Today, for the year’s end, an unashamedly chaotic wander through horror and crime films – and crime literature – connected by that wonderful actor and narrator Valentine Dyall. Come marvel at an adaptation of a Bulwer-Lytton ghost story, the thrills of hypnosis, curious Golden Age crime and Sherlockian connections, and even The Goon Show. It’s like an accident happened in our brain… with some fun audiovisual links as well.

“On all that it can reach within these walls, sentient or inanimate, living or dead, as moves the needle, so work my will! Accursed be the house, and restless be the dwellers therein.”

The Haunted and the Haunters: Or the House and the Brain,by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

One of our most popular articles over the last few years, much to our surprise, was our piece The Man in Black. A product of our love of old-style horror – on radio and in black and white films – it focused on Valentine Dyall, the eponymous narrator/actor whose voice chilled millions. And as there was plenty more to say, this year we decided to revisit this fine chap, with film reviews, and of course, more trivia. A quick recap may be in order first. Who are we talking about?

Valentine Dyall (1908-1985) was the true Man in Black, and it came about because of the BBC. In the 1940s and 50s, they aired a wonderful radio programme called Appointment with Fear. This was a series of dramatised horror stories which both drew on the classics and also invited new stories from contemporary writers. Each started with an introduction from the narrator, the Man in Black, either teasing the listener about the nature of the tale to come, or warning them of the terror that awaited them. Each show was about half an hour long. When Dyall started speaking, you knew you were in the right place. His voice was dark and distinctive (some called him the British Vincent Price), and he had a resonance which just oozed menace.

A stalwart of horror, crime and comedy, of film, TV, radio and the boards, Dyall’s career ran from1942 right up to his death, at the age of seventy seven, in 1985. And although best known for his voice, he was a tall, long-faced fellow who added visual gravitas to many roles. You may already know him from such unashamed horror films such as City of the Dead (1960) and The Haunting (1963), mentioned last time. Not all his films were winners, but one of his less successful ventures – The Ghost of Rashmon Hall (1948) – does bear particular attention for supernatural/horror enthusiast.

YOU SAY TOMATO, WE SAY RAMELSHAM

The Ghost of Rashmon Hall, released in the States as Night Comes Too Soon, is a peculiar, almost amateurish horror film which is quite flawed and yet still relevant to those interested in the genre.

One reason for its relevance is that it is (loosely) an adaptation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s famous horror story, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters: Or the House and the Brain’ (1859).

Be warned that there are two print versions of the story – the longer, original one has more substantial debate and includes aspects (and a major character) not covered in the shorter version produced as a result of Bulwer-Lytton’s own revisions. The revised version is often reprinted as ‘The House and the Brain’ (someone better informed than we are might also know if this story had any influence on Richard Matheson when he wrote his 1971 novel Hell House).

Crucial to Bulwer-Lytton’s story is the power of mesmerism, as extended to include the possibility of moving the inanimate and the influence of dead ‘minds’ – or an echo of them – affecting the living.

“My persuasion is, that they [the malign phenomena under discussion] originate in some brain now far distant; that that brain had no distinct volition in anything that occurred; that what does occur reflects but its devious, motley, ever-shifting, half-formed thoughts; in short, that it has been but the dreams of such a brain put into action and invested with a semi-substance. That this brain is of immense power, that it can set matter into movement, that it is malignant and destructive, I believe…”

But to the film adaptation, which steals from, and messes generously with, Bulwer-Lytton’s story. It would only be fair to say that its flaws are not subtle ones. In many places the acting, even Dyall’s, is oddly stilted and even sometimes baffling. Characters stare at each other, into rooms or into the distance without obvious purpose; there is much locking and unlocking of doors and windows, also sometimes without clear reason.

Dialogue arrives suddenly, or ends just as quickly; debates make little sense, and leave the viewer trying to work out what these people have been drinking. None of this is helped by the antics of the orchestra, as the score seems to consist of breaking into random chords and themes when the conductor wakes up every so often.

Valentine Dyall plays a framing role as Dr Clinton, who describes past events to a disparate group of people gathered in the parlour of an old house. Most enjoyably, despite being called The Ghost of Rashmon Hall, the place in question is clearly referred to in the film – more than once – as Ramelsham Hall. Quite what happened there we have no idea.

Dyall is also a player in the events being recounted, which form the bulk of the film. The production itself includes some fairly cheap special effects. The unexpected vision of a chap in a striped pullover, for example, which may be intended to represent a long-dead sailor, reminds you more of a burglar or onion seller who has lost his way. And as for the scene around the accidental discovery of a large handful of wet seaweed, er…

On the plus side, there are quite effective shots of dripping taps and ruined rooms, which do add atmosphere, and intimate that something is certainly not right here. And for M R James fans, the film includes an odd element – every so often the male lead stares with alarm at a painting on the wall, which shows the (original?) hall at night. And at first there is an ominous figure in the foreground, then it has moved, and then it has gone. Distinct shades of James’s 1904 story ‘The Mezzotint’, yet this aspect is never explained.

In short, The Ghost of Rashmon Hall is worth watching for its spookier moments, its links to the original story, and to hear Dyall’s dark tones…

The film is free to watch here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2rbwd3

Anne M. Pillsworth and Ruthanna Emrys discuss ‘The House and the Brain’ in more detail on Tor’s website, here:

We Interrupt This Haunting for a Public Service Announcement: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s “The House and the Brain”

A DOCTOR CALLS

Mesmerism also plays a crucial part in the non-supernatural Dr Morelle: The Case of the Missing Heiress, based on the popular long running BBC radio series written by Ernest Dudley – with Valentine Dyall as Dr Morelle, an expert criminal psychologist (Cecil Parker was the original Morelle).

We mentioned this last time, but noticed recently that the film is available to watch online, so have provided the link. https://vimeo.com/86856759

For atmosphere, you have a journey past ‘Gibbet Corner’, a creepy house on the moors, a young heiress, a grasping uncle, and a strange Welsh butler (who talks to the unseen ghost of his long-dead dog), but rather than wicked spirits from the past, you will encounter only too human deceit and murder.

As in the radio series, Dr Morelle is an insufferable know-it-all, and treats his secretary Miss Frayle (played here by Julia Lang) once again as if she were a misguided idiot:

“It’s just as I feared. That girl’s sheer bone from the neck up.”

In this one, the mesmerism involves less the sheer power of the human mind, and more the ability to turn shiny things over and over until the victim goes blank. Needless to say, the multi-talented Dr Morelle is also a highly trained mesmerist, as well as a brilliant psychiatrist, a keen investigator, etc. etc. And Miss Frayle thinks he’s wonderful. As with most of the radio episodes, we remain surprised that she herself hasn’t shot or poisoned Dr Morelle by the end of it all.

The performances are mannered, but less ham than in The Ghost of Rashmon Hall, and Dyall’s voice is top-notch. Watch for the twist, mesmerism-linked ending.

A RIPPING PUZZLE

Our third Valentine Dyall film, Room to Let (1950), is a period mystery, harder to find, and yet holds a particular interest for us, as it was the first of three Hammer films to use Jack the Ripper as its subject matter – The other two were Hands of the Ripper (1971) and Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971).

This one concerns the arrival of a strange character, Dr Fell, at a London lodging house – not long after an asylum burns to the ground. Dyall is Fell, the secretive guest, and gives a sinister performance which is better than the script in general. This being 1904, and thus sixteen years after the Whitechapel Murders, people begin to suspect that the sinister Dr Fell might be Jack the Ripper, coming round for another killing spree. Which seems unlikely, but what the heck. An intrepid reporter investigates, and provides the framing device, looking back on the events.

Room to Let is an adaptation of the 1947 play by noted crime writer Marjorie Allingham – and hmm, here we have a lead character called Dr Fell. Curious, as the ‘other’ Dr Fell, an eccentric detective, was the creation of Allingham’s friend John Dickson Carr – who, as we mentioned last time, wrote or adapted many episodes of Appointment with Fear, the radio series which brought Valentine Dyall to everyone’s attention as The Man in Black in the forties and fifties. Dr Fell the detective goes back to the 1930s, and it seems unlikely that Allingham was unaware of the character. Carr stayed with her and her husband more than once, and in 1949, he presented them with a signed copy of his The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

In the end, Room to Let turns into a ‘locked room’ mystery, but the subject matter makes it still an interesting little piece.

THE DETECTION CLUB

In fact, many of the key Golden Age writers such as Carr and Allingham belonged to the same British club, the Detection Club. This was founded in 1930 by Anthony Berkeley, creator of Roger Sheringham, the amateur detective – and this is where trivia enthusiasts like ourselves could lose their minds completely, as interconnections with life and fiction were rife (we noted last time that the appearance of Carr’s Dr Fell was based on G K Chesterton, who was also in the Detection Club).

Take, for example, the matter of Professor Alfred Swain Taylor (1806-1880), called by some the Father of British Forensic Medicine.

Taylor was a pioneering toxicologist who was an expert witness in court a number of times, and wrote numerous medical papers, particularly on murder by poisoning. The detection of arsenical poisoning, being a serious concern at the time, was a particular speciality of his.

“Poisoning was rife in the nineteenth century, whether accidentally or on purpose: poisons were readily available contained in common household goods such as wallpaper and wrapping paper, beer and wine, sweets and toys, clothing (including hat trimmings), candles, coal and chemicals used on farms and parklands to exterminate pests. After numerous infamous criminal trials, the fear of it completely captured the public imagination and daily newspaper reporting reflected this everyday menace. In such circumstances, chemists and forensic toxicologists became heroes and Taylor was no exception.”

Corinne Hogan, Royal College of Surgeons of England

R Austin Freeman – another member of the Detection Club – admitted that he may have had Taylor at the back of his mind when he created his own investigating scientists character, Dr Thorndyke. And Berkeley, the club’s founder noted above, has a strand in his highly enjoyable novel The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), where suspicion falls upon someone precisely because they are in possession of one of Taylor’s texts on toxicology. So the old chap’s scientific name lived on almost fifty years after his death.

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N.B. You can read much more about R Austin Freeman and Dr Thorndyke via noted Sherlockian writer/editor David Marcum, who has been reviving the entire Thorndyke canon. Next year MX Publishing will issue the last three of nine Thorndyke books. the 17 step program

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself is supposed to have met Taylor, well-known for his textbooks and his courtroom appearances. It has even been suggested that Sherlock Holmes’s experiments with chemicals and reagents owed something to Conan Doyle’s knowledge of Taylor – although the same could be said with regard to Robert Christison (1797-1882), the eminent Scottish toxicologist, so we won’t push that one too hard.

For those interested, Lynne Truss has a more recent reflection on the Detection Club which might be of interest: https://crimereads.com/an-evening-with-the-detection-club/

To over-egg the detective pudding, we might add that Valentine Dyall also played the role of Inspector Grice in two films based on crime writer John Creasey’s character The Toff – Hammer the Toff and Salute the Toff (both 1952). For those who don’t know, The Toff, aka the Honourable Richard Rollison, was one of those amateur upper-class period sleuths. Creasey, who wrote hundreds of novels under twenty eight pseudonyms,  went on to form the Crime Writers Association in 1953.

SEX AND THE EGYPTIANS

Finally on the film front, we must mention Dyall’s role as the Egyptian mummy who narrates the 1970 sex comedy/horror film Secrets of Sex – later released in the States as Bizarre and Tales of the Bizarre.

Hard to describe, we can do little better than provide the IMDB summary for this whacked-out film:

“A brainy sex flick with a sense of humor, the film begins with a narrator/mummy who guides us through a number of vignettes promising to show what some of us go through in the pursuit of sexual pleasure. There’s a fabulous ten minute opening, where the half naked go go dancers have vegetables thrown at them. One of the tales features a female photographer who tortures a male model. Another has a female burglar (Cathy Howard) caught by the house owner. The craziest involves a nerd hiring a blond call girl (Sue Bond) in pursuit of a menage-a-trois with his pet lizard; and there’s an endearing misadventure with secret agent Lindy Leigh (Maria Frost) who does topless safecracking.”

Secrets of Sex was directed by Antony Balch, an experimental filmmaker who had collaborated with William S. Burroughs, which might explain some things; the executive producer was Richard Gordon, who was the producer of many horror films, including Tower of Evil, Inseminoid, and Horror Hospital. Gordon was also executive producer for the classic 1968 Fiend Without a Face.

This strange film, which does have sort-of-horror moments, was described by The Guardian as having “Flair, resource, and a splendid gothic dottiness.” Why a mummy is narrating it all, we have no idea, but the trailer gives you just a taste of what to expect…

secrets of sex trailer

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VALENTINE DYALL AND AN ATTACK OF THE NEDDIES

After all that, we abandon the world of film, and leave you, dear listener, with one of Valentine Dyall’s pitch-perfect contributions to The Goon Show – ‘The Canal’ (1954).

In more sepulchral tones than usual, ‘Lord Valentine Dyall’ hams it up splendidly:

Lord Valentine Dyall: Neddie!

Seagoon: Father! You – you are Father, aren’t you?

Lord Valentine Dyall: Do I have to undress?

Seagoon: No, it’s just that you’ve changed so much. [Aside] And, dear listener, changed he had – he looked tired and weary – his eyes, his eyes were sunk back in his head, they were were bloodshot, watery and red-rimmed – what had caused this?

Lord Valentine Dyall: Neddie, we’ve bought a television set. But what are you doing back from school?

Seagoon: My schooling is completed.

Lord Valentine Dyall: Oh nonsense, you’ve only been there forty-three years.

A recommended listen, and a splendid encapsulation of all that is Dyall. ‘The Canal’ can be bought as part of various Goon Show collections, or found on OTR sites such as this one: the canal – radio echoes

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Our first article on Valentine Dyall, with further audiovisual links and comments, is still available here: http://greydogtales.com/blog/man-black-appointment-fear/

Should you fancy a read, The Poisoned Chocolates Case is widely available in print and Kindle: the poisoned chocolates case on amazon

Today, dear listener, we are pleased to have an examination of the more romantic and human side of classic ghost stories, penned especially for us by ace Gothic and Romantic author Amanda DeWees. Amanda examines stories by Margaret Oliphant, Mary E Wilkins, Algernon Blackwood and E F Benson, and provides links for you to read the tales in question. Do grab a hankie, and read on…

THE HUMAN TOUCH

by Amanda DeWees

Recently I’ve seen an article recirculating on social media that was first published in 2017 but gets revived every now and then—especially by my friends. Written by Colin Dickey for Smithsonian magazine, it’s titled “A Plea to Resurrect the Christmas Tradition of Telling Ghost Stories.” (the christmas tradition) In it, the author explains the connection between this holiday and the telling of ghost stories, a connection that Charles Dickens deliberately fostered in both his own writings and the magazines he published.

This tradition is also revived in the upcoming Pavane Press anthology, A Winter’s Tale: Horror Stories for the Yuletide (a winter’s tale on amazon) The introduction to the anthology notes that “Whether their intent was to inspire or to frighten, the Victorians had one thing right: there is an inexorable connection between joy and fear, and they celebrated the season of joy with ghost stories that both frightened their audiences and relieved them with the knowledge that their own existences were less terrifying.”

2020, in particular, seems suited to reviving the custom of ghost stories for Christmas. It’s been a darker year than any I can think of in my half century of life, one that has brought tragedy and fear and terrible uncertainty. Though the new year approaches with the hope of change, it is still an unknown, so walking into the winter is as frightening for us in its way as for our ancestors centuries ago. At the same time, though, the winter holidays—including Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Christmas—are times of cheer when we celebrate our communities. We are encouraged to exchange gifts, be generous to our fellows, and (depending upon one’s religious views) celebrate a symbolic new beginning.

What a strange and somehow poetic paradox. This is certainly a year when we need the comfort and glamour of our winter holidays more than ever, yet the tinsel and candlelight will not be able to distract us entirely from the anxiety and sadness that we still harbor.

Compassion is the gift that I believe we all need this year, both to give and to receive, and it is also the key to some of my favorite tales of the supernatural. Like this season itself, they yoke together darkness and light, dread and love. And I relish them for the hope they bring in the midst of the creepy promise they extend—for, after all, they are ghost stories.

The perennial favorite, of course, is ‘A Christmas Carol’, in which Charles Dickens’s spirits teach skinflinty Scrooge to look upon his fellow men and women with compassion. It’s a beautiful idea that so selfish a creature can find redemption and change his life for the better, and I’m not surprised “A Christmas Carol” continues to maintain its popularity more than 175 years after it was first published.

For me, though, one of the most poignant plot arcs sees a living human being able to release a tortured soul from its bondage here on earth. To be sure, there are many different sorts of ghosts in fiction, and they may be trapped on our plane for any number of reasons: to gain revenge; to complete unfinished business; or even simply a kind of recording, a “stone tape” (as Nigel Kneale’s teleplay termed it) that has no capacity for thought or reason and is no more than someone’s most anguished moments of life played like a film projected over and over.

But some are able to communicate with the living…and of those, there are lucky ones with whom the living can interact. Sometimes a mortal person’s compassion can even be their key to freedom. This is the case in the four stories I present to you now. All are frequently chosen for anthologies, perhaps because of the poignancy that each conveys so powerfully. And though only one is truly Victorian, all are heirs to that tradition.

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THE OPEN DOOR

‘The Open Door’ by Margaret Oliphant, published in 1881, is an excellent example of the sentimental Victorian ghost story at its best. (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10052)

A comfortable domestic setting is established at once by the narrator and protagonist, a family man, and his affection for his children—particularly his young son, Roland, who is described as sensitive and delicate—is crucial to the development of the story. Roland is the first to be aware of the haunting, and the evident agony of the spirit torments him to the point that he falls ill. He tasks his skeptical father with finding a way to end the agony of the unseen spirit.

The father’s love for his son—and his fear that the boy may die if thwarted—motivates him to investigate and to persist in those investigations even when he would much rather give up his quest. “Was ever such a task given to an anxious father trembling for his only boy? I felt in my heart, fantastic as it may appear, that I must fulfill this somehow, or part with my child.”

When the protagonist does experience the visitation, he describes it as “a low, moaning, wailing voice, full of suffering and pain, …full of human misery” calling, “Oh, mother, let me in!” Like his son before him, he immediately feels pity for the spirit: “My heart was rent with pity and trouble,—pity for the poor suffering human creature that moaned and pleaded so, and trouble for myself and my boy.”

The protagonist enlists the help of first his butler, then his son’s doctor, then the local minister—and, as in the old fairy tales, the third encounter is the charm. The minister recognizes the voice of one of his late parishioners, and in a powerful scene entreats the anguished ghost to leave the earthly realm and go to both his deceased earthly mother and his heavenly Father. His prayer and his own conviction, aided by his past relationship with “Willie” during life and his knowledge of the specific circumstances of his death, succeed in ushering the troubled soul to peace.

Oliphant ends by offering two different interpretations for the phenomenon. The father muses that an event like the living Willie pleading in vain for his late mother to let him in “might impress itself somehow upon the hidden heart of nature. I do not pretend to know how, but the repetition had struck me at the time as, in its terrible strangeness and incomprehensibility, almost mechanical,—as if the unseen actor could not exceed or vary, but was bound to re-enact the whole.” After he proposes this “stone tape” explanation, however, he notes that “This spirit in pain,—if it was a spirit,—this voice out of the unseen,—was a poor fellow-creature in misery, to be succored and helped out of his trouble, to my boy.” Indeed, whether the spirit was a thinking, feeling entity or a psychic record of a single event, had young Roland not taken pity for it and recruited his father’s help, it’s clear that the ghostly phenomenon would have continued.

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THE LOST GHOST

Mary E. Wilkins’s 1903 story The Lost Ghost’ (http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/LostGhos.shtml) is also about an unquiet spirit separated from its mother, but this is a darker story, and we learn that the mother was not worthy of the ghost’s devotion. Wilkins, too, starts the story in an atmosphere of cozy domesticity, with two neighbor women visiting together over needlework and gossip, which makes it all the more startling when the darker tendencies emerge. Mrs. Meserve tells the story of a time before her marriage when she lodged with two widowed sisters, delicate Mrs. Dennison and kind Mrs. Bird.

Initially she is happy in the house and even enjoys being spoiled a little by one of her landladies, Mrs. Bird, who is “a real motherly sort of woman; she always seemed to be the happiest when she was doing something to make other folks happy and comfortable. Mrs. Dennison told me she had always been so…. ‘It’s lucky Abby never had any children,’ she said, ‘for she would have spoilt them.’”

Mrs. Meserve’s contentment is destroyed, however, when she learns the house is haunted—a fact that emerges when a ghostly little girl brings the lodger’s coat to her room:

“I saw my coat first. The thing that held it was so small that I couldn’t see much of anything else. Then I saw a little white face with eyes so scared and wishful that they seemed as if they might eat a hole in anybody’s heart. It was a dreadful little face…but it was so pitiful that somehow it did away a good deal with the dreadfulness. And there were two little hands spotted purple with the cold, holding up my winter coat, and a strange little far-away voice said: ‘I can’t find my mother.’”

Now that the phantom has made its presence known, Mrs. Meserve begins to see it frequently—carrying out errands and chores without being invited, and saying over and over, “I can’t find my mother.” She adds, “I never heard a living child cry for its mother that was anything so pitiful as that dead one. It was enough to break your heart. She used to come and say that to Mrs. Bird oftener than to any one else.” Mrs. Bird responds to the visitations with more sympathy and less fear than the other women, once going so far as to say, “It seems to me sometimes as if I should die if I can’t get that awful little white robe off that child and get her in some clothes and feed her and stop her looking for her mother.”

When Mrs. Meserve learns the terrible story behind the ghost child’s presence, these pitiful, eerie manifestations take on even more horror. She learns that the little girl died when her mother left town for an extramarital assignation, locking her daughter in her room before leaving. When finally found, the little girl had either frozen to death or died of starvation—her would-be rescuers seem unable to determine which. Knowing this history, the women who see her ghost can’t understand why she would wish to be reunited with her now-dead mother.

The little ghost shows good judgment in visiting Mrs. Bird, however. When the kindly, maternal woman dies suddenly, her spirit becomes the mother figure the phantom longed for. “We saw, as plain as we ever saw anything in our lives, Mrs. Abby Bird walking off over the white snow-path with that child holding fast to her hand, nestling close to her as if she had found her own mother.”

From that time on, Mrs. Meserve notes, the little girl’s ghost was never seen. Though kindly Mrs. Bird had to die to do so, she and her impulse of tenderness freed the lost ghost from her lonely vigil in the house where she had died waiting for her mother’s return. At the same time, Mrs. Bird attained a daughter to care for, as she had wanted. It’s a sad but satisfying ending.

The two tales that follow are among my very favorite ghost stories, and both showcase women characters whose capacity for empathy proves paramount to a happy ending. They carry over, I believe, from the Victorian tradition that assigns emotionality to women and children (like Roland in the first story). Men in fiction of the era are permitted to be compassionate in more restrained ways, but they risk seeming unmanly if they give free rein to fear or to their softer feelings. And, intriguingly, our next story comments explicitly on the role women can and should play with regard to unhappy specters.

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THE WOMAN’S GHOST STORY

‘The Woman’s Ghost Story’, by Algernon Blackwood (1907), is brief but powerful. (https://americanliterature.com/author/algernon-blackwood/short-story/the-womans-ghost-story) The unnamed narrator tells a room full of men about her “experience” years ago when, as an unconventional and independent young woman, she went to spend a night in a house reputed to be haunted. When she encounters a man apparently waiting there for her, she assumes he is the caretaker, but soon after he follows her inside she realizes her mistake. “I’m the man who was frightened to death,” he tells her.

Concluding that he is a madman, she runs from the room but turns the wrong way and, instead of escaping the house, runs upstairs. There she locks herself in a room, only to find the man is there too. He explains, looking at her with “the saddest eyes I had ever seen,” that he died in that house and fear keeps him there—but he feels that if someone can love him he may be freed. “It’s my condition that keeps me here. I want something to change my condition for me, for then I could get away. What I want is sympathy. Or, really, more than sympathy; I want affection—I want love!” He needs to be relieved of the feeling of fear engendered by “the succession of cruel and curious people who come to this house to see the ghost, and thus keep alive its atmosphere of terror.” He implores the narrator to take pity on him instead of cowering in a corner. “Won’t you step out into the middle of the room and try to love me a little?”

With her “sense of pity” touched by the spirit’s plight, even in the midst of her terror she is able to do as he bids, and is rewarded by the spirit exclaiming, “You have done a kind act. That’s the first attempt at sympathy that has been shown me since I died.” As her compassion for the hapless ghost grows and her fear subsides, she is able to walk closer to him and find the determination to help him.

His response is an extraordinary and lovely speech that always haunts me long after I finish the story: “You women…you wonderful women, to whom life often brings no opportunity of spending your great love, oh, if you only could know how many of us simply yearn for it! It would save our souls, if but you knew. Few might find the chance that you now have, but if you only spent your love freely, without definite object, just letting it flow openly for all who need, you would reach hundreds and thousands of souls like me, and release us!”

It’s a poignant speech, bestowing a kind of beauty and nobility on the idea of being a spinster, a status generally not held in high regard at the time. This philosophy overturns what might otherwise seem a tragic denial of fulfillment and suggests that love need not go to waste simply for the lack of a husband or children.

It certainly has an impact on the narrator, who is “stirred…profoundly.” The ghost urges her, “Put your arms round me and kiss me, for the love of God!…Forget that I’m a man and you’re a woman….Forget that I’m a ghost, and come out boldly and press me to you with a great kiss, and let your love flow into me….Love me! and I shall be free!”

The spirit’s plea summons forth “an emotion infinitely greater than fear” in the narrator, and she goes toward him with arms outstretched. She recalls, “Pity and love were in my heart at that moment, genuine pity, I swear, and genuine love.” She finds the strength to give him the embrace that sets him free:

“How can I describe to you, all you skeptical men sitting there with pipes in your mouths, the amazing sensation I experienced of holding an intangible, impalpable thing so closely to my heart that it touched my body with equal pressure all the way down, and then melted away somewhere into my very being? For it was like seizing a rush of cool wind and feeling a touch of burning fire the moment it had struck its swift blow and passed on. A series of shocks ran all over and all through me; a momentary ecstasy of flaming sweetness and wonder thrilled down into me; my heart gave another great leap—and then I was alone…. All fear had left me, and something was singing round me in the air and in my heart like the joy of a spring morning in youth.”

Just as the ghost insisted, her act of generosity and pity frees him from his miserable existence on earth. I find it particularly moving that he has to persuade the heroine to release him from his suffering, and every step she takes toward that goal is a triumph of courage and trust. She undergoes a journey in just a few pages that challenges her to find the courage to free a soul in torment and profoundly changes her understanding of the world—and of love. There is no indication in the story that she ever married. Perhaps after the beauty and power of that encounter she found the prospect of marriage inadequate.

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HOW FEAR DEPARTED FROM THE LONG GALLERY

The last story I’ll discuss is E.F. Benson’s ‘How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery’, published in 1912 (in Benson collection from Project Gutenberg Australia: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0605171h.html). I first read it in Marvin Kaye’s anthology Ghosts: A Treasury of Chilling Tales Old &New. Kaye made it the last story in the book, explaining, “I have given this tale the last position because I do not believe it can be bettered.” I can’t disagree, and, like Kaye, I have been saving the best for last. This small masterpiece, like a good chocolate assortment, contains many different flavors. It begins like a light, even arch country-house comedy, then takes a more serious tone and becomes increasingly eerie and unsettling. When the suspense has become unbearable, the hammer falls…and then comes piercing, unexpected sweetness. All is concluded with a reassuring return to the playful tone with which the journey began. I urge you to read the story if you haven’t already done so, for I will cover a relatively small portion of it here.

The story begins not in trying to impress upon the reader a mood of terror and suspense; in fact, quite the opposite. We are told that the Peveril family, whose home, Church-Peveril, will be the setting of the story, is so accustomed to ghosts that they no longer take them seriously, for “to the Peverils the appearance of a ghost is a matter of hardly greater significance than is the appearance of the post to those who live in more ordinary houses.” With this perspective having been established, the unnamed narrator, a friend of the Peverils’, runs down a roster of ghosts who might be fearsome to other families but are treated by the Peverils with the affectionate indifference usually bestowed upon eccentric relatives.

There is an exception, however—a haunting whose consequences are so dire that even this irreverent family scarcely dares speak of it. It had its origin in 1602, when wild Dick Peveril, desirous to inherit the family seat, murdered his twin baby nephews because they stood between him and his goal. So heinous a crime was this, and so innocent the victims, that it is imprinted upon the room where the children were killed—the long gallery of the title. “On each occasion they appeared at night, between sunset and sunrise, always in the same long gallery, and always as two toddling children scarcely able to walk. And on each occasion the luckless individual who saw them died either speedily or terribly, or with both speed and terror, after the accursed vision had appeared to him.”

This is the only family haunting that the Peverils respect, and they make certain not to linger in the haunted gallery after dark, also taking care to warn their guests about its dangers. It is only through a combination of accidents and miscalculations that young Madge Dalrymple, a cousin of the Peverils who is visiting for New Year’s festivities, finds herself in the gallery after dark. She is resting an injured leg there alone one afternoon, and although she knows of the gallery’s dangers, she has plenty of time before sunset—but then she falls asleep.

Madge’s paralyzed terror when she wakes and finds herself in the gallery after sunset is the stuff of nightmare. Benson makes us feel her panic and horror as she tries to fumble her way out of the room by memory and touch alone, while certain that at any moment the ghostly twins will appear and seal her doom. And sure enough, before she can escape, they do:

“There stood…two little white figures, side by side. They came towards her slowly, shufflingly. She could not see face or form at all distinctly, but the two little white figures were advancing. She knew them to be the ghosts of terror, innocent of the awful doom they were bound to bring, even as she was innocent.”

The thought inspires her with an idea: to plead for mercy. “She had not hurt them or laughed at them, and they, they were but babies when the wicked and bloody deed had sent them to their burning death. Surely the spirits of these children would not be inaccessible to the cry of one who was of the same blood as they, who had committed no fault that merited the doom they brought.” Kneeling, she starts to beg for mercy, but then in the very midst of her plea undergoes a change of perspective: “Her tender girl’s heart thought no more of herself, but only of them, those little innocent spirits on whom so awful a doom was laid.” With “the enlightenment of pity…her fear fell from her” and she says, “Dears, I am so sorry for you….It is not your fault that you must bring me what you must bring, but I am not afraid any longer. I am only sorry for you. God bless you, you poor darlings.”

The apparitions that have brought doom to so many before her “smiled at her with shy little baby smiles” and gently fade away. Madge feels a beautiful certainty that no harm will come to her, and the narrator notes that, as of his recording of the tale, she has shown no ill effects. The girl’s selflessness and pity were the key to freeing the ghosts from their destiny to bring suffering and death. “Something, her attitude to them, we must suppose, her pity, her sympathy, touched and dissolved and annihilated the curse.”

In any other ghost story, I’m certain the twins would have vanished entirely and passed on to whatever version of the Elysian Fields the author deemed fit. But it is part of the charm of this tale that, instead, the ghosts of the twins are brought into the family fold to take their place among the harmless specters that walk there. The narrator describes his welcome when he recently arrived at Church-Peveril after dark. His hostess greets him thus: “I’ve just been seeing the twins. They looked too sweet and stopped nearly ten minutes. Let us have tea at once.”

The flourish of humor is welcome after the tension and redemption of the climax. The story may bring you to tears, as it does me, but it will leave you with a smile on your face.

I think one reason I love ghost stories like these so much is that they do give me hope that humans can do better; that we can rise above self-interest. Of course, these are fictional characters I’ve been discussing, but their creators had to come up with them, and that kind of imagination—the magnanimity of believing that readers will sympathize with and celebrate fictitious creations characterized by compassion—is very welcome indeed, both for the holidays and for the rest of our journey through the winter darkness. May we all find the empathy and kindness to help each other through to the better times ahead.

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Atlanta author Amanda DeWees wrote her doctoral dissertation on 19th-century vampire literature, the perfect training—though she didn’t know it at the time—for writing Victorian gothic romance novels. These include With This Curse, which won the 2015 Daphne du Maurier Award for historical mystery/suspense, and her mystery series about Victorian actress and spirit medium Sybil Ingram, which includes A Haunting Reprise and The Last Serenade. Visit amanda dewees website to learn more about her books.

You can also read Amanda’s overview of some classic female authors of the supernatural here: http://greydogtales.com/blog/forever-new-women-supernatural-fiction/

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And a reminder that the Pavane Press anthology, A Winter’s Tale: Horror Stories for the Yuletide, is available now, in Kindle and print – including ghost stories ‘Haunted Harbor’ by Amanda DeWees and ‘The Heron in Winter’ by John Linwood Grant:

amazon uk

amazon us

 

 

I’ve said before that I would probably never have written any Lovecraftian or Mythosian stories had I not come across Scott R Jones’ Martian Migraine Press in 2015, and read his own book When the Stars Are Right. After that, I was intrigued – and tempted. In 2016 Scott accepted the first such tale I ever wrote, without any idea of who I was, and the whole thing sort of ambled on from there.

So it seems fitting that we have another first today, the only time we’ve covered the same book twice on the website in any detail – the absolutely excellent Shout, Kill, Revel, Repeat by Jones, reviewed this time by guest author Justin Burnett of Silent Motorist Media…

(Our own perspective on Shout, Kill, Revel, Repeat was posted in July: http://greydogtales.com/blog/shout-kill-revel-repeat-what-would-scott-r-jones-do/ )

Shout, Kill, Revel, Repeat: a Review

by Justin A. Burnett

 

“He’s good, this Huxley of the Old Ones, this Prophet of Diabolical Singularity. Reading Jones is like slipping into a dream…”

Lovecraftian fiction has me bent two ways. On the one hand, it implies a wearied narrative structure: Protag stumbles across an esoteric mystery purloined craftily amidst the mundane and generally indicated only by the presence of quirky characters with fishy auras. Protag teases the edges of said mystery until either her mind or existence (often both) unravels. That’s my uncharitable bent.

But then, if the rows of Lovecraftian anthologies and collections on my bookshelf indicate a Hyde to my over-critical Jekyll, it’s because Lovecraftian fiction is simultaneously rich with variety within its formal structures and prone to opening chasms of the heart resembling its concurrent space and time variety.

But let’s not mention Lovecraft more than necessary, or you’ll get the wrong idea. For Lovecraftian, Scott R. Jones is not. He prefers the term R’lyehian. If he means operating within the Lovecraftian Mythos (at its widest) sans the absurdity of treating it with Roman dogmatism, then call the distinction apt.

It’s also a worthy starting point in considering Jones’ 2020 collection, Shout, Kill, Revel, Repeat. I’m far from a Lovecraft expert (much less so than Jones himself), so trying to trace each iteration of the Mythos winding through this collection is useless. It’s also beside the point. It’s nice to recognize bits of Ramsey Campbell and Frank Belknap Long along the way, but what’s nicer is watching Jones “abuse” the tradition.

I’ve always wanted to read a Lovecraftian collection set after the end. What’s it like, writhing in the tentacles of the novus ordo seclorum? When the sun sets forever and the fungus fills the horizon with impossible colors, what then? SKRP is the sharp edge designed for this very itch.

Many of Jones’ strongest stories reside in this rough, gore-drenched landscape of the weirder-than-weird apocalypse. There are plenty orifical portals to close, crippled sanities to maintain, and all the mind-bending tech you could possibly want to get the doing done. It’s a playground, really. A happy place for deranged imaginations prone to stretching the extremes inherent in weird fiction to snapping.

And Jones wields a prose to match, an angular, jarring thing that doesn’t coddle the reader with downy description. It’s overloaded with a universe that only Jones knows fully, bursting at the seams in places where you can glimpse the hallucinogenic machines of world-building beyond. It’s sharp. Hostile. But this is a fiction collection, not a pillow.

I can barely pick favorites. ‘The Abraxas Protocol’ is as crazy as a werewolf tale can get. In fact, forget werewolves. Remember how I keep bringing up (however reluctantly and loaded with disclaimers) Lovecraft? Well…

And what about ‘The Amnesiac’s Lament’, smacking of VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts in the best of ways, blending mind and matter in a way that injures the very notion of Point of View?

There’s even a story about coffee.

Yes, Jones wields quite the sense of humor between the permeable boundaries of his multiple dimensions. Nevertheless, you won’t escape his darkness, the sense of a universe bent ever to violence against its involuntary inhabitants. If there’s a challenge to reading this collection, it’s the sting of his worldview.

But let me avoid another possible mischaracterization: Jones is not without tenderness. ‘Book of Hours’ is a heartbreaker about a couple who would do anything to bring back their dead boy. And they do it… every bloody thing. What they find, as you’d expect, isn’t what they sought. In this one, like others in the collection, transcendence looms in the burning horizon, a dark one filled with agonies and joys, but transcendence nonetheless.

Joel Lane, in This Spectacular Darkness, makes a useful distinction between “ontological horror” and “existential horror.” The former is anti-humanistic, Lovecraftian, centered around the erasure of humanity. The latter, associated with popular writers like Stephen King, is interested in utilizing horror to examine the human dimension: loss, desire, those truly squishy terrors that terrified Lovecraft. Jones writes himself into the borderlands of this divide. The human is never far, particularly insofar as she seeks the perennial need lying buried beneath the mask of the given: escape, atonement, whatever-you-call-it.

He’s good, this Huxley of the Old Ones, this Prophet of Diabolical Singularity. Reading Jones is like slipping into a dream: It’s strange, horrifying, and you awake with a fresh new vocabulary of ideas and images you wouldn’t have found in the dreary daytime. Not many writers can do that. It’s no surprise that Ramsey Campbell calls him “a genuine master of horror.”

I heartily recommend Shout, Kill, Revel, Repeat. Indeed, I’m looking forward to a re-read.

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Justin’s Silent Motorist Media small press can be found here:

https://silentmotorist.media

And SMM’s latest book is The Nightside Codex, which we hope to finish and review here soon:

the nightside codex – amazon

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A selection of John Linwood Grant’s Lovecraftian fiction will be included in his second collection, Where All is Night, and Starless, due out mid-2021 from Trepidatio/JournalStone.

Given that Thanksgiving is now being celebrated across the colonies (except by those who don’t celebrate it), and in view of the fact that we’ve been very quiet here recently, today we are proud to present another classic European folktale concerning the Christmas Wasp.

Like many other such tales, this one was collected by Professor Ernst Stellmacher, author of Insekten-Archäologie für Frauen (1873), some time in the 1860s, and probably carries a heartwarming message for children everywhere…

THE TAILOR OF BREMEN

There once was a poor tailor who lived in the town of Bremen, along with his wife and seven children. Originally he had intended to live in Düsseldorf, but he was so poor that he couldn’t afford the extra letters, especially with the severe tax on umlauts at the time. There – in Bremen, not in Düsseldorf, you can forget about the geography stuff now – this simple, honest tailor made marvellous suits for the rich merchants of the town, and beautiful gowns for their wives, who all sported inexplicable duelling scars (the reason for that won’t come up, either – you do understand what ‘inexplicable’ means, right?)

It was often said around town that the tailor’s clothes were some of the finest in the land – and it was also said that being simple and honest was how you stayed poor in those days, especially if rich merchants kept ‘forgetting’ to pay their bills. This being so, the family augmented what little the tailor made through his wife’s spinning, which occasionally attracted the interest of passing travellers.

“Ach! Why is that old woman round and round going? Wunderbar!” they would cry, and throw a few pfennigs into the children’s open mouths.

Despite this, one December day the tailor found that they had no money left to buy even a loaf of bread. So he left his house and walked down to the church to pray that God might ease his poverty, but he was unable to get in for the crowds of Calvinists, Lutherans, Anabaptists and other dissenters busy nailing proclamations to the church doors. What was he to do? Just then, a finely-scarred merchant’s wife saw the little tailor crouching by the church entrance, and took pity on him.

“This very morning,” she said, “I had a vision of the Blessed Emma of Stiepel, who is, as you know, the patron saint of Bremen – and not of that stupid Düsseldorf place. She came to me while I was ironing the children, and said that I would be granted a fine meadow, which I should give to the poorest people of the town.”

“A vision!” said the tailor. “But…”

The merchant’s wife nodded. “Ja, I thought that was a dumb idea as well. What should they do with a meadow? Eat it? So instead, I made a pact with the Devil, and he gave me hundreds of golden thalers, on each of which can be seen the image of the sacred Weihnachtswespe (or ‘Christmas Wasp’, for any foreigners reading this). These coins I give to you, that you and your family might prosper!”

At which she opened her silk gown, and out flew not coins, but a large swarm of irascible insects, mad as hell at being confined in the dress by a delusional merchant’s wife who had just spent three solid days and nights in her husband’s wine cellar, knocking back the hock and Glühwein.

And darting and stinging, the wasps drove both the poor tailor and the drunken merchant’s wife down the street, never to be seen again…

As for the tailor’s wife and children, they too were visited by the Blessed Emma of Stiepel, but – being neither drunk nor simple – they took up the offer of a meadow, applied for planning permission, and went into real estate, eventually owning half of Bremen. And some of the nicer parts of  Düsseldorf.

Thus even today, those who have been fooled by a suspiciously generous gift, or who have done badly in a transaction with a merchant, refer to themselves as having been ‘stung’… or something like that.

N.B. For those who like to know real stuff, Emma of Stiepel was born somewhere between 975-980 and died 3 December 1038, being known for her good works. More details tracing the myth of the Christmas Wasp can be found here: http://greydogtales.com/blog/folklore-origins-christmas-wasp/