Tales Of Supernatural Terror by Guy de Maupassant, Pan Books (Selected & translated by Arnold Kellett, 1972)

Like Theophile Gautier before him, (see my ‘Clarimonde’ review of the 8^th November) Guy de Maupassant was another protégé of Hoffmann and his tales of paranoid delusion.  Striking in their difference – even to this novice - is the unnerving suspicion he merely enlarged upon what he himself experienced.

  Among these sixteen swift tales it seems it is the author, rather than a character of his own devising, who narrates.  Either Maupassant never bothered to delineate separate voices, or he remained happy to let the reader assume each were his own.   Certainly, the narrators – if they are plural - are faceless, anonymous; separate names never given us.

  Turning back to Arnold Kellett’s Introduction, a picture is painted, tactfully, between the lines, of a mother’s boy with an overactive imagination who - hating work - got lucky, fucking his way to a modest literary success.  Flaubert – a friend of Mme. de Maupassant – initially guided him, Zola initially published him, and English poet Algernon Swinburne was rescued from drowning by him off the Normandy coast.

  What concerns Maupassant more than the ambiguous source of the terrors described is the effect these terrors had on his characters psyches.  Or, should I say, his own.  He is too scared to seek the source.  In Britain at the time, it was best to keep away from such things in case they were ‘unholy’ or dangerously scientific.  The excuse in Maupassant’s France was pleasingly more personal and pragmatic; keep away because your own mind is too powerful and this power we have yet to understand and harness.

  Clearly, he is communicating these effects based upon his own psychosis.  He seems to be playing out his innermost fears in public as a means to, perhaps, overcome them.

  What intrigues is precisely when this occurred in life.  He’d contracted syphilis before he reached 30; on passing 40 it had reached his cerebral cortex, inciting hallucinations, some of which he turned against himself.

So, the paranoia described across this collection was, quite likely, his own.

  In an earlier collection, Editor Gerald Gould claimed ‘Maupassant, of course, overwrote,’ whereas, here, Kellett states, ‘though he is easy to read, he is notoriously difficult to translate – mainly because of his strict economy of expression.’  Clearly, they cannot both be right.  The good news is Kellett’s assertion rings truest.  You will whip through these tales, without fear of any grandiose Gallic pretension or over-stylised description you might have anticipated.

  ‘The Horla’ is the most famous of these.  A more accurate depiction of a nervous breakdown in progression – its transcendent highs and plummeted lows - you will not find among the files of your average psychotherapist.  (This reviewer should know).

  ‘Who Knows?’ – a phrase of helpless resignation repeated throughout -appears last, from the private mental hospital Maupassant was staying at up to his death aged 43.

  Don’t let this fool you, however.  A second piece of good news for the first-timer to this author is the wry sense of humour, rarely mentioned and likely underused.  The last line in ‘The Wolf’ gives away Maupassant’s true position as a creative artist and I won’t spoil things by repeating it here.

Sunday Times on Penguin Books

I feel it necessary to temper the novice author's enthusiasm with a cautionary note. Saw in today's ST a piece on Penguin Books starting to publish short story ebooks by well known authors. After years of agents claiming no one wants the short story any more, this rather flies in that particular face. Am concerned about the mark-up of £0.99 - £1.99 though. Where does this leave the writer who doesn't mix with London's West End literati, and trying to scrape a living? Will the ebook now encourage them to take on more new names? If not, I suspect there are not going to be the opportunities beyond your own laptop that many seem to think.

Clarimonde and Other Stories by Theophile Gautier, Tartarus Press

You cannot be forgiven if the only Vidal you know of owns a chain of hair salons.  More forgivable might be the assumption that the one true Gautier is also in Fashion.

  After all, most readers of the strange and uncanny rarely venture toward the authors of Europe.  I know it has taken me some blinkered years to look beyond my immediate shelves.

  This is hardly surprising.  This French author, active between the 1830s’ and 1860s’, was only accepted into his own country’s literary canon in 2002, according to the only other recent English translation of Theophile Gautier’s work; My Fantoms, published by the New York Review of Books in 2008.

  Quite why is something of a mystery.  It cannot be the regard of fellow vagabond dissentients such as Charles Baudelaire whose blasphemous, poetical The Flowers of Evil dragged him back to a religiously censorious court on numerous occasions, while still managing republication in his lifetime.  Neither can the issue be with the work itself, which, also Byronic in inspiration, was no more controversial.

  The most likely reason is what Brian Stableford alludes to in his new introduction to Tartarus’s latest release; the ‘moral rigour’ of his subsequent admirers.  Or, as it might be interpreted; ‘Gautier would’ve been such a great writer if only he hadn’t been so infernally kinky.’  The grudging, belated acceptance of Baudelaire by the literary Establishment was enough; a second prick-kicking Romanticist on the subs bench was probably better left there.

 Yet, what might have been considered kinky then intoxicates now.  Read this for the prose style alone, which, for anyone who has read his one anthologised story ‘Loving Lady Death’ (‘La Morte Amoureuse’) - re-translated as the title tale here -  will already have experienced his stunning, sensual evocation of place and time.  This continues in the other eleven tales.

  ‘King Candaules’ astonishes, as, by its end, you realise it is, effectively, a feminist fable against male pride and presumption.  Penned by any other hand, the wife would have been deservedly executed in a coda of preening masculinity.  In Gautier’s, his Queen gets precisely what she wants and on her own terms.  In ‘One of Cleopatra’s Nights,’ a young man also makes the mistake of feeding his obsession.  But, again, he is not punished for sinning in the eyes of any Church; only for the callousness of the advance.

  Elsewhere, the female protagonist Jacintha, in ‘Onuphrius,’ and the female Mummy in ‘The Mummy’s Foot’ each coolly take charge of their destinies after volatile male presumption.  While in ‘Jettatura’ the male lover is again spurned, and ultimately destroyed, seemingly by his own paranoia, fired by the pagan superstition of those around him.  (A contextual nod back to the paranoiac fantasies of E.T.A. Hoffmann – one of Gautier’s biggest influences). There is little doubt from these that Gautier, unlike many in his field before or since, openly adored women - a refreshing change.

  I must comment on the book itself; one of the most beautiful of Tartarus’s releases in recent years’; purple boards with a lemon silk bookmark and an apposite detail from Jean-Andre Rixens' Pre-Raphaelite-ish ‘Death of Cleopatra’ upon its signature, cream-coloured cover.  Steeping each copy in essence of violet or lavender might have gilded the lily, but not been a touch out-of-place.

Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now by Patrick McGrath, Bloomsbury.

The greatest ghosts have never appeared in print; but only there, covertly felt.  A century ago, British writers such as Blackwood and Oliver Onions – being at least agnostic – had little choice than to manifest an accepted religious concept they didn’t believe in by other, less tested means.  European writers had been doing it for years, of course, but the old Victorian propriety proved hardest to challenge.  It took Freud to shift the goalposts.

  Now, as then, these ghosts stem from the psyches of the protagonists.  Consequently, they have become far more interesting; broad in character and motive because of those very individual psyches’ that produced them.

  Patrick McGrath knows this, and showcases’ three as guilt-ridden, familial anecdotes during times of great historical upheaval for America’s greatest city.

  ‘The Year of the Gibbet’ is 1777, telling of a man’s lifelong guilt at the cost of momentary honesty in childhood that consigned his mother to the rope during the War of Independence.

   A generation on, ‘Julius’ is a heartbreaking tale of another son’s first love, denied by a prejudicial father, and its terrible consequences upon him and his family.

  ‘Ground Zero’ brings this triptych of innocence betrayed up to 9/11 with the psychological fallout of a psychiatrist’s patient, her over-involvement in his welfare, beside the ground-shifting, parallel devastation of the World Trade Centre itself.

  The ghost here in each is the nightmare of guilt – the self-inflicted punishment from doing right.  Although the protagonist in the first tale believes he ‘sees’ his mother returned from the dead, finally giving comfort to his guilt by taking him back with her, the ghost may not be literal here either, but only the final loss of his sanity through another sleepless night.  A nice contemporary nod to the Georgian, Gothic climax.

   The ghost in ‘Julius’ is just as destructive, described as ‘prejudice acquired as a function of fear.’  An earlier, track-covering lie is confessed to all too late to make amends to either the liar or his victim.

  In ‘Ground Zero,’ the ghost’s existence is only third-hand.  A Tower fatality who, in life, had been the previous lover of the patient’s controlling girlfriend and who – perhaps – once mistook another man for him after death.  Described by the patient himself, it is difficult to know who’s account to trust.  Yet, this is the sublime brilliance of all three tales.  The ghosts matter even if they never existed; they are the very human void between fact and perception.  An interpretation of what cannot be understood.

  These three long tales are of quite exceptional quality, with not a word wasted, or a line superfluous.  The tone is consistently measured, yet, perhaps because of this, the emotional pulls when they arrive feel profound.  I’ve mentioned elsewhere how the greatest writers seem to reach their peak when they are best able to describe so much in so few words.  McGrath has surely reached his, but I suspect he has yet to plateau.

Supernatural Buchan: Stories of Ancient Spirits, Uncanny Places and Strange Creatures by John Buchan, Leonaur Ltd.

Ostensibly, a reprint of the 1991 Peter Haining / Robert Hale edition of the ‘Best Supernatural Stories’; despite the lurid re-titling, this remains a welcome re-issue.  The fifteen tales represent Buchan’s uncanny contributions to monthly literary magazines, such as Blackwoods Magazine in the UK and Atlantic Magazine in the US.

  What swiftly hits today’s reader as lasting less well is the passé Celt slang and the cultural references of the time that, naturally enough, permeate throughout.  The stag-hunting, cigar-chomping, colonial old boy network represented may well alienate – or, at least, tire – most interested women readers these days, and, likely, several male.  Yet, equally tempering is Buchan’s healthy scepticism of Christian doctrine and a receptive take on human nature.  An antidote to more smug contemporaries, Kipling and Chesterton.

  Buchan’s sickly, part-incapacitated boyhood affords him a sensitivity to the natural world that partially explains the authenticity of landscape he delineates in his subsequent Richard Hannay cycle of novels.  The allied machismo, therefore, is something well observed rather than a description of himself.

   Consequently, in his autobiography Memory Hold the Door, Buchan confesses to ‘summers of pagan idleness’ by the Tweed during his student days, where, according to Haining, ‘he mostly fished or read, but occasionally let his sense of adventure get him into trouble.’  This included skirting the borderland of Scots country law, joining poacher gangs and such; an element of compensating danger that also found voice in those later heroic thrillers.

  So, the best entries here reveal aspects of his personal mortality on the one hand, and feral learning on the other.  ‘Basilissa,’ ‘The Watcher by the Threshold,’ ‘Tendebant Manus’ and ‘The Death Notice’ find him exploring the former theme, with ’No-man’s-land’ and the deceptively succinct ‘The Keeper of Cademuir,’ the latter.  ‘A Journey of Little Profit’ is a neat enough ‘Devil’s bargain’ tale, but an early example too bogged down with showy, geographical detail.

  An exception to these themes is the fantastically child-like and still highly readable ‘The Magic Walking Stick’; its wide-eyed, wish-fulfilling concept gloriously evoking the ‘Listener’ / ‘Lost Valley’ era of Algernon Blackwood.  Just as such writers are clear influences, so are those he’d inspire.  The metaphysical chase climaxing ‘No-man’s-Land’ and the somnambulant, night time follower of ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’ prefigure the later, more lurid scenarios from fans Lovecraft and Robert Howard.  You can see why these tales so fired such frustrated psyches.  Watch out for the rising self-loathing – surprising and brilliant – from both the protagonists.

 

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