The Somnabulist's Dreams, by Lars Boye Jerlach

9780692746608
Angry Owl, 2016
181 pp

"and the stars look very different today..."

paperback, and a big thanks to the author for my copy

When I first heard about this book, I knew I had to read it. I am fascinated with the use of lighthouses in literature, since they have a sort of ambiguous symbolism to them.  In some books, lighthouses imply safety, while in others they convey a deep sense of isolation.  While I won't say which camp this book falls into,  the back-cover blurb, which barely even hints at what's in store for readers of this book, describes  a New England lighthouse keeper who comes across a collection of "seemingly deranged" writings left behind by his predecessor.

It seems that what Enoch Soule has actually left behind is a collection of his dreams, as he puts it, "the fantasies of my mind, over which I have no control."   And what dreams they are indeed.  It took me no time to discover that not only is this book something very much out of the ordinary, but also that there is nothing straightforward here until the somewhat jaw-dropping ending which puts everything into perspective. In the meantime, as soon as we find ourselves peering into Enoch's dreams, it becomes obvious, once again referring to the back-cover blurb, that we have found ourselves in a "narrative that ... defies time and space."  I won't say how, but trust me, this concept continually manifests itself as the book progresses, and as the dreams of Enoch Soule's become darker and stranger, they start taking on an ethereal quality that is difficult to describe.

this isn't how I pictured the lighthouse keeper of this book,  but it's a cool drawing nonetheless. From the website of the Australian National Maritime Museum

I hate being so vague about this book, but I'm doing it purposely since to give away anything is definitely a crime and would spoil the reading for the next person.   The minor niggle here is word usage ... I had to look up certain words such as "fuliginous," "caliginous," and "sudoriferous" and while I've now enhanced my knowledge of vocabulary, sometimes for me just sticking to what one means in a clearer way is best. Other than that minor issue, though, I was pretty much awed by this book, most especially in terms of the author's  literary and philosophical knowledge which he's put to great use here.

This isn't a book to speed read through.  The author has obviously spent a long time putting it together, combining elements of literature, mythology, pop culture and philosophy here to help shape the narrative, and I found myself feeling elated whenever I'd recognize a reference, since in my head, each served as a clue in my own effort to piece together what is actually going on here.  I will say I got a vague sense of what the ending reveals long before I got there (some of these "clues" are pretty self explanatory),  but I'll also admit that certain recurring/changing symbols got the better of me, causing me to take time to go over them again and again, throwing out some ideas, keeping others.  And then, of course, the element of time is a definite conundrum, one that kept me on my toes trying to puzzle out what the author was doing here.  The point I'm trying to make is that it is a challenging read and a book for serious readers who enjoy thinking.  I was in hog heaven here.

***

personal note to Lars:
I took down my copy of Conrad's Nostromo thanks to you -- on the summer list it goes.

crazytown .... The Fourth Monkey, by J.D. Barker

9780544968844
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017
416 pp

arc - sent from the author/publisher, thank you!

I had this debate with myself about where I should make this post -- it is technically a crime novel so it should go on the crime page of my reading journal, but at the same time, what happens in this book, at least in the diary entries from the past, is dementedly dark, so I figured maybe it should go here.

I have to start off here with a disclaimer. I'm not at all a fan of serial-killer novels. I used to be, having read all of what I'd call "the classics,"  but that all changed after I made the mistake of reading Mo Hayder's The Treatment a couple of years back, which was just outrageous in terms of the number of graphic torture scenes one person can cram into a book. Then I started noticing that a lot of newer serial-killer novel blurbs boasted about torture, violence, etc., and I just couldn't do it any more.   Some people like that stuff, to which I say whatever floats your boat, but it's just not me. Luckily, that sort of thing is at a minimum here. Don't get me wrong --   there are some pretty sick things going on in this book ( my first impression was "demented serial killer served with a side of sadism"), but unlike a huge number of other serial-killer novels, the sick stuff is definitely not the book's main raison d'être and frankly, that's what counts for me.

The police have been after a particularly nasty man whom they've dubbed the Four Monkey Killer (4MK) for several years with no success.  The guy has never left a single clue that would help them determine his identity, and he has been clever enough to be able to move throughout Chicago without ever being seen, despite the fact that he's left a couple of victims in public spaces. However, it looks as though their luck has changed as the novel begins, when a man launches himself in front of a bus and does himself in. Detective Sam Porter is called out to the scene,  a situation he wouldn't normally be called out for, but when he gets there, he gets the surprise of his life -- it seems that before the dead guy offed himself, he'd been carrying a "small white box tied up with black string," the only thing ever left behind after 4MK had done his dirty work in the past.  This box is just one more added to the twenty-one boxes Porter and his task force have collected over the years -- seven victims with three boxes per person, containing their ears, eyes and tongues, relating to the old adage of  hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.  4MK isn't 4MK for nothing -- despite the fact that he's a killer, the "4" reflects  "do no evil," as in the representation of the four monkeys shown below.   The "do no evil" message is  always left behind with the dead bodies in some form or another, but that's it. No clues, no evidence, no nothing that would help Porter find this guy. The cops are elated until they realize that the discovery of the box with its contents means that while their killer might be dead, somewhere there's another victim out there.  Oh -- and this time the killer has left behind a huge clue in the form of a diary that just may help the police find a missing teenage girl before it's too late. The killer evidently intended the cops to find the diary, so that Porter could, in the killer's words, "understand what I have done."

the four monkeys, from Wikipedia

So far, so good, and I'm turning and burning pages as fast as I can.  And then, we get to the diary, where quite frankly, all things start pretty normally enough and then BAM -- things get full on insane  in the space of a few entries.  Now, I know that the diary thing is a gimmick that a lot of writers use in your standard serial-killer fare, but I'm here to tell you that you've probably NEVER seen anything quite like this one.  Holy crap! When at the end of the book the author says that this story was "born of 'what if' and an imagination that lost its governor some time ago" he wasn't just filling in space in the acknowledgments section.  What's in that diary is a) definitely reflective of why our killer does what he does in the present, but b) so insane and (as I said earlier) darkly demented that I wasn't sure what the hell I was reading for a while. Talk about a new spin -- sheesh! It's like a Wally-less Leave it to Beaver gone wrong that plays out in a bizarre parallel universe, and god help me, although it is over the top and I was enjoying the investigation itself, I couldn't wait to get back to the diary entries every time they popped back into the story.  I've decided that I'm in need of mental help because of that, but to my credit, I will say that the phrase "there are some sick f***s out there"  kept running through my head so perhaps I'm not so inwardly twisted as I might think.

Now that I've said all of this and have revealed myself to be mentally deranged for being so engrossed in the ongoing saga of MK4's childhood, I will say that I figured out the first major twist before I was a quarter through the book, so loss of points there. Writers of crime novels (standard fare or not) really ought to be aware that long-time mystery/crime readers like myself have become quite  good at predicting twists here and there after years of reading this sort of thing, so for me the lack of originality there was a bit disappointing. Also, the whole serial-killer-playing-a-game-with-the-cops thing is a bit overused, so that was also a bit bothersome.   However, it was the second big twist (which I didn't see coming and which was definitely original - yay),  along with what happens in the diary entries that sort of evens things out, not to mention the fact that although the Four Monkey Killer has done some pretty messed-up things, it becomes very clear that he was in his own way, looking for some measure of justice for those who've been wronged in a very big way.

Read it, and just keep telling yourself that thankfully, it's only fiction.

The Third Ghost Book (ed.) Lady Cynthia Asquith

03300260617
Pan, 1975
originally published 1955, 1957
253 pp

mass market paperback
(read earlier)

I am a sucker for a good ghost story, and over the years my shelves have started groaning as I continue to add more collections to my library.  I finally discovered the Pan Ghost Books series, the first three of which are edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith, and I'll definitely be revisiting some of these in the future, although others took their turn as editor after Asquith's three.  For more about these books, you can visit Tabula Rasa where Nick Kennett has a nice article (including contents!) about the series.

Twenty-seven stories are included in this little book, some of which  I've read before:  "The Ghost of the Valley", by Lord Dunsany,  Aickman's "Ringing the Changes," "The Tower," by Marghanita Laski, and "Poor Girl," by Elizabeth Taylor. Out of the remaining 23, several authors are familiar, although their stories were not:  Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Fitt, Elizabeth Jenkins, L.P. Hartley, and Lady Cynthia Asquith herself.  That leaves a total of 18 writers whose work I've never read, offering lots of possibilities for further reading (yay!).  The collection as a whole is not the greatest, but as I'm always saying, when you pick up an anthology it's bound to be a mixed bag where there are treasures and there are those stories that are not so hot.  Depending on the reader though, people's choices in each category will be different.

The entire table of contents is as follows, my favorites annotated:

"The Telephone," by Mary Treadgold
* "The Claimant, " by  Elizabeth Bowen,  my favorite story in this book.  A man and his wife inherit a home in the West Country from a relative in Australia who died intestate.  Their happiness is interrupted when someone writes about his intentions to claim the house, which he says has been left to him by his uncle, and then tells the couple that it is his inheritance, and that "no one shall cheat me of it."  Things get very weird after they learn he is flying out from Australia to set things straight.
"Napoleon's Hat," by Evelyn Fabyon
"The Bull," by Rachel Hartfield
"The House That Wouldn't Keep Still," by L.A.G. Strong
* "The Doctor," by Mary Fitt.  Set in the moors of Devon, a woman who loves the moors and long walks finds herself lost in the darkness.  Taking a short cut, she sees another woman coming towards her, who invites her to stay at her home for the night. Of course she's not going to say no, but later, I'm sure she probably wishes she had.
*"On No Account, My Love," by Elizabeth Jenkins, in which a young woman is keen to visit the empty house that once belonged to her great-grandmother, known as an "abominable old tyrant," who used it as a school for girls. Hoping to connect with her past, she "felt sure some contact" with her great-grandmother might be possible.  This one really doesn't hit you until the last sentence. Yikes.
"The Ghost of the Valley," by Lord Dunsany
"The Day of the Funeral," by Margaret Lane
* "Take Your Partners," by Ronald Blythe is both bizarre and creepy, in which a grandfather relates a strange experience to his grandson that took place at his first ball.  As an eighteen year-old, he was miserable being there until he met a young woman who seemed as unhappy as himself.  One of the better stories in the book, for sure.

arrrrrr 

"Someone in the Lift," by L.P. Hartley
*"The Tower, by Marganita Laski -- in an earlier post.
*"Ringing in the Changes," by Robert Aickman -- again, one of his best stories ever, a work of pure genius.
* "I Became Bulwinkle," by Jonathan Curling, is less a ghost story than a tale of terror involving a "third-rate conjurer" who received his "baccalaureate in black magic" while in Sierra Leone before returning home. It's a slow burner, but damn, it's good.
"Mrs. Smiff," by Collin Brooks
"Somebody Calls," by James Laver
*"Harry," by Rosemary Timperley -- I will say that this sort of thing has been done a number of times, but this is one of the best examples of the imaginary friend story I've ever come across.
"The Shades of Sleepe," by Ursula Codrington
"The Woman in Black," by Daniel George
"A Laugh on the Professor," by Shane Leslie
*"Poor Girl," by Elizabeth Taylor.  As I said in another post, this one's just flat out creepy on more than one level. Just thinking about it is giving me the willies.
"The King of Spades," by Nancy Spain
"The Uninvited Face," by Michael Asquith
"Remembering Lee," by Eileen Bigland
"Who is Sylvia," by Cynthia Asquith

While I can't promise that each and every tale will produce goosebumps, there's probably here something for everyone who enjoys these older stories. For  me it's all about discovering those obscure, long-forgotten authors whose work has just sort of faded away, and in that sense, this book was a goldmine.

recommended for strange, nerdiferous people like me who revel in the older stuff.  I know you're out there.

Lovecraft Country, by Matt Ruff

9780062292063
HarperCollins, 2016
372 pp

hardcover

"... you think you can forgive, forget, the past. You can't. You cannot.  The past is alive, a living, thing. You own, owe it."

The first clue that this is not going to be your average Lovecraftian pastiche or rehash is on the cover -- what some people may see as ghosts or white spaces between tentacles actually bears much more resemblance to the white hoods of the KKK.  In fact, if you're thinking this is going to be Lovecraft redux, you seriously have another thing coming.  While his own particular brand of racism was horrific in itself, anything that Lovecraft produced in his fiction is dwarfed here by  the real-life terror that the characters in this book experience in their daily lives in Jim Crow America of the 1950s, and that little yellow, starry-looking thing on the cover that says "America's DEMONS Exposed" certainly isn't just there to add to the cover art.

    The book begins with an army vet, Atticus Turner,   leaving Jacksonville for Chicago,  driving 450 miles the first day nonstop except for getting gas. With his copy of The Safe Negro Travel Guide in hand, Atticus spent that night in Chattanooga, where the Guide showed that there were "four hotels and a motel, all in the same part of the city." The next day, wanting to "put the South behind him," he has the diner next to his motel fill a basket with food and Cokes so that he wouldn't have to stop in Louisville, Kentucky where again according to the guide, there was a "restaurant that would serve him lunch."  An hour after crossing a "bridge named for a dead slave owner" on the Ohio River, he blew a tire, sending him on foot out to find a garage..  Just his luck -- a Confederate flag hangs over the entrance and, of course, that didn't quite work out.  Pulling out his Safe Negro Travel Guide once more, he discovers that the nearest "Negro-owned garage" was fifty miles away; with no other options, he had to wait seven hours for help to arrive. And this is all just the beginning of worse to come.

So at this point (and I'm only on page four), I'm already creeped out about the necessity of something like a  Safe Negro Travel Guide, and after a little digging, came across the story of The Negro Motorist Green Book, and now I'm really interested to see what else Matt Ruff is going to do here.  I just sort of sat flipping pages as the real horrors of the  lives of the characters unfolded in each of the interconnected stories in this book.

The way Ruff sets up this book is clever -- as he notes in an interview at The Seattle Review of Books,  his idea was to start with "classic story" ideas

"... like, somebody buys a haunted house or somebody finds themselves being chased by an animated doll"

and with that, he asks himself the questions of

"how does this happen to my protagonist and how does having a black protagonist change the nature of the story?"

 Without giving away too much of what happens here, Atticus has returned to Chicago after receiving a letter from his dad Montrose in which he reveals to his son that he's discovered "something about your mother's ... forebears," and that there's some sort of "legacy, a birthright" that's been kept from Atticus, something that "has something to do with the place that Mom's people supposedly came from." Now Montrose has gone missing, and Atticus has only the letter he was sent as a clue to finding him.   From that letter, it turns out that "Mom's people" came from Ardham, Massachusetts, in what Atticus calls "Lovecraft Country."  Atticus, his Uncle George and a friend from childhood named Letitia Dandridge set out for Ardham, and encounter the Braithwhites, who have a strange connection with the Turners through "Mom's people."  The Braithwhites are white,  rich,and powerful; they are also key figures in a strange group known as the Order of the Ancient Dawn. (I have to say that my pulp-loving heart went pitterpat here with this name.)  I won't say why, but what happens during their time with the Braithwhites at this meeting sets up all that follows in this book, during which we come to understand the phrase "Lovecraft Country", as one reader puts it, as having

 "more to do with the rampant racism in that part of the US at the time, rather than the Lovecraftian horror subgenre."  

The way that Mr. Ruff has brought out his story here is very nicely done, and the little "mini-adventures" do, as he also notes in the Seattle Review of Books interview linked above, turn out to be each character's "own weird tale." Some of these are much better than others -- I loved "Horace and the Devil Doll," for instance because it's so on point as far as old-fashioned pulpy horror is concerned -- but really,  each story added to a wider picture of  Jim Crow practices of this time, things that, as anyone sane would realize, were just horrific and inhuman.  At the same time, there's a very real sense of empowerment that comes from the characters in each story in some fashion, as they fight back as best they can, each in his or her own way.   Speaking of pulpy/horrorish tropes here,  Ruff obviously went well beyond Lovecraft in framing his tales -- HG Wells, Ray Bradbury, Robert Louis Stevenson and many more authors find their way into this book as well.

I have to say that on the whole, I liked this book, didn't love it and maybe that's not entirely the author's fault.  Not too far into it, I was reminded in a very big way of what Victor LaValle had done with his excellent  Ballad of Black Tom which uses Lovecraft's own work "The Horror at Red Hook,"  to turn Lovecraft's particularly nasty brand of racism on its own head, so (and I hate that this happens, but I can't help it), there was already a comparison at work in my head. Frankly, when it comes right down to it, LaValle's book, in my opinion, is the better of the two, since  LaValle is hands down, no question,  the better writer.  Having said that though, I don't  mean that readers won't like this one --  there are plenty of reasons to recommend Lovecraft Country to anyone, especially since it seems to be sadly pertinent to our own times.

*****

for more in-depth coverage of this book, I give you

Alex Brown, "Cthulhu Gon' Slay," at tor.com

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.

The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories (ed.) Michael Cox

0192142607
Oxford University Press, 1996
425 pp

hardcover

"I could tell you lots of things you wouldn't believe..."
                         -- Joanna Russ, "The Little Dirty Girl" - 346

As I write this post, we are on vacation in Cancun -- well, not exactly Cancun, but more like an hour south on the lovely Riveria Maya in Playa del Carmen.  Nothing but sun, balcony, bebidas,  and lots of great food (my downfall, sadly) all of which  translates into much reading time.

There are a whopping thirty-three stories to be found in this anthology, ordered chronologically from 1910 to 1994.  Two most excellent tales bookend the entire collection -- E. Nesbit's "In the Dark" is the opener, while the grand finale is Jane Gardam's "The Meeting House," completing an entire book short but memorable tales. Like most anthologies, there will be something for everyone here, and also like most anthologies, it's a mixed bag of good, great, excellent, and oh my god yes. And while for me there really is nothing better than the old, classic ghost stories, some of these modern ones should be taken just as seriously.

Since there are thirty-three stories here, I'll just give the barest of barebones outline on what someone might expect to find within. I was quite delighted to discover some of my favorite writers on display here, for example Angela Carter, May Sinclair, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and Robert Aickman are here, along with other writers whose names are legend in the realm of ghost-story writing and some whose appearance is a nice surprise.  Let's begin, shall we?

** indicates my favorite stories

1. "In the Dark," by E. Nesbit -- when a story begins with "It may have been a form of madness. Or it may be that he really was what is called haunted," well, it's sure to be a good one. And it was. A man decides he's going to kill himself, and wants someone to know why ...

2. "Rooum," by Oliver Onions -- in which echoes abound, and like most stories by this author, it's a seriously and delightfully slow-burning, creepy tale.

3.** "The Shadowy Third," by Ellen Glasgow.  I read this previously in a collection edited by Alan Ryan called Haunting Women, and it's still disturbing now.

4. "The Diary of Mr. Poynter," by M.R. James. What ghost-story collection would be complete without M.R. James?  After reading this one, though, my first thought was "I've finally found an M.R. James story I don't really like." Here, a decision to decorate a room with curtains using a certain pattern causes havoc at Redcomb Manor.

5. ** "Miss Porter and Miss Allen," by Hugh Walpole -- this is a good one. Two women live together in a "conspiracy of silence," that probably should have been broken much, much earlier.

6. ** "The Nature of the Evidence," by May Sinclair. Seriously one of the most downright creepy stories in this entire book, in which a widower's new wife gets much more than she bargained for in the marriage.  I love May Sinclair's writing, and this story is just reason why.

7. "Night-Fears," by L.P. Hartley, the story of a man who's happy to have taken on a new job but then has second thoughts after running into a stranger.

8. **Bewitched," by Edith Wharton.  Holy crap. This one is just flat-out terrifying and not just in a supernatural sort of way, as a man admits to having an affair with a young woman and is accused of being "bewitched." There's definitely a reason why in this case.  Edith Wharton truly was a master of terror.

9. Next up is "A Short Trip Home," by of all people F. Scott Fitzgerald.  It's okay -- not brilliant, but read between the lines on this one.

10.** "Blind Man's Buff", by H. Russell Wakefield is truly panic inspiring, taking place in a house where "none of us chaps" ventures "after sundown."

11. "The Blackmailers," by Algernon Blackwood, follows, and while it's not his best, it's still quite squirmworthy especially at the end when that particular 'aha' moment hits.

read this book!

12. Next comes "Yesterday Street," by Thomas Burke -- I've seen several variations on this theme in my ghost-story reading, but this one is really quite sad. It burns slowly, but is well worth the payoff.

13. Fritz Leiber makes an appearance with his "Smoke Ghost," in which a man whom "you might call a sensory prodigy" meets his match in something that seems to follow where ever he goes.  Very nicely done.

14. "The Cheery Soul," by Elizabeth Bowen -- again, not her best work, but still immensely creepy. A young woman accepts an invitation to stay as guest in a lovely home, but is puzzled by what she discovers there, interrupting her "disreputable psychic pleasure." Oh -- if she only knew!

15. Wow! Graham Greene has a nice little tale here with his  "All But Empty" from 1947,  which has a great surprise ending I never saw coming.

16. ** And now, my favorite story of the entire book, Elizabeth Jane Howard's "Three Miles Up," which is also one of my lifetime favorites because it is so frightening. While I won't give away the show, I could only imagine the horror facing the people in this story as their situation finally dawns on them.  The story begins "There was absolutely nothing like it," and that's definitely the case here.

17. "Close Behind Him," by John Wyndham comes next, another tale in which two criminals have no idea what they're about to get themselves into, with serious results. Pleasantly terrifying.

18. Walter de la Mare's "The Quincunx" is also quite good, a tale in which an inheritance from a dead aunt proves to be the main character's downfall.

19. ** To my great surprise, an author I've recently discovered, Marghanita Laski, makes an appearance here with her "The Tower." Italy is the setting for this story which centers on a young wife who decides to visit the Tower of Sacrifice built in 1535, which was the only thing that survived the destruction of an entire village in 1549. Another slow burner, but terrifying.

20. ** Elizabeth Taylor's "Poor Girl" demands two readings -- once for the supernatural element, which is in no way typical, and the second for what is really going on underneath the horror.  Very well done.

21. Robert Bloch's "I Kiss Your Shadow" is nothing if not entertaining, and definitely vintage Bloch.  A mixture of the supernatural and mystery/pulp gives it a kind of easy-read, fun sort of feel but there's a lot going on here once you get into it.

22. "A Woman Seldom Found," by William Sansom finds a mysterious veiled woman the object of attraction of a young man on his first visit to Rome.  He probably should have stayed home. Yow. The last line of this one...

Elizabeth Jane Howard (from The Telegraph)

23.** "The Portobello Road," by Muriel Spark is also a good one in which secrets have a way of coming back to haunt those who harbor them, not just in this life, but beyond.

24. ** A true virtuoso performance is up next in Robert Aickman's "Ringing the Changes," which is one of most truly-terrifying stories he's ever written.

25. "On Terms" by Christine Brook-Rose - well, let's just say it wasn't on my top ten or top twenty lists of stories in this book, but that's just me. A very strange tale related as a body lies slowly decomposing...

26. William Trevor has an entry here, "The Only Story," in which one man slowly deteriorates over time to the detriment of everyone around him, but mostly himself.  Talk about psychological insight ... whoa.

27. **"The Loves of Lady Purple" is a mind-blowing story by another of my very favorite writers, Angela Carter.

"She, the sole perpetrator of desire, proliferated malign fantasies all around her and used her lovers as the canvas on which she executed boudoir masterpieces of destruction. Skins melted in the electricity she generated."

Greatness in print. Enough said.

28.  **Penelope Lively's "Revenant as Typewriter," is also wonderful as a woman tries to exert herself and her will over the home she recently bought. Note I said "tries."

29. "The Little Dirty Girl," by Joanna Russ I've read before (I can't remember where) -- the second time through made it better than the first, but again, not in my top ten.

30. "Watching Me, Watching You," is by Fay Weldon, and reflects what a justice-loving ghost sees as the years roll by.

31. "The July Ghost" by A.S. Byatt -- good but not up to (in my opinion) Byatt's usual literary greatness.

32. "The Highboy, " by Alison Lurie -- this one's also good with a sort of sarcastic, funny edge to it as well as a great ending.

33. ** Jane Gardam's "The Meeting House" centers on the struggle for quiet in a Quaker meeting house. The Quakers eventually find it, but not in the way they'd expected.


I am just delighted to see so many women writers represented in this collection, and it's definitely a book serious readers of ghostly tales should include in their home libraries. It's certainly one I'd recommend.

The Book of Monelle, by Marcel Schwob -- beautiful and brilliant.

978098411587

Wakefield Press, 2012

originally published 1894

translated by Kit Schluter

115 p

paperback

With only a couple of minor exceptions, it's been an outstanding reading year so far, and it just got better with The Book of Monelle, by Marcel Schwob. It's such a great feeling when I lose myself in something this good not just once, but twice.  

The story behind The Book of Monelle is a sad one, yet it's  vital to the contents of this little book.  In the translator's afterword, Kit Schluter writes about Schwob meeting Louise, a "young, working-class girl" who may have been a prostitute, who was quite ill with tuberculosis.  The two of them grew very close, and according to Schwob himself, "without her affection, he would have lost his taste for life," 

"She taught him to see again the levity of existence, to find joy in fairy tales and little toys made for children. Perhaps without ever saying it, she taught him that the falsehoods we believe as children are not detrimental or misleading, but joyous and fruitful, that the certainty of adulthood is a sorrowful and wasteful thing." 

They were together for a couple of years, during which time he wrote stories for her, and as her condition deteriorated,  a "fictional girl named Monelle began to appear everywhere" in his little tales, and he began to use the voice of an "adult narrator" who related them "with desperation."   Schluter notes that the name conveys the meaning of something along the lines of  "My-her" (mon elle), which is, if you think about it, just beautiful.   On her death, Schwob was so grief stricken that he couldn't write for a full six months, and then came The Book of Monelle, as Schluter notes in an interview with Paris Review, 

"an assemblage of fairy tales, nihilist philosophy, and aphorisms tightly woven into a tapestry of deep emotional suffering."

That suffering is writ large here and I felt every second of it.

While I won't go into detail -- it's another book that is genuinely felt by the reader -- the book is structured as a sort of triptych.  The first part is called "The Words of Monelle," which begins poignantly with Monelle finding the narrator "in the plain where I was wandering." Here it's easy to imagine the narrator (think Schwob himself) as being lost and unsettled, wandering in grief. She goes on to speak about prostitutes, who "leave the crowds of the night for an act of kindness," who

"heave a cry of compassion to all of you and stroke your hands with their bony hands. They only understand you if you are extremely unfortunate; they cry with you and console you."

More importantly, for the next section, Monelle says

"And I shall lead you among my sisters who are myself and similar to witless prostitutes.

And you shall see them tormented by selfishness and desire and pride and patience and pity, not yet having found themselves at all. And you shall see them set out in search of themselves in the distance..."

However, before arriving at the next section, "The Sisters of Monelle," there is a burst of things that Monelle "shall speak to you of," including destruction, formation, the gods, etc which reminded me of  manifesto-like sutras, or as the translator puts it, "commands."

Once we're in "The Sisters of Monelle" though, the tone changes.  There are a number of short stories in fairy tale/parable form here, parts of which have been mined from already-existing tales, but which are clearly original and incredibly sad. Personally, for me, "The Fated" is the best story of them all, because it really highlights what Schwob is saying here, as does "The Dreamer," but read carefully, it's easy to see that they all reflect what Schwob had written in "The Words of Monelle."

 Part three is entitled "Monelle," which for me was the most gutwrenching part of this entire book, but strangely enough (and most gratefully, I have to say), it does end on a very brief note of hope.  "Of Her Emergence" nearly had me in tears, and I was even worse off by the time I got to "Of Her Patience," where the narrator finds Monelle after having lost her only to be told that he cannot stay with her.  "Of Her Emergence"  begins with the narrator once again lost, in the dark, not knowing how he came to be where he is. It is there where he finds the "dim weak lights of the little lamp girl," who cannot sell her lamps to anyone except children.  As she says,

"...the little lamps I sell don't last forever. Their flames wane, as if burdened by the dark rain. And when my little lamps go out, the children no longer see the glow in the mirror, and they despair. For they fear they won't be able to foresee the moment when they will start to grow up."

That's sad enough, but when the little lamp girl and the narrator look into a mirror by the light of her lamp, he sees "well-known stories play out:"

"But the little lamp lied, lied, lied. I saw the feather rise up from Cordelia's lips; and she was smiling and convalescing; and she was living in an enormous cage like a bird with her old father, and she kissed his white beard. I saw Ophelia playing on the glassy surface of the pond, and wrapping her wet arms, garlanded with violets, around Hamlet's neck. I saw Desdemona, awoken, wandering beneath the willow trees. I saw the princess Maleine take her two hands off the eyes the eyes of the old king, and laugh, and dance. I saw Mélisande, freed, admiring herself in the fountain.

And I cried: 'Lying little lamp...' "

I almost lost it right there, trying to fathom just how much pain this man must have been in while writing this book. The translator notes that as Louise was dying, he

 "spoke to none of his friends of her, but retreated instead into a world of symbol and metaphor, at the center of which was Monelle."

And really,  I've never read such a personal, grief-filled book, but it makes sense that he wrote it. I've read tons of books about people trying to come to terms with loss, but there's something unique about this one. He also, I think, succeeded in keeping Louise alive here, making her immortal through Monelle, and she continues to live with every person who now reads this book.  Jeez -- just read it.