Yes, it’s our mid-week medley, that popular feature where people tell us about exciting stuff and then we forget to mention them anyway. Today, Django goes into complete reversal, the charming, erudite Tim Prasil has been given parole to edit another anthology, and Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is revisited in a new e-book from Ansible Editions.
First, that lurcher note. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single longdog needs his bottom scratched. Django is the least prey-oriented lurcher we have ever had, but he really is obsessed with being the wrong way round. And with being somewhat of a kangaroo, but that’s not relevant here.
Ever since we took him on, we have noticed his limited interest in having his front end attended to. Our late Jade used to like a nuzzle now and then. Chilli is nose-insistent to the point of knocking the glasses off your face so she can shove her cold, wet proboscis in your eye. Twiglet was constantly muzzle-to-muzzle, usually with her tongue up your nose. Django, however, was always one for a scritch around his tail or haunches, and in the last few months he’s developed reversing to a fine art.
His standard attempt to grab attention now is by backing into you forcefully until you scratch his bottom. If this doesn’t work, and you’re low enough down, he plonks his rear down on you. As JLG regularly lays on the floor to ease his rubbish spine, this leaves your jolly writer-chum with a large, heather-brindled lurcher sat on his shoulder, like an alarmingly mutated parrot. Given that Django is muscular and over 30 kilos, this is not entirely comfortable.
We are watching this development with interest. Either we try to teach him that a little ear noogie is preferable, or we build an automated bottom-scratcher. Or we teach him to say ‘Pieces of Eight’ when we have visitors. It’s a hard one, that.
A Multitude of Ghosts
As for debonair man-about-college Tim Prasil, we are delighted that Coachwhip Publications have published a second of his period anthologies – Those Who Haunt Ghosts: A Century of Ghost Hunter Fiction.
“This collection of ghost hunter fiction–28 short stories and novellas from the 1820s to the 1920s–includes such renowned authors as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Henry James, Charlotte Riddell, Ambrose Bierce, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Algernon Blackwood, Rudyard Kipling, Sax Rohmer, and H.P. Lovecraft. With an enlightening introduction and helpful footnotes provided by supernatural fiction scholar Tim Prasil, this book is a first-of-its-kind source for this distinctive branch of ghost fiction and will be a treasured addition to any ghost-story library.”
If you’re not familiar with Tim’s work, we once dubbed him the Occult Detective Detective, because he spends so much time ferreting out such folk. His first anthology was Giving Up the Ghosts: Short-Lived Occult Detective Series by Six Renowned Authors. This included Fitz-James O’Brien’s Harry Escott, Gelett Burgess’s Enoch Garrish, Algernon Blackwood’s Jim Shorthouse, L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace’s Diana Marburg, A.M. Burrage’s Derek Scarpe, and Conrad Richter’s Matson Bell.
giving up the ghostsUnfortunately, Coachwhip don’t do e-formats, so we haven’t had a look at the new one yet. It does remind us, however, we recently re-read H G Wells’ The Red Room (aka The Ghost of Fear). This is one of the most worrying stories of the period and well worth finding on-line. It’s not quite what you might expect – a piece of psychological horror that questions assumptions and twists the usual ‘haunted room’ trope.
“Mention has been made of the weird work of H. G. Wells and A. Conan Doyle. The former, in “The Ghost of Fear”, reaches a very high level; while all the items in Thirty Strange Stories have strong fantastic implications.”
Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature
You’ll also be able to read Tim’s take on such things again in his article ‘How to be a Victorian Ghost Hunter’, appearing in the first issue of Occult Detective Quarterly, which should be heading for the printers in about a week. The less savoury aspect of Tim’s work is that he wrote the excellent and most diverting Vera van Slyke paranormal tales. Such tales constantly threaten to sideline greydog’s own period Tales of the Last Edwardian. But if you really must, his book of Vera stories, Help for the Haunted, is tragically well worth it.
You can pick up a copy of Those Who Haunt Ghosts here:
Hanging Rock
Now to a book which not only caught the imagination of millions and which was also made into a major film. Picnic at Hanging Rock was written in 1967 by an Australian author Joan Lindsay (1896-1984). Originally an artist, Lindsay wrote a parody of travel books in 1936 under the pseudonym Serena Livingston-Stanley. She followed that with a number of factual works (on subjects such as the Red Cross, and on art). Then, in the sixties, she produced three new books – Time without Clocks (1962), Facts Soft and Hard (1964), and finally Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Picnic at Hanging Rock is not like her other work, although it’s said that she had experimented with some darker plays in the 1920s. It’s been described as a Gothic mystery, exploring death and femininity. The book concerns female students from an Australian women’s college, who go on a St Valentine’s Day picnic in 1900, visiting Hanging Rock, an area in Victoria, Australia, which is is know for its peculiar geological formations. The Hanging Rock itself is basically a large boulder balanced on two others.
The Wurundjeri
This area, north of Melbourne, formed part of the territory of the Wurundjeri people, but as so often happened, they were chucked out in the 1800s. Or bought out with blankets and sundries, as in John Batman’s ‘deal’ with them in 1835.
In fact the Wurundjeri seem to have had a rough time of it, being forcibly moved more than once.
“Wurundjeri dispossession of land took place not just through displacement, but also through disconnection. Land was sold, bush was cleared for the creation of roads and buildings, and wetlands were drained. Over time, even the course of the Yarra River was changed. The disruption of sacred sites might be termed desecration. For the Wurundjeri, who had a spiritual connection to the land, these changes had a devastating impact on all aspects of their health and well being.”
The Aboriginal History of Yarra
If you’re interested in Hanging Rock, then it might be a mark of respect to check out its original people.
The Lindsay story: In short, three of the girls and one of their teachers inexplicably vanish, which has the community in uproar and provokes further disastrous occurrences for people at the school. Some readers considered the book to be a record of an actual event, and Lindsay refused to confirm or deny outright that the book was fiction. She even hinted that bits of it might be true.
“Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.”
Lindsay, foreword
It is, however, pretty certain that it was what we experienced writers call ‘made up’. It provoked enormous interest at the time, and became known as one of the great Australian novels of the period.
Hanging Rock Secrets
The final chapter, which is supposed to partly explain what happened to the missing people, was apparently deleted at the request of the publisher, and not published until twenty years later, three years after Lindsay’s death. We should point out that the missing bit, The Secret of Hanging Rock, is only about 12 pages long, not a whole detailed breakdown of the what and why of it all.
Anyhow, in 1980, before the missing chapter was published, writer/critic Yvonne Rousseau wrote a book called The Murders at Hanging Rock, which offered a number of potential solutions to the mystery. As the SFE says, Rousseau presented:
“four mutually incompatible approaches to the novel’s central mystery include analyses in terms of classical detective fiction, Hermetic magic and Australian Dreamtime Fantastika.”
sf encyclopedia online
Ansible Editions, the child of that talented author and reviewer David Langford, have now produced the first e-version of Rousseau’s work.
“What really happened at Hanging Rock on St Valentine’s Day in 1900?
“Picnic at Hanging Rock is the source for this erudite literary entertainment, which will be enjoyed and appreciated by all scholars and lovers of unsolved mysteries. In The Murders at Hanging Rock, Yvonne Rousseau offers four logical, carefully worked-out but thoroughly tongue-in-cheek explanations of the fate of the missing picnickers from Appleyard College.
“Now reprinted with a foreword by John Taylor which casts yet more light on the subject.”
You can get hold of a copy here:
ansible editionsWe came across this news yesterday. By genuine coincidence, we are seeking to acquire one of David Langford’s excellent Dagon Smythe occult detective parodies for ODQ as well. It’s a big, small world out there.
The greydog Writes
As our parting (or Parthian) shot today, we’ll remind you that if you like murder and mystery, a new John Linwood Grant tale, The Adventure of the Dragoman’s Son, is now out in Volume One of the new anthology Holmes Away from Home. Lots of Holmes, but no ghosts or Australians.
holmes away from home vol oneOr you can spend mere pennies (almost) by picking up the e-book of old greydog’s substantial, five star rated novella, A Study in Grey, of which it has kindly been said:
“Some authors create names for a story, this author fills them with life and personality. I loved the controlled sense of suspense, and the sheer wit.”
“Grant masterfully weaves together these two seemingly dissonant fictional realms: the “no ghosts need apply” world of Sherlock Holmes and Carnacki’s, where ghosts not only apply — they prove worthy of the job.”
By this you can gather that the freezer is low on dog food again.
In a couple of days – a terrific feature and interview on new weird fiction magazine Turn to Ash, with editor/publisher Benjamin Holesapple…