Review - Where Shadows Gather by Michael Chislett

Cover art by Paul Lowe

Where Shadows Gather
Michael Chislett
Sarob Press (Robert Morgan), 2019
HB, 207pp

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher to review for Ghosts and Scholars magazine, where this review first appeared.

Where Shadows Gather, the new collection of uncanny stories by Michael Chislett, is a little different from other collections I have reviewed here.

To begin with, the stories are more of a unity than those other collections. Mostly set in and around London, in both real and fictions locations, they often explore the same themes - vanishing shadows, the immanence of both the past and present of London in the present day - and some feature some characters (such as the Faust-like Doctor Crescentius in Mara, Endor and The Coast Guard) or allow their protagonists to brush up against one another (Only the Dead Know Deptford/ The Extras). There are hints of connections to wider histories (as when, in Only the Dead..., we have detailed and repeated references to an earlier incident in Brighton).

These stories depart, somewhat, from the Jamesian 'several decades removed' trope, being mostly told in the present (even if set in the 19th century) and also often (though not always) featuring protagonists not ignorant of the occult (indeed who are sometimes practitioners of it) although there are also innocent victims who turn the wrong way on a foggy night or are beguiled by something seen across the water. Chislett has a formidable talent for making the ordinary sights, sounds and weather of London and especially its river seem extremely eerie, and I will be watching lout myself in future. Even the bright lights of Canary Wharf dim at time sin this volume.

Downriver is a perfectly sinister story in which a young couple, out for a walk downriver, encounter something that is is, on the surface, interesting and harmless. It's a lesson in how little hooks can be placed in the mind, calling the victim back later to a cruel fate.

In In the Garden we again, we see how even in the midst of safe, suburban London, one wrong step can take you somewhere unexpected, and far beyond help.

In Only the Dead Know Deptford, Thea, returning from work in the glitzy offices of Canary Wharf, goes wrong somewhere around St Nicholas's Church in Deptford (location for several of these stories) and is unable to find her way home. Or at least she can find the where of it but not the when. Pregnant with the past, the night seems alive and to have quite other intentions that she she does.

Mara introduces us to Doctor Crescentius (who Chislett informs us he has written about before), an exile in London from the 1848 "Year of Revolutions". Like Tim in In the Garden Crescentius finds an older, wilder side to London, but unlike him, he knows a little about such things and may be one step ahead of the forces he encounters.

The Extras is a more extended story, featuring two men, Fletcher and Matthews (they of the impliedly  debauched Brighton trip mentioned above). At one level, it's two men who spend a lot of time in pubs discussed a lot of metaphysical twaddle. At another level, they are documenting London, taking photographs, which seem to have a... mutability... of their own. All manner of wonders emerge. Again, the pair are knowing - they speak of various supernatural tidings from different parts of the city - but that may not save them from falling victim. (This story is also notable for establishing that, perhaps, this version of London is not quite ours - there are references to a character with Ostrogothic ancestry, some unfamiliar country names, and so forth as well as links in to a Central European mythology involving witches and demons.

In The Subliminals we're now into full-fledged tampering with That Which Ought Not to be Known. Lant is some form of occult master ("the sceptical occultist") who - carefully - stands back from himself doing what he encourages his pupils to do. Now, those pupils seem to be paying the price. There is a tensely drawn, very eerie standoff here, all the more creepy for the stakes being obscure.

Endor, a somewhat longer story than many of the others here, again follows Crescentius who is however now in early 30s Germany. (is he some kind of wandering, eternal scholar, deathless and cursed?) Among dark references to book burning and a previously liberal friend having joined the Brownshirts and become a power in the town, Crescentius pursues knowledge - ignoring going on all around him - as he latches onto a woman with the talent of a medium and who is, it seems, able to contact an imprisoned spirit that promises Crescentius much... this is a gripping and dark story, replete with abuse and manipulation (one scene in particular sees Crescentius take advantage of his victim is a very physical, not spiritual, way) and also with nods to other aspects of this book (the power to steal shadows, the Ostrogothic origins of the mysterious "witch".

The Whistle Thing opens with Carla and Jago, a couple very much in love, finding a strange whistle in a park,. It may already be known to you as it was published in G&S 33. It is a fine story, riffing, of course, off MR James's "O Whistle..." but modernising the setting to Chislett's London and providing the somewhat too daring male protagonist with a shrewd female companion (I wonder how many of MR James's scholarly heroes would have benefited from that?) It's very atmospheric and also hoks into Chislett's wider mythology.

Jago may actually be more... knowing... that he lets on, as he's mentioned as one of Lant's associates in The Subliminals, alongside Redriff, who gets his own story, indeed a story named after him, in which he begins to receive messages, scrawled in red on discarded free newspapers or on Tube station whiteboards (very London). In the story we lear more about Haggerston and Mardyke from The Subliminals, and also a certain Morden whom Redriff consults for help with the perplexing messages. We also encounter the enigmatic Ms Hand (mentioned in The Extras). There's a slippery, claustrophobic sense about the commerce done between these stories, a sense that all these characters may know things, may know each other, but they can't escape, can't get out of the sticky amber that's entombing them. And so with Redriff.

The Raggy Girl is an effective weird and chilling story wherein a slum tenement is being demolished over the head of its supernatural resident. The story is notable for the sense of alienation given off by the narrator, Terry. Despite Raglan Mansions being slap bang in the middle of Milford Hiugh Street, opposite the station, Terry and his friend Danny experience a haunting in full daylight as the Girl pursues them from her disintegrating lair. Like many of the other stories here this is less in the end about what happens to an individual as about how the mundane and supernatural communities coexist and how people find their place in one or the other.

The Coast Guard is one of only two stories here (I think) not set in London though it has London connections as Fraukie, a young girl spending some time with her grandfather on the Baltic Coast, is a Londoner through and through and has made allies there - who help her when she's menaced by a local spirit. I felt this to be one of the most Jamesian stories in the collection - well, with sand dunes, a vengeful sport and an ancient book of lore, how could it not be?

Those That Come from the Air has a uniquely nasty air, the agitated spirit being bound up with stirring whorls of rubbish, crackling black plastic and all the detritus of modern life. It also features a truly horrible version of a demon, one referred to elsewhere in this collection but studied in detail here. Again fairly uniquely here, it has an element of redemption, which I strongly welcomed.

Finally, The Snow Queen gives us Fletcher and Matthews again, explicitly after the events of that story (and so, perhaps, shedding some light on the ending of The Extras). It's more of an encounter, perhaps, than a complete narrative but serves to round off the collection nicely.

Taken together the stories give much more of a sense of being part of a thematic whole than most collections. They're explicitly set in the same world and we see many of the same characters come and go. Each is though its own, more or less self contained, mystery - the collection doesn't amount to a unified story and the overall effect is therefore more "Isn't there a lot of weird stuff going on in London?" than "Ah, so that's what was behind it all!"

And there's nothing wrong with that.

For more information about the book, see the Sarob Press website here.

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 - Terror Tales of Cornwall, ed by Paul Finch

Terror Tales of Cornwall

ed Paul Finch

Telos Publishing Ltd, 2017

PB, 283pp

This review first appeared in The Ghosts and Scholars MR James Newsletter, No 32, Autumn 2017.

I'm grateful for a review copy of this book.

This isn’t a collection of traditional ghost stories or folktales. Rather, the stories in this book are by modern authors. Between the stories are short essays about mysterious Cornwall, and about some of the authors who have been inspired by it. Here we meet Daphne du Maurier, but also the Morgawr, or Cornish sea-monster, fairies, piskies, giants, smugglers, murderers and many more. These sections draw both on traditions and more recent sightings and claims. These essays don't attempt to introduce the stories directly although there are some resonances - but they powerfully add to the mood of the book.

There is a good overall liminal sense to this collection. A county unlike any other in England (I write "in England" advisedly, given some of the content here), Cornwall juts out into the Atlantic Ocean, putting it at more than just a physical distance from the rest of the country. There are other boundaries as well: the distinction between the remote, inner landscape and the popular seaside resorts; between the locals and the visitors; the new and the old; the safe and the - unsafe. Boundaries seem to be especially significant places in horror. We can approach them. We can get too close. Things can come over. All of this creates endless opportunities for that chilling feeling you get when, on the warmest day, a cloud hides the sun.

And the authors take full advantage. Tasked with writing tales "of Cornwall" some have produced stories that draw heavily on Cornish tradition, atmosphere and themes, while some are simply set in Cornwall (and which might perhaps have equally been set anywhere else). I'm glad to say that the former are in the majority as that seems more in the spirit of the exercise, although there are some strong stories in both categories.

The book contains sixteen stories in all. In We Who Sing Beneath the Ground (Mark Morris) a dedicated teacher crosses a boundary when she follows up a non-attending pupil, turning up late one evening at the dilapidated farm where he lives to find all the lights out. But there's worse to come. This was a good opening story, bringing in a distinctly Cornish angle as well as an element of the fantastic that fitted well with the guidebook-style commentaries on Cornish myths and monsters that alternate with the stories themselves. As its title suggests In the Light of St Ives (Ray Cluley) also features light and dark, when a young artists tries to erase her work because the colours – particular colours – are seeping out. Again this reflects a distinctly Cornish theme - the artistic colony of St Ives – and has a nice effect of "pleasing terror" as we gradually discern what is wrong.

Trouble at Botathan (Reggie Oliver) is an authentically Jamesian story in which a young undergraduate discovers a harrowing narrative hidden in the library of a remote house on Bodmin Moor. It reveals a ghastly crime, and takes him out to a mysterious wood with its own guardian.

Mebyon versus Suna (John Whitbourn) begins as a more lighthearted tale and one which takes place outside Cornwall. It illustrates what happens when frictions between the Celt and Saxon come to the surface in the borderlands between two ancient kingdoms (and also perhaps pokes gentle fun at modern nationalisms which see the past through such 19th century, invented lenses). There is less terror here, perhaps – or so it seems – but there is a nice twist.

The Unseen (Paul Edwards) is perhaps only incidentally Cornish but is a horror story that would feel perfectly at home in one of the classic 1970s Pan anthologies, focussing on a particularly nasty DVD and a, shall we say, lacklustre father who allows his obsession with it to lead him astray. it's effective, nicely done and will stay with the reader. Dragon Path (Jacqueline Simpson) on the other hand is wonderfully shameless in its pillaging and piling up of the most vainglorious aspects of modern Celticism and New Age syncretism, to the point where you feel that in his showdown on Bodmin Moor the central character Mick is really going to come unstuck. But then something very nasty happens and it becomes a very real story. Great fun.

The Old Traditions are Best (Paul Finch) draws on that eerie atmosphere that can attend a fair, a carnival or - as here - a village festival (the scariest killings in Midsomer Murders take place at the Village Fete, don't they?) when the masks, the costumes and the ritual take over and the humanity is lost. Again drawing on custom and tradition, this was one of my favourite stories in the book

The Uncertainty of Earthly Things (Mark Valentine) arguably isn't actually terror or horror, it's more one of those epiphanies where a veil is split showing something else behind the solidity of life. The indifference of that something can provoke horror, blessed relief or curiosity. Here, it's a mixture of the three. This was another of my favourites, not least for the contrast between the cosy, dusty life of its museum curator protagonist and the truth of what is revealed. 

His Anger Was Kindled (Kate Farrell) is genuinely spine chilling, even if, I think only Cornish. I enjoyed the collision between a single minded elderly clergyman and the bureaucrat despatched to fire him (even if the story does ride roughshod over how things actually happen in the Church of England). Another story that simply uses a Cornish location is Four Windows and a Door (DP Watt) allows childlike innocence to collide with something very... un-innocent. All the stronger for being, at its heart, mysterious, this story does share a feature with The Memory of Stone (Sarah Singleton) - a father who, following a catastrophe, retires to brood on the Cornish coast. Watt's protagonist is easier to sympathise with than Singleton's, a middle aged man who turns stalker when he meets an attractive young woman, thereby bringing disgrace on himself and I found myself rather hoping that the strange pebble-leaving creatures would harm him. But maybe they're just an externalisation of the shame and self disgust he feels?

Claws (Steve Jordan) echoes The Old Traditions are Best in exploring brash, jangling creepiness - this time of an amusement arcade. The Cornish angle comes from the presence of something else, something bent on making mischief. Again, in the way that this something strikes against guilty and innocent alike, the story provides a true sense of horror as does A Beast by Any Other Name (Adrian Cole) which is, surprisingly, the only story in the book to feature the mines and caverns of Cornwall, pairing them with another legends, that of the Beast of Bodmin. But something more evil, more dangerous than a mere monster is at work here. A creepy, effective story – one of those where a subtle change at the end casts a new light on the earlier narrative.

Moon Blood-Red, Tide Turning (Mark Samuels) is another little mystery. Creepy, not particularly rooted in anything Cornish, it takes its impetus, as it were, from the artifice of the theatre. Still chilling, mind.

In Shelter from the Storm (Ian Hunter) a group of Explorer Scouts on a training walk take shelter (from a storm) and foolishly stumble into something ancient that they ought to have left alone. While pretty chilling, I felt at times was slightly stretching what the boys would actually do – yes, I know, going into the old creepy house/ castle/ church despite the obvious scariness of the place is a bit of a cliche and Hunter provides good motivation for that, but perhaps less so for what they do next.

The last story, Losing its Identity (Thana Niveau) was, for me, the strangest in the book (and my very favourite). Framed by extracts from the Shipping Forecast, that invocation of British maritime topography, it is almost science-fictional in one respect, the treatment of a future of rising sea levels and increasing storms which is, bit by bit, drowning Cornwall. There's nothing supernatural, nothing eerily or creepily horrible in this and in some respects it's rather a gentle story. But it is one that rather haunts me.

Overall, this is a strong collection. The "Cornish" theme, however the particular authors choose to interpret it, delivers a focus which adds to the overall sense of place. For example, we hear the same place names repeated from story to story. A grumble in one story about the time taken to get to Penzance on the train sheds light on a couple of others. The factual information about wreckers and the murder of shipwrecked sailors is at the back of one's mind in one or two other places even if those aren't central events in them, as are the more modern examples of the weird which add an "anything can happen" sense to the stories (which are mainly set in the present, or recent past). Perhaps most of all, the sheer chanciness of life on this peninsula, especially when that life depends on the sea, injects an element of potential danger and menace that pervades every story in the book, almost as though the reader can taste the salt and hear the murmur of the waves.

Strongly recommended, whether you are after a good tingle of terror or just a dollop of satisfying atmosphere.

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.