback from Sundial Press.

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I Would Haunt You If I Could by Sean Padraic Birnie, Undertow Publications / Infra-Noir 2020 (2021), Zagava / Albertine's Wooers

Editorial: Firstly, a notification sent to me by Editor, Matthew Walther: 'I am writing to pass along the details of a ghost story contest being sponsored by The Lamp magazine that may be of interest to readers of The Pan Review: https://thelampmagazine.com/2021/06/24/the-lamp-christmas-ghost-story-contest/ The winner will receive $1000; two runners up will receive $300 each. All best wishes, Matthew Walther.'

On his website, Sean Birnie describes himself as 'a Technical Demonstrator on the Photography programmes at the University of Brighton, where I deliver beginner and advanced workshops in Adobe applications such as Photoshop and InDesign, studio lighting, and preparation for digital print, and install degree shows, among other things.'  His literary art is more evocative of the paintings of Francis Bacon, the focus being the macabre physical – as well as psychological - descent of the human condition. The role of infection in sado-masochistic relationships is the prominent theme across the collection. In the tales 'New To It All,' 'Like A Zip,' 'Holes' and 'You Know What To Do,' pain is utilised as a weapon of control. 'New To It All' has the narrator recount the previously unexperienced sexual habits that (unwittingly?) drew him to his relationships. 'Hand Me Down' finds a new mother's growing paranoia for the safety of her child turn into something entirely. 'Holes' sees a man's quickly growing rash spread to his partner after he already harbours fear for his disappearance.

  In 'I Would Haunt You If I Could,' again, infection, stains and encroaching entropy foreground the title tale, and quietly compelling it is too; especially if, like yours truly, you live as a bachelor in rented accommodation. 'You Know What To Do' is my favourite here. A successful new entry in the library of the uncanny, a husband's obsession with the apparently hidden room behind the cupboard under the stairs holds a fascination, which may – or may not – be exerting a dangerous, unspoken obsession.

  In 'Dollface,' the question that hangs over the narrative is whether or not a daughter's doll is possessed. Is the father obsessed? (My hunch). Or, since it bears an alleged physical human trait, is the doll even a doll? Only the final tale – 'Other Houses' – which sees the narrator plagued with guilt over the younger sister he believes he pushed into a pond when children, didn't quite hold my attention to the end. Still, as with the previous tales, Birnie displays a superior knack for the uncanny that I so favour. This collection is a solid addition to the library for lovers of quiet horror and an undoubtedly assured debut.

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Infra-Noir 2020 collects all eleven chapbooks, released across last year, in a single volume. 'Craft' - DP Watt's opening contribution demonstrates how the perishability of art can spawn its own unexpected legacy. In 'The Clerks Of The Invisible' - the first of two Mark Valentine tales - a dying bookseller entrusts his literary estate to his chief cataloguer, with the view to contacting interested agents to seek out a mysterious book 'that mattered to him most.' The slenderest of tales by page-count, it is, however, the kind of springboard Orson Welles might have run with to manifest as an on-screen magnum opus. 'The Idyll Is Over' shines with beauty, being one of Jonathan Wood's introspective prose poems.

  'Codex Of Light' by Karim Ghahwagi has a monastic society holding candlelight and its smoke in censorious and holy esteem. 'Posterity' by Mark Samuels highlights Sybil Court, 'scholarly trailblazer of posthumous interest in the fiction of Rupert Alderman.' Court feels her reputation as an Alderman scholar could be questioned by her academic-only interpretations rather than primary research of his extant archive. (It's surely no coincidence that the late fictitious author with increasingly remote, right-wing leanings shares the initials of another English author of strange stories).

  In 'Ancestor Water' by Rebecca Lloyd (of the great Gothic novel of 2019, The Child Cephalina) an immigrant daughter, naturalised by her time in London, discovers her visiting mother alienated by her Western traits. 'Stained Medium' – the second Mark Valentine – features a bookish student of modern Gnosticism encounters one aged whose own experience is revealed as much closer to home. On a not dissimilar theme, 'The Purblind Bards' by Timothy Jarvis finds one of a band of bardic outcasts in a seaside town reflect upon what brought him to his becoming. 'The Wet Woman' - An out-of-condition actor, about to take on a new film role, is sent by his agent to a health farm to get back into shape. A late lover and rival adds some dark interest to his reluctant presence.

  'A House Of Treasures' – Familial intrigue surrounding the presence and significance of Noah Court – discovered in a unique photograph - makes for my new favourite Ray Russell tale. 'Home Comforts' – Sheltering from a downpour in a shop of this name, Megan is shocked to discover that a stuffed, life-size figure in the window is referred to as a real person who works next door. To her own puzzlement, she expresses a determination to purchase it.

  Clocking in at a modest, but sufficient, 187 pages, this is one of the more accessible Zagava releases, in a form I hope is repeated in future years. A very worthy primer to this publisher.

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                                   Albertine's Wooers

Reggie Oliver's eighth collection – A Maze For The Minotaur – is soon to be released by Tartarus Press...who've also just released a slipcase of two thorough collections-in-one of Oliver Onions tales...Swan River Press follows up its popular first Green Book of 'exclusive' short tales (issue 15) with a second (issue 17)...Valancourt have reissued some choice paperback titles in hardback. Speaking of which, the British Library's publishing arm has just released a collection of six-of-the-best by Margaret Oliphant, The Open Door And Other Stories Of The Seen & Unseen.

Aickman's Heirs, Edited by Simon Strantzas, Undertow Publications

To embrace the work as a whole... I respect Strantzas for wanting to avoid the obvious tribute collection, as he concedes from the outset, so adding to the countless roster of second-rate fan-fiction titles; but his alternative reasoning for the title feels tenuous in the extreme.

  For those anticipating a tribute collection, written-in-the-style, you may be disappointed. The narrative voices are mainly the authors'; which is just as well since the majority, expressed in the modern American-English vernacular, would only further distance us from Aickman's own English RP style.

  While Strantzas warns against this very assumption in his intro, his alternative reasoning for the title seems equally vague – that, while RA's work was idiosyncratic, the way he worked is shared by our generation, influenced by him. i.e. by “mining their own personal psychology” and “tapping into their own subconsciousness, much as Aickman had.” Aickman, yes, and also every other writer on the planet, which fails to justify or explain precisely what set him apart.

  On reading, I remain puzzled as to how these tales – taken in unity – even begin to justify the book's title, if the way Aickman worked is a raison d'etre shared by this generation. Strantzas claims this is through being“open to exploring new avenues of the subtly bizarre.” Then could you not say that about any idiosyncratic author in recent history? Which then was Aickman's avenue? This isn't defined. The approach of each contributor is so much a contrast to its predecessor as to have been lifted from disparate sources. This is less a complaint, though, than a mild word of warning to an Aickman completist going by the title alone. I'd suggest its appeal would lie more with the convert to the uncanny, at large, rather than the seasoned specialist on the author. Strantzas also claims that attempting to write like Aickman is “impossible.” Difficult, certainly, but not insurmountable.

  The best of the work here defies this claim, showing the necessary cool impassivity and psychological insight. Praise then to Richard Gavin, John Howard, D.P. Watt, Michael Cisco, Lynda Rucker, Michael Wehunt, Helen Marshall and Malcolm Devlin. Their entries at least feel influenced by Aickman, without, in any way, aping him, as Strantzas wanted to avoid. Were that the whole collection was so pitched.

  But it is fortunate, for us all today, that we live in an era where the short tale has blossomed in popularity, regularity and quality, in the face of nay-saying publisher agents; one of whom – as recently as 2008 – confidently predicted its demise. Undertow's growing list remains welcome confirmation of that untruth.