Review - Revenants and Maledictions by Peter Bell

Art by Paul Lowe

Revenants and Maledictions
Peter Bell
Sarob Press (Robert Morgan), La Bliniere, 53250, Neuille-Vendin, France
Published 2018
HB, 115pp
ISBN 9782956211525
Dust jacket by Paul Lowe

This review appeared first in the Ghosts and Scholars newsletter.

This is a thrilling and truly creepy collection of stories by Peter Bell. All the elements are there - the setting, slightly distanced in place or time, the coded (it mustn't be too obvious) 'theory' of the haunting, warnings or hints of menace - and the sprung trap. Whether that trap closes on an actual victim, or merely (merely?) leaves the narrator changed, it has to close the circle, leaving the reader thinking "ah!" or else dreading what the last paragraph will bring. All of the stories here deliver that, meeting and building on the best Jamesian standard. And in the course of the volume Bell explores some particular preoccupations - such as with the Hebrides and their folklore, and more widely, those of the celtic fringes in general, which feature in several stories here.

Apotheosis, the first story in the book, is one of these. The unnamed narrator, a distinguished historian now retired, relates an uncanny episode that happened to him many years before on visiting one of those islands. Ingeniously bound up in the neglected paintings of a lost master, the penny drops here for the narrator slightly after the reader may have joined the dots - but is no less effective for that. The Executioner is another Hebridean tale, focussing on the dangerous mountain peaks of the Black Cuillin - their Gaelic names recited in a hypnotic, spell-like litany - and the perils of climbing them unprepared. As in the best stories, it unsettles while leaving a lingering doubt as to what really happened. Similarly, while not 'Celtic' - venturing instead to the north of Iceland - Many Shades of Red also uses a remote and sublime setting, with its own dark mythology, to bring a sinister mystery from the past into the present.

In The Virgin Mary Well, we visit the Isle of Man (this book has an excellent geographic reach) - a setting I haven't encountered much in Jamesian fiction (I think I can recall one story by Robert Aickman?) and therefore with a sense of the unfamiliar that adds to the air of menace. An ancient well has been rediscovered, but there's an ambivalence about it from the locals because of a link with the Fair Folk. Despite this, Norman and his twelve year old daughter Alice, visiting from the mainland, decide to take a look...

The Island returns to the Hebrides, with an account of a traveller who wants to set foot on every Scottish Island. Sometimes, though, it's hard to find a way to land on an island, almost as though someone thinks it might be a bad idea... Perfectly realised, this story left a real sense of lingering unease both abut the reason for the abandonment of the island, and about what might have become - or might still become of - our brave narrator.

Sithean - my favourite story in this book - has a similar setting, with a mystery surrounding a holiday cottage to which a young couple have come for a week of climbing and walking.  (Seriously, shouldn't there be some kind of regulatory authority to make sure that cottages inherited form distant relatives are properly checked out for hauntings, fairy infestations and feelings of dread before they are let to unsuspecting tourists?) You just know something bad is going to happen. Just not how bad.

Wild Wales has again, of course, a 'Celtic' setting which this time hosts a classic ghost story when a somewhat fussy National Trust bureaucrat bites off much more than he can chew while on business in a remote district. Despite the story, in some respects, repeating a fairly familiar outline, Bell makes it distinctive by a startling juxtaposition of cultures. He also (and I know this seems unlikely) brings out the political and cultural background of the 1940s in a way that makes the supernatural seem almost a reaction to the pressures and stresses falling on stately homes and the landed gentry (I thought of Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger which pulls off a similar trick).

I'm going to place Blackberry Time firmly in the Celtic group here. Set on the Wirral, it takes place in a region that remained British longer than much of the rest of England and - even if the deity referred to on 'Thorphinstry Hill' has been Norseified - Bell suggests an older, much older origin for the evil he describes here. An eerily effective look back at the time - not that long ago - when two young children could go off blackberrying in the country unaccompanied by adults, this story has a sharp edge of horror.

The Robing of the Bride, while again set on Skye and based on the menace of ancient mythology, struck me as slightly different to the other stories in the book, almost more Lovecraftian than Jamesian in being focussed on the evil wrought by true believers as much as by the entities they worship. A story with a truly unsettling premise, this is, I think, really one to keep the reader awake at night.

The House departs from the theme of the Celtic fringes to narrate a wicked occurrence in the staid suburbs of North Oxford. These are streets I'm very familiar with (my son's school was on one of them) and I was amused to see three academics, bunking off from a conference, wander into trouble so close to their cloistered world.

In all, the stories in this collection meet the highest standards and deliver genuine chills. I'd strongly recommend them.

Finally, I always feel that cover artists get too little recognition. Paul Lowe's dust jacket for this book - illustrating Apotheosis - is especially effective at conveying the weird atmosphere of these stories and is a thing of beauty in itself.

Review - Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver #Blogtour #NetGalley

Wakenhyrst
Michelle Paver
Head of Zeus, 4 April 2019
HB, 359pp, e-book, audio

I'm grateful to the publisher for inviting me to take part in the Wakenhyrst blogtour and for providing a free advance e-copy of the book via NetGalley.

Having loved Paver's previous two supernatural-tinged novels, Dark Matter and Thin Air, I was delighted to see Wakenhyrst coming - and then to be able to take part in the tour.

Like Dark Matter and Thin Air,  at the heart of Wakenhyrst is the social structure of early 20th century England (England not Britain). I say that despite the fact that the previous books were not set in England: they still explored English notions of class and the way that English arrogance impinged on, and fell foul of, other cultures and places.

Wakenhyrst is, very much, set in England (with one short diversion to Brussels) and the English upper class scorn for the beliefs of the 'natives' that featured in Thin Air is here turned back on itself as a dilettante Edwardian gentleman, researching the obscure fifteenth century mystical biography of one Alice Pyett, goes to dark places despite (or because of?) his rejecting the beliefs of the 'lower orders'.

Edmund Stearne is a man 'of spotless reputation' but, to his daughter Maud, a forbidding and pernickety father ("You know my dislike of manhandled newsprint") who enthusiastically administers physical punishment. To his Belgian wife he is a tyrant ('It was Father who had decreed what Mama ate, read, did and thought...') As a girl, indeed as a woman, Maud is slighted, discounted, disregarded. Edmund knows what he wants - his wife pregnant (she suffers an endless series of miscarriages - Maud comes to dread 'the moaning'), his daughter silent in the nursery, and servant girl Ivy at his disposal ('Nor did he regard what he regularly did with Ivy as anything but the satisfaction of a lawful appetite'). Allegedly a religious man, it would be overgenerous even to label the contents of the diary we're allowed to read here as hypocritical. Indeed there's a vein of outright misogyny in Edward ('Women are all the same. Devious, hypocritical, corrupt') and also in his pals the local doctor and the Vicar. The subordinate role of a young woman in that time and place is made very plain: when she seeks their help in a crisis, Maud is threatened, told to stop being hysterical sent on her way. Throughout the book, Ivy and Maud are at odds, seeking to undermine one another, even though the cause of their problems is not their own relationship but the stultifying, patriarchal, power of Maud's father.

But this isn't just a story of how bad things were in the past and how much better they have become. Paver is shrewder than that. The book opens in 1966 with a quoted newspaper article which is, in its own way, just as patronising, just as set on keeping women in their place, as Doctor, Parson and Squire at their worst. Describing the discovery of some sublime artworks created by Edmund in his later life, it introduces the academic who first recognised them thus:

' "My hair stood on end," shrills Dr Robin Hunter, 36, a mini-skirted redhead in white vinyl boots...'

That article portrays the elderly, reclusive Maud, still living in her decayed childhood home out in the Fens, as at best, a bitter old maid, at worst, a murderer and witch - and naturally, as in conflict with another woman, her cook. Plus ca change... Initially unwilling to share the real story, despite the calumny directed at her, Maud eventually relents  (a storm has damaged the roof, she needs money) and admits to her confidence that same Dr Hunter.

We then hear Maud's account, interspersed with entries from her father's diaries. This is where the real story begins - of a lonely girl with a strict father, growing up amidst the wildness of the Fens. Young Maud's life is marked by contrasts, for example between the different customs, of her father and of the villagers, which she must or mustn't follow (sometimes she can't remember which is which). There's the language itself - while the elderly Maud speaks with a 'cut glass accent' it's clear that she is or was perfectly fluent in the local dialect:

' "D-don't fret thysen,' she stammered, unthinkingly lapsing into village talk. "I told thee I wanted to go babbing..." '

In keeping with that, it's clear that everyone - not just the working people but Maud, her mother, Edmund himself - has recourse at one time or another to the potions and remedies of the village wisewoman.

There is the contrast between the entitled, complacent world of men (principally her father) and the second class existence of women.

And between the buttoned-up public attitudes of the trinity who preside over this world and their secret behaviour.

Above all, the story contrasts Edmund Stearne's public reputation as 'a rich landowner and respected historian' with a private dread that he has committed a terrible sin (even if he protests to his diary that he can't remember what it was, and that anyway it wasn't his fault). His fear drives an obsession with Pyett's text, which seems to him to parallel his own case. This is an aspect of the story that only surfaces gradually (there is a lot submerged in the Fen) and indirectly, and saying too much would spoil the effect. The slowly emerging picture does, though, underly a growing atmosphere of menace which makes this book truly Gothic. Paver signals what may be going on with language that alludes to the master of this genre, MR James, from details (toad-like carvings on a pew, Stearne's almost tripping as he comes downstairs, his feeling as if he had been bitten) to turns of phrase ( '...whoever painted that picture painted the demon from life') and overall themes (the fear of a hairy thing that has been let loose, the story's focus on a lone scholar and its being told, in part, looking back some fifty years through a manuscript account). We could be reading one of those stories where an accusing spectre haunts the guilty, slowly driving them over the edge of sanity.

Michelle Paver (photo: Anthony Upton)

Whether that is, in the end, the case - well, I won't say any more about that. You should read the book and make up your own mind. But it is clear that there is much more going on than in a classic ghost story, even though Paver uses that form expertly. Apart from the theme of patriarchy, I think there's also an exploration here of the creation of memory, of the importance of story - most obviously of course in older Maud's desire to control the narrative, as one might put it now, but also for example in the way that Stearne says in his diary that he remembers something 'though I didn't before' - he is a most unreliable narrator indeed and seems to me to be reinventing his life and outlook under pressure of - well, of whatever it is.  Maud sees Edmund's story take shape and come to life - and eventually realises how it threatens her and those she loves. And in the end she has to take control and make her own truth.

In describing how Maud does that, Paver has, in a sense, to go beyond the supernatural and show how some horrors are actually worse - because more universal - than the shades haunting remote mountain peaks or isolated Arctic bases and which her previous books turned on. Wakenhyrst depicts a sense of unearned entitlement, the systematic application of privilege and the embrace of hypocrisy, both in the Edwardian summer and the topsy turvy '60s, which to me is actually much more chilling than a vengeful ghost keening in the Fen.

It is a powerful, enthralling book which I'd encourage you to read. If you need any more urging, it's also a beautifully designed thing, the cover tactile and brooding, the endpapers leafy and glorious, the pages crawling with the life of the Fens - the design by Stephen McNally really enhancing the experience of reading this book (yes, I was sent an e-copy, yes I have bought the hardback - there was no way wasn't going to have this on my shelves). And there's much, much more than ice been able to cram into this review: the teeming wildlife of the Fens, Maud's later life - only sketched but Paver does it so well that we can join the dots - and even some romance.

This will definitely going to be one of my standout books of the year.

The blogtour continues - see the poster below for other excellent reviews - and you can buy Wakenhyrst from your local bookshop, including via Hive, from Blackwell's, Waterstones or Amazon (and doubtless other places besides).

Malevolent Visitants by CE Ward

Image from http://sarobpress.blogspot.co.uk/

Malevolent Visitants
CE Ward
Sarob Press, 2016
HB, 115pp
Source: Review copy, kindly provided via The Ghosts and Scholars MR James Newsletter

This review first appeared in the Ghosts and Scholars MR James Newsletter, No 30 Autumn 2016.

In this collection of eight stories (six have been published before, while two are new) Ward shows great skill at evoking the hard to pin down spirit of the best MRJ stories. Yes, I know we have James's own rules - if that's the right word - but it's not just a matter of following rules, is it? Or anyone and everyone could write this sort of story.  Actually I think it's quite a rare skill.

Ward adds his own themes and flavours, of course. He has a tendency to lose his protagonist down baffling English country roads, for example (in his Afterword he makes clear his preference for the 20th century setting for strong personal reasons, but I think a further consideration might be that a decent satnav would remove this possibility). He also explores some less familiar locations - the decaying seaside town has clear potential for hauntings.

In At Dusk, Simon, a writer of ghost stories, holidaying with his girlfriend in Cromer, insists on a diversion to view the grave of Daniel Rouse Bartram, master of the genre. Unfortunately the remote cemetery closes at dusk, and Simon is late. I was impressed at the way Ward engenders an eerie atmosphere from the start, and uses the winding English backroads to confuse and delay his protagonist. The end twist is rather clever and a bit meta (as my son would say).

Another journey along twisty country lanes disorients in The Mound as Mark Warren deviates from his planned route to see just what "The Mound" is that's signposted so tantalisingly... a modern twist on an age old theme that travellers should ignore those tempting sights just off the path.

Merfield Hall will be familiar to readers of this Newsletter, having been published here in issue 20 and so I won't say any more about it now. It's Ward's continuation of MRJ's story. The break-point is carefully marked, which is just as well, since I don't think I would be able to tell otherwise where one writer ends and the other begins. A satisfying completion, I think.

The Return - which is the subject of the creepy and indeed rather terrifying cover illustration by Paul Lowe - reverts to the theme of an innocent abroad on the A-roads, this time fusing it with a distinctly Jamesian antiquarian touch. Donohue is an academic, a student of the Civil War, visiting the site of a minor skirmish - or, as becomes clear, something more like a massacre. The violent deaths which are being reenacted by a troupe of the Sealed Knot have left their mark on the village, as he finds out, rather too late. This was almost my favourite story in the book. I especially enjoyed the touch of humour shown in Donohue's encounter with Alfred, the unwilling (but thirsty) informant from whom he learns what really went on all those years ago.

Squire Thorneycroft is the story of a young and ambitious solicitor, sent to deal with the affairs of the eponymous Squire. Of course, he finds a house that the locals are wary to visit after dark. Of course, the local man, who should be helping, is strangely elusive. And of course, there are dark family secrets, going back to a battle in the South African War. What would an honourable soldier do to protect his family name from a discreditable secret? And what might his life become after?

One Over the Twelve is the first story in the collection to use something like the traditional Jamesian framing - here two single men (a widower and a "lifelong bachelor") alone in a "small hotel in an undistinguished town in the Midlands of England". It's Christmas, so (of course) one tells a ghost story - a tale involving the last of a noble line, gone to the bad, and the trouble that's had when he's laid in the family vault. There are some delicious moments of terror, and for me there was a bit of  a thrill in being able to relate it to a (non supernatural!) story from one of my wife's former churches. (This church has a door, bricked up from the outside, on which are displayed a number of brass plates inscribed with names. When I asked what they were I was told that the door used to lead to the private vault of the family who owned the village. The vault was pulled down in the 19th century when it began to damage the church, and the occupants reinterred in the churchyard - their coffin plates the only reminder...)

The House of Wonders was the story that edged The Return into second place for me. Again, two gentlemen past the prime of life are taking their ease, this time in a garden on a summer's evening, and the story emerges from Stevenson's reminiscences about a mutual acquaintance who has recently died. The setting he describes is a seedy Victorian amusement show complete with waxworks, grisly artifacts of murder and a collection of early slot machines of the "What the Butler Saw" type (but - some of them - with darker themes). I'm drawn to the tawdry, seedy atmosphere of rotting seaside towns, travelling shows and sawdust (for a full length novel dealing with similar themes try Adam Nevill's House of Small Shadows) and for me this treatment of the theme - supported by a dash of wartime darkness - is simply masterly. And there's a moment of chill at the end suggesting that all is not yet done.

The final story, The Gift, is another that picks up where MRJ left off - this time a sequel (in fact Ward has rather cleverly made it a sequel to two of the original stories). It was originally published in The Ghosts and Scholars Book of Shadows (so, again, you may already have read it). For me it felt a little close in theme to One Over the Twelve (there's some slightly similar business with a family vault) and perhaps coming after Wonders, that made it hard to love quite so much. It is, nevertheless, an effective and well plotted story.

Overall this is a good collection, playing some clever variations on the theme of the ghost story, and one I'd strongly recommend.