The Hastur Cycle, ed. Robert M. Price

0568820097
Chaosium (Call of Cthulhu Fiction #1), 1993
303 pp

paperback

"Close contact with the utterly bizarre is often more terrifying than inspiring..." --- HP Lovecraft in "The Whisperer in Darkness" (193) 



Some time ago, long before HBO's True Detective was even in the works, I read  S.T. Joshi's Chaosium collection of Robert W. Chambers'  The Yellow Sign and Other Stories.  It  was my  introduction to  King in Yellow, and I was so entranced that I had to have more.  Then I remembered that I had a copy of  The Hastur Cycle (and A Season in Carcosa, which I'll discuss after this book) somewhere among the jumble of books in my horror/weird fiction shelves. Score!

Robert M. Price notes about this collection that 

"The Hastur Cycle ... may be seen as a literary genealogy, a family tree in which Lovecraft's 'The Whisperer in Darkness' is a single branch, with other branches stemming from it and going in their own directions" 

and  that "the family tree begins with Ambrose Bierce."  With "The Whisperer in Darkness" at the center of this collection, the book focuses on the antecedents of this story (Bierce, Chambers, Wagner, Blish, Machen);  then, after Lovecraft's piece,   moves on to the works of writers inspired by HPL. But as I've discovered, Lovecraft only mentions Hastur as one among many terrible names, and moves his story into the realm of outer space and crustacean-like fungal creatures (Mi-Go), a theme which runs for a while before another author makes Hastur a participant in a battle of bad monsters, so  I don't think I quite got the connection.   If someone wants explain it to me, I would be grateful. I thought about this long and hard, believe me. 

 Just a note --I have the original version of The Hastur Cycle rather than the revised edition of 2006 so I'm missing "The Feaster from Afar," by Joseph Payne Brennan. Otherwise, it seems to be the same, although I don't know if Price's commentary has changed in the newer version. Another note: ignore the introductions to each story until the end -- I discovered after reading the intro to "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" that the editor needed to provide spoiler alerts, so I waited to read the introductions until after I'd read each story.

The table of contents is as follows:

Ambrose Bierce: 
---  "Haita the Shepherd," and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa," both stories that  have no mention of a King in Yellow, but do mention Hali, Hastur and Carcosa. The first story is about a shepherd who worships a god named Hastur;  the second tells of a man who has awakened from an illness and makes a surprising discovery.

Robert W. Chambers:
--- Now we get into the really good stuff, first with "The Repairer of Reputations," which is one of my absolute favorite King in Yellow stories ever and then "The Yellow Sign," also excellent.  

Karl Edward Wagner:
--- "The River of Night's Dreaming" absolutely blew me away. Perfectly placed after the 2 pieces by Chambers, this story follows a passenger on a prison bus who sees her chance for escape and takes it.  This one story is so well written and so good that out of all of the stories in this collection it's the one I will never, ever forget.

James Blish:
--- "More Light" wherein a version of the play "The King in Yellow" is found. The story is revealed in the first person by a narrator who is invited to the home of one William Atheling, a literary critic.   It strikes me as a rather tongue-in-cheek kind of story (except for the play), since as I discovered after having finished this book, William Atheling Jr. is also a pen name of James Blish.  Atheling has a copy of the actual play "The King in Yellow," purported to be written by Chambers himself, but has received it from HP Lovecraft after a bit of badgering. Now he wants the narrator of the story to read it.  The play, of course, was never written by Chambers, only alluded to in his stories. Also a very good story, "More Light" allows the reader to judge for him/herself just how terrifying it might be, perhaps proving the point that by skirting around the play itself in his work, Chambers makes the play much more frightening in his readers' heads than it seems to be on paper.

Arthur Machen:
--- Machen is one of my favorite "weird" writers, although now I think I want to read the Best Weird Tales 3-volume set published by Chaosium again just to reconnect.  His contribution to this volume is the most excellent "The Novel of the Black Seal," the story of  Professor Gregg, an antiquarian whose research leads him to the discovery of a strange black rock on which are inscribed characters at least four thousand years old.  His curiosity also leads to the revelation of  the thin line that exists between the world we know and the darker reality that lies beneath.  The Professor says it best when he looks at a bridge, seeing in it "a mystical allegory of the passage from one world to another."

H.P. Lovecraft
--- The only Lovecraft entry in this book is "The Whisperer in Darkness," which comes together as a kind of horror meets sci-fi sort of thing, as   Price suggests that this story was not only inspired by Machen's "The Novel of the Black Seal," but that in many ways, it is a  recasting of Machen's work moved from Wales to the "wild-domed hills of Vermont".  Professor Albert Wilmarth's story begins with something horrible he hasn't actually witnessed that causes him to experience a severe mental shock which causes him to flee.  A series of floods in 1927 leads to some pretty wild speculation about strange things floating in the rivers of Vermont as well as sightings of strange creatures. Wilmarth, who is an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University, relates the present sightings to old local myths and writes a series of letters to the local newspapers  supporting  his skepticism against the "romanticists who insisted on trying to transfer to real life the fantastic lore of lurking 'little people' made popular by the magnificent horror-fiction of Arthur Machen."   But Henry Akeley, also a scholar now living in a secluded farmhouse in these remote hills, begs to differ, and has firsthand evidence he would like Wilmarth to see that will ultimately lead to a challenge to Wilmarth's skepticism and will also challenge his rational mind as well.  Very enjoyable story.

Richard Lupoff
 --- picks up the Akeley story again in "Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley," moving it forward into 1979.  Henry Akeley's great-granddaugter Elizabeth is the leader of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood, where she is known as the Radiant Mother. She holds regular sessions where she communes with the dead on behalf of her congregants. One day she picks up a "spirit" transmission from a voice with "the twang of a rural New Englander," who asks about Wilmarth.  I enjoyed the satire in this story and I liked it right up until the very end, when I think it got kind of silly and left me just a wee bit disappointed.

Next up is Ramsey Campbell with his "The Mine on Yuggoth," the tale of a young man who was into very "less orthodox practices," who got it into his head to see for himself the source of the "obscure process" of immortality practiced on "Tond, Yoggoth, and occasionally on Earth." Using the Revelations of Glaaki and the Necronomicon as his guide, he gets much more than he bargains for. I liked it, but not as much as the other stories in this book.

James Wade  also uses Yoggoth as the locale for his very short story, "Planetfall on Yuggoth."  Technology has advanced to the point where it is feasible to make a very short trip to Pluto, and an expedition is organized to make "planetfall."  As it turns out, this might not have been such a good idea, and worse, scientists don't seem to learn from their mistakes. This one was short, and okay.

We leave the lobster fungi and get back to the aptly-named "The Return of Hastur" (since Price seems to have gone a little Mi-Go happy for a while) , written by  August Derleth.  I read the story first, thinking that the ending sort of reminded me of a Japanese B-movie monster flick of the 1960s mixed with a familiar horror trope. It seems that the nephew of the dead Amos Tuttle (of Innsmouth)  not only failed to heed his uncle's warning and last request that the uncle's home be destroyed, but accidentally opened the way for Hastur, "He Who is not to be Named," and also a being as bad as Cthulhu, by playing around with forbidden books.  Then I read the introduction, and had to laugh, because Clark Ashton-Smith had given Derleth some advice he really should have taken.   

My edition  of this book ends with Lin Carter's "Tatters of the King," in three parts. First, "Litany to Hastur," a poem that re-situates Hastur in Carcosa and causes the narrator to warn others not "to seek to learn nor ever ask What horror hides behind ... The Pallid Mask!".  Next is "Carcosa Story About Hali," which finds a priest of the Elder Gods seeking the necromancer Hali the Wise who knows what dwells in the depths of the Black Lake. Finally, there's Lin Carter's version ("after James Blish") of the King in Yellow Play.

All in all, I liked the majority of these stories, but I'm still a little puzzled about the connection between the Hastur mythology of the pre-Lovecraft sections of the book and the Mi-Go portions of this collection.  I tried to keep notes but honestly, it probably went over my head along the way.  Either that, or Price didn't bring it out in his commentary.  In the long run, though, if you consider the authors represented here and the stories they have to tell, it's a pretty darn good book for readers of weird fiction.  Definitely recommended.

Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Stories

1853262188
Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994
174 pp

Madam Crowl's Ghost and other stories contains twelve supernatural tales that might be best be read late at night when the house is quiet. Even Henry James agrees: there's a statement by James on the back cover that reads

"There was the customary novel by Mr. Le Fanu for the bedside; the ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight."

The book is a mix of Victorian ghost stories, haunted houses, and tales based on Irish folklore.   These aren't perhaps the best ghost stories I've ever read, but Le Fanu is a master of  atmosphere, which helps to  produce the sense of dread or doom I look for when I read these tales.  For the ghost-story aficionado, this collection is definitely one not to miss.

Since this is not  a literary blog, and because I am not at all skilled in literary analysis, you won't find that here; there are, however,  lots of places on the Internet where people get much more in depth with Le Fanu and his ghost stories than I ever could. 

The contents of Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Stories are (with absolutely no spoilers)

"Madam Crowl's Ghost," in which  an elderly woman, looks back to her thirteenth year, when she arrived at Applewale House near Lexhoe.  She was there to help take care of Dame Arabella Crowl, who's "gone quite aupy, and can't remember nout rightly," often so out of control that the servants have a straitjacket just in case.  As our young maid is about to find out, there are secrets hidden at Applewale House waiting to be uncovered.  Very creepy -- a deliciously eerie haunted house story.

"Squire Toby's Will," where the ghosts that haunt the old house are not the usual benign spirits.  About "three miles south of the town of Applebury and a mile and a half before you reach the old Angel Inn," there stands a "large black-and-white house," called Gylingden Hall standing in neglect. It wasn't always that way; some seventy years earlier, it had been the home of Squire Toby Marston.  On Squire Toby's death, his sons Scroope and Charlie, were surprised to discover that their father leaves the house to Charlie, the younger, rather to the the elder whose whom it should have been.  Some time later, a dog shows up and Charlie takes him in, even though his servant thinks it's a bad idea -- and the servant turns out to be right. 

"Dickon the Devil," is set in the northwest of England near the "famous forest of Pendle, "which Mr. Ainworth's Lancashire Witches has made us so pleasantly familiar." Squire Bowes dies with no will, causing his property, Barwycke,  to be left to the Misses Dymocks. He had planned to make a will, but died before it was finished.  The narrator, who is there twenty years later to divide up the property between them, is curious about the house, and one of the locals goes with him to Barwyke. While examining the churchyard, the narrator encounters "an idiot, an awpy," known in those parts as Dickon the Devil, "because the devil's almost the only word that's ever in his mouth."  It isn't long until the narrator receives a visit in the nighttime from someone his guide swears must be the old Squire himself -- and until the narrator discovers why the "awpy" idiot Dickon is the way he is. 

"The Child That Went With the Fairies."  Back in Ireland again, in Munster, following a "very old and narrow road, " connecting the Limerick road to Tipperary and the road going from Limerick to Dublin, there's a lonely stretch through "a deserted country" among the Slieveelim hills. There, on a small pasturage lives Mary Ryan, a widow, and her children. At the head of her bed she has her beads (rosary) and a "phial of holy water" to protect her and her family from the "Good people," or the fairies. The "hill-haunt" Lisnavoura is close by, and Mary keeps a constant watch on her four children just in case the fairies have it in mind to take them.  But one day when Mary had left older daughter Nell to keep an eye on the three younger ones, they go missing; when two of the three are found, they relate a strange story of a beautiful woman and her dark companion.  You can spin this one lots of ways, but to me it was a cautionary tale, and with a bit of imagination on my part, I could see how a story like this one told to small children at night before bedtime might scare the crap out of them so that they don't ever wander off.  While there are a number of stories about the loss of children to the fairies, here the atmosphere and the  descriptions of the lonely country where Mary and her family are living set the stage for a most incredibly haunting tale. 

"The White Cat of Drumgunniol" again set in Ireland, here evil takes the form of a white cat. Interestingly, the first paragraph of this story lets the reader know that LeFanu is going to take a "famous story of a white cat, with which we all become acquainted in the nursery," and make it into something "more sinister."  It is a story told by one Dan Donovan to the narrator, who has come to Munster to study some records and to learn the Irish language.  As a boy in Drumgunniol, Donovan used to go down to read by the lough, a deserted place in "the gentle hollow field that is overhung toward the north by the old orchard." One day at age thirteen, he saw a woman coming toward him in a light grey dress; between the two of them was the lough.  She didn't change course, though, and walked right over the water, giving Dan the fright of his life.  It was the first of many frights for the family, who found themselves ultimately struck down under a strange curse.  

" An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street," my favorite of all of the haunted house stories in this book.  Two medical students and cousins, Tom and Dick (who is the narrator of this tale), are in need of lodgings, and take up residence in a Dublin home that Tom's father had purchased but which remained unoccupied. Their cleaning lady  had been working in the house when  "under an impulse of 'temporary insanity'," one of the former tenants, a Judge Horrocks, had taken a child's jump rope and hanged himself over the bannister.  It isn't long until they both become surrounded by strange phenomena, starting out first with nightmares but eventually becoming much worse.  I loved this one.

"Ghost Stories of Chapelizod" is really three small tales: "The Village Bully", who gets a most terrible retribution by one of his victims; "The Sexton's Adventure," in which a boozing sexton's friend and favorite publican kills himself with a gun, shaking the sexton to the core to the point of promising never to drink again. However, after a late night appointment with a curate, his promise is put to the test as he passes by the dead man's pub, where a stranger tries to tempt him with a bottle. The third story is "The Spectre Lovers." Having had a good evening of drinking, Peter Brien is going home from the pub. Crossing the Chapelizod bridge, he sees something very strange -- a regiment of soldiers, who to the man had a "melancholy and hang-dog look" about them. Peter accompanies them to an old stone house, the home of the Captain's lover, who has a particular job for him: to "bring my lost treasure to the churchyard."  According to the introduction to Bleiler's collection of Le Fanu's Ghost Stories and Mysteries, the author was very interested in folklore and with the help of different friends, collected these sorts of tales. I love folklore, so this little group of stories definitely appealed to me. 

"Wicked Captain Walshawe of Wauling." This story has a particular frightfulness that creeps up on you slowly, and it's one of the better stories in this volume.  Captain James Walshawe (who wasn't really a captain except by "courtesy," married an heiress named Peg O'Neill, who had been living in a nunnery.  Peg eventually dies, and she is attended by "some half-dozen crones..." and her maid Moll Doyle. Peg had been laid out in a "strange brown robe," holding her rosary and a burning candle, which the Captain took out of her hand, and flung at Moll Doyle.  She tells him it was the "holy candle," and he accuses her and the others of witchcraft.  Moll sends him out with a curse. Some forty years later, the Captain, who  "hated nearly everybody" dies, and one of his cousins, uncle to the narrator, is summoned to the funeral.  He also wants to look around the estate, but he will eventually regret ever going there.  In some ways, this story runs along the same lines as "Squire Toby's Will," but is definitely much better.

"Sir Dominick's Bargain: A Legend of Dunoran." In the south of Ireland, the narrator who has come there for business took a long, twenty-five mile horseback ride, a journey "By bog and hill, by plain and ruined castle, and many a winding stream."  At the end of one day, as he's ready to find a place to rest, he notices a ruined house halfway up the mountainside. The name of the place is Dunoran, "a grand house in its day." He meets a hunchbacked man who tells the narrator a very strange story about Sir Dominick's proverbial deal with the devil.  Normally, these deals-with-the-devil type of stories are pretty formulaic, where good triumphs, but you're in store for something just a wee bit different here.  I liked this one.

"Ultor de Lacy," is one of the strangest and saddest stories in this book, and tells of the last members of a family of Jacobite lineage. The past reaches out to confront the present here in this eerie tale of Ultor de Lacy and his daughters Una and Alice.  When  Ultor is implicated for treason in the Rebellion of '45, he flees to France, but sneaks back every now and then to see his daughters. They are also watched over by a priest who comes to visit every so often, up until one day when try as he might, he was physically prevented from reaching the girls. The locals think the old castle where they live is haunted, so they're left on their own.  Eventually Ultor comes up with a plan to save his family from complete ruin, but what's really going on in the castle could thwart any hopes he has.

"The Vision of Tom Chuff." Another personal favorite, this story is a little like "The Sexton's Adventure," in that something causes the main character to give up his vices and change his ways. Unlike "The Sexton's Adventure" though, this one is pretty frightening.  Tom Chuff, local poacher, drunkard and wife beater, arrives at his little house one evening and after his third dram of spirits, passes out in a chair by the fire. His wife and children are petrified that Tom his dying, when a "death-like pallor came over his face" and he didn't respond to her cries.  The doctor arrives, and sticks Tom with a lancet and no blood comes out. Twenty minutes later, however, Tom comes to, and the narrator reveals that he'd had a most disturbing vision. What he saw in that vision chilled him to the marrow enough to inform his wife that he'd become a changed man.  But then again...

"Stories of Lough Guir" are again, like "Ghost Stories of Chapelizod" bits of folklore the author picked up from his childhood from local storyteller Anne Baily of Lough Guir.   The first story in this collection, "The Magician Earl," is about the Earl of Desmond and his lovely bride who, due to the wife's inability to stay quiet, find themselves living in a submerged castle. The second story here is "Moll Rial's Adventure, connected to the "Magician Earl." Moll Rial, old when Anne Baily was a child, used to be a washer woman. One day she saw a gentleman walking toward her, who offered her a ring from his finger as a "reward." Luckily she didn't speak to him or things could have been very bad.  And what Irish folklore would be complete without "The Banshee," which Miss Baily herself once experienced.  "The Governess's Dream" has Anne's governess recounting to her pupils a very strange dream. It was so intriguing that she took the girls to the old castle nearby to carry out instructions from the dream.  Finally, there is "The Earl's Hall," that takes place in the same castle with the same governess, but this time, she's visited by a strange apparition.

 While these stories aren't a complete set of terrifying tales by Le Fanu, they've been enough to whet my appetite for more. Most of these tales have to do with vengeance of wrongs brought forth to the present because of actions of someone in the past, while some are folkloric in nature. My favorites are the stories set in among the hills of Ireland, largely because Le Fanu steeps these  tales in atmosphere from the outset.  I also noticed that in many or most of these stories, there are clues at the very beginning that lead the reader toward the climax -- when all is revealed.

While I have all of Le Fanu's novels, I've never before ventured into his shorter tales, but I must say that they are very satisfying for someone like me who loves a good ghostly yarn. As I read this book, I could envision people sitting near a fireplace in a darkened room listening to someone tell these ghostly tales and feeling chills run up and down their respective spines. 

...and the saga continues: The Spawning, by Tim Curran (Book Two of The Hive Series)

9781934501191
Elder Signs Press, 2010
383 pp

paperback

"They didn't take the hint that the Kharkov Tragedy was the only warning this world was going to get.." 

Building on the events both in Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness and in Curran's previous novel in this series The Hive, The Spawning opens once again during the long, dark Antarctic winter.  It seems that in the meantime, what happened at Kharkov Station some years earlier has become fodder for conspiracy theorists, since the powers that be have covered up and put their own collective spins on the truth.  Unlike my experience while reading Hive, which was a little slow for me, I couldn't put this one down. It's weird (in the weird-fiction sense of the term), coolishly pulpy, and this time my tension level remained on high throughout most of the novel.  If you haven't read At the Mountains of Madness or The Hive, it's okay -- better if you have but The Spawning fills you in on the backstory enough so that you don't feel like you've missed too much.

With a prologue that's bound to get your rapt attention as twenty-five British scientists disappear from Mount Hobb station, it doesn't take long until you're in the middle of a lot of gut-twisting action, beginning at US/NSF station Polar Clime.  It starts when a helicopter crashes from nearby Colony Station, a top secret, hush-hush area "with armed guards and motion detectors," like "Area 51 or something" where "they had to keep people away."  Teams from Polar Clime are sent to the crash site, and right away one of the men, Slim, notices something odd about the crash itself.  Trying to extricate bodies from the wreckage, Slim happens to see something under a tarp, which right away, his friend Coyle realizes is "more than just a charred body...Something bad."  It isn't long until the "spooks" from Colony Station appear; their leader, Dayton orders the Polar Clime teams to leave. Coyle realizes something's off -- and not just with the crash. As he notes:

"The whole scenario was spooky and strange. First Mount Hobb and then this crash and now Dayton with his James Bond shit."

But "spooky and strange" will turn out to be an understatement.  After returning to Polar Clime, Coyle decides he'll join some of the others in viewing a live NASA feed of the historic landing of the Cassini 3 spacecraft as it lands on Jupiter's moon Callisto.  As they're watching, the craft's camera records "a series of interconnected megaliths" that will set off a chain of events that will eventually affect the entire world as we know it. Add to this horrific occasion a number of strange doings at  the NOAA Field Lab Polaris and Emperor Ice Station on the Beardmore Glacier, and it will be all Coyle and his companions can do to maintain their sanity and stay alive in the process.  


The tension builds from the novel's beginning and rarely lets up.  The chapters are short, the action moves around from place to place but never lingers too long in one spot, keeping the reader hooked.  Once again, as in Hive, Curran builds on the work of Lovecraft without copying his tone or style, letting his own writer voice come through.  Thematically, one of the main themes reveals that in their zeal to maintain secrecy, the government and other powers that be keep too many secrets and ignore lessons from the past that probably should have been heeded -- in this case, to the detriment of the world's population.  Once again though the characters seem a little bit too pat, often bordering on stereotypical; the whole us vs. them (the common man vs. the government and the scientists) is also very obvious. Also, while the story moves along at a good pace, Curran sometimes spends a little too much time with his characters pondering what all of this means.  However, I enjoyed The Spawning much more than its predecessor -- and the cliffhanger ending left me wanting much more.  So come on, Tim Curran -- it's been four years already -- time for the next installment!

Hive, by Tim Curran

9780975922941
Elder Signs Press, Inc, 2009
269 pp

paper (first ed.)

"Nothing stays buried forever at the Pole."

Hive is the first in a series of two books, followed by The Spawning, which I haven't yet read.  I own both books in their original paperback editions; a good thing since the prices of these two books have gone way up since their original publication dates.  Billed as a sequel to HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, Hive takes its readers back to Antarctica decades after the original Pabodie expedition; if you've read Lovecraft's work, you'll remember that at the end (without giving away the show if you haven't) of that story, the narrator and expedition leader William Dyer clearly warned any future expeditions to stay away from Antarctica.  Obviously, the warning went unheeded. While I liked the overall story, the premise and especially the claustrophic Antarctic setting, in truth, this was a book I could read a while, put down, and wait to come back to. In the realm of weird fiction, that's unheard of for me.

Kharkov research station is the setting for this story -- Antarctica is in its winter which means total darkness, storms and for the crew at the station, isolation.  As the novel opens, paleobiologist and professor Gates is returning to Kharkov after his team discovered some frozen, mummified corpses buried in the ice.  He deposits his finds in Hut #6 where the mummies are definite objects of curiosity for the station's crew, creatures unlike anything anyone has ever seen before.  While Lind, the plumber is first in awe over how famous Gates' discovery is going to make everyone at Kharkov Station once the spring comes, Hayes, the mechanic is less enthused.  After seeing the mummies up close though, Lind  has second thoughts, warning everyone not to stay alone with these creatures.  The sense of dread and bizarre events that follow aren't helped by  NSF administrator  Dennis LaHune, who makes everything worse by cutting off the crew's contact with the outside world, setting himself up as an enemy to Hayes and eventually to Sharkey, station doctor.  Lind's sense of danger will turn out to be prophetic; it isn't long until the strange effects of having these creepy corpses at the station are experienced by all. But what are these things and what is the strange power they hold over everyone?

There is a very highly-developed atmosphere of isolation, darkness, and utter hopelessness that runs throughout this novel, and at times when that feeling of dread set in, it was all I could do sometimes to prevent myself from turning to the back to see if the main characters were still there at the end.  Sadly, the  hackle-raising sense of fear that exists in spots was overpowered by how many times the characters stop to expound on the nature of these creatures, often the same things over and over again. For me, this need to analyze things to death, along with the often-stereotypical characters, is what prevented this novel from being the gut puncher it could have been.  To his credit though, Curran has his own voice, unlike some authors who've taken Lovecraft's work and tried to turn it into theirs, all too often unsuccessfully.



Reader response varies -- some found it absolutely stunning, while others have kind of a middle-of-the-road reaction, and still others didn't care for it at all.  I am going to read the second book, and as a rule, I like Curran's fiction so despite my fault finding with Hive, I have no plans to stop reading his work.   I'd say read it, keeping in mind the caveats I've listed above.

The Ghost Hunters, by Neil Spring

9781780879578
Quercus, 2013
522 p

paperback

"Do you suppose that those who hunt ghosts are haunted, in turn, by them? 

Normally a 500+ page book will take a few days to read; once I seriously got into this one,  I had it done in two.  I gave up a lot of sleep to read this novel, and it was totally worth it, in fact, the constant wind I could hear blowing outside provided the perfect ambience. The Ghost Hunters is really several stories meshed into one -- first, there is the story of Sarah Grey, a young woman living with her mother who in this book became confidential secretary to Harry Price, the subject of the second story, a "psychical researcher" and  debunker of fake mediums during a time when spiritualism was at its heyday. The third story focuses on the "most haunted house in England," Borley Rectory.  When I first bought this book I thought I was getting a horror story, and even though it didn't completely turn out that way, I was totally amazed at just how good this book is. Aside from a few parts that verge on melodrama, the novel is highly atmospheric and will definitely send shivers up your spine here and there.

The narrative is related mainly by Sarah Grey, looking back over her life and career from 1955.  Her story begins in 1926, two weeks before she turned 22.  Her widowed mother, having lost her husband during the war, is very much into spiritualism, and on this particular day in January, Sarah is reluctantly accompanying her to the gala opening of Harry Price's new laboratory.   Sarah disapproves of her mother's interest in mediums and seances, thinking spiritualism to be in "poor taste," and also believing that instead of focusing on the dead, people should be thinking about moving on.  The laboratory is paid for by funds from the Society for Psychical Research,  "equipped with the necessary scientific equipment," and is a place where "men and women with open minds can test the mediums unhindered by preconceived prejudices."  On this night, the two women witness the testing of a medium whose powers seem so real, only to be followed by Price's denunciation of her work as a trick.  Price also announces that he does not believe in ghosts, and notes that his "science, psychical research," will leave behind the "cheap mummery of the seance rooms."  His comments are objected to by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, famous  for his belief in spiritualism, making for an exciting evening.  Harry himself is rather at odds with the Society, and makes no bones about his stance on their methods.

Eventually, this gala opening turns into a position for Sarah as Price's confidential secretary, as well as his eventual assistant in his debunking activities.  It isn't long until Sarah comes across a letter from a Dr. David Chipp, who also attended Harry's lab opening, and who finds that his own experiences are "at odds" with what Harry had to say. The letter goes on to tell about several eerie things that happened to him during a visit at the family home of a colleague and friend, Borley Rectory.  After the visit was over, he heard many more stories about Borley Rectory and the things that his friend had witnessed, and while Dr. Chipp was himself looking for a "satisfactory explanation" on the rational side, he could never come up with an explanation.  Chipp tells Harry that perhaps he should investigate the place for himself. Sarah alerts Price, who is not at all interested, and the matter drops until sometime later when a story is written in the newspaper about Borley Rectory and the experiences of the new tenants of the place.  As it turns out, the reporter who wrote the piece, Vernon Wall, is eager for Harry to visit, because he himself had  traveled there and witnessed some things that "confounded all reason."  As Wall states to Sarah,

"In my occupation one is accustomed to discovering facts and reporting them -- accepting them. But when I remember what happened at that house I am unable to explain it to my satisfaction. Either what I saw wasn't real, or the bedrock of modern science is entirely inaccurate...I can't see how it can be otherwise."

Wall invites Harry to go to Borley Rectory to experience the place for himself, but it is only when Harry's  obvious reluctance moves Wall to say that perhaps the Society for Psychical Research might wish to go there that Harry decides he'll take the case.  With Sarah in tow, Harry meets Wall at the rectory, and what happens during this investigation will have an impact on the remainder of Sarah's life.

Borley Rectory, from occultopedia.com

 While, as I noted earlier, this isn't a horror story per se, there are some spine-tingling moments in this book that ghost-story aficionados would love.  Mr. Spring details each and every event so well that I got totally immersed in the Borley scenes and didn't want them to end.  The author incorporates actual sources into Sarah's account; in fact, to be really honest, since this was the first time I'd ever heard of Borley Rectory, I thought they were all fake until my post-read curiosity got the better of me and I discovered that there really is a place called Borley Rectory, and that there really was a person named Harry Price; one of the footnotes even directed the reader to a book called Poltergeists Over England that I'd forgotten I actually own.  There is such a fine blending of reality and fiction in this book that it's hard to determine at times where one stops and the other starts.  The book also provides an atmospheric quality that gets under your skin as you read; whether or not you are in the Rectory, you can't help but wait for that next little jolt of fear to hit. But beyond all that, I really liked how the author set up the theme dealing with the costs of deception throughout the story.

When all is said and done, Harry Price turns out to be a character loaded with irony, and the author sets things up so that it isn't up to the last that we discover exactly what that irony entails. The "secret" Sarah carries around with her isn't so earth shattering when revealed (and I figured it out early on), but even with this little bit of drama (a tad bit overdone, imho), she is also an interesting person both with and without Harry Price.  There are many side characters who also come to life here -- most notably, the tenants of Borley Rectory, past and present.

Overall, considering I went into this book with the wrong expectations, I really enjoyed it ... just the perfect thing for a windy/stormy night's read. 

Stephen King x2: The Shining, and Doctor Sleep

The Shining, by Stephen King
Doubleday, 1977
447 pp

hardcover (first doubleday book club edition)

Continuing on in my month of spooky reads in honor of Halloween, I now come to two books written by the same author. The Shining is a classic horror read, while the latest book by Stephen King, Doctor Sleep,  hones in on the kid from The Shining, Danny Torrance, picking up his story again as a young man. I hadn't planned on reading The Shining again (it made for some freakishly-great entertainment years ago), but because Doctor Sleep builds on Danny's (now Dan) experiences at the Overlook,  I decided to reread The Shining before I started the new one.  To be frank, I liked both books; to be even more truthful, I fell in love with The Shining all over again and found Doctor Sleep to be fun and often suspenseful but not nearly as intense as its predecessor.  More on that later.

Before I try to offer up a synopsis here, let me say this: if you're considering reading Doctor Sleep, the references back to events in The Shining come from the original book -- which is not at all the same as the movie made by Stanley Kubrick.  So if your understanding of things comes from that film, you might be a little lost.

 Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy and their son Danny used to have a good life. He taught at a prep school, he made money from publishing some of his stories, and Wendy did typing part time -- all good enough to where the couple could put money away each month.  Jack is an alcoholic, but had managed to get himself together and keep it under control, but he has temper issues: an assault on one of his students put Jack out of a job and drove Jack and Wendy into financial crisis.  Luckily, one of his former drinking buddies has found him a job as the winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel high in the mountains of Colorado.  Jack sees the job as a good opportunity to finish writing a play he's been working on, since the Torrance family will be the only inhabitants there.  The truth is, Jack and Wendy have no choice but to take the job due to extreme financial necessity -- as Jack notes sarcastically some time later in the novel, "A man with his sterling record of alcoholism, student-beating and ghost-chasing would undoubtedly be able to write his own ticket," ending up with a job "swamping out Greyhound buses," or "washing cars in a rubber suit," or even "washing dishes in a diner."  Danny, however, is not so sure -- his "imaginary" friend Tony has been showing him visions of the Overlook in his dreams, and what he sees frightens him. Meeting the hotel's chef, Dick Hallorann, gives Danny the chance to understand why he sees things or knows things that others don't: he has "the shine," an ability shared by the chef.  They both realize it in the other, but as Hallorann explains, Danny has the biggest shine he's ever encountered.   Danny levels with Hallorann that he's frightened, but Hallorann assures him that if he needs him, he only needs to send a mental message to him and he'll come back from his other job in Florida  to help him.  He also warns Danny that places can shine, and as the Torrance family is about to discover, the Overlook is one of those very places.   The hotel is a place where "all the hotel's eras" are together at once, an "inhuman place" that "makes human monsters."

The Shining has long been one of my all-time favorite horror novels, meriting the switch some time back from mass market paperback to 1st Doubleday hardcover book club edition.  It may not be filled with the kind of horrors seen in the Kubrick film (which I actually loved as well, but in a way not connected to King but to Kubrick's vision and genius here), but it is one of the most intensely cerebral novels of horror I've ever read.  The symbolism of the wasps, for example, is incredibly potent, a thread that runs completely throughout the story and absolutely necessary for understanding what's going on here.  Another point: in Kubrick's film Jack's character comes across as a raving lunatic, while here, it's much easier to see Jack as more of a victim of the hotel itself, allowing the reader to view his character more on the edge of sadness and empathy rather than as a person bent on self destruction and insanity.  If I had to make a top ten list of horror novels, this book would definitely be on it, although considering the horror novels being published today, it may seem relatively tame to modern  readers.  For me though, it is and always will be a classic.

*******

Moving on to Doctor Sleep, 

9781476727653
Scribner, 2013
544 pp

hardcover 

Where The Shining is brimming over with horrific intensity, Dr. Sleep is in part a coming-of-age novel as well as a novel about demons, both internal and external, a bit more relaxed in the telling and well, for me, not nearly as frightening, cerebral or haunting as its predecessor.  That is most definitely NOT to say it's not good; it's just very different.

 The story catches up with Danny (now Dan) Torrance years after events at the Overlook.  He still has "the shine," although after years of alcohol abuse, it's been "tamped down" somewhat.  Dan has been unable to keep a job because of his drinking; at the same time the alcohol helps blot out the visions that continue to haunt him, for example, the "ghostie people" like the woman in room 217 at the Overlook.  He's also learned how to put these visions and his ethereal tormentors away in a mental lockbox, but at some point Dan just hits bottom.  Afterwards, he just wants to get away and make a new start -- after a bus ride into Frazier, New Hampshire, something inside of him realizes that this is where he needs to be.  He takes a job, and his boss ultimately gets him into AA, after which he starts work in a hospice center where he's nicknamed "Doctor Sleep" because of his ability to help the dying pass on while holding their hand.

As Dan is going through his bottoming out and taking steps to become human again, a girl named Abra is born, and as it turns out, she is also gifted with the shine.  With abilities much more powerful that Dan's ever were, she makes contact with him through her mind, and can even switch places via Spock-like mind melding.  But trouble is looming: a group of ancient beings known collectively as "the True Knot" also have powerful psychic abilities, and they actively seek out young people and children who like both Dan and Abra have "the shining," capture and torture them, and then use their psychic essence (which they call "steam")  to sustain themselves and keep themselves young -- psychic vampires, if you will.  The steam of one of their young victims, however, left some of the True Knot's members with a huge problem.  The group has also come across Abra and her potent abilities, which may be stronger than those of the True Knot's leader, Rose, who sends some of her "people" to pick her up, hoping that her "steam" will provide a much-needed solution to the group's problem as well as much-needed sustenance.  Abra reaches out to Dan for help, but he will need to revisit dark parts of his past in order to save her.

There's so much to like about this book which not only has a suspenseful horror story at its center, but also focuses in great detail about addiction. Personally, I enjoyed this facet of the book because it not only keeps in line with The Shining, but given Stephen King's own addiction background, he knows what he's talking about and it makes Dan's character much more credible.  But even if the addiction aspect fails to grab you,  the author has this incredible talent for incorporating the mundane into this story, disguising his dying-breed psychic vampire creatures as denizens of the world of  retired RV ramblers.  As he shifts to the story of the True Knot, he begins his chapter with how very annoying the traveling grannies and grandpas are on the roads in their big Winnebagos or other big vehicles,

"the RV People, elderly retirees and a few younger compatriots living their rootless lives on the turnpikes and blue highways, staying at campgrounds where they sit around in their Walmart lawnchairs and cook on their hibachis while they talk about investments and fishing tournaments and hotpot recipes and God knows what.  They're the ones who always stop at fleamarkets and yardsales, parking their damn dinosaurs nose-to-tail half on the shoulder and half on the road, so you have to slow to a crawl in order to creep by. They are the opposite of the motorcycle clubs you sometimes see on those same turnpikes and blue highways; the Mild Angels instead of the wild ones." 

Seriously, you know exactly who he's talking about because they're everywhere, and I have to admit that these few pages made me laugh out loud in recognition.  Try going down Highway 1 at Big Sur in California  behind a huge RV going 10 miles an hour listening to your otherwise calm husband bitch and moan,  and you'll know that he's described these people to a tee.  Mr. King also manages to toss in a nod to his son's NOS4A2, both in terms of a character mention and a bumper sticker on (where else?) the back of an RV.  Basically the only thing I really did NOT like about how he wrote this novel was that he throws in a major coincidence in the novel that I thought was a cop out (you'll know it when you see it) and made the whole set up kind of cheesy.

One more thing.  In my very humble opinion, readers shouldn't judge this book as a true "sequel" to The Shining.  There are several reviewers who are saying they've been "let down" or have made other negative remarks while trying to compare the two.  My guess is that a) they haven't read The Shining in a while or are going off the Kubrick film as their source or that b) they're so fixated on the idea of this novel as a sequel that they're trying to draw parallels that aren't there.  There are large parts of the The Shining worked into this one, so it works that way, but Doctor Sleep is also a fun read on its own, though less intense and definitely less cerebral than the other.  My advice is to just sit back and read it, and enjoy it for what it is rather than complain about what it isn't.

*This House is Haunted, by John Boyne

9781590516799
Other Press, 2013
304 pp

paper
arc, thank you, Other Press!

"...any story which concerns itself with the afterlife and with forces that the human mind cannot truly understand risks disquiet for the reader." 

In the spirit of great timing, being released in the US this month is This House is Haunted,  a perfect Halloween read, especially for people who appreciate and enjoy a good ghostly yarn or for those who find happiness in spending a few hours immersed in the supernatural.  It incorporates a number of my favorite components, including a Victorian setting, a governess, an English country home, and of course, a ghost that has the run of the house and goes around scaring people half to death or worse.  As in many well-written ghostly tales, there's also a mystery underlying the source of the haunting.   Done before --  yes, for sure, but not like John Boyne does it here, where he's put together an entertaining ghost story by incorporating elements of various writers of the Victorian era, paying tribute to their works in his own.  And it all starts with Dickens.

In fact, Eliza Caine, 21,  the illustrious heroine of this novel, actually blames Charles Dickens for her father's death, and following that logic, he's also responsible for everything that happens afterward.   It's 1867, London, and Eliza has accompanied her sickly father, "an impassioned reader," to a reading by the author against her better judgment. They had an enjoyable time, but within a day or so her father is dead.  Eliza works as a teacher, but when her father's death leaves her unable the pay the rent on their house, she decides to apply to an advertisement for a governess she's seen in the paper. She is accepted right away and leaves London for the first time in her life, taking the train to Norfolk and Gaudlin Hall, her new home, only to find that there are no parents around, only two young children, Isabella and Eustace Westerley.  It isn't long until she realizes that there is something wrong there, and that she is the victim of a vengeful spirit who frequents the place and makes Eliza's life a living hell. When she appeals for information from the locals, she's met with a wall of silence, but her curiosity on one score leads to information that all of her predecessors have been frightened away or have met terrible ends.  Eliza knows she absolutely must get to the heart of the mystery before she becomes the spirit's next victim and the children are left alone once more.

Deborah Kerr, The Innocents

My guess is that the author had a great time while writing this book. It's a really good one -- a  tale probably best enjoyed on a stormy evening under a blanket with a hot cup of tea.   There are a number of  nods to Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and Henry James in this novel as well as  a hint of the gothic.  While some parts come across as a bit tongue-in-cheek, making me think "parody",  the literary elements are very recognizable in terms of tropes, names, and style. Where this book shines  is in its characters, especially that of  Eliza, who is well beyond her timeframe in her thinking.  While she tends to be naive in the face of the supernatural at first,  she is no hands-fluttering  standard Gothic or Victorian heroine who needs rescuing. She is extremely rational, independent, and courageous, but at the same time genuinely nurturing and caring toward her young charges. Taking no for an answer or being brushed off by the male characters (one Mr. Raisin comes to mind, oh! How Dickensian can you get!) who attempt to sweep her under the rug just isn't in her nature, although she is prone to the odd romantic reverie here and there in terms of the men she admires.

Perhaps the ghost story is not as frightening as others I've read, although the ending is downright chilling, but for me what makes a tale of the supernatural work best  is the aura of atmosphere that an author can produce and sustain throughout  his/her story. That's definitely part and parcel of this novel, as the author sets the tension level on high  with the villagers' silence,  the servants who appear and disappear quietly, the house and the untended children, creepy happenings and the procession of governesses to name only a few things. To his credit, he doesn't let the backstory out all at once either, allowing his readers to pick up a little bit at a time until the whole mystery behind the haunting is revealed. This House is Haunted is perfect for people who enjoy a good ghost story once in a while.  If you're thinking that you're going to get gore and splatter here, move along.  It's not that kind of book.  My advice -- go grab a copy and just have fun with it!