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.

http://www.englishpen.org/

English PEN is the UK branch of the International Writers Association
that supports freedom of speech and its proponents throughout the
World.  They are always on the lookout for new supporters, so why
not check them out.

The Box: Uncanny Stories by Richard Matheson, Tor Books

We are in the territory of the white picket fence and the twitching curtain; specifically, post-war, Atomic America of the Fifties and Sixties, where the white-collar middle class believed it had much to fear from blue-collar make-doers.

  Time has emphasised the class demarcation as something worth fearing.

In ‘Button, Button,’ – the opening tale turned into a movie for which this release is its tie-in – a door-to-door salesman from a nameless, possibly disreputable, company offers a special offer to a well-to-do New Yorker couple in return for the ultimate sacrifice that may salve the conscience through anonymity.

  ‘Girl of My Dreams’ describes an insecure, psychotic, trailer-trash Bonnie-and-Clyde blackmailing a respectable married woman in her own home.

‘…he appraised the room.  Money was in evidence wherever he looked, in the carpeting and drapes, the period furniture, the accessories…this was it all right.’

  ‘Dying Room Only’ has nice Ford-owning Bob and Jean finding a downbeat roadside café at summer’s unbearable height, that sells only ‘Hi-Li Orange and Dr Pepper,’ leaving Jean alone with the idling, downtrodden drinkers, while her husband’s non-return from the John makes each one culpable.

  ‘A Flourish of Strumpets’ returns us to door-to-door selling of the back-page variety as The Exchange tries soliciting a different kind of service to its not-in-our-backyard Republicans.

  To what extent was Matheson aware of this at the time?

The second half of the collection, penned subsequently, is more varied, but collectively revealing an umbrella theme all their own.

  ‘No Such Thing as a Vampire’ has a medical twist in its tale.  ‘Mute’ - the longest and best story here – describes a voiceless German boy, orphaned from a house fire, and his mysterious survival.  ‘Shock Wave’ is a more conventional horror tale where a church organ, due for removal, takes revenge against its fate on behalf of its covetous owner.

  The remaining four are message stories played for laughs.  ‘The Creeping Terror’ is a punning satire on the Cult Phenomena and the media’s relationship with ‘the facts,’ while ‘Clothes Make the Man,’ ‘The Jazz Machine’ and the very silly ‘’Tis the Season to Be Jelly,’ closing this collection, all deal with the question of man’s ability to hold onto his identity.

  Matheson fans will know too well most of the early tales here, having been anthologised to death over the past forty years.  Yet, for the newcomer, they have morphed into something else; a snapshot of the repressed fears in post-war conservative values faced with the, then, new cushioning appliances and their purveyors of domestic convenience.

Tales of Hoffmann by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Penguin Classics

In the introduction to ‘The New Uncanny,’ Ra Page refers to Sigmund Freud’s seminal 1919 essay on the subject, and the eight irrational fears he defined as often deployed in such tales.

  The eighth is quoted as ‘confusions between reality and imagination (waking dreams, etc.).’  Not that the whole setting, from the outset, is confused, but, more crucially, the ambiguous perception of the main character or narrator and its depiction.  ‘The Sandman’ – used as Freud’s model – is easily Hoffmann’s most famous tale, having appeared as an actual character in everything from the opening of Roy Orbison’s 1963 hit single ‘In Dreams’ to a 1990s’ graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman.

  A mother’s friendly deadline to her bed-wary young son to beware the eye-dust sprinkling Sandman by 9 pm each night gains credence with the simultaneous arrival of Coppelius; his father’s domineering ‘mechanician’ and spectacle-selling hawker.  In hiding one night to discover his identity, the boy misinterprets the adults seemingly shared interest in mystical alchemy, played out in the front room.   Scaring the boy, a lifelong pathological hatred of the figure is triggered, particularly after the boy’s father suddenly dies.

  But - almost another century on - it’s clear something else is going on here.

The physical description of ‘Sandman’ Coppelius is rather less ambiguous than the tale.  The ‘large heavy nose drawn down over the upper lip’ and the seemingly delighted overcharging to a subsequent customer, point to the stereotypical, contemporary sketch of the avaricious Jew.

  Yet, you can’t help feeling the story is greater than this.  Since the whole tale is based upon the varying prejudicial assumptions of those who come into contact with Coppelius, it can also be read as a satire on that very prejudice.  Hoffmann himself is intriguingly wrought in R. J. Hollingdale’s introduction as an ‘anarchic humorist’ who, as a lawyer by day, shamelessly satirized those he’d been working with at night, getting himself, (despite or, perhaps, because of his contemporary literary success), into a lot of libellous trouble.  Such Jekyll / Hyde duality surely makes him as much of a choice character for the graphic novel as The Sandman himself.

  The rest of the book continues in the vein of characters either defying the narrators’ perceptions or justifying them in wholly unexpected ways, leaving each a victim psychologically scarred. .Hoffmann’s cynical wit pervades throughout, presaging that of American author Ambrose Bierce whom he most closely resembles.  Of the other ‘Tales’ worth recommending are ‘Councillor Krespel,’ ‘Doge and Dogaressa’ and ‘The Choosing of the Bride.’  Each, in their entrances and exits, as madly Gothic as the next.

  R.J. Hollingdale also translated this text.  By his own admission, he edited for increased pace more in keeping with our generation than Hoffmann’s, which, if its classic age and status had previously put you off, I’d seriously reconsider.