Mist and Other Ghost Stories, by Richmal Compton

 Good grief. The last time I posted was in February; since then it has literally been one thing after another with what seems like very little breathing space in between. That doesn't mean I haven't been reading -- au contraire, I've actually read a lot as a sanity-saving measure.  Mist and Other Stories is just the latest in a lineup of some pretty awesome books, so I'll begin with this collection of supernatural/ghostly tales, which, while perhaps not the most hair-raising stories I've ever encountered, are certainly compelling enough that I  read them all in one sitting.  Here you'll find ghosts, as promised, along with haunted houses, haunted people, and more. For those readers of the dark who love older supernatural tales, it is  no-miss read;  for me there's also the added bonus of discovering a new author in the genre. 

9781908274281

Sundial Press, 2015

originally published 1928

191 pp

hardcover

As if to signal that this will be no ordinary book of ghost stories,  the first two entries, to my great delight, are inspired by the figure of the Great God Pan.   In the opener,  "The Bronze Statuette,"  a "modern" but somewhat shallow sort of young woman ("she had become engaged to Harold Menzies simply because his dancing step and his game at tennis suited hers") at a house party undergoes an unexpected and extraordinary change after the host's father brings out a small bronze statue, "a thing of extraordinary grace and beauty."  Following that one is  "Strange," which also takes place during a house party, where one of the guests, "a chap called Strange," enchants the others with his presence as well as his syrinx.   

No ghost story collection would be complete without a haunted house or two, and what Crompton has on offer here strays a bit off the beaten path in that area. For example in "Marlowes," a woman who, along with her husband has left her home and is staying in a hotel while repairs are being made, confides to another guest that they love their Sussex house, but for a while there it didn't love them back.  Of course, "there's a story about that."  A full tank of petrol would have prevented the happenings at "The House Behind the Wood,"a personal favorite,  in which a threesome find themselves stuck in the cold night "six miles from anywhere."  Frank, married to the "fragile and delicate" Monica decides that sleeping in the car would likely bring on a case of pneumonia, but luckily for the couple and Frank's childhood friend Harold, there is a house nearby with a light shining in the window.  The caretaker has no petrol, but he does offer them a place to stay out of the cold. Let's just say that Frank blames what happens next on a nightmare, but oh Frank, it's not the drains that are causing it.   "The Haunting of Greenways" is another favorite in which the actual spectral visitation begins about ten pages in, but the events leading to that point are really the main show, centering on a young woman who is incapable of true happiness and  "had that gift for self-torture that belongs to the mentally unbalanced."  The title  story in this book is the last but by no means the least; I thought it was one of the best in the collection.  "Mist" finds a hiker who has lost his way in the "bleakest part of the moor" and luckily finds his way to a small inn for the night.  Surrounding and stranding him is the mist, "like something sinister and malevolent."  After boredom and cabin fever set in toward tea time, he decides it might be good to get out and go for a walk. But wait -- what's that "dull light flickering in the fog?"    

Of the remainder, three are well worth honorable mention: "Rosalind," "Harry Lorrimer, and "The Oak Tree,"  the first two of which are excellent and the third entertaining.    In the first, a young artist is haunted by his passion after he dumps the woman he loves for someone more suitable for marriage; the first vows that she will never let the second have him.  In the second, two old school friends, Gregson and Harry Lorrimer, meet by chance, and after a visit to the home of Harry Lorrimer, his friend makes a chilling discovery.  Gregson feels uneasy about Harry, but the uneasiness soon turns to sheer horror when he learns what's really happening with his old schoolmate.   Finally, "The Old Oak Tree" is the last of its kind, sitting in the yard of Bletchleys on "prehistoric land" where Druidic worship may have once been carried out.  Indeed, an old flat stone lies at its base;  Mr. Fellowes informs his wife that it was likely used for human sacrifices, but  Mrs. Fellowes  feels sorry that no one worships it now, and promises it a garland a day.  Sure enough, she keeps her word and the oak tree begins to take on a "new lease of life," which Mr. Fellowes doesn't necessarily like.  

Original 1928 edition cover, from Sundial Press 

 Crompton's characters range from wronged women to people haunted by their pasts, including ghosts who aren't quite ready to give up the pleasures they had in life; her stories occur mainly within the framework of upper middle-class existence  where strange events have the potential to disrupt an otherwise comfortable life. Her real focus here though (for the most part) seems to be on the people themselves, taking her time to develop her characters just enough so that what leads up to the supernatural happenings is well understood by the time you actually get there.   Above all though, she excels in atmosphere -- not simply in natural world phenomena (which is itself so well done that in the last story, for example, you can actually see and feel the clammy fingers of mist in the forest) but also in the way she ever so slightly ratchets the tension experienced by her characters in the midst of uncanny events.   

Mist and Other Ghost Stories is a fine example of ghostly tales done in an original fashion and done well.  While not every story is perfect, it is still a collection that I would most wholeheartedly recommend. 

Slade House, by David Mitchell

 

9780812998689

Random House, 2015

238 pp

hardcover

"Proper X-File, this is..."

I had absolutely no idea what I would be letting myself in for with this novel, nor had I even planned to throw it into the October mix.  Someone in one of my goodreads groups had just finished the book and really liked it, describing it as a haunted house novel, so I decided I'd dust it off and read it.   My bad for letting sit on my shelves gathering dust for five years, because I really had great fun with it.  

Slade House started out as a Twitter story entitled The Right Sort in 2014, and according to the author it "asked more questions than it answered," so he "re-translated it out of Twitterese and into English."  The basic premise of this story, as the back-cover blurb notes, is that every nine years, 

"the residents of Slade House extend an invitation to someone who's different or lonely..."

 and the true question to be answered here is this: "But what really goes on inside?"

The house itself is located off an alley, and one must go through a "small black iron door" set in a brick wall to enter the grounds.  In a nutshell (because to tell is definitely to spoil), over the thirty-six year period during which this novel takes place, a number of different people find the mysterious door, make their way through and are never seen again.  While they are inside, each person finds himself/herself  in the midst of something unique and caught up in an experience specifically tailored for each indivual  -- the teenager, Nathan Bishop, for example, has been invited to come along with his mom Rita who has been invited to Slade House by a certain Lady Grayer  to attend a  musical soirée along with other guests including Yehudi Menuhin.  Then there's the cop who after nine years comes to investigate the Bishops' last known location and meets up with the present owner of the place. Or as just one more example,  Sally Timms, who accompanies a small group of fellow Paranormal Society friends who had planned to investigate the  house but  find themselves invited to a crazy party going on inside.  Each character provides his or her own firsthand narrative of his or her own experiences, allowing for more of a sense of immediacy to the novel, which heightens the chills and the creep factor all the way through.  Giving the book even more of an eerie edge are the ties between past and present that link together everyone who has entered Slade House.  Characters reappear in others' experiences, playing a role in some way or another, and with each successive visitor, we also get closer to what exactly is going on at the heart of it all.  

inside of Slade House, from the cover inset. Blurry, so it's obviously my photo. 

Some readers have found the continual firsthand narratives to be "tedious" after a while, what I call a sort of lather-rinse-repeat format,  but I didn't at all -- with each chapter I braced myself for what could possibly come next, and there was even one that fooled me completely, prompting a huge out-loud gasp and a "holy s**t"  when I tumbled to what was going on.  Each character has a distinct life, a distinct background and his or her own voice; in reading their stories, it was easy to see that the author spent quite a lot of time on the people in this book, getting into their somewhat damaged psyches and fleshing them out with the most human of qualities, and as time moved on, so did worldly concerns outside of Slade House.   My only complaint about the book is that there seemed to be bits of expository overload here and there when I just wanted to move on with things , and that's really just a minor niggle in the face of what is a most delightfully-absorbing, sinister, haunting and mysterious story. Any writer who can toss in a trove of old tropes  into one novel, blend them together and make them come out as a rollicking good read and not same old same old tired certainly gets my vote. 

A  heads up to potential readers:  while  not particularly necessary, it might be a good idea to have read Mitchell's The Bone Clocks prior to reading Slade House.  I didn't, but having just read a synopsis of The Bone Clocks earlier (knowing that this book was somehow related), the last chapter made much more sense; I also just discovered  that this book is just one more in the "vast shared universe"  in his other works.   The bottom line is that it probably won't really matter too much here -- curl up, grab your favorite tea, and just have fun with it. 

HR #6 & 7: two haunted house stories from the 80s: Haunted, by James Herbert and The Well, by Jack Cady

Trying to decide which horror novels from the 1980s to read is like trying to make your way around a buffet table that's loaded down with all kinds of food you'd like to eat, but the small plate in your hand sort of makes it impossible to try everything at once.  My library is chock full of these little gems,  but since 'tis the season, I pulled out two: Haunted, by James Herbert, the old beat up mass market paperback that I've had forever, and The Well, by Jack Cady, which is a newer addition to my library but one I hadn't read.  They are as different as night and day but they're both stories that take place in haunted houses, and after all, what's Halloween without being stuck inside of a haunted house or two?

0515103454
Jove, 1990
originally published 1988
354 pp

Back when I initially read Haunted (which was probably in the 90s),  for some reason I thought it was one of the best haunted house stories I'd ever read; now I think that it had its moments, it was fun, but in the end, it's really only the ending that saved this story from being just another ho-hum haunting.  Before anyone starts mentally pelting me with rotten tomatoes, consider the fact that eons and a growing taste for more sophisticated haunted house stories now stand between this reading and the first.  What I did notice most prominently about it this time around, and what I really enjoy about it  is that it's really quite twisted in a hugely-ironic way, and what the author's done here turns his story into something wholly unexpected.

David Ash is what I suppose we'd now call a psychic/paranormal investigator with the Psychical Research Institute, and has an

"impressive record for exposing phonies and for explaining hauntings or certain psychic phenomena in perfectly rational, materialistic terms."

He's exposed several fake mediums while investigating seances, and has made no secret of his "total rejection of the spirit's existence after death."  As this story begins,  he's been given the opportunity to investigate some strange supernatural activity at Edbrook,  the family home of the Mariells, and he arrives armed with not only the latest gadgetry, but his own conviction that the house itself is not actually haunted, and that there are likely other more natural, rational explanations behind what the family is experiencing.  In short, he believes that the Mariells are "mistaken."    He flat out tells them that while most people think of ghosts as "spirits of the dead," he sees them as

" a thought process, from someone now in another place, or an impression they've left behind."

 Ash also believes that the Mariells might be experiencing

"Apparitions, telepathic visions, electromagnetic images. You might even call them vibrations of the atmosphere,"

but he stubbornly holds on to his steadfast refusal to believe despite the bizarre things he starts to experience at Edbrook.   Oh David...

What makes this book work for me is the sheer irony of it all which isn't revealed until the very end, and rightly so. In that sense, Herbert's done a fine job here, giving the average haunted-house story a major jolt and upending it to the point that it becomes something very different than the norm.  The sad thing is that up to that point, and I'm really sorry major Herbert fans (shields self from flying tomatoes),  what happens along the way may have been earth shattering in the 80s but well, kind of old hat by now.  That's not saying I didn't like it, but it really is a book that depends on its final few pages for the major shock.

9781939140968
Valancourt Books, 2014
originally published 1980
199 pp

On the other hand, there is nothing at all old hat about The Well, by Jack Cady, which is a book that is so rich in atmosphere that a serious case of the creepies grabbed me from the very beginning.  This may just be one of the most original haunted house novels I've ever encountered, and the story, like the house itself, takes several eerie twists and turns along the way as we weave our way through its darkness.

I realized this one was going to be something completely different even before I'd finished reading the first few lines:

"There are Things that do not love the sun. They weep and curse their own creation. Sometimes on earth a cruel shift takes place. Time splits. Corpses possessed at the moment of their death rise from tombs. The dark ages of history flow mindless from stagnant wells and lime-dripping cellars. The corpses, those creatures of possession, walk through ancient halls and rooms...  "Through endless halls are dusks gathering like the memory of screams. There is a concatenation. Presences drift toward combination. Darkness rises and takes shape behind the sound of footsteps." 

 The house at the center of things,  "begun by Johan Traker, father of Theophilus Tracker, grandfather of Justin Tracker, and great-grandfather of John Tracker," may just be seeing its last days on Earth. The old Tracker house is in the way of a new freeway, and the last of the family line, John Tracker, is ready for it to come down. The old place has

 "more than two hundred and fifty rooms, not counting the towers, not counting the darkened plain of the cellar nor the subcellar, which he considered a a true nether-region," 

and John has spent most of his life away from the house trying hard to forget it.   He knows that it was not "just a house," but in actuality,

 "more a trap, a disaster visited on Trackers for over a century. Man after man, and woman after woman, they added their share: predestined, it seemed, to pour into the monster the best of each individual genius."

 However, what he does regret is that he doesn't know as much as he'd like to about his family. So by page twelve, we already get that this story is not only going to incorporate the house itself but its past inhabitants as well.  The blending of these two elements moves the story along, as does knowing that the Tracker house was built as a "trap to capture the Devil," a "theme" which had continued since the original builder, worrying for his soul, laid down its foundations. The traps come in various forms, not the least of which are time shifts. Yow.    And now, John Tracker has come to see the place for the last time, bringing along his secretary and friend Amy.  While they'd planned just a quick visit, they find themselves trapped there during a horrendous storm; and it's during this time that John Tracker realizes that the house just may have a mind of its own.

I have to say that there are spots in this book where the writing just grates, but overall, it's one of the creepiest, darkest, haunted house stories I've ever read, certainly on the list of most original.   Sheesh!  I read this one twice and even in the middle of the second read I was still freaked out enough that I had to put the book down and go do something else.  It's not only the horrors that stand out though, since it is also a story about the people who'd lived in the house from its beginnings, so there's also plenty of insight into human nature. I won't say more, but seriously, there's a reason that this house is described as a "well of depravity."

This one I wholeheartedly recommend, and of the two books here, it is hands down the winner.

Just published and well worth every damn second: The Grip of It, by Jac Jemc

978037453916
FSG Originals 2017
288 pp

paperback/arc -- my thanks to the good people at Powell's.

"It's like a closed circuit."

                                                                      
Jac Jemc certainly gets major points for ingenuity here in her newest novel, The Grip of It, and coming from me, Ms. picky-pants, that says a lot.  The official blurb calls it "a literary horror novel about a young couple haunted by their newly purchased home," which is definitely the case, but it is not at all your standard haunted house fare.

The Grip of It is related via alternating viewpoints between Julie and James, the couple who have bought the old Victorian house at the end of Stillwater. They'd left the city to take James away from his "old haunts" because his wife felt they'd needed a change after he'd gambled away all of the money in his bank account. His gambling problem had put him into therapy, but she thinks that it's time for a "fresh start".  They buy a house that's been on the market for quite some time, and it isn't too long after they've moved in that they discover a number of things that need fixing. There's also something very off kilter here, and weirdness sets in almost from the moment they begin unpacking to start their new life.  Because creepy moments need to be experienced on one's own, I'm not going to go into detail as to what's going on, but things quickly begin to spiral out of control for this young couple to the point where it becomes difficult to separate what is and isn't real.

The ingenuity here is not so much in the haunted house horror story per se -- when all is said and done, the tropes that the author uses here have most certainly been done elsewhere, and the truth is that there are some things that are left unanswered.    What is original here, and what is in my opinion the thing that makes this book very much worth reading, is in the way the author mirrors the couple's search to try to get to the root of what's ailing this house (what's actually haunting it) with what's actually ailing/haunting this couple -- complete with "undercurrents," gaps, walls, and as James reveals, the "buried, fetid stories" which have "bubbled to the surface."  As Julie notes at one point,

"This house is sapping us, pulling out our cores"

and as the novel progresses, the reader comes to understand that the "grip" the house has come to have on this couple is far more menacing than either one of them could have ever realized.

There are so many things going on in this book that make it worthwhile. As just one example, there are several scenes that bring out the idea of   "alternative versions" of ourselves that we reveal to everyone, even those closest to us, and the idea of others'  unacceptability of "the wilderness of the mind," where people "will always wonder what to believe," since they "expect the mind's voice to unstitch only when alone."  The Grip of It  is also another fine example of a writer using the horror genre in a most original way well beyond the norm as a vehicle for exploration into the human psyche.

Readers who go into this novel expecting the standard haunted house fare may be somewhat disappointed, since, as I said, this story, when all is said and done, actually moves further beyond, well into the literary zone where the focus is more on people.   My only real issue is that sometimes what the author has her characters thinking is more authorial than real-world speak, which for me came across a bit overblown at times, but hey -- that's a minor thing compared with what she's done here.  I hope this book does well and that people will come to realize that horror can convey so much more than the content of  much-overdone tales of zombie apocalypses or vampire plagues and that when done right, it can move into the realm of the literary.

The Scarlet Boy, by Arthur Calder-Marshall

Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961
222 pp

hardcover

(read earlier this month)

I was doing a bit of reading on the topic of British ghost stories some time ago (I forget where exactly), hoping to find more authors of such tales for my library, and I came across a reference to this book by a writer I'd never heard of.  The fact that he was unknown to me was a definite plus so I decided to take a chance and I bought the book -- and it seems that with only a few reservations, my gamble paid off.

According to George Grantley, the narrator of this tale, the story "undoubtedly" had its start on April 3, 1959.  On that day, he had received a letter from his friend Sir Christopher Everness (aka Kit), who reveals that "after years of wanderlustiness," it's time for the Everness family to settle down.  Kit is married to artist Nieves, who wants to live in Wilchester.  It seems that their eleven year-old daughter Maria hates the boarding school she goes to and so her mom wants a home near a day school.  He's also very specific about the type of house he wants -- it has to be

"the run-down shell of place that we can make over to our own idea of home...with a garden and plenty of room."

Grantley asks around and comes to learn that a certain Anglesey House is on the market. It's a house that Grantley knows well, since he had spent quite a bit of time there as a child playing with young Charles Scarlet. He also adored Charles' mother Helen -- Grantley had always "envied" Charles because Helen was "much more beautiful and gracious" than his own mom had been.  Although they were playmates, George came to realize that Charles was "obscurely vicious," often wanting the two of them to play "Tortures" in Charles' treehouse, becoming a "different person, almost as if he were possessed." Grantley was actually afraid of Charles, "too frightened by this strange creature within Charles not to do what I was told." It isn't too long into the story that we discover that Charles died later in 1916, having fallen and broken his neck; Grantley would often go and visit Helen afterwards, and their friendship lasted for well over thirty years.

There is, however, one hitch -- Anglesey House, as Grantley becomes aware, is rumored to be haunted.  While he tries to warn his friend, Kit is having none of it.  But as things turn out, perhaps he should have heeded George's advice.

the author, courtesy of Great War Fiction

While The Scarlet Boy is an unsettling, creepy ghost story and a good haunted house tale, there's a lot more going on here than just a simple haunting. Family relationships are put in the spotlight,  as is the age-old debate between faith and reason, with the narrator of this tale often changing his own ideas and beliefs as he sifts through the past to find answers.  Considering the author's background, this isn't so surprising.  According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (I'll add the link, but it's a subscription-only website), Calder-Marshall leaned left in his thinking during the 1930s, but later edged toward a belief in Christianity, a move that was "underpinned by unchanging ethical concerns."

Sometimes it gets a little boggy, interrupting the flow,  but overall, it's a good read.  While I wouldn't say it's in my top ten of haunted house novels, it definitely kept me turning pages, making it one I'd recommend.   This is another book that will probably be appreciated mainly by niche readers, but I'm quite happy that it crossed my path.

Night Things, by Michael Talbot

9781941147610
Valancourt Books, 2015
218 pp

paperback

"They say Lake House draws evil like a magnet." 

I just can't help myself -- I can't resist a good haunted house story. I have no clue why, it just is what it is.  Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is at the top of my list, followed by  Nazareth Hill by Ramsey Campbell, these books, and many, many more. It's all about the atmosphere and the surprises that people discover inside, both of which are part and parcel of Night Things, with the added bonus of an eerie mystery at its very core.

The action begins when Lauren Montgomery, her young 11 year-old son Garrett, and Lauren's new rock star husband Stephen Ransom rent a house in the Adirondacks for the summer. It's not just any house, either -- Lake House was built in the 1890s by Sarah Balfram, who, as the story goes, lived there in complete isolation after being jilted by her fiancé. With 160 rooms, it sits on two hundred acres of land, complete with lake -- very much cut off from everything and everyone for miles.  As Stephen tells Lauren as soon as they enter the place for the first time, it's not a "normal house"; evidently Sarah was a wee bit eccentric and  had

"strange things built into the house -- stairways that go nowhere, hallways that end at blank walls,"

reminiscent of California's Winchester Mystery House.  This place, though, is no  tourist destination -- it's been the scene of several violent murders in the past, something Lauren doesn't know at the time of their arrival, but will soon discover.  Garrett, a naturally-curious child with a fascination for science combined with

Winchester Mystery House, CA (thanks to prairieghosts.com)

a belief in UFOs, ETs, and all things strange, is fascinated about the "unknown vastnesses and further architectural oddities" the house may be hiding, "so evocative of old horror movies that he fancied just about anything might be hidden in its innumerable closets and passageways."  While exploring the place on his own, he discovers that "the layout of the house had a curious rhyme and reason" -- evidently it had been "designed to prevent anyone from venturing too deeply into its inner recesses." This starts him wondering why Sarah Balfram may have had the house built this way, as he sees it, meant to "control and influence the route a person took through her house. " He also begins to question what would happen if somehow he could "travel deeper into its interior."  As Garrett and Lauren soon discover, the house itself is, as the back-cover blurb notes, a "labyrinthine puzzle," complete with rooms that are filled with strange oddities, but also  cause disorientation and dizziness.  The two take their own tour through the place, and after a while Lauren comes to believe that the stronger the effects caused by the rooms, the closer she was getting to "whatever it was that Sarah Balfram had gone to such great lengths to conceal."

The mystery is slowly revealed around the story of the dynamic of a strained family relationship, as Lauren finds herself caught in the middle between her new husband and her son.  It's a good book and it had me going right up until the last section when this family tension causes Stephen to take off,  leaving Lauren and Garrett behind.  With no car and the two stuck in the middle of nowhere, Talbot had a great opportunity here but in my opinion sort of missed it with how he ends the novel, which I won't disclose. Let's just say that I get it and the mystery of the house is solved to my great satisfaction,  but  I felt that rather than making the final reveal a bit more in keeping with the creepy atmosphere and the ratcheting suspense up to this point, Talbot's  final section was more of a standard '80s horror fare ending.  And before you say "well duh - it was written in the '80s," what I'm trying to say here  is that having read his Delicate Dependency,  I think Talbot was capable of much more than he gave me here.  Still, I can't complain,  since in any book it's all about the journey for me, and it was a really good one all along the way and I had a LOT of fun with it.   I'd certainly recommend it to other fans of haunted house stories and to people who enjoy their horror on the tamer side.

Those Who Haunt Ghosts: A Century of Ghost Hunter Fiction, (ed.) Tim Prasil

9781616463458
Coachwhip Publications
459 pp
(read in January)

paperback - from the author, thanks!!!

"And you, my dear sir, ...would also do well not to play with things, the dark and terrible nature of which you are far from being aware of." -- 45

"It's grown rather dark now, and I've got the keys to the haunted house right here. Allow me to admit you. I hope that you enjoy your night -- and that, come morning, you'll be of sound mind and body. Alive, at the very least."   And with that word of warning at the end of the introduction to this book, we're off and running. I could almost hear that evil "bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha" laughter in my head as Prasil throws down that  challenge, and it definitely sets the tone for what's to come. 

 Editor Tim Prasil has spent what I'd say were likely countless hours "digging through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century supernatural literature" to find these tales and the ones that appeared earlier in his lovely collection Giving Up the Ghosts: Short-lived Occult Detective Stories.   In the introduction he reveals what he means by a "true ghost hunter," saying that it is 

"that brave soul who learns of a haunting across town or in a wing of a castle they're visiting, and who then very purposely investigates it."  (10)  

And that is most certainly the case with the stories in this volume, where the ghost hunters are either brave souls motivated by "curiosity" or "skepticism," or those who've been hired to investigate, then, of course,  there are tales of brave people, both men and women, who spend the night in a haunted location on a bet.

The opening story by an anonymous author "The Haunted Chamber" stems from 1823, while the final story is HP Lovecraft's  "The Shunned House," from 1928. These two bookend other works by a few more anonymous writers along with those who are much more well known among readers of old ghostly tales.  Just as a tiny sampler,  Edward Bulwer-Lytton has an entry here from 1859, Henry James makes an appearance with "The Ghostly Rental" from 1876 (excellent story, by the way),  and Prasil has included Ambrose Bierce's "A Fruitless Appearance" from 1888.  And anyone who's read Coachwhip's Shadows Gothic and Grotesque will recognize the name of Ralph Adams Cram, whose wonderful "No. 252 Rue M. Le Prince" (1895) also is included here.  To see the  full table of contents, you can follow this link to Tim Prasil's blog, The Merry Ghost Hunter; as I said earlier, there are 28 stories in this book, and I won't be giving away anything about any of them here.

from Pinterest

There are too many stories that I loved in this book to cull out a single favorite -- I'm such a sucker for this sort of thing, especially those ghostly yarns that take place in an old house or in a reputedly-haunted castle that I was very happy with all of them. And while one might think that an entire volume of tales that take place in various haunted locations would soon enough become same-old same-old, that doesn't happen here at all.  To his credit, Mr. Prasil has chosen a wide variety of stories in terms of place, hauntings, and the ghost hunters themselves;  there are a also number of tales here with surprise endings that I never saw coming.

I can't wait to see what's coming from Coachwhip next -- every time I pick up one of this publisher's books I'm off into my own little world and loving every second of being there.  Ghost- and haunted-house story aficionados do NOT want to miss this one at all.

campfire reading, part two of two: Devil in the Darkness, by Archie Roy

9781943910557
Valancourt Books, 2016
originally published 1978
158 pp

paperback

Book two of the campfire reads and oh, it's a good one! Then again, I'm a huge huge fan of haunted house stories; add in the "benighted" aspect and there's no holding me back.  Devil in the Darkness made me crazy happy -- sometimes I'm just in it for story and this book did not at all disappoint.

The author of this book is no fly-by-night dude who decided one day to write a book about a haunted house.  Archie Roy was a celebrated scientist, and in his introduction to this novel, Greg Gbur notes that

"what we have in Archie Roy's Devil in the Darkness is a truly unique novel: a haunted house tale written by a man who was simultaneously a professional physical scientist, a professional author, and a professional paranormal investigator." 

 While that's interesting to note, the real draw is the story itself -- it's one I couldn't put down until I'd finished the entire book.  I'm all about reading ambience, and with nature at night in the background -- owls calling, scuffling noises in the dried leaves on the ground, and the crackle of an open campfire in an otherwise silent darkness, I found the perfect setting for reading this book.

Set in Scotland, a newlywed couple on the way to their honeymoon destination find themselves lost and caught up in a horrific snowstorm. As the road begins to deteriorate, as the windshield wipers fail, and as the couple is unable to turn around to make it back to safety, Paul and Carol Wilson decide that it's time to take shelter anywhere they can find it. In the darkness they see a light, leading them to Ardvreck House.  The man who answers the door informs him that he and Carol are welcome to stay, and that all of the people currently in the house are "strangers."  Other than that bit of information, no one tells the newlyweds who are they are, where they're from, or why they're there in the house, but since the Wilsons plan on leaving in the morning, it doesn't seem too important at the time.  The newlyweds are given a room, where they bed down for the night. At about 2:20 a.m., Paul is awakened by strange sounds from the room above theirs, goes up to investigate, and finds nothing. The next day, they depart, but return to the house when they discover that the road ahead is no good, and they're stuck for the duration.  It is then when their housemates reveal what they're doing at Ardvreck House, and it is not long at all before the Wilsons become witnesses to strange events taking place there.  Discovering what lies at the heart of these dark doings becomes a quest for everyone in the house, but whatever it is that shares the house with these people isn't going to make things easy for them.

Greg Gbur in his introduction goes on to say that the revelation behind what's going on in this house "clearly draws upon Roy's own investigations and theories about hauntings," which makes the story even more fun to read, knowing that it comes from the mind of someone who's spent a lot of time in reputedly-haunted houses.  While it may not be the best haunted house story I've ever read (the honor there goes hands down to The Haunting of Hill House), it's definitely fun with a good, solid mystery at its core.  And when all is said and done, it's also highly satisfying and just oozes atmosphere.

With no gore and no guts spilling out anywhere, Devil in the Darkness reminds us that blood doesn't need to be splashed all over a horror novel's pages for it to provide good, solid entertainment and a story that will keep its reader turning pages.  I had a lot of fun with this book and once again, a salute to the Valancourt guys for liking it enough to re-introduce it into the reading world. I liked it enough to immediately buy two other books by Archie Roy, so that should say something right there.

HB#1: nothing says Halloween like a haunted house: *The Uninvited, by Dorothy Macardle

0892440686
Queens House, 1977
reprint of  Doubleday 1942 ed.
342 pp

hardcover

Just a brief note about this book.  My edition was published in 1977 and is a reprint of the original 1942 edition.   It was a bit pricey, although as it turns out, worth every damn cent, but the good news is that anyone looking for a reasonably-priced edition will find it in the new (September) edition put out by  Tramp Press. If you're an Amazon shopper, then you're in luck -- it's also available there.

On a weekend in Devon, writer Roderick (Roddy) Fitzgerald and his sister Pamela, are driving around looking for house to buy. Both of them want to get out of London and feel that they need a  "complete break with town, a life with air, space and growth in it." This is, as it turns out, their fifth weekend of looking.  They actuallly find the perfect spot, but the house itself turned out to be a "drab barrack" not even facing the sea.  Turning the car back toward London, and feeling like their "hopes had been preposterous," Pamela sees a lane she'd like to explore, convinced that there "must be a grand view from the top." It is then that they set eyes on Cliff End, fall in love with it, and ultimately buy it from Commander Brooke, whose granddaughter Stella actually owns the house. After the offer is made, Brooke reveals something that he feels obliged to mention without going into much detail:   it seems that some six years earlier, Cliff End had been occupied for some months, but the people who'd lived there had "experienced disturbances" and had left. Roddy shrugs it off -- and the two siblings begin to fix the house to begin their idyllic country life.

Not long afterward, the two learn about the  "local legend" attached to Cliff End, regarding the death of its former mistress, Mary Meredith. Mary was the daughter of  Commander Brooke, and was married to artist Llewellyn Meredith.  It seems that one very windy and stormy night, Llewellyn's model Carmel took off running toward the edge of a cliff, Mary following behind.  Carmel got pushed into a tree, while Mary went off the cliff.  It wasn't too much later that Carmel died from a resulting case of pneumonia. Left motherless was three year-old Stella, who was then taken to live with her grandfather.

Happy now that they are "at home," it doesn't take long before they start noticing a few strange occurrences, which only intensify as time goes on.  When their first houseguests arrive, things get even stranger; the horror becomes gradually worse to the point where the Fitzgeralds realize that the smart thing would be to leave Cliff End. Ultimately, though, they realize that everything they're experiencing seems to center directly on Stella.  Neither of them really want to leave, so Pamela tries to come up with a number of theories as to what's happening to them in order to find some sort of solution to be able to face down the menace that is currently in control of their lives.

Cliff End, from the movie

The Uninvited is a wonderful story, but reading carefully, it's not difficult at all to see that there's  more going on in this book than just ghosts and a haunting.

 While I'm not going to go into any detail at all in the way of what I think is going on here besides all of the supernatural events, I will say that I saw different undercurrents at work here, including repression and marginalization, a reluctance to dig up past history even when it's the only hope for the future, and most importantly perhaps, motherhood under the microscope.

I have this deep and abiding love of good haunted house stories, and I have to say that I was very, very happy with The Uninvited on many levels. On the other hand, the novel was slow to start, but it wasn't too long before I was completely absorbed.  I also figured out the surprises in this story long before they were revealed; then again, that may be due to my many eons of reading crime fiction and learning to put two and two together as the clues unfold.   Bottom line: it's a fine, creepy novel that is fun to read on its surface with much deeper strains running underneath all of the ghostly activity.

And now to the film. I had great fun watching this movie.   The first thing I noticed is that the beginning of the movie belies what's coming later on with its sort happy-go-lucky kind of opening.  Here, Rick (known as Roddy in the novel) and Pam arrive at the house with little dog in tow. There's this kind of silly fun sort of scene where the dog chases a squirrel into an open window at the house, followed by Rick and Pam where they take a tour of the place and decide that it's perfect.   We see Pam and her brother in a sort of carefree, happy mode that not too much later dissolves as the first of the strange happenings gets their attention. It's an awesome movie, and the acting, especially that of Gail Russell who plays Stella, is quite good.  I also loved how the director played with shadows here, which in some instances reminded me of classic noir film scenes. Side by side, though, the book for me was much better -- much darker than the movie, for sure.    Contentwise, the book goes much deeper into the whole mystery behind the hauntings, whereas  it gets sort of a muddled reveal toward the end in the film retelling.  And the seance scene in the novel is beyond brilliant as compared to the one in the movie.

Once again, both book and movie are yesses, and true fans of the supernatural should miss neither. Highly recommended, although both may seem tame to modern readers.  Not to me, though -- I was sucked into both and stayed suspended there until the end.

and he does it again -- No One Gets Out Alive, by Adam Nevill

9781250041289
St. Martin's Press, 2015 (US edition)
629 pp

hardcover

It's nighttime and it's very quiet. I'm sitting at the table in the breakfast room and all I can hear is the tick tick tick of my neon pink pig barbeque clock (don't ask) coming from the pantry room off my kitchen. I'm in the middle of page 400 something of this book and suddenly the phone rings and I actually felt myself jump out of my chair. I'd say that's a pretty good indicator of the book's intensity -- it grabbed hold of me and just wouldn't let me go.

82 Edgehill Road, London is an older Victorian home where a young woman named Stephanie has taken a room. The rent is dirt cheap, which is good, since Stephanie works temping when the agency actually has any jobs for her.  Stephanie lost her mom at an early age, and that was bad enough, but her father remarried and stepmom turned out to be something of a lunatic who has it in for Stephanie for no good reason.  After Stephanie's father dies, she stays with her stepmother, but things got so bad that she had to leave.  Now she's on her own, having left her boyfriend, and finds herself at the point of poverty.  The price of the room is unbelievably low, so 82 Edgehill Road becomes her new home.  Right away she notices something is wrong -- from under the bed she hears the sound of plastic crinkling, she hears women crying, a voice coming through the fireplace, and when someone unseen joins her in her bed, she decides she can't spend another day in the house.  Sadly, she's forked over what little money she has for the room and the landlord refuses to refund her deposit; soon we discover that he's doing everything he can to keep her from leaving. She tries to get help from friends, but everyone's been hit hard economically and no one has enough cash to help her out.  Her situation gets increasingly worse, but when she meets the landlord's disgusting psychopath of a cousin, living in the house turns into something akin to a nightmare.   So Stephanie is stuck while the strange occurrences continue and escalate, and as time passes the situation gets beyond bad to the point where for Stephanie, death just might be preferable.

The supernatural terrors of this novel are creepy enough, but Nevill adds in some very real-life horrors that intensify Stephanie's experiences.  The media (and some social media-ites as well)  and its relentless attacks on her character point to the tabloid-ish tendencies to blame the victim:

"It was the media that had driven her into what two doctors had called 'emotional breakdowns', not the house... Her best defence had been the screaming of her own story straight into the maelstrom of competing voices; the opinionated and ill-informed voices that always knew better..  But she would never forgive the world for what it had done, nor trust it again. Because of how it had interpreted her without restraint or remorse, for the purposes of its own entertainment."  

There were times in the first half of the novel where I found myself wondering whether  this house was actually haunted or whether Stephanie's own mental state brought on her terrors; it's to Nevill's credit  that he can keep his readers guessing at every turn. What I really loved about this novel is that this story is just downright scary in a very "old-school" kind of way, while staying very much grounded in modern times.  So if you need splatter, gore and sick pornography to get your horror jollies, you just won't get it here.  Part one was definitely the best of the book, although obviously it remains creepy enough for me to jump out of my chair while reading part two.

Super super super book -- any novel that can make me jump from the ringing of a telephone is one well worth reading.  Huzzah.  Keep them coming!

The Uninhabited House, by Mrs. J.H. Riddell

1406839043
Echo Library, 2007
105 pp
(originally published 1875)

paperback

My many go thanks to Michael Flowers, who maintains a website dedicated to Charlotte Riddell (1832 - 1906) where I was fortunate enough to find some valuable information about this relatively unknown author -- well, at least I'd not heard of her prior to discovering this book.  An incredibly prolific writer, Riddell's vast bibliography includes over fifty novels and short stories, several of them classified as "supernatural."  The Uninhabited House is a novella-sized haunted house story, set just outside of London along the banks of the Thames.

The "uninhabited house" of the title is River Hall, the property of Miss Helena Elmsdale who inherited the property after the death of her father. Miss Elmsdale has not yet reached her majority, however, so the business of keeping the house rented falls to her aunt Miss Susannah Blake who  puts it in the hands of her attorneys, Messrs. Craven and Son.  She is not the easiest of clients, but the lawyers do their very best to keep it rented for her.   Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the house has a history of tenants who are only too eager to leave shortly after taking the place.  After one tenant decides he's had enough, Mr. Craven realizes that the house that is doomed by reputation to never again see a tenant grace its threshold. With Miss Blake demanding that something be done, one man takes it upon himself to stay in the house so he can discover the secrets that plague River Hall.

Charlotte Riddell, 1875

Without giving anything away, the circumstances in which Miss Blake and her niece find themselves in this book are loosely based on events in the author's own life. After her father died and left the family in financial straits, Charlotte and her mother relocated to London where Charlotte took up writing as a way to help support herself.  Her skills came in handy after her marriage when her husband also suffered some financial setbacks.   In this story, the Blake sisters (the other being Kathleen, now deceased) discover one day that "their trustee had robbed them," and that they were penniless.  Although they tried to earn a living, they found themselves "on the edge of beggary." In The Uninhabited House, the sisters are saved when Kathleen marries a businessman, Mr. Elmsdale, but with Kathleen and Elmsdale dead, Miss Susannah Blake and Helena find themselves in a bad financial predicament once again.   The story's focus on money and the lack of it is quite interesting, not just because of art reflecting life, but because all of their problems could have actually been solved if only Susannah Blake had not set her social and class standards so high throughout her life.  It seems to me that in many ways, one of the points of this story is that it isn't money that brings happiness -- in fact, it is just the opposite in some situations.  Combined with the supernatural elements of this story, it definitely should have made for interesting reading at the time.

I will say that for a while I wasn't quite sure how this tale was going to play out, since it reads like a mystery novel in some parts.  Actually, for me as a crime reader that's not a bad thing, but I really wanted to know exactly what was happening at River Hall. As it turns out, it becomes sort of a hybrid mystery/ghost story when all is said and done; the downside is that it also has a wee bit of sentimental sappiness there at the end, which frankly, given the time it was published doesn't really surprise me.  This is also a story you don't read in hopes of being scared out of your wits ... it's more something you read in appreciation of the author's craft and as a representation of Victorian ghost-story writing, especially the work of a woman writer.

 While it has its issues,  I enjoyed The Uninhabited House very much, and when I finished it, I bought two more books of her work for my home library, Volumes I and II of The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Mrs. J.H. Riddell,  published by Leonaur.  (By the way, I don't reap any benefit if you click on this link that goes to Amazon).  I foresee many hours spent reading Riddell's work in my future -- and would recommend this book to readers who are interested in Victorian-era women writers, to readers of old ghost stories/haunted house tales, and to anyone like myself who is trying to discover previously-unknown authors and bring their obscurity into the light.

another great book from Valancourt: The Feast of Bacchus, by Ernest G. Henham

9781941147078
Valancourt Books, 2015
214 pp

originally published 1907

paperback

I became interested in this novel as part of my little haunted house foray, but I soon discovered that to label this book as one more haunted house novel is to do it a major injustice. Once again, Valancourt has not let me down ... I LOVE these guys!

The small parish of Thorlund is the site of a "inexplicable" and abandoned house, known locally as the Strath.  It had sat empty for well over a century and had "no evil reputation" attached to it, although it had been the site of a murder of one Thomas Reed before the Crown was supposed to have seized the property. However, since the Crown never took it, the Reed family claimed it, but being too poor for its upkeep, they had rented it out, but no one ever stayed too long at the Strath.  As the novel opens and the current owner of the house, Henry Reed, enters he  finds the remnants of the last dinner party of the last family to have lived there still out on the dining table.  Reed has decided to make something of the Strath and himself, and has plans to clear it out, clean it up, tame the wild garden and start a poultry-farming enterprise.  One of Thorlund's locals,  the Rector Dr. Berry, has been the only person for years to have ever set foot into and to have enjoyed the Strath's gardens, and he "knows" the house well enough to advise Reed that his plans will never see fruition -- that the house will never allow him to make his desired changes. Berry, who has fallen under the "spell" of the house over several years, now finds himself an unwelcome guest.  But it isn't long after Reed takes up residence that he is soon found dead.   Soon enough, another person comes to take Reed's place; unlike his predecessor, however, Charles Conway quickly finds himself growing in tune with the house and its influences.  The problems really begin when other people begin to make their way to the Strath and the house starts to work its spell on them, causing them to, as the back cover blurb says, "behave in bizarre and violent ways."  They become "puppets," acting out some strange dramas while inside the house; outside, they return to themselves but with only a vague, hazy recollection that they'd been there.  But what exactly is the source of the house's power?  That is indeed the question that will keep you reading until the very end when all is revealed.

There are a number of factors that elevate this novel from being just another simple haunted house tale. I'll list a couple of them here.   First, the house is the stage for a contemporary tale related in the form of classical Greek drama, complete with all of its component parts.  It doesn't take the reader long to figure this out; if nothing else, the chapter headings are constant reminders -- there are  acts, scenes, scene-shifts, incidentals, etc.  Another factor that elevates this novel way beyond the norm is the shifting atmosphere of the house, denoting some strange force that takes control of and fashions the players' personalities depending on the current whim of the house.As the introduction states,  "the ceaseless interaction of comedic and tragic is the human condition,"  and in the case of the Strath, this idea takes on some very dark overtones. I will leave it for the reader to discover how and why. There are other indicators of the uniqueness of this story as set apart from "normal" haunted house tales, but those I will leave for other readers to discover.

I was both fascinated and disturbed by this novel for many reasons, most of which I can't explain without giving away the show. I will just say that Feast of Bacchus is a book that once you've read it, sticks in your head for a very, very long time -- it's that good. A word, though, about the book itself. It was written in 1907, so the writing may come across as a bit archaic to modern readers. If you can get past the style though, it's a book you definitely do not want to miss.  Creepy, weird, strange, way out of the ordinary yes, but definitely a fine read.

when those demons you're looking to purge just might be your own: Nazareth Hill, by Ramsey Campbell.

0812539303
Tor, 1998
383 pp

paperback

No, S.T. Joshi, this book does not "rival" Shirley Jackson's Haunting of Hill House, but it is certainly a good one. It's an incredibly well-balanced novel where the supernatural provides a backdrop for an intense psychological examination of a man as he sinks into his own madness.

Outside the market square, beyond the park gates on a hill in the village of Partington, there lies an old ruined house on Nazareth Row.  It is known to the locals as Nazarill,  but to eight year-old Amy Priestley, it is "the spider house."  Maybe it has something to do with the idea that "its ominous stillness reminded her of a spider crouching in its web," but more likely because

"...since she'd glimpsed her father's fear of spiders despite his efforts to conceal it from her, it somehow stood for fears of her own that she would rather not define."

At the time, though, she "hadn't the words to express that idea." Regardless, dad Oswald decided to teach her a lesson about conquering her fear, and makes her look into the window, so that he can prove to her that there's nothing there. Later we find out that at the time, he's actually more worried that Amy might be showing symptoms of her maternal grandmother's mental illness, so he tries to make her realize that there is absolutely nothing to fear from the house. Unbeknownst to Oswald, he's just made a huge mistake -- Amy does see something there, but so as not to make her parents upset, she hides the panic it causes and never says a word. After a time, she forgets, but it all comes back  seven years later when Amy and her father take up residence in their  newly-rebuilt Nazarill upscale condo. All seems to be going well until strange things start happening at Nazarill -- including a death -- and Amy becomes convinced that there's something more there than meets the eye.  Looking for any kind of answers, she starts researching Nazarill's history.  The more she digs, the more she finds, but in trying to persuade Oswald into believing her that there is weird stuff happening here, she only manages to convince him that there's something terribly wrong with her -- and that perhaps her grandmother's mental illness has caught up with her. Things take a very wrong turn when Oswald refuses to listen to her and she decides to call in and tell the truth on a radio talk show, which only makes things worse and alienates her from the conservative locals. Their complaints to Oswald, her resistance to her father's growing tyranny,  and Oswald's own increasing paranoia lead him to take some pretty drastic and horrific measures to rid her of the demons he thinks are plaguing her.

I must say, I read Campbell's Ancient Images not all that long ago, and Nazareth Hill makes that one seem like the work of an amateur.  This is a great book -- it is a drama based in the real world that finds itself played out on the stage of the supernatural.  It is a look at a man's descent into utter madness and how it affects others around him. The big question, I think, is whether or not what ultimately happens in this book has its roots in Nazarill itself, or would Oswald's decline have eventually happened no matter where he and Amy lived?   It seems that whatever is inside Nazarill has the ability to isolate, understand, and then magnify the fears of its inhabitants. After all, it's not just Amy and Oswald who have issues -- other people in the Nazarill  building have seen and experienced strange things (one even manifesting itself in a group photograph).  But sadly for Amy, Oswald has a number of issues he's internalized (including his arachnophobia) so if you opt for Nazarill,  he's a particularly susceptible candidate for the house's influence.  What's really and truly frightening to me, though, is how calm and caring he appears to those on  the outside, seen to all as a father who wants to help his little girl. The problem is that  no one really understands how far into his own delusional paranoia he's fallen, and even worse -- because of things Amy's done to rock the boat in this little conservative community, no one will listen to her when she begs for help.

I don't understand the negative reviews of this novel -- some people didn't find it scary enough, some thought it was too long and too clunky in terms of how Campbell writes here. I mean, each to his own, but I found it exceptionally frightening on a human level. And while I'm a huge fan of the author's short stories, he manages to keep the tension flowing and building throughout the entire length of this book. A lot of authors I've read can't make that transition and do it well, but in this case, I was hopelessly lost in this story until the ending.  Actually, the ending was kind of what I found not so great about this novel, but for me it's usually about the journey anyway. I have zero qualms recommending this book.

And I digress: following the path of the haunted house -- post number one

from "The Haunting" -- Hill House

A few weeks ago,  I read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and was just blown away with just how great of a book it is. It's definitely not your average haunted house story, for example, as in the case of John Boyne's This House is Haunted, where there is an actual spirit in the house who haunts the governesses of her children, or in  Haunted by James Herbert where there are definitely ghosts who cause trouble for a paranormal investigator. While there's absolutely  nothing wrong with the appearance of ghosts and other creepy entities in haunted house novel (and let's face it -- they're fun when you want a bit of light reading and want that nice shiver of fright running down your spine), The Haunting of Hill House gave me an entirely new perspective on things.  When it was over and I thought about it, I realized that unlike the straight-up haunted house novels mentioned above,  The Haunting of Hill House works at a much deeper level, focusing mainly on the character of Eleanor Vance.  At some point I remember asking myself whether it could possibly be Eleanor herself  unconsciously projecting her own neurosis (and she has many psychological issues that revealed themselves as I went through the book)  and actually creating the "hauntings" that occurred there. On the other hand, it could be the house itself  that is evil in its own right, something malevolent that wants something from the people within. Actually, now that I'm rehashing it in my head, maybe it's a combination of both.

Borley Rectory, England

As much as I would love to talk about the psychological implications of Jackson's novel, since to me they're at the very core of this story,  this post isn't a "review" of the novel at all. Reading Jackson's book has kind of put me onto this haunted house kick, so until I get really sick and tired of the topic, I'm thinking I'd like to do kind of a survey of haunted house fiction to explore how different authors use these spooky dwellings in their work. Nothing too literary, mind you -- just reading for my own entertainment and personal enlightenment.  Right now I'm sort of flying by the seat of my pants re my book choices, sticking to what I have on hand, but I think I'll spend some time researching the history of haunted house literature and sort of arrange my findings/reading in some kind of chronological order if possible. [As an interesting sidebar, I read somewhere once that one of the Plinies even wrote an account of someone staying in a house that was supposedly haunted, but I'll have to double check that].

So far since Jackson, I've read Nazareth Hill, by Ramsey Campbell (another excellent novel but not quite in the same range of excellence as Haunting of Hill House, imo, but close), which I will discuss sometime soon down the road, and another I'll post about shortly, Kim Newman's An English Ghost Story.  Currently I'm reading The Feast of Bacchus by Ernest G. Henham written in 1907 and republished by Valancourt Books.

 Any help with titles would be welcomed, the more obscure, the better.

AAAAIIIIEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Michael McDowell's The Elementals

9781941147177
Valancourt Books, 2014
218 pp

Over the last few nights as I've been reading The Elementals, nature has provided the perfect backdrop -- hard rain, thunder, and lightning so bright it flashed through the closed blinds.   And while this is the ultimate perfect atmosphere for reading a horror novel (or short stories for that matter),  as it turns out, in this case it was totally unnecessary: the eerie atmosphere that McDowell infuses into The Elementals holds its own without any help.

The novel focuses on two Alabama families, the Savages and the McCrays. They're linked together through marriage and the fact that both families have for years spent their summers at Beldame, "a long spit of land, no more than fifty yards wide," where there are three tall gray Victorian homes,  "large, eccentric old houses such as appeared in coffee table books on outré American architecture."  Back now at Beldame after the strange funeral of Marian Savage is her son Dauphin, who is married to Leigh McCray and  has inherited the family fortune; Leigh's brother Luker and his too-wise-for-her-years thirteen-year-old daughter India McCray from New York City; Big Barbara McCray, Leigh and Luker's mother, married to Lawton McCray, a candidate for US congressional representative, and the faithful Odessa, who's worked with the Savages for as long as anyone can remember.  

One one side of this narrow piece of land is St. Elmo's Lagoon; on the other is the Gulf of Mexico.  At high tide, Beldame is cut off, becoming a virtual island when the Gulf flows into the lagoon.  The McCrays have a house on the gulf side; just opposite their house on the lagoon side is the house belonging to the Savages.  The third house nobody lives in. No one can: the sand dune at the end of the spit has been encroaching on that house so much so that,  as India  notices on first seeing it, it "did not merely encroach upon the house, it had actually begin to swallow it." The third house holds its secrets, as do the McCrays and the Savages regarding their own childhood experiences with the third house.  All anyone will tell India is that she should stay away from it, but India has a mind of her own, and off she goes exploring. And then ..., well, to say more would be to wreck the experience for someone else.

There are so many excellent things about The Elementals -- the characters, the quiet beginning moving slowly toward an ever-growing anticipation of dread and then headlong into the horrors --  but one of the best features of this novel is  the author's ability to capture and evoke the sense of place in his writing. There are various schools of thought either yea or nay on  place as a character in a novel,  but here that's just how it is. The isolation of Beldame, the third house with the sand covering it both inside and out, the beautiful waters of the Gulf, St. Elmo's Lagoon, the channel, the sand, and above all, the paralyzing heat and humidity of a southern summer that sucks the energy right out of a person --  the way he brings all of this place to life allows it to act not only on the characters directly, but also on the reader.   He's captured the Southern summer heat with its god-awful humidity so perfectly that I could totally feel it while reading about it.  

Even better, by the last sections of the book, McDowell has perfectly combined those rising temperatures with the increasingly-growing horror, producing a kind of claustrophobic atmosphere that remains nearly up until the last moment of the story.

I loved this novel. If you're considering reading it, do not look at any reviews where they give away the whole shebang -- if I had known what was going to happen I wouldn't have enjoyed this book nearly as much. And speaking of that,  read this book very carefully if you are at all interested in trying to figure out the main mystery surrounding Beldame and the third house -- it's never overtly stated (which I thought was a good thing), but I think you'll find that there are answers there to dig out.  The one thing I didn't like about this book was that the pacing seemed kind of off at the very end -- much more rushed than I think it should have been given the tone of the rest of the novel. But what the heck.  It's one of the best supernatural horror stories I've read in a very long time.  Maybe modern readers of hack/slash gorefests will find it somewhat tame, but I certainly didn't.  Kudos to Valancourt Books for making this out-of-print book widely available and very affordable.

Lovecraft's Library: Sinister House, by Leland Hall and Cold Harbour, by Francis Brett Young

9780979380655
Hippocampus Press, 2008
269 pp
paper

Two books in one volume isn't so odd, but two books in one volume where the books are upside down from each other is a bit of a weird setup.  It works; it's just a bit disorienting.  The two books in this particular volume, Sinister House, by Leland Hall and Cold Harbour, by Francis Brett Young, are from a series by Hippocampus Press called "Lovecraft's Library" which features nine volumes -- three doubles, like this one, and six novels -- all of which, according to the Hippocampus website, offers "the modern reader a selection of works that Lovecraft himself read and admired, and that he commented upon in his letters or elsewhere."   This is my first foray into the series, and it was a bit of spooky, creepy fun -- best suited for reading after dark or during a night when you're all tucked up in bed and thunder, lightning and rain are all rampaging outside.

Up first is Cold Harbour, by Francis Brett Young.  Originally published in 1924, most of this haunted-house story takes place in the West Midlands area of England.  As the story opens, a group of friends are together on a terrace somewhere on the Italian Island of Capri. While they are enjoying the night, two of the guests, Ronald and Evelyn Wake, reveal their strange adventures at an old house in England's Black Country, keeping their friends spellbound with their eerie tale. 

The Wakes are on their way home from a short vacation and while in the Black Country, in the middle of a thunderstorm something goes wrong with their car and they find refuge at a nearby inn.  While they are there, Evelyn is waiting for Ronald to do some repairs, and she meets Mr. Humphrey Furnival, owner of a house called Cold Harbour.  He makes note of some writings he owns from one of Evelyn's favorite poets, long forgotten now, and invites her to come see them for herself.  Evelyn senses that something is not quite right about Mr. Furnival, and she and Ron really should be getting back home, but the two decide to visit the house on the following day.

During their visit to the house, Ron is taken around the place by their host.  He is shown Furnival's library which comprises many volumes on witchcraft as well as research into madness; he also has quite a collection of artifacts dating back to the Romans he's dug up around the grounds of the house.  One of his prize possessions is a dagger that he discovered was  used in sacrificial worship of the goddess Astarte. As Wake gets the tour and his uneasiness and fear grows,  Evelyn is left with Mrs. Furnival.  Evelyn's time is spent listening to the woman talking about all of the eerie occurrences that she, her children, visitors and the servants have all experienced since they came to Cold Harbour.  Ghostly screams, a poltergeist, manifestations of blood and other phenomena are all part of her story, as well as the revelation that Mr. Furnival considers his wife to be delusional.   As the last vicar left in fear of his very soul, Mrs. Furnival turned to Catholicism, building a small altar and retreating to it as her only source of peace in this house of torments.  It isn't long until the Wakes have had enough and take their leave, but they do so with the  feeling that "they’d been thrust out of their normal, peaceful orbit by a blow from something dark and invisible whirling out of space.” 

An old-fashioned and atmospheric haunted house story with a chilling twist,  Cold Harbour might seem pretty tame to today's horror readers who thrive on gore and grossouts, but for an old-fashioned tale of hauntings, it's pretty scary -- especially when all is finally revealed. 

Coming now to Leland Hall's Sinister House,  this book is another haunted house story, which takes place in an old house on a cliff.   Published originally in 1919, it is the story of two young newlyweds who have come to live in the Hudson Valley.  Rather than follow the lead of their very good friends  Pierre and Annette Smith who have settled nearby in a more modern housing development built especially for commuters,  Eric and Julia Grier decide to take residence in an eerie old house in the woods that stands on a cliffside.  Eric has to commute for work; when he is away he can't stand being apart from his wife; while she misses him when he's gone, she is more worried about him returning.  It isn't long until Pierre realizes what's going on -- there's some sort of force within the house that wants to separate Pierre from anyone who cares about him, making them feel uneasy in his presence, and this includes his wife Julia and his friends.  Pierre's little son is hypersensitive to these haunted goings-on, so much so that  before long Pierre must tell Eric he can no longer come to the Smith's home.    But there's more to this presence than just its isolation of Eric -- and soon Julia realizes that her very life is in danger. 

Sinister House has it all -- a creepy old house with a locked room where no one dares to go, dark woods that hide it from the outside, and an ongoing sense of impending doom that creeps under your skin.  It also holds a core mystery centering on the nature of the evil forces that inhabit the house as well as a truly horrifying story that unfolds after all is revealed, one that will chill you to the bone.  At the same time, the book is also a product of its times --  while the author is great at building and maintaining a chilling atmosphere, sometimes the story heads off in a direction reminiscent of a romantic melodrama.   There are also a few issues about his ghosts that make no sense if spirits are the ethereal creatures they're supposed to be -- can ghosts really trip and stumble over each other? 

In spite of a few misses, Sinister House is a fun read; together with Cold Harbour there are a few hours of hair-raising entertainment to be found.  If I had it to do all over again I'd save both stories for the quiet and the darkness of night -- the chills would be a lot more effective.  If you're into old ghostly tales that depend heavily on atmosphere, you'll like this book; if that's not your thing and you prefer brain-eating zombies or other more in-your-face kind of horror, you'll definitely want to pass.  I liked it, but I'm much more into creating scary scenes in my head than having them already splashed all over the pages with not much left to the imagination.