The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets by Sophie Hannah, Sort Of Books

While Sophie Hannah’s voice is consistent throughout this ten-tale collection, the book is, in terms of genre, very much of two halves.

  Five of the tales conform to what may be called ‘uncanny.’  The narrator voice, increasingly neurotic as domestic paranoia sets in, gradually making us doubt our first assumption.  ‘The Octopus Nest’ cleverly switches the stalker with the stalked, justifying that doubt in the most satisfying and unexpected way.

  ‘Friendly Amid the Haters’ concerns a harboured bid for revenge against a personal, physical attack, and we wonder, right up until the end, whether her extreme choice will be finally acted upon.

  The title story concerns a woman who lives by the delusion of a double life and how she thinks others perceive it.  Once she reveals she has been sacked by more than one previous employer, it doesn’t take us long to understand why.

  ‘The Nursery Bear’’ has the Aickman influence in a series of odd events that may or may not be linked, but form a dreadful coherence in the narrator’s mind.  With ‘The Octopus Nest’ the highlight, this is the second best tale here flawed only by a late scene involving a mirror-image front room in the neighbour’s house which, somehow, doesn’t work as an enticement to additional fear.  A gilding of the lily this excellent tale doesn’t need.

  In ‘The Tub,’ a woman left licking her wounds from a possibly unrequited love is left to confide in one who desires only her body.  The man lacks any real character beyond his carnal intent, while the woman’s hopeless bid to salvage words of comfort from him becomes increasingly psychotic.

  The remaining five tales dispense with the uncanny element entirely, being little more than blackly humorous episodes of imaginary sitcom.  But Hannah remains strong on her fellow woman and the stifled subjective opinions that stem from saving face.

  ‘We All Say What We Want’ is a wish-fulfilling tryout by a husband and wife who break out of their boring lifestyle by joining a pair of pleasure-seekers.  (Read it and admit to whose side you wish you were on).

  In ‘Twelve Noon,’ a woman’s thin-skinned sense of guilt extends to the time she has left with her limited parking space and its advice, ‘maximum stay two hours – no return within two hours,’ taken as a dire warning.

  ‘Herod’s Valentines’ involves an insecure single who becomes willingly deferential to another, richer, more egocentric, and more sexually profligate than herself.  Agreeing to help her with her sexual half-life for a large amount of money, the second woman only causes problems for herself.  A night-time fantasy involving Christopher and Peter Hitchens is a comic highlight in a clever but slightly too long tale of passive domination.

  ‘You Are a Gongedip’ appears to concern the pathological envy of a publisher’s employee who stalks the writer she had wanted to be, and the (unjustified) psychological revenge she exacts.  Again, Hannah is less convincing with the male voice.  More than once, I was certain Hannah herself was narrator when in truth her gender floundered, uncertainly, as the male author.

  ‘The Most Enlightened Person I’ve Ever Met’ reads as a wish-fulfilment fantasy of Hannah’s very own, where a woman, disappointed by the ending of her relationship, draws her ex-lover into a confession of his failings and a shock final entrapment.

  The quality of Hannah’s writing is high and consistent, although I found the sitcom-type stories held much less interest than those told as ambiguous mysteries.  In these, she displays the best of both worlds.

Edgelander & Other Uncanny Tales, Kindle Direct Publishing

My latest book is now available from Amazon.  A mere taster for bigger and better tales in the future...

I'm always interested in hearing from other writers about their experiences in independent or self-publishing.
The good, the bad, the indifferent.  What, so far, has been yours?  My only goal is to improve my craft at each attempt, until other publishers finally realise what they've been missing.  It is all any of us can do.

What are the downsides of publishing without an agent?  Of getting your work to the public without the formative quality control of an editor?  What are the advantages?

When it comes to layout and technical presentation of a text, to what extent is the human element still necessary in its production?  Should the writer have to be responsible for this at all?  Then there is the question of quality control over democratic access.  Let me know your views.  Mark

Boy In Darkness & Other Stories (Centenary Edition) by Mervyn Peake, Edited by Sebastian Peake, Peter Owen Publishers

One of a dozen reissues this summer to celebrate Peake’s birth centenary has been this modestly slim collection of the half-dozen short stories he’d found time to squeeze out on Sark between the illustrations, paintings, sculpture, plays and poetry.

  Effectively, the title story is a discarded chapter from the second half of ‘Gormenghast,’ set during one of 12-year-old Titus’s initial attempts at escape from the castle and his heredity.

  Lost in an outer forest, the Boy encounters the seemingly demonic Goat and his even more satanic bully of a master, Hyena.  These characters are nightmarish enough, except each are in thrall to a creature even worse; the hollow Lamb and its insatiable hunger for other’s souls.

  Imagine if the ‘Alice’ books had been penned by Clive Barker, drawn by Goya, and you have a fair idea of the tale’s horrific nature.  Always confounding category, this story most clearly highlights Peake’s belief in fantasy as a genre as much for adults as for children.  (In fact, he often felt frustrated by publishers who only perceived it for the young and marketed it as such).  It is a brilliant nightmare, but, ultimately, too graphically so for the trilogy.

  ‘I Bought a Palm Tree’ is an autobiographical account of an exotic impulse buy during the Peakes’ time on Sark.  The writing is spare and wry, somehow defying the time in which it was written.

  As is ‘The Connoisseurs,’ which asks of us, what price beauty when a maker’s mark on a piece of art is deemed more important than either its appearance or its positive effect upon the onlooker?

  ‘The Weird Journey’ is a typically Peake-esque flash of madcap wit couched in paradoxical Edwardian SF.  A lot like his nonsense verse.

  ‘Danse Macabre’ exists in the historical Y-fork between the traditional pre-War ghost story and the proto-comedic fantasies of Richard Matheson to come.  A lovely waking dream.

  ‘Same Time, Same Place’ ends the collection and is, perhaps, the most interesting tale behind ‘Boy.’  A young man, desperate to leave the daily monotony of living with his parents, finds release in his growing desire for a woman customer at a Lyon’s Corner House.  He is pleasingly surprised by her own swift, reciprocal willingness, finding her always at her table on his arrival while insistent on remaining as he leaves.  She instantly agrees to marriage after he proposes, and, on the big day, as his approaching bus passes the window of the room in which they are about to register – he receives a frightening revelation.  He decides that, by comparison, his old life wasn’t quite so bad after all.

  This story, wittingly or otherwise, appears to harbour a moral, being a warning against prejudice and the power of immature desire.  As a truly vagabond artist it is difficult to believe Peake sided with the young man, having several outsider-type friends of his own such as Augustus John and the young Quentin Crisp.  At the end, you suddenly feel sorry for the lady he has betrayed and are, surely, meant to.

  This is more a title for fans of Peake, so I wouldn’t recommend it as an introduction.  What it offers instead are intriguing glimpses of the creator outside Gormenghast’s dominant realm.

Oriental Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn, Wordsworth Editions

It is always refreshing to discover a British author from the late Victorian and Edwardian eras unencumbered by Christianity and its mono-centric repressions.  If unquestioning atheism is too much to ask, then those highly sceptical agnostics have at least gone in their own, intriguingly divergent directions.

  Algernon Blackwood, from youth, favoured a form of Eastern nature mysticism; John Barlas, Baudelairean revolutionary socialism, with Buddhism alone favoured by the writer of this three-volume collection.  Except Lafcadio Hearn was only ever British in the colonial sense, his life cosmopolitan to an almost wayward degree.

  Born of an Irish father and Grecian mother, David Stuart Davies’s usual informative introduction reveals a subsequent existence as a newspaperman in New Orleans, before moving on to Japan, aged forty, to study the culture, eventually settling to marry a local girl and change his name to ‘Yakumo Koizumi.’  (As if ‘Lafcadio’ wasn’t an original enough a choice for him, being pronounced Lefcadia after the Greek-Ionian island upon which he was born).

  The stories making up these three very short - and very plotless - collections, are fables, related to the reader almost as anecdotes, as if around a public bar.  This is just as well considering the Eastern names for places, times, ranks and reliquaries prompting footnotes at the bottom of the first two collections and so the inevitable pause every few pages.  Stick with these, though, as they are not unduly long, certainly informative, while evoking mystical mind pictures that, with focused detail, open up a world of Eastern mythology a textbook three times the size could not inspire.

  Like most fables, the construct in each is the same.  A beautiful and mysterious young woman captures the heart of a brave young soldier (invariably a Samurai in this case) and gives him a life choice by which to prove his heart.  By either reneging on a promise given or justifying it, is his fate sealed.  In the former case, one of the lovers (invariably the woman) dies.  In the latter, the male lover may yet die through proving his worth.  There are rarely happy-endings.

  Glimpses of what might today be considered ‘body horror’ (in truth, self-flagellation) accompanies the climaxes, but a large enough minority ensure you will not be left feeling too depressed.  Of course, these are also morality tales.  A few go against this grain.

  ‘Silkworms’ is inspired by the saying of a Chinese proverb told the author, who then quotes the proverb’s source.  It is as groundbreaking and beautiful a short story as I have ever read.

  ‘Incense’ continues in this vein of being more article than tale, with its history and varied early uses.

  ‘A Passional Karma’ is another suggesting Hearn is quoting an experience from life, while, for a change, it is the woman in the tale it has to tell who has the last laugh.

  Unlike other white Colonial writers of his day, Hearn himself is never judgemental, letting the material do the talking.  Since he integrated, going ‘native,’ this lends modernity to what is a passively appreciative voice.

  

Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman, Tartarus Press

There are three main effect-responses a writer wishes to provoke from the reader.

  In no particular order, these can be reduced to 1/ the heart, 2/ the gut, and 3/ the head.  If we take it as an interchangeable list, we can vary the order for various authors.  The final order very much depending upon a writer’s individual approach.

  Hold on, you say; surely, the author isn’t in charge of the response?  What matters is the reader and his reaction to the material?  You think?  I would argue that a competent writer is very much in control of a reader’s response.

I mean, when was the last time ‘War and Peace’ was bought by anyone anticipating knockabout comedy?  Or a James Kelman novel purchased for its solid Jackie Collins-type situations?

  So long as Genres exist for authors to write in – whatever that genre may be – then emotional response will always be their priority.

  The Horror genre might be one easiest to highlight by example, since it exists to provoke the more extreme reactions.  One author specialising in sensationalist pulp-horror, let us say Shaun Hutson, will try to instil a visceral, churning feeling mingled with black humour.  His order of priority of effect-response can be thus;

1/ Gut

2/ Heart

3/ Head.

Graham Masterson – less knowingly witty - might be closer to

1/ Heart

2/ Gut

3/ Head.

While Clive Barker, I would consider

1/ Head

2/ Gut

3/ Heart.

This doesn’t mean these writers lack what isn’t uppermost in the list; merely that one intended effect-response is prioritised over the other as the best means to tell their tales their own way.  Move away from straight horror, towards a less easily definable genre, and this list still applies.

  By this token, there is little doubt that Robert Aickman is a Head, first, heart, second, and gut, third, man.  Here lies an issue, at least, if not a problem.   Even as ‘strange’ rather than horror fiction, the gut reaction to a tale should never be as low as third inconsideration.  An accusation could be levelled that this may not have been the writer’s intention and, again, is more a problem for myself as anticipating reader.  I don’t believe that.  As an issue, I suspect it lies at the heart of Aickman’s detractors.

  ‘Cold Hand in Mine’ – newly reissued by quality independent, Tartarus Press – is a case in point.  As Phil Baker concedes in the latest of their, always excellent, Introductions, “Aickman’s stories are often over-plotted…”  I’ll say.  There is little doubt he pulls this off in most of the tales in the first three books.  There, they work because – however puzzling - the pay-offs never leave us hanging without considered cause.  Here, the climactic results are mixed and a lot more uncertain.

  ‘Meeting Mr. Millar’ promises much, being this collection’s longest narrative, but ultimately pulls its punch.  The Mr. Millar of the title is landlord to the narrator staying in his digs; to the latter he appears as absent in personality as in presence.  He also drinks too much and brings home strange women at night.  This marks him down as someone sinister – apparently.

  Believe me: passed experience has warned me to always approach Aickman with intellectual respect and rigour, knowing it to be a mistake ever to take his narrators’ statements at face value.  Yet, even with this mindset, this tale fails to deliver.  Based on his descriptions, there is no justification whatsoever in ‘Meeting Mr. Millar’s narrator feeling especially freaked by his landlord.  Millar makes shallow, distracted conversation and keeps dubious company at night.  I hesitate to ask; so what?  The narrator’s paranoid overreaction is puzzling, a possible covert source not even hinted at elsewhere in the text.  In trying to provoke a likeminded reaction in the reader, I wonder if Aickman was trying too hard in the preliminaries; the over-plotting Baker refers to.  Personally, I have met far more inexplicable characters in bed-sit land than Millar.

  ‘The Clock Watcher’ is interesting as an intellectual exercise of making stationary objects harrowing, but we are presented only with other cameo characters vaguely paranoid perceptions of various clocks, with no uniting factor even hinted at.  Is Ursula’s own paranoia justified or based upon something else?  Unfortunately, too much is left to chance, unexplained.

So, in this case, we are told too little to care.

  Aickman is on far stronger, and, perhaps, safer territory here in his more conventional storytelling.  Fortunately, his gift for originality isn’t consequently forsaken.  ‘The Swords’ is an intriguing take on unfettered sadism as a competitive circus game.

  ‘Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal,’ the most conventional entry here, is, nevertheless, a beautifully wrought tale of mutating vampirism from the victim’s point of view.  It perhaps feels a less original take on the sub-genre today than on the collection’s original release in 1975, but no less enjoyable for that.

  ‘The Hospice’ - easily my favourite in the collection – is a disquieting tale of a man who has lost his way who – suddenly injured - takes refuge in a care facility.  I later pondered that the whole tale might be based around the infected narrator simply misreading ‘hostel,’ or even ‘hospital,’ as ‘hospice,’ his terror stemming from that misled assumption about its staff and residents; but to criticise further on that would be churlish.

  ‘The Same Dog’ is almost unique in the Aickman oeuvre in actually foregrounding its pay-off in the title.  Still, it is a neatly dour tale of unrequited love meeting physical danger.

  The remaining stories, ‘The Real Road to the Church’ and ‘Niemandswasser,’ remind us where Aickman’s real strength lies; when dispensing with the pay-off entirely to concentrate on the poetry, gradually larding with likely clues, earlier, in the text.  It is here where I care more about his characters, his burgeoning heart compensating for the lack of gut.

TPR - Summer Break

Just to announce that, due to other writing commitments, I'll be taking a break from THE PAN REVIEW.
However, I'll be back - refreshed - on Monday 8th August with the Tartarus reissue of Robert Aickman's
'Cold Hand In Mine.' TC.

The Wolves of God and Other Fey Stories by Algernon Blackwood & Wilfred Wilson, Wildside Press.

Perhaps the rarest collection of Blackwood, in truth, it remains one of several never officially reprinted.

  First published in 1921, a re-reading today uncovers certain forgotten facts.

Overall, the collection is uneven.  Of the fifteen tales, the first four are shamelessly derivative of past glories, re-treading plot and country from ‘The Listeners and Other Stories’ (1907) and ‘The Lost Valley’ (1910).

  But, stay with them.  ‘The Tarn of Sacrifice’ has an ex-soldier, back from the Front, and intent on a walking tour of the Lake District.  His clear loneliness for company is served when he all too willingly falls in with a windswept young woman and her father, disturbed by their own past, who welcome him in to their obsessive world of ritual.

  ‘Egyptian Sorcery’ subconsciously links Blackwood to Alistair Crowley and their membership of The Golden Dawn as thought transference becomes the means to pull a man’s beloved sister through a life-saving operation that might otherwise have killed her.  Some intriguing – and, perhaps, unintentionally amusing – gender bending ensues.

  ‘Confession’ is a favourite, and one of the most satisfying tales in its subjective fear and unrelenting build to the climax.  A Canadian soldier, suffering agoraphobia, has to face the fog of London for the first time, en route to a final week of convalescence in Brighton.  Losing his way, he is also on the point of losing control, when a strange woman - only half-conscious of him - draws him into following her.   What follows is the kind of blind circuitous route no one would wish to take.

  The penultimate tale, ‘The Lane That Ran East and West,’ is another gem; as earthily romantic in rural setting and character as the best of D. H. Lawrence.  Running through all his work, Blackwood’s signature ability to deftly meld ‘real’ events with the dream state is, here, depicted at its best.

A woman who spends her life watching various entrances and exits come and go beside the long country road she lives by, one day meets a mysterious passer-by who stops to hand her – and her alone - a fern leaf as a gift for payment she will one day pay to herself.  What comes-to-pass many years later, in a time and place she could never have predicted, reminds her tellingly of this day.

  That good stories have been hiding amongst those already considered inferior isn’t the only forgotten fact about this book.  Most of the unwary protagonists are soldiers, either shell-shocked or otherwise wounded, returning from World War One to a new world they must somehow re-engage with.  (Blackwood’s world of myth and madness would surely have made most wish they hadn’t come back at all!)

  This is hardly surprising, since Mike Ashley’s revealing biography on Blackwood – ‘Starlight Man’ – confirms that most of these tales were written in the immediate aftermath of Armistice, during 1919 – 20.

  And who was Wilfred Wilson?  Ashley confesses to gleaning few facts about him, other than he seems to have been a long-term hill-walking companion of Blackwood’s, who deemed he'd offered him enough research on the lie of foreign lands to justify joint credit.