'tis certainly the season: The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, Volume Three, (ed.) Simon Stern

9781948405218
Valancourt Books, 2018
245 pp
hardcover

"Night, and especially Christmas night, is the best time to listen to a ghost story.  Throw on the logs! Draw the curtains!  Move your chairs a little nearer the fire and hearken!"

           -- Frederick Manley, "The Ghost of the Cross-Roads"

Let's put ourselves in the moment.

from  from Visit Lancashire

Outside the snug home of Andy Sweeny, a terrible storm is raging, while inside the house, the Christmas celebrations are in full swing.  Everyone's got

"a glass of steaming punch in his hand; every one's face is lighted with love and radiant with joy; every one toasts every one, sings merry songs, dances with his sweetheart,or makes love to her in some shady corner, while the aged every-ones make matches for their their boys and girls; and the blind fiddler plays away for dear life. The flames grow brighter as the storm without increases... In short, there never was a happier home; there never were such music and such punch as Mrs. Sweeny's, nor jollier souls to drink it."

Space has just been cleared for dancing when the revelers are interrupted by what one of them describes as the "banshee's cry," and the door is opened to a stranger.   When asked if he'd seen a ghost that night, the newcomer  promises to tell them "all that happened."  It is "these words"

"which promised the glorious entertainment always to be had from a ghost story ...."  

"The Ghost of the Cross-Roads" by Frederick Manley is the absolutely perfect story with which to begin this book since it really does place the reader right into  the heart of Victorian Christmas warmth and merriment, complete with "crackling fire," "steaming punch," and above all, the promise of a ghost story to round out the evening.  As Jerome K. Jerome wrote in his Told After Supper,  

"Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood."

This promise of  "glorious entertainment" at Christmas, as Colin Fleming relates in a 2014 article at  the Paris Review blog, anticipates a sort of  "pleasing terror," in which

"the status quo is infused with a sensation of something being a touch off, chuckles give way to shared, uneasy glances that maybe this isn't all merrymaking."

The twenty stories in this volume were originally published between 1867 and 1898, and while there are plenty that fall on the more traditional and disquieting, "uneasy"  side of ghostly tales that include hauntings and even a vanishing village (!),  there are definitely a few in which the ghosts (again quoting Colin Fleming),

"even when they mean to  avenge themselves upon us, also seem to have dipped into the nog a time a time or two, with their own playfulness in evidence."

There are at least two spirits who take their cues from a certain character in one of Oscar Wilde's stories, and more than one who seem to be right out of  Dickens,  but with unexpected endings that are funny and at the same time a bit refreshing.  Simon Stern, who wrote this volume's introduction, comments on the more comical sort of ghost stories, saying that most of them came from century's end,

"when the familiarity of the genre in its traditional form, carrying the accumulated weight of many decades, may have prompted writers to seek out new directions."

That's not a bad thing, really, especially not here.

I appreciated not only the "wide variety of incarnations" of Victorian ghosts represented here, but also the variety of authors of these stories as well.  Some of the authors will be quite familiar to regular readers of Victorian ghost stories, including Mrs. J.H. Riddell and Mrs. Henry Wood, but there are others I've never heard of before to add to my inner database of obscure Victorian writers, as well as their anonymous storytelling counterparts.

I look forward to reading The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories every year at this time; it's now become a regular part of my holiday season routine. As Frederick Manley tells us,

"Night, and especially Christmas night, is the best time to listen to a ghost story,"

but this collection of Victorian tales of ghostly mayhem is perfect reading for any night of the year.

The King in the Golden Mask, by Marcel Schwob. I loved this book. Absolutely loved it.

9781939663238
Wakefield Press, 2017
originally published as Le roi au masque d'or, 1892
translated by Kit Schluter
188 pp

paperback

The other day I decided that I really ought to read this book since it's been just sitting on my shelves sort of being neglected.   I grabbed the hardcover edition (Carcanet New Press, 1982; Iain White, translator) that I've been holding on to forever, and then I picked up this edition from Wakefield to see if there were any differences between the two before I started reading.  I chose the Wakefield over the Carcanet because translator says here that

"Although Iain White has translated a brilliant volume of Schwob's selected stories under the title of The King in The Golden Mask -- first published by Carcanet Press and recently updated and reissued by Tartarus Press -- White's selection includes roughly half of the original 1892 collection of that title.  As such, the book in your hands marks the complete publication of Schwob's original King in the Golden Mask in English. "

 Back went the Carcanet edition onto its shelf.  Why would I only want to read half a book?

from Abe Books

The titular first story sets the tone and the main theme that carries through this collection of stories.  Before that begins, however, there's Schwob's own preface that will clue readers in to what they're about to experience:

"There are, in this book, masks and covered faces: a king masked in gold, a wild man in a fur muzzle, Italian highwaymen with plague-wracked faces, and French highwaymen with false faces, galley slaves under red helmets, little girls aged suddenly in a mirror, and a singular host of lepers, embalming women, eunuchs, murderers, demoniacs, and pirates, between which I pray the reader belive I take no preference, as I am certaint hey are not, in fact, so various. And in order to demonstrate this most clearly I have made no effort, throughout their masquerade, to yoke them together along the chain of their tales: for we find them linked by their similarity or dissimilarity."

and, perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this book:

"To an observer from another world, my embalming women and my pirates, my wild man and my king, would possess no variety."

Schwob goes on to say that this "observer from another world"  would have "the blinkered view of the artist and the generalization of the scientist," which would help to shape his perspective; this "superior observer" would say that "all in this world is but signs and signs of signs."   Masks, he would say, are "signs of faces."

In an interview at The Paris Review, Translator Kit Schluter says that Schwob's book is "all about the way identity is a mask over our 'true' selves,"  and in the book's "translator's afterword" section, goes on to explain that the mask functions

"both literally and figuratively by turns, to represent the impossibility of attaining truth, be it of identity or narrative, or even of belief" 

 and is presented here in different ways, both physical and

"in the way many of the stories' narrators doubt or are uncertain of, what what they see for example -- there is an ambient paranoia throughout that narrative, even the most neatly 'historical' is only a mask laid over the inaccessible truth of the event..."

Both the author's preface and the translator's afterword lend themselves quite nicely to a discussion of semiotics if anyone's interested.   In terms of this book, quoting Schluter once again, The King in the Golden Mask

"suggests time and again that one's true identity comes to light only in the crucible of a struggle so intense that it bares him of any privilege or nicety behind which he could otherwise hide."

Schwob is known to have combed through all manner of  literary, historical, and biographical works as source material.  While the author is well known for his disbelief in "originality," Mr. Schluter notes that he

"made fiction new by making it deeply diachronic, indebted to history..."

Rather than simply regurgitate though,  he uses the material to explore what it is that makes people human. In most of these stories, it seems that he uses the potential that exists in everyone to engage in some sort of violence or cruelty as a part of his definition.


There are twenty-one stories in this volume, each dedicated to a different friend, ranging from science fiction-ish to contes cruels to the out-and-out weird.  Honestly, I loved them all, and on the whole, the entire collection is just beautiful both in terms of writing and in what Schwob is able to bring out in each story.  I won't go into them but I will share a rather eye-opening experience about myself in reading "The Plague" that sort of sideways makes the point of the book.  Consider the seriousness of the spreading of the plague  in Medieval Europe for a moment, the fear that everyone had that they would become its next victim, and at the end of this particular story, I actually had to stop and reflect on my reaction at the end when I didn't know whether to laugh or to be horrified.  That's the sort of writer he is and when a story can make me go inward to try to examine myself, well, that's power.

You could read this book in one sitting, but don't. Take the time to go through it slowly and think about it.  If you're in it  looking only  for the horror/weird shockness (I know that's not a real word but it works here) you're reading it for the wrong reason. It's definitely there, but this book is a work of art between two covers, and those don't come along every day.  Highly, highly recommended for the thinking reader,  and for people who appreciate the beauty found in the written word.  You'll certainly find it here.

This is a good one: Number Seven Queer Street, by Margery Lawrence

Mycroft and Moran, 1969
236 pp
hardcover
originally published 1945, Robert Hale


"People do generally come to me as a last hope!"


There's nothing like getting to the end of a book only to discover that it's an abridged edition, which is exactly what happened to me with this one.  First panic set in, and then I got busy trying to find the remaining two stories that had come with the 1945 original.  After a little sleuthing, I found a modern edition so I could finish the book as it was intended to be read.

from the IFSDB

It's a bit confusing, actually, since in the 1945 original shown on the right (Robert Hale), there are seven stories; in the 1969 edition I have there are five, and in the Ash-Tree Press kindle version,  Ash-Tree Press Occult Detectives Volume Two: The First Casebook of Miles Pennoyer, there are six.   Luckily between the Mycroft and Moran edition and the Ash-Tree Press edition, I managed to read them all.  There is yet another edition of four later stories featuring Miles Pennoyer, Master of Shadows (1959) that to my knowledge has not been reprinted since it was published, and according to Biblio.com, there was a twelfth Pennoyer story published after the author's death.   I'm really hoping that Ash-Tree decides to publish (as promised at the end of the Kindle version of Volume 1),  The Second Casebook of Miles Pennoyer, which the blurb says "will be available soon."    Not soon enough for me -- even though these stories can definitely become a bit long winded at times, as the author starts to hone in on the actual problems solved by the "psychic doctor" and their cures, it's eyes on the page without budging an inch.

Ash-Tree Press, 2013
Kindle edition, B00H599QN6
234 pp

In the foreword which is given by Jerome Latimer, the fictional pupil, assistant, and chronicler of  the exploits of  Miles Pennoyer, we are given a clue as to the author's influences in writing this book:

"There are not many people who are fortunate enough to know these selfless and splendid people, the psychic doctors -- and there are still fewer books that record the wonders they can do and are still doing.  Algernon Blackwood's book John Silence was one of the first, and Dion Fortune's book The Secrets of Dr. Taverner is another..."

 The title of the book comes from Pennoyer's address, No. 7 Queer Street, where Pennoyer lives with his housekeeper Friedl and his dog Hans; it is a "top-floor eyrie" perfectly suited to his need to be alone, without "too close contact with the crowd."   According to Latimer, Pennoyer is  a "psychic doctor -- one who deals  in ills that beset the soul rather than the body of man;" Brian Stableford says in his entry on Margery Lawrence in St. James Guide to Horror Ghost and Gothic Writers that   Pennoyer's "ostensible purpose" is to "put an end to the supernatural disturbances by healing the experiential wounds they symbolize." (350)   Over the course of these seven stories, he arrives on the scene to try to understand what is causing someone to act the way they do, but before he can do that and effect a cure, he must get to the root of his or her psychic disturbance. Sometimes he is able to do this alone; at other times he must call on "Them," aka "the Masters" for guidance and help.

In "The Case of the Bronze Door," Pennoyer reveals to Latimer how he came to be the owner of  a certain Chinese screen, a gift from "a patient" who marriage started going very wrong once the piece was put in his study.   "The Case of the Haunted Cathedral" finds him investigating a new cathedral which is haunted by not just one, but two spirits, keeping the practitioners from wanting to worship there.  An invitation in the mail prompts Pennoyer to tell Latimer about "The Case of Ella McLeod," whose strange attachment to a stray dog and her strange knowledge of Ancient Greek gives Pennoyer his first clues as to what's going on.  And then we come to "The Case of the White Snake," which to be really honest, absolutely disturbed me at first because of the device used in this story, which honestly made me question her judgment here.  I won't go there so as not to spoil things, but even Brian Stableford notes that the symbolism was "sanitized."  Yikes.

Next is my favorite of the collection, "The Case of the Moonchild."  To bring Stableford into the discussion again, he remarks that this one was "obviously borrowed from Alistair Crowley," and it shows.  Talk about creepy! In this story, Latimer gets a call from Pennoyer to come to Exeter, where the doctor is visiting an old friend.  He asks Latimer to bring the "bogey-bag," a nickname for a bag

"filled with all sorts of oils and unguents, queer-looking metal contraptions, robes and headgear, various documents, and a book or two, packets of herbs, odd-looking amulets, all manner of things that might be needed by my colleague in his frequent battles with the Forces of the Outer Dark..."

Obviously something weird is happening where Pennoyer is, and Latimer will get his chance to discover what it is when he gets involved in the case on his arrival.

At this point, I bought the Kindle edition for the remaining two stories, "The Case of the Young Man with the Scar" and "The Case of the Leannabh Shidhe."  In the first one, Pennoyer takes on the strange case of a young fellow whose prospective father-in-law wants the boy's "trouble" to be "cleared up" before the relationship can go any further.  It seems that the young man has a strange scar that "comes and goes," one that takes on the shape of a "dull red snake curling round the arm." Possibly the most pulpish story of the seven (and to be honest, for me, the most fun because of the all of the elements involved in this tale), Pennoyer will have to depend on the word of a strange source to get to the root of the scar's random appearance.   The last story finds Pennoyer in the guise of a tutor to a child who

"had got the entire village, besides his mother and the staff of the Manor House, entirely under his thumb. They dreaded and feared without in the least knowing what they feared..."

 It seems that "if Master Patrick's crossed, and especially if he's struck, something nasty'll happen to whoever touches him," reminding me so much of the boy played by Billy Mumy in that episode of  The Twilight Zone called "It's a Good Life."   The doctor and the family have to travel to Ireland to unravel this one, as it turns out, on Halloween.

On the strength of these stories I bought Margery Lawrence's Nights of the Round Table, The Terraces of Night, and The Floating Cafe. While it may not be great literature, Number Seven Queer Street is by an author whose works have been left to drift into obscurity, and that's just a shame.  I agree with  Brian Stableford, who says that "an eclectic collection of her best supernatural short stories...is long overdue."  I'd be first in line to buy it, for sure.

Recommended highly for readers of lost or forgotten authors of dark/supernatural fiction, who also don't mind the pulpy side of horror.

a little late for Halloween, but read it anyway: The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Volume Three, by James D. Jenkins and Ryan Cagle (eds.)

9781948405133
Valancourt Books, 2018
327 pp

hardcover


I actually meant to make this post around Halloween when I read this book,  but life's been seriously hectic here at home so I'm a bit late.  It doesn't matter though, since this third volume of The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories can really be read and enjoyed at any time.

There is not a single misstep in this entire collection, something I can't always say about most horror anthologies I read.  Normally I find at least one story that just doesn't work; that is just not the case here. Here's something else that's great about this book: the arrangement of the stories is excellent.  It starts off with R. Chetwynd-Hayes' somewhat humorous  "Don't Go Up Them Stairs" and concludes with Robert Westall's   "Beelzebub" (also somewhat laughworthy), almost as if the editors thought they'd put their readers through enough horror in between.  I don't know about anyone else, but I tend to carry tension while reading horror, so beginning and ending with touches of humor here is perfect. 

While each and every story in this book is top notch, I did have a few personal favorites, with  "Mr. Evening" by James Purdy at the top of the list.   It is probably the most atypical horror story in the book, but in my case, it did its job.  The chills grow slowly in this one,  increasing in increments until the end where I had a sort an overall  bird's-eye view of what was happening here, and then I actually had to put the book down for a while to recover as the actual horror of it all left its impact. When I come across a story like this one where the implications are truly frightening, sometimes they scare me much more than the ones where all is explained.    Forrest Reid's "Courage" offers a new dimension to the standard haunted house story, as does Helen Mathers' "The Face in the Mirror," which also hits every one of my Victorian ghost story buttons.  "Mothering Sunday" is another great tale by one of my favorite writers of horror and the strange,  John Keir Cross, whose "Glass Eye" remains one of the creepiest stories I've ever read.  Steve Rasnic Tem's "The Parts Man" while horrific, is also surprisingly poignant, in which a man strikes a strange deal, with high costs to pay.    I'll also add Elizabeth Jenkins' "On No Account, My Love" to this list, although I have read it before. It's another one where only in the final moments do you realize the nature of the implications of this story, at which point the chill runs up the spine. And finally, there's  "Blood of the Kapu Tiki" by Eric C. Higgs,, which has a great, old-fashioned pulpy horror feel to it that I absolutely couldn't resist. 

the tiki cover edition of this book,
9781948405157 (from Valancourt)

And speaking of "Blood of the Kapu Tiki,"  I also had to buy the paperback tiki cover edition of this book.

I'm beyond happy that James and Ryan have continued the tradition they started with the first book in this series, compiling amazing horror stories written by the authors whose work they publish. As I've said all along, they have an uncanny feel for knowing not only what's good, but also unique; I appreciate  both of them for having such great taste.  The same applies to Valancourt's publications in general; as I've also said all along, they somehow manage publish exactly what I want to read.  And as for this book in particular,  to be honest, at this point it just wouldn't be Halloween without a volume of Valancourt horror stories in my hands. 

The Virgin Vampire, by Etienne-Leon de Lamothe-Langon

9781612270326
Black Coat Press, 2011
translated by Brian Stableford
257 pp

paperback

"Who dared to lift the mysterious veil with which Heaven covers the accomplishment of its terrible will?"

While I'm not a huge fan of vampire fiction, last year I discovered Black Coat Press, and their lineup of novels featuring vampires sort of reinvigorated my interest. And while The Virgin Vampire isn't likely to land in the category of  greatest vampire fiction ever written, it is still historically significant in terms of the history of vampire literature, and offers readers a look at an entirely different sort of vampire altogether.

Originally published in 1825 (or quite possibly 1824),   La Vampire, ou la vierge de Hongrie is not your average vampire tale by any stretch. The story opens in 1815, as  Colonel Edouard Delmont has resigned his army commission, and has informed his dutiful and loving wife Hélène that he wants to move the family to the countryside just out of Toulouse, to an area where he is "unknown" so that they can life a life of "peace and quiet." After the usual strangers-in-the-village uneasiness passes, the family settles  comfortably in their new home where they find happiness for quite a long time; soon,  however,  Delmont is called away for a family matter, leaving  Hélène and their two children  in the hands of his former sergeant and now trusted servant Raoul. During his absence, the two Delmont children, accompanied by Raoul, make the acquaintance of a "foreign woman" along with her strange servant.   While she is new to the area, to his horror, Raoul discovers that she is no stranger, and  immediately writes the Colonel to inform him that Alinska is in the neighborhood, reminding him that he

"will never be happy or tranquil as long as that unfortunate Hungarian woman exists"

or as long as she continues to pursue him.  It isn't too long before some strange events take place in the area, including  the discovery of a dead body drained of all of its blood, leading Raoul to bring up the subject of vampires:

"No blood!...No blood!  O Heaven! The horrors of Hungary are being renewed in France!"

Shortly thereafter Alinska's house burns down, and in doing her Christian and charitable duty Madame Delmont  invites her to come to their chateau to live. Raoul, who has a "peculiar presentiment" that this is probably not a good idea, can't bring himself to tell  Hélène of his misgivings because it would mean that he would have to reveal something involving the Colonel's past, of which his wife is completely ignorant. He promises himself that he will watch over Delmont's family, but not even he can imagine what's about to happen next.

If you're suspecting that you know how the story is going to play out from this point on, well, you're probably wrong. I know I was way off the mark with my own predictions, and that was a definite plus as far as the reading experience.  But it's not just a matter of the book deviating from the usual path taken in vampire fiction as we know it -- as Brian Stableford says in his afterword, Lamothe-Langon's vampire is "not a predator in her own right," but more a "mere instrument of a higher power, more puppet than actor," caught up  in a "plan for vampiric vengeance." This facet of the story is only one way in which The Virgin Vampire differs from the more familiar plots of  vampire lore; another difference  is found in the very nature of this "higher power."  And there are many more deviations to be found here as well if you read carefully.

The Virgin Vampire is a fine bit of dark, supernatural, and gothic fun which can be chilling at times, and while I wouldn't say that Lamonthe-Lagon's  writing is destined to make this book a classic,  Stableford believes that this book is "not without literary merit as an item of dark Romantic fiction." I agree, and  I also think that the story reveals much about the nature of Enlightenment thinking in terms of rational thought vs superstition.

It may be  a bit tame for readers of modern vampire tales, but it does make for a rollicking good yarn;  to be very honest, it was unputdownable fun. Considering that I'm not a rah-rah fan of vampire stories, well, that should say something.

recommended, but mainly for people interested in the history of literary vampires, and for readers who are looking for something entirely different in their vampire fiction.

haunted house, anyone? The Silent Companions, by Laura Purcell

9780143131632
Penguin, 2018
originally published (UK) 2017
304 pp

paperback

The Silent Companions is my real-world book group's pick for our meeting on October 30th.  I racked my brains trying to come up with a book that would be a good Halloween-ish read -- I could have, of course, easily gone and scanned my shelves for a title but the women in my group tend to not share my love of dark dark books, so it was tricky.  I needed to find a novel that would not only fit in with the occasion, but one that was well written with intelligent themes that would hopefully provide for some good discussion.  When I found out about The Silent Companions, I added it to the list.  I will confess that near the midpoint of this novel, I was beginning to regret my choice because the book was moving along at a slow pace, but just after complaining about it on Goodreads, a few pages later I was actually hooked and couldn't put the book down.  It's not great literature, but on the other hand,  it's fun, it's creepy, and once I got in the groove of its gothic weirdness, I couldn't stop turning pages.  Certainly it isn't without its faults, but it is a perfect Halloween read, just filled with that lovely ambiguity that made me wonder if there's more than meets the eye here, right up until the very last page.


This book spans three different timelines, alternating between present and the past.  First, as the novel opens, we find ourselves in main character Elsie Bainbridge's present, which, as we learn pretty quickly,  is during Elsie's time in an asylum  where she is undergoing a psychological assessment.  Before her doctor can pass judgment, though, he begs her to tell the truth about the events that landed her there, but Elsie cannot speak.  Giving her a slate, and then later a pencil and paper, he encourages her to write down all she knows, and we are immediately taken back to the time before Elsie's incarceration when she had first arrived at the Bainbridge family home, The Bridge, in 1865.  Her husband Rupert had gone ahead of her,  leaving Elsie in London while he got the place ready for the two of them and their unborn baby, but his unexpected death while at the house brings Elsie there as a woman in mourning.   Also at The Bridge  are a handful of servants, as well as Rupert's cousin Sarah, who had served as lady's companion and who is now at The Bridge to keep Elsie company.  It doesn't take long until Elsie becomes aware of strange noises that seem to emanate from a room that has always been kept locked, but that's just the beginning of a series of bizarre events that plague the household.   The house itself has a long history and a dark past that continues to keep the villagers away, which is reflected in the third timeline (the 1630s) during the reign of Charles I.  I'm not saying another word about the actual plot here or how the time periods interweave; I was perfectly happy not knowing anything at all about this story until I'd it read it.

from Treasure Hunt

The Silent Companions has it all: hints of witchcraft, gypsies, locked rooms, strange noises, a black cat, eerie happenings, madness and an asylum, but as the title suggests, the centerpiece of this story is "the silent companions."  The photo above is one of these and is the cover image of the Penguin edition of this book; they are also called "dummy boards,"  which as noted by the blogger at Treasure Hunt, were made out of wood, but had a "lifelike quality"  which could "render them a little spooky as you suddenly come upon a solemn little child, a gesturing servant or even a soldier with gun at the ready."   The first of the silent companions is discovered in a locked garret, but soon others begin to appear, heightening the already-existing tensions within the household, making for a creepy and unforgettable tale.

As I said earlier, the book starts out very slowly and sort of trudges along for a while as we get the picture of the house and its environs as well as the people within, but that all changes very quickly just about midway and zooms toward the ending.  Aside from the atmospheric sense of place and time that is built into this story, the best part of this book is the underlying and particularly unsettling sense of ambiguity that not only ratchets up the tension, but makes you want to question everything you've read after finishing. 

Considering that I prefer my horror from yesteryear, the author's done a fine job here and I can certainly recommend this novel.  Do yourself a favor and carve out a few hours -- once the creepiness gets rolling, it doesn't let up.

It's October again,

and that means Halloween reading. I'm so ready. 

rats. I should have saved this book for October: The Moons At Your Door, (ed.) David Tibet

97981907222429
Strange Attractor Press, 2016
450 pp
paperback

As I'm sitting here writing this, in the background I'm listening to the eerie music of Current 93's album Faust .  Had I been listening to this  when I read Count Eric Stanislaus Stenbock's tale in this book of the same name,  it would have totally heightened the creep factor that the story produced in my head.   The editor of this collection of strange, hallucinatory tales just happens to be David Tibet, the founder of Current 93, and that particular album was inspired by that particular story. 

Tibet's music isn't solely limited to Stenbock as inspiration though;  it reflects at least one way in which the stories and authors in this book (and beyond) have "crept, crept, crept" into his work; in the introduction to this book he lists other music which has been inspired by Ligotti, Machen,  M.R. James and others, whose "names and phrases and worlds and dreams" he has "channeled" into what he's done.  And if Faust is any indication of how he's managed this, I need to listen to more.

Getting to the book now, it's one thing reading an anthology of strange, supernatural tales and it's quite another to read a book that serves as part of a roadmap of stories that have not only made a huge influence on someone's life, but continue to "enthral, and terrify" that person. All of these stories, he says,

"...spell how close is the darkness, how subtly and slyly it may seep into our lives and change them utterly." 

"Enthral, and terrify" they did in my case, and seep into my life is an understatement in the case of some of these stories.  For example,  Stenbock's "Faust" I had to put down in the middle and continue the next day because it was so utterly terrifying;  "The Tower of Moab" by L.A. Lewis and  "The Testament of Magdalen Blair" by Aleister Crowley  took me out the comfort of my reading chair, out of my living room, and into another place entirely.  Those last two are probably imprinted on my brain forever now, and along with the two stories and two poems by Stenbock in this book, have raised the bar for what I'll be expecting from my strange/dark fiction reading from this point on.  Some of these twenty-eight stories I've read before, but I didn't care -- I got a  sense that they belonged here for some reason so I reread them with absolute pleasure.


I'll post the contents here, but I will not be going into any detail about any of them. That should be a pleasure best left to anyone reading this post.

"The Moons at My Door" by David Tibet

*"Faust," "The True Story of a Vampire," "Vol d'Amor," and "Requiem"  by Count Eric Stanislaus Stenbock 

"Casting the Runes," "A School Story," and "O, Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad" by MR James

*"He Cometh and He Passeth By" and "Look Up There!" by HR Wakefield

"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant

"The White People," by Arthur Machen

* "The Testament of Magdalen Blair," by Aleister Crowley

"The Frolic" and "Les Fleurs," by Thomas Ligotti

"The Monkey's Paw," by WW Jacobs

 * "Ravissante," by Robert Aickman

"Smee," by A.M. Burrage

"Sredni Vashtar," by Saki

"Bluebeard," by Charles Perrault

"The Touch of Pan," by Algernon Blackwood

From "The King in Yellow," by R.W. Chambers

 *"Young Tambling," traditional (as sung by Anne Briggs)

* "The Hobyahs," traditional

 *"Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrows," by Thomas de Quincey

 *From "The Thunder: Perfect Mind"

From The Epic of Gilgameš

 *"Couching at the Door," by DK Broster

"The Old Nurse's Tale," by Elizabeth Gaskell

Rounding out the rest of this book are "Biographical and Story Notes," by Mark Valentine and "Lunar Tunes," by David Tibet. 

The asterisks by a few of the story titles mark those I hadn't previously read; I'll just briefly mention a few of those here.  Some time ago I preordered (and am now anxiously awaiting) Strange Attractor's  edition of Of Kings and Things: Strange Tales and Decadent Poems by Count Eric Stanislaus Stenbock, also edited by David Tibet. Not to steal Strange Attractor's thunder, but if anyone's interested, Snuggly Books has recently published a collection of Stenbock's work called Studies of Death.   If the Stenbock entries in The Moons at Your Door are any hint of what's to come, I'll be freaked out, utterly terrified, and delighted all at the same time. HR Wakefield's two entries reminded me of MR James, perhaps not with as much depth, but both had eerie twists; Aleister Crowley's "The Testament of Magdalen Blair" chilled me to my bones with its implications.   Aickman's "Ravissante" actually woke me up one morning at 4:30 with an "aha" moment; evidently it was strange and powerful enough to have lingered on in my sleeping subconscious after reading it twice.  "Young Tambling" sent me to youtube to listen to the haunting voice of Anne Briggs;  "Couching at the Door" seems mild and even a bit silly at first but don't let it fool you: it hides a darkness that completely crept under my skin and has stayed there. 

I'm now deep into a second round of Current 93's Faust and thinking how sad I am that this book is over, but fortunately all is not lost.  I have Tibet's newest collection, There is a Graveyard That Dwells in Man (also preordered) to look forward to.  I'm just sorry I didn't save The Moons At Your Door for October reading -- it would have been great to include it in the heading-to-Halloween lineup.

One more thing: yes, you may have many of these stories in various anthologies shelved in your library, but the ones you probably don't are well worth the cost of this book.  The Moons At Your Door should be a mainstay in the home libraries of any serious reader of strange/dark/supernatural fiction.

two beautiful books from John Gale: Saraband of Sable; A Damask of the Dead

"For do not we all wait for something that we know nothing of, something that has not arrived, and possibly never will."  -- from "Vigil," A Damask of the Dead 

A few months ago for reasons I still can't put my finger on, I picked up a copy of his Saraband of Sable from Egaeus Press (the third book in the Egaeus Press Keynote Edition series), never having read anything by John Gale before that time.  Now I would read anything this man writes.

9780993527890

Egaeus Press, 2018

illustrated by Alfredo Guido

185 pp; hardcover

With absolutely no idea what to expect from this author on opening the book,  it didn't take me long at all to realize that I had something exquisite in my hands. By the time I'd finished it, I was telling everyone and anyone who reads dark/strange/weird fiction that they need to buy a copy of this short but sophisticated, highly-satisfying collection of tales, not just because the stories are so good, but also because of the unique quality of the writing.  I'm actually lost for words in trying to describe it, so perhaps I should refer to the description at Egaeus (from the link above) which says that

"Saraband of Sable presents eight of Gale's sumptuous strange tales; dreamlike at times, dense in their imagery yet delicate as dimming perfume."

It also noted there that the author's "previous collections" ... "garnered praise for their sophisticated and decadent prose styling," and I'd only add that I found a sort of ethereal quality to his work, but it really goes much deeper than any description that my non-writer's head can produce.  The most surprising quality of these stories, though, is that while basking in the sheer beauty of the writing, it's like the clouds lift and there at the heart of each story is the darkness that's been peeking through all along, finally emerging with gut-punching force. And while it seems that we're in the middle of long ago and far away, the essentially-human traits that are represented here are tragic, real and timeless. One more thing -- the incorporation of the natural world flows beautifully through each and every story, as in this description of a city's necropolis:

"... a few do venture here, to tarry for a while amidst the cypress and the ebony poplars, basking in the light which falls here like tarnished copper during the diurnal hours; they are the dreamers that revere the lank and elegant grasses that grow between the monuments of obsidian and chrysoberyl, the grasses that turn from jade to gold during autumn; and they love the jackdaws who inhabit the sable green of the elder yews and who often speak in the voices of the dead through eating the fruits of the trees that look like crimson pearls, the trees whose roots bind tight the ivory bones of the long departed."  (from "Lord of the Porphyry Nenuphar"). 

The truth is that even before finishing Saraband of Sable, I was so enchanted that I absolutely had to have more, so I tracked down a copy of the now out-of-print A Damask of the Dead published by Tartarus.

1872621635

Tartarus Press, 2002

100 pp, hardcover (#136)

The dustjacket blurb really tells you all you need to know about this book:

"The perfumes of the East suffuse these tales, of poets, lovers and kings who, despite the luxury and beauty of their surroundings, desire something beyond."

Immediately we find ourselves standing at the gates of  "Death's City", with "palaces with colonnades flooded with darkness, stretching away into infinity," moving later onto "a castle of many turrets that reared up from a cliff of dark rock," complete with "black tourmaline crypts," at some point reaching an "onyx-domed city."  The fourteen stories in this book transport the reader completely out of this world and into others where sorcery is a natural part of life, where poets can really fall in love with the moon, or where the ghost of a king appears one night to give advice to his son and heir, and more.

Fantastical these stories may be, but they are not breezy tales with rewards at the end; as with Saraband of Sable, there is only tragedy, unhappiness, and darkness to be found within.

On the dustjacket blurb of A Damask of the Dead, Mark Valentine has this to say:

"As Machen has observed, literature consists in the art of telling a wonderful story in a wonderful manner. Few writers today acknowledge the need for either element. John Gale is someone who has mastered both."

I couldn't agree more, and that goes for Saraband of Sable as well.  John Gale is a rare find indeed.

So highly recommended that no scale exists for how highly I recommend these books.

The Marvelous Story of Claire D'Amour, by Maurice Magre, adapted by Brian Stableford

9781612276526
Black Coat Press, 2017
254 pp

paperback

"They were all dreamers, and they were there because they had dreamed of the ideal on earth, and were suffering bitterly..." -- 175

After spending the summer exploring other areas of reading interest, I'm back here again with this book, which is the first of twelve in a series exploring the work of Maurice Magre, a French writer, who as Brian Stableford reveals in this book's introduction, was "one of the most far-ranging and extravagant writers of fantastic fiction active in France in the first half of the 20th century," and  "perhaps the finest of them."   The fourteen stories in this book are examples of "contes merveilleux," or "tales of enchantment," but as Stableford notes (and which quickly became obvious once I started reading), some of these are actually quite nihilistic, trending more along of the lines of tales of "disenchantment."  As I also discovered not too far into these tales, he's also on the money when he says that "in Magre's work the tragic component usually outweighs the comedic component, and sometimes swamps it entirely." [For a more complete take on Magre's work, I can point you to Stableford's articles in The New York  Review of Science Fiction  (NYRSF) vols. 341, 342, and 343; the last article is available for free online; the other two you can pick up as pdfs for $3.00 each.]

Before launching into just brief sketches of each story, I'll add here that while not true for every tale, there's no missing the message (as Stableford tells us)  that "amour, although irresistible is invariably fatal because it is blinded by illusion" (NYRSF, 341, 7), which may reflect on events in Magre's own life and how they influenced his fiction.  In the introduction, for example, we learn about the author's breakup with "the first woman with whom he became infatuated as soon as he discovered that she had slept with someone -- someone he found particularly loathsome," and that this same motif also runs "incessantly" through Magre's stories. It may be that the author "changed his philosophy of amorous relationships abruptly in 1903", and if so, it is probably

" not a coincidence that Maurice, in "Histoire merveilleuse de Claire d'Amour" is blinded by illusion, and thus immunized against jealousy. Such, so far as it can be determined, is the personal context of Magre's early fiction, insofar as it deals with claire d'amour -- i.e., the bright light of amour in the broad sense."

Whether or not this background is of interest to anyone else or not, the bottom line is that I fell in love with this book while reading it, and as brutal as it can be sometimes, it is absolutely delightful.

In this collection of tales, it is "amour," "the flower of youth," the power of illusion, and "the ideal" that takes center stage, beginning with "Marcelle."  Unlike the stories that follow it, there are no elements of the fantastic to be found anywhere, just a man whose lover deceives him with other men. He breaks it off in anger, later bemoaning that he'd killed "amour...by virtue of stupidity and pride."  "Doctor Faust's First Love" follows a young student named Fritz in love with the daughter of the local burgomaster, Elsbeth. Sadly, Elsbeth has a "mediocre soul" under her outer beauty and accepts her father's choice of husband, a "rich and aged lord." Fritz, believing that "science and labor might perhaps bring a remedy to his woes," goes to visit local sage Dr. Faust and arrives at just the wrong time. "Marinette and Old Water-Sprite" is a delightful tale about a sad young girl and those who love her, including a water sprite, a simple young man "full of gaiety and charm, and a "very rich lord," born under the sign of Saturn. The centerpiece of the book, and the titular story is next, "The Marvellous Story of Claire D'Amour. "  One would think that when one has Jesus Christ and the Holy Virgin as godparents, life would be great for young Maurice.  It may have been except for the "gift of illusion" bestowed upon him by the Sandman that will permit Maurice "never to see life as it is." When he meets and falls in love with the poor, amoral but beautiful Claire, that extra gift will cost him.   Beyond excellent, it is my favorite story in the book and while this one is definitely on the nihilistic side, it is a joy to read.

Maurice Magre, from Black Coat Press

"The Toy Merchant" is the story of Lubin and Colette, who vow as children to love each other forever.  It starts out sweetly enough and then BAM!, end of that.  How I won't say, but it's another good one.  Next up is "The Story of Lili-Des-Roses and the Black Prince," in which Lili, "the glory of the country" scorns the simple pastor Jean-des-Bois and his "limitless love for her" in favor of the black prince"because he is rich."   This one is followed by "The Poor Musician and the Little Genie," which also touches on amour but also something a bit different -- the love and dedication of an artist for his art.  "The Flower of Youth" comes next, a true quest story in which young Joël must find the flower of youth in order to marry Princess Raphaële, who has sworn to love only the "King of France, the Devil," or the man who brings her this treasure.  She is, of course, taking advantage of his "naivety" and being cruel, but he doesn't know this, and off he goes, abandoning everything previously dear to him in his search.  A very twisty ending has this one, catching me completely by surprise.  In "The Story of an Unlucky Grenadier," a young man who has, since childhood, had the worst luck ever, desperately wants to impress the parents of the woman he loves after they refuse to consent to the marriage.  All I'll say about this story is that maybe he should have rethought that idea.  "The Doll" is its own way a poignant story, focusing on a man whose attraction to a beautiful actress causes him to rethink his career choices in order to get her attention while he wonders what he can do to make her love him.   "The Goatherd King" has a lovely touch of irony, beginning with a prophecy made to young Eloi by a witch who reveals that he is destined to be a king; this is followed by "The Last Siren" who is discovered by a man in the Seine after deciding to end it all.  Finally, the end of this book offers  "Jeannett's Three Professions," reminding me a bit of a rather twisted "Parable of the Talents."

I can't begin to say how very much I enjoyed this book and how I looked forward to coming back to it every time I had to put it down.  I've been stockpiling books from this series for a while, and now that I've had my first taste of Magre, I don't doubt that I'll be reading as many of them as I can.

yes, yes, yes, highly recommended. 

Compulsory Games, by Robert Aickman (ed.) Victoria Nelson

9781681371894
NYRB Classics, 2018
341 pp

paperback

Just recently I told someone who'd never read an Aickman story  that while reading this author's work,  don't go looking for the weird, the strange, or the horror in his work, because it will pop out at you when you're least expecting it.  So imagine my surprise when my own thoughts were somewhat mirrored in one of the stories in this book,  "The Fully-Conducted Tour,"in which Aickman says that

"... strange things happen all the time to many of us, if once we can get our minds off our own little concerns.  One point is that the strangeness usually takes an unexpected form, it is no good looking looking for something strange.  It only happens when you're not looking." 

 And when you finally catch on,  when the strangeness finally makes its way onto your radar, you find yourself, as the narrator in "The Strangers" describes, at

 "...the moment one yells, and with luck, wakes up, during a long nightmare: its nature, can never be quite examined, quite elucidated, or quite extinguished."

Or, to put it in another way, as the editor notes in her introduction to this book, the "kinds of questions" that are left in the wake of any Aickman story,

 "lay eggs under your skin. No satisfactory answers are available, either in the stories themselves or in the readers's head.  More precisely, any answer that might be proffered will be (to echo an Aickman title) insufficient."

Personally, I think Aickman was a genius writer and an artist in every sense of the word.   His writing is unique -- reading him  really is like being caught up in someone's bizarre nightmares that straddle the real world and a different sort of space in which time, nature, and human oddities all merge into the surreal or the strange. In Compulsory Games, there are numerous examples of his work that begin with ordinary people in ordinary situations on ordinary days, creeping slowly into the realm of the strange before it hits you that ordinary has left the building.     In "Hand in Glove," for example, two young women decide to go on a picnic in the countryside after one of them ends a bad relationship.  Things start out benignly enough, and then everything completely changes -- at first in subtle ways, and then before you know it, this picnic takes on a most menacing, surreal tone. And even then, it's not quite over.  Or take "Residents Only," which on one hand obviously highlights some of the complete absurdities of a town's council bureaucracy and then turns into something much, much darker.  With Aickman, the simplest things can take on terrifying significance, for example, a herd of cows, an airplane, or a house on a riverbank.  He builds dread and the feeling of doom ever so slightly, and he has the ability to horrify without overtly doing so.  In this book, as is true in most of his work, half the fun of reading is in trying to discern exactly what is going  on; sometimes the situation seems pretty straightforward but then, after reading the same story a second time, lends itself to an entirely different way of thinking as you pick up on things missed the first time around. 

Out of fifteen, I didn't particularly care for two ("A Disciple of Plato" and "Raising the Wind); as for the remainder, each had its own moments of brilliance. I loved "Hand in Glove," my personal favorite, which is one of the creepiest and the best stories in this collection once you stop to consider what's going on here; "The Strangers" is another favorite, taking on a theme familiar to horror readers but with added twists and a deeper darkness,  and "No Time is Passing" takes us into that zone so familiar to Aickman readers where time, space, and nature go awry in a most surreal way.  The rest I will leave to others to discover, but with the exception of the two I mentioned that I didn't care for, they are a mix of creepy, strange, just plain weird, or slow-burning horror tales told only as Robert Aickman can tell them. 


 The stories he writes are, for the most part brilliant, capturing the nuances that make people human or some recognizable, realistic situation that  shortly begins to morph into something beyond weird before all is said and done.  His work is definitely not geared toward readers who need closure ... his stories are, again borrowing from the introduction, like a "door left confoundingly ajar."  One more thing -- I've seen several reviews by readers who say that this should not be your first experience with Aickman, but I have to disagree.  The stories in Compulsory Games are not nearly as complicated as most of his work in other collections, so this book offers a learning experience in  how to read/approach Aickman.   I also know that the Aickman-newbie friend with whom I read this book was so wowed by it that he immediately ordered another book of  Aickman stories as soon as he'd finished this one. 

Take your time with it, and be aware that you might feel lost or groping around in the dark while reading, but trust me, the experience is well worth every second.  Very highly recommended. 


for a professional review, read "Burial Plots" by Anwen Crawford at The New Yorker. 

"What's your favorite shade of yellow?" Giallo Fantastique (ed.) Ross E. Lockhart

9781939905062
Word Horde, 2015
225 pp

paperback

Now here's something you don't run across every day: a book filled with stories blending giallo and the fantastique, as interpreted by the twelve authors contributing to this volume.  In his introduction Ross Lockhart says that what we're about to read is

"a paranoiac descent into a dark world of literary Grand Guignol like no other ... on the one hand grim and fantastic, on the other pure (if grotesque) cinematic fun" 

and he isn't joking.  Fun, for sure; grotesque, definitely; and grim is an understatement.

Rather than just doing my usual, I'll focus on my favorite three stories here, in order of appearance.

Lockhart made a wise move in using Michael Kazepis' "Minerva" as the gateway to the rest of this collection; as I've often noted, for me the first story should whet the reader's appetite for what's to come,  and it most certainly did that.   While I could feel giallo happening here,  this story is also incredibly weird, as in good weird, as in brain-boggling weird.  It centers around a young woman who comes to Greece after the death of her estranged brother.   She starts out with the idea of making "an attempt to know something about him as the man he'd become," and gets way more exposure to him than she'd bargained for. I love the out-of-the-box, strange way this writer thinks, most especially during a scene in a most bizarre theater.   Like the main character  who says at one point "I never want this to end," -- well, neither did I.    Anya Martin's "Sensoria" also gets my vote in the category of great, mixing music, the artist's inner gaze, and the psychedelic/psychotropic to create a story I can only describe as surreal.   I may have just discovered what it might be like to enter into someone else's hallucination.    Nods to giallo in this one, but to me it moves much more along the fantastique line; it's a story you live rather than simply read.     "Sensoria" is one of the most truly original stories ever;  the ending on this one will send you right back to its beginning to read it again.  And then maybe a third time.   And even then you'll still be thinking about it.  And finally, we have Orrin Grey's  "The Red Church."   Sick of writing "fluff pieces," when Yvonne is assigned to interview eccentric artist Wade Gorman, "a brilliant underground artist" who hasn't produced anything in the last six years, she's excited.  Hoping for an "exclusive" on possibly new projects, she makes her way to Gorman's studio.  Let's just say the experience will change her forever.  I made the  mistake of reading this one just before I turned off the book light and closed my eyes; I kept seeing it play out in my head, unable to turn off the completely unnerving feelings it caused.  What these three stories have in common goes far, far beyond the thematic elements of this book; these are some of the most literary, most well-written  pieces of horror that I've encountered in some time.  If more of today's horror writers would learn to write like these three people, I might be tempted to read more contemporary work.    Outside of these three, I have to give major applause to Garrett Cook for his "Hello Handsome," a not-for-the-squeamish murder tale which is told from a different, most unsettling, and original perspective. 

Bava's "The Girl Who Knew Too Much" from Kultguy's Keep

Pointing out these stories specifically as personal favorites doesn't mean I didn't like the other ones, because there is some really good, quality writing going on here.  Quite honestly, the only one that I really didn't care for was the last story written by Brian Keene, "Exit Strategies. "  Here we find a serial killer on a mission, but for me it read like the author just wanted to throw in a bunch of killings, violence, and gore for scare effect.   Yes, there's a bit of plot, but it's nowhere near as nicely composed as the more literary offerings in this book, and I'm still kind of wondering how it fits with the rest of the stories here.

The other authors in this book are Adam Cesare, Nikki Guerlain, MP Johnson, Cameron Pierce, Ennis Drake, E Catherine Tobler, and John Langan, most of whom are new to me and all of whom bring a unique take on that space where, as the editor reveals, "crime and supernatural horrors" intersect.     You can find the full table of contents here at SF Signal.   This one I'd certainly recommend.

The Other Passenger, by John Keir Cross

9781943910977
Valancourt Books, 2017
originally published 1944
261 pp

hardcover

"We go, you see; and with us goes always Another Passenger. He is beside us in every deepest action and speaks through us in every fateful announcement. There is no escaping him or his influence. His voice whispers suddenly in the night, his presence intangibly lingers at our shoulder when we feel ourselves most alone...  We go; and he -- the Other Passenger -- is always at our side."


In the introduction to The Other Passenger, writer and blogger J.F. Norris from Pretty Sinister Books (which has been responsible many times over for titles added to my out-of-control tbr pile) says that

"John Keir Cross is a master at capturing and evoking the indescribable, of exposing the forbidden desires and the criminal impulses, of showing us the people who fall in love with the macabre.  The Other Passenger will take you on whirlwind tour from dizzying heights of delirium and whimsy to the chasms where lie tortured souls forever lost."

 I couldn't agree more.  It is one of those rare books which from the very beginning pushed me to an edge where I don't normally find myself while reading and then kept me there until it was all over.  I knew this book and I were meant for each other after reading the first story, "The Glass Eye," which for a while there gave me an eerie sense of déjà vu before I remembered I'd seen it played out on TV somewhere -- a quick bit of research and I discovered that it was an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I pulled out my  DVD of Season 3 and  watched it again, and yes, there's Jessica Tandy as Julia, at the theater to catch Max Collodi's show.  Back to the book for another read and from

from Shatner's Toupee

that point on, I knew I was in good hands so I just surrendered and let John Keir Cross take me where ever he was going to go.

Since J.F. Norris has completely captured the essence of this book in the paragraph I quoted above, there's really not much left to say here, except that each and every story has some sort of gut punch, sometimes quiet, sometimes full force.  While every story in this book is beyond excellent, my favorite is "Miss Thing and the Surrealist."  Like many of the other tales in this collection, the true horror in that one sneaks up on you only at the end as you brace yourself from the start, knowing that something's going to happen, but you just don't know what that something's going to be.  You might think you know, but then everything changes in an instant.  The stories here all feature some sort of  tragic figure, adding a touch of poignancy to their situations,  but then things begin to turn toward the horrific as you come to realize the sense of doom that engulfs them.  It's like Cross has looked into a variety of human souls and has brought forth the darkest or most tragic among them. The eerieness of this book is so finely crafted that, as I said earlier, it will keep you on the edge and on edge until that final page has been turned.

Once again, my thanks to Valancourt for bringing this book back into print.

back to the present with The Garden of Blue Roses, by Michael Barsa

9781630230616
Underland Press, 2018
226 pp

paperback


"...he was both a fiction and real somehow." 

It took me some time to readjust to the real world after reading this book, which threw me completely off kilter during my time in the head of the main character, not always a comfortable place to be.  There are a number of unsettling things about this story, not so much because of what happens here, but rather because it left me somewhat disoriented throughout, trying to discern what exactly was real and what was not. In a mind that's filled with fragments of memory, strange dreams and living in a house filled with shadows and "strange echoes," it can get tricky sometimes. To his great credit, the author immerses us in atmosphere from page one and doesn't let up, ratcheting up the tension until it actually becomes a relief to finally make it to the end and breathe again.

 Briefly, because this is yet again another novel that needs to be experienced,  Milo Crane and his older sister Klara live together in the family home after the death of their parents in a car accident.  It is a quiet life for both of them, and Milo wouldn't have it any other way.  Given his dysfunctional childhood and his failed attempt at college, home suits him just fine. As we're told, thanks to their parents, neither Milo nor Klara were "suited for the modern world," so they share the house, Milo busy  constructing models while imagining himself as part of the world his figures inhabited. Life changes though when Klara decides to make big changes in the landscaping and brings in Henri Blanc, the gardener who will be doing the work.  Is it, as he wonders, only Milo's imagination that makes him so "wary" of this man?  Or is there something more at play here?  The dilemma here is that we're not quite certain what's real and what is a fiction.  Fictions, according to Milo's father, live "in the mind. Of the reader," and Milo has come to the point where he needs to, as he says,

"find a way out of this novel I was trapped in -- out of the entire mental architecture I'd built up and only now realized was a cage..."

But at some point, the fictions and the reality will merge, and then...

I know it's incredibly cliché to say this, but this book really does work in layers, and they are beyond-skillfully crafted here in this author's debut novel. Secrets abound, memories come to light, and even then we're still not sure that we're dealing in reality.  While there is a LOT happening here that will jump out at you, it is, in a very big way, a book that deals with the question of perception, to the point where everything has to be questioned.   The first time through was unsettling; the second time through I gained much more of an appreciation for what he's done here. Not only has he produced a rather chilling tale, but if you look at (and are familiar with) the literary references the author mentions,  you can definitely see how these have helped to shape his own narrative in terms of both style and story; at the same time, this is clearly an original work.  And without going into any sort of detail,  I'll just say that my favorite references scattered throughout this novel are those relating to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- to me they were the most appropriate of all, but I won't say why because I don't want to wreck anything.

Don't expect a quick thrill here, because that's not what's going in in this book.  It is a story that both intelligent readers and literary-minded authors can enjoy.  And if this is his first offering, I'll be the first one in line for the next.

book #3 in my British Library run, a serious case of happy camperville: Dreamland and Ghostland: An Original Collection of Tales and Warnings from the Borderland of Substance and Shadow, Etc. , Author Unknown

ASIN: B003MGK022
originally published by George Redway, 1887
330 pp

paperback

"...what happened to me last night was no dream to me, it was a reality..."

This book just might win the prize for longest title ever:

Dreamland and Ghostland: An Original Collection of Tales and Warnings From the Borderland of Substance and Shadow: 

Embracing

Remarkable Dreams, Presentiments, and Coincidences: Records of Singular Personal Experience by Various Writers; Startling Stories from Individual and Family History; Mysterious Incidents from the Life of Living Narrators; and Some Psychological Studies, Grave and Gay.

There are another two volumes following this one: Dream Warnings and Mysteries:  Strange Stories of Coincidence and Ghostly Adventure and Ghost Stories and Presentiments.  I'll probably get to those at some point -- if they're anything like this one, they'll be completely worth it.  Volume I is an experience in itself. I don't know if it was done purposefully, but there are thirteen stories here, a mix of dream tales and ghostly encounters, all collected by "The Editor" who has, over the years,

"come across some extremely curious and interesting narratives,"

some of which "now the see the light for the first time."    While the collection is supposedly compiled from works of anonymous writers, the Editor reveals in the preface that he wasn't really "at liberty" to "give specific names attached to certain facts" that came to his notice "through personal acquaintance with the narrators," so that he could then try to "point out" which were actually real experiences and which were "a germ of reality expanded and coloured in the hands of a practised writer."  He also reveals that some of the writers whose work is represented here did not want publicity "either for personal or family reasons."  I can say that these were all stories I've never read, so it was a serious case of happy camperville for me.  In case no one's noticed yet, I live to find original old tales like these to add to my mental database. 

Many of the dream-based stories are of the type where a dream one day foretells the future of the dreamer; more than one of these involves bilocation of some sort, and these are not limited to sleep-based dreams, either.  As just one example of many, in "Mab: The Woman of the Dream," a young girl staying in a country home goes off one afternoon into a sort of trancelike state in which she "looked more like an automaton than a woman."  During the time she's not in the active world, she is drawing a portrait of a man she's never seen; surprises ensue.   The dream tales don't all run in this particular vein,  but that one begins the collection and it drew me in, immediately whetting my appetite for more.  The best dream story in this book has to be "A Double Event; Or, 200 to 1" in which a poverty-stricken man places his bets on a horse he'd dreamed about, wins, and becomes a slave to the bookies from then on.  Now, years later, he has a chance to redeem himself on a horse that came to him via the same medium and he just knows it's a surefire deal.  But of course, there's a twist here that I never saw coming.  Coincidentally, this one happens to be one of my favorite stories in the book.

While the book is dominated mainly by the dream tales, there are a few ghostly tales here that are top notch.  "Cousin Geoffrey's Chamber" is one of these, a good, old-fashioned spooky story that not only takes place in a big English country house, but also provides a chill when the ethereal encounter leads to the unexpected for the unlucky human involved.  In "The Brand of Cain, Or, What Could it Be?," we find another fine bit o' the creep factor at play as a strange woman  takes up residence in a newly-built home.  A friendship costs this woman plenty, but that's all I will say.

There is much more strangeness to be had in this little book, which will most likely be more of interest to people like me who are very much into the discovery of older tales, most especially as the Editor wrote, those which are now seeing "the light for the first time."  I haven't looked to see if this book is online but if it is, and you don't want to shell out the price for the paperback, it might be one to put in your e-reader's reading queue.  I get that dream stories are pretty old hat now, but hey -- these are definitely worth the read.