M R James and his Friend in The Fens

December 19, 2016 greydogtales 4 Comments

Today, a dash of Fenland history, a gentle vicar and some ghost stories, as we follow in the footsteps of M R James – in a way. Join us, dear listener, for a ramble in East Anglia and some ghostly trivia in the company of E G Swain…

It’s easy enough to chart those authors who continued the M R James tradition in the early half of last century. Some became over-specific in their horrors; others grasped at James’ style but couldn’t quite achieve his ease. And a number broke one or more of his ‘rules’.

His friend and contemporary Edmund Gill Swain, often broke a cardinal rule and yet achieved stories which shine with that careful, detailed touch which makes James so readable. So today we stand on the edge of The Fens a while, and reflect on Swain’s Mr Batchel and his landscape.

M R James on Ghost Stories

There are no real rules, of course, but M R James set out a number of points as to what he himself considered to be the requisites of a ghost story. These can be found in the introduction to the collection Ghosts & Marvels (1924), and in the preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911):

“Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage…”

“For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable. ‘Thirty years ago,’ ‘Not long before the war’, are very proper openings. If a really remote date be chosen, there is more than one way of bringing the reader in contact with it. The finding of documents about it can be made plausible; or you may begin with your apparition and go back over the years to tell the cause of it… On the whole (though not a few instances might be quoted against me) I think that a setting so modern that the ordinary reader can judge of its naturalness for himself is preferable to anything antique…”

Ghosts and Marvels

“Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story.”

More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

E G Swain (1861-1938) adhered closely to the first two points above, but pretty much ignored that last one. Swain was Chaplain of King’s College, Cambridge, from 1892 to 1905. His chaplaincy came after he had been a curate for some years in South London.

He and M R James had an amiable relationship, and shared a number of interests beyond college and religion. It’s known that he regularly attended M R James’ ghost story readings at Christmas, and his only collection of ghost stories, The Stoneground Tales, is dedicated:

TO MONTAGUE RHODES JAMES, FOR TWENTY PLEASANT YEARS MR BATCHEL’S FRIEND, AND THE INDULGENT PARENT OF SUCH TASTES AS THESE PAGES INDICATE

We gave a brief mention to this volume over a year ago ( gods and garden rollers), but felt it was time to do more justice to an unjustly forgotten writer and his geographical influences. Like James, he drew on antiquarian knowledge and folk-lore to bring a strong feeling of history, the church and the land to his tales.

The Stoneground Ghost Tales took form quite directly from Swain’s period as the vicar of the real Stanground, near Peterborough, on the edge of The Fens. He was in that position at the church of St John the Baptist from 1905 to 1916, and his collection was published in 1912. M R James had already featured parts of East Anglia in a few of his stories. Swain confined himself entirely to the area outside Peterborough, and to that part nearest to his living.

Unlike James, there are no un-named or varied narrators in Swain’s stories – only Mr Batchel, vicar and amateur antiquarian. And the wry, delightful bachelor Mr Batchel at Stoneground is, indeed, a certain version of E G Swain at Stanground.

As one of those ‘small’ heroes who seeks justice in whatever way they can, he is admirable. He brings God to the Fenland in that peculiar old-fashioned way which makes allowances for both the supernatural and the foibles of humanity. He doesn’t employ the degree of rational deduction of G K Chesterton’s more famous Father Brown, but he does share a certain mild determination with that figure. And having introduced the protagonist, we should say a little more about the backdrop to the stories.

The Drained Land

The geography of the area is of direct relevance. Although Stanground is situated south of the River Nene, on relatively high ground, most of the Fenland lies within a few metres of sea level.

map showing the results of a one or two metre rise in sea level on the area, courtesy of http://flood.firetree.net/

The area originally consisted of fresh- or salt-water wetlands. These were artificially drained and have to be protected continually from floods by drainage banks and pumps. Stanground itself was not immune to flooding, as happened in the August of the same year as Swain’s collection was published. Swain wrote, concerning these events:

“It may well be that Vermuyden and the Dutchmen who drained the fens did good, and that it was interred with their bones. It is quite certain that they did evil and that it lives after them. The rivers, which theses men robbed of their water, have at length silted up, and the drainage of one tract of country is proving to have been achieved by the undraining of another.

“Places like Stoneground, which lie on the banks of these defrauded rivers, are now become helpless victims of Dutch engineering. The water which has lost its natural outlet, invades their lands… and a summer flood not infrequently destroys the whole produce of (the) ground.

“Such a flood, during an early year in the twentieth century, had been unusually disastrous to Stoneground…”

The Eastern Window

In The Richpins, Swain gives a fine picture of the area at its best, with regard to an area called ‘Frenchman’s Meadow’:

“It was upon the edge of what is known locally as ‘high land’; and though its elevation was not great, one could stand in the meadow and look seawards over many miles of flat country, once a waste of brackish water, now a great chess-board of fertile fields bounded by straight dykes of glistening water.”

Only a few miles from Stanground (now a suburban neighbourhood of Peterborough) lies Wicken Fen, one of the only ‘wild’ fens in East Anglia, although it has long been under human management. The first recorded sedge harvest at Wicken was in 1414, and ever since then, sedge has been regularly cut for roofing. The area is also notable for the history of Spinney Abbey, more properly Spinney Priory.

Beatrice, the grand-daughter of the Steward of the Count of Brittany, founded the Priory of St Mary and the Holy Cross in the spinney by Wicken in the early 1300s. The priory was first endowed with three canons of the Augustinian order. In 1403 the Prior, William de Lode, was murdered by three of his own canons who stabbed him in the priory church. Only the priory cellar and few fragments of the original buildings remain.

It may be the murder of de Lode which started legends of monkish ghosts being seen in the area. Some would say that the area is a supernatural hotspot. The bank nearby called Spinney Bank, for example, is a location notorious for sightings of the mythical ‘Old Shuck’, the demonic black dog of East Anglia. For our Northern equivalents to the Shuck, see game of groans and clanking chains

The Church of St John

St John’s church itself in Stanground was constructed some time in the 1200s and is the oldest building in the parish. The Lampass Cross, a 12th-century scheduled monument, stands in the churchyard, and is thought to date from the 11th or 12th century. It was originally in the vicarage gardens, and would have been in the latter position during Swain’s time.

These gardens are a constant presence in the stories – Bone to His Bone, one of the best tale, concerns a genuine predecessor, Vicar William Whitehead, who donated his own close of ground to these gardens. The real-life church is key as well, and even its glasswork has a role.

“The focal point of the interior is the impressive stained glass window at the east end of the chancel. This features Christ in majesty at the top, holding globes with hand raised in blessing. To either side he is flanked by his disciples, eleven of them depicted, along with Mary Magdalene. Below, we have scenes from the life of Christ. From left to right the infant Jesus lying in a manger, Jesus baptised by John The Baptist, the crucifixion, the last supper and the ascension.”

Rob’s Churches

Here is Mr Batchel’s typically deprecating take on this, which plays a crucial part in The Eastern Window:

“It is a large painted window, of a somewhat unfortunate period of execution. The drawing and colouring leave everything to be desired… The five large lights in the lower part are assigned to five scenes in the life of Our Lord, and the second of these, counting from the north, contains a bold erect figure of St John the Baptists, to whom the church is dedicated. It is this figure alone, of all those contained in the window, that is concerned in what we have to relate.”

The interconnection between fact and fiction is a constant in Swain’s ghost stories. He doesn’t go in for exploitation of the more macabre Fenland legends such as the Black Shuck, although he does include two tonsured figures in cassocks in his story The Place of Safety. He tends to choose rather smaller human stories, and eschews the viler apparitions of M R James. In The Richpins, for example, he draws on another genuine piece of history – Norman Cross.

Napoleonic Remains

Norman Cross was the site of the world’s first purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp or “depot” built during the Napoleonic Wars by the Navy. It was intended to provide humane confinement for prisoners of war, especially those who had limited means. The average prison population was about 5,500 men most of the men held in the prison were low-ranking soldiers and sailors, including midshipmen and junior officers, with a small number of privateers.

“Within five miles of Stoneground a large barracks had been erect for the custody of French prisoners during the war with Bonaparter. Many thousands were confined there during the years 1808-14. The prisoners were allowed to sell what articles they could make in the barracks; and many of them, upon their release, settled in the neighbourhood, where their descendants remain.”

The Richpins

Particularly pertinent to the tale is the fact that in Swain’s time, there were older folk still alive whose grandparents had witnessed the Napoleonic wars. The last British veteran of the Battle of Waterloo had died only 20 years before the publication of Stoneground Ghost Tales – Morris Shea (1795–1892), of the 73rd Foot Regiment.

The Richpins is a small reminder of that past, with a faint shiver included. As we said of Swain last year:

“His tales are not ones of loathsome horror, or doom to come. They include hauntings, but avoid being trite or overly romanticised. They… are of loss, longing and wistful souls, and all the better for it.”

Swain only ever wrote the nine tales. David G Rowlands did take up Mr Batchel’s cause and write another dozen or so stories of the vicar in the eighties and nineties. It’s a difficult task to capture quite the right tone of James and Swain, but some of them are certainly worth a read. Perhaps the best of these were included in Michael Cox’s Bone to His Bone collection for Equation in 1989. This is sadly long out of print, but old copies can still be found at a good price.

Anyway, there you have the Stoneground Ghost Tales – an essential read for enthusiasts of M R James, and of the gentler or more curious sort of ghost story. If you can’t find a second-hand copy, you can read all Swain’s stories at Project Gutenberg:

the stoneground ghost tales

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H P Lovecraft and the Lords of Venus

December 15, 2016 greydogtales 1 Comment

Did H P Lovecraft receive his concept of cosmic horror via astral transmission from the late Helena Blavatsky? Were E Hoffman Price and Talbot Mundy the reincarnations of Atlantean mystics? And what has this to do with an English plumber or with Edward Douglas Fawcett, one of the founding fathers of the Devon County Chess Association?

It’s the Fawcett Saga Part Two, dear listener, with lots of H P Lovecraft, some other writers of the weird and the Book of Dzyan again. And we have a rather nice slice of fiction, courtesy of today’s guest, Bobby Derie. Theosophy is once again our cue, and, by an odd coincidence, we are reminded of a piece of local history. Did you know that the world’s first Science Fiction Convention was held in 1937, Yorkshire? In our own city of Leeds, in fact – at the Theosophical Hall (hence the passing thought). We’ll tell you more about that some other time.

typical convention attendees in their bizarre costumes, 1937

Everybody loves books of forbidden knowledge and lost cities of the ancients. A week or so ago we began our latest saga, concerning the lives of two late Victorian/Edwardian brothers, Edward and Percy Fawcett. One of our many interests in the pair was Edward’s serious involvement in theosophy, which led us to the Book of Dzyan, mentioned in a couple of H P Lovecraft’s stories. We rattled on about this in Part One, so we won’t repeat ourselves ( the fawcett saga 1 ). What we didn’t provide is a definition of the linking school of beliefs, so we’ll amend that now:

“Theosophy is a collection of mystical and occultist philosophies concerning, or seeking direct knowledge of, the presumed mysteries of life and nature, particularly of the nature of divinity and the origin and purpose of the universe. Theosophy is considered part of Western esotericism, which believes that hidden knowledge or wisdom from the ancient past offers a path to enlightenment and salvation.”

Not long after writing Part One, we were talking about the whole caboodle to scholar and historian of weird literature, Bobby Derie.

The knowledgeable Mr Derie has often assisted greydogtales with quotes and curiosities related to some of those classic old-time writers – H P Lovecraft himself, Henry S Whitehead, Robert E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, for example. Most usefully, this time he kindly supplied some quotes on HPL’s familiarity with theosophical tomes. We’ll explain…

The world of Edwardian Arcane is littered with theosophists, and there’s no doubt that their works influenced weird fiction. Strong among theosophy themes were the concepts of ancient civilisations and phases of human development which you didn’t find in the history books, and these were rich material for writers throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

We should briefly mention the largely forgotten British adventure story writer Talbot Mundy (1879-1940), a fairly prolific writer who was once quite well-regarded – and certainly sold well. He was, yes, an active theosophist, a convert from Christian Science.

He deserves a nod not only because his Tros of Samothrace (1925) is a fond memory from our teens, but also because Robert E Howard, E Hoffman Price and Fritz Leiber all acknowledged that he had an influence on their writing. Amongst his many works are a couple of books, concerning The Most Reverend Lobsang Pun, known to all as ‘Old Ugly Face,’ a mystical monk of venerable age, who lives in Tibet, a magical land of forbidden places and secret mountain fastnesses. The Thunder Dragon’s Gate and Old Ugly Face are the books in question.

One of the repeated themes in theosophical writing is that much of their knowledge was supposedly dictated over the astral plane by various Hindu and Tibetan mystics. Which reminds us of another teenage influence, the works of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, wherein we learned of life in a Tibetan monastery and the secrets of the Third Eye. Excepting the fact that T Lobsang Rampa was actually an English plumber called Cyril Henry Hoskin. Cyril claimed that his body was inhabited by the spirit of the Tibetan lama, and that was how he received detailed information on growing up in a lamasery. Unlike Talbot Mundy, who had travelled extensively and been to the Orient, Hoskin never bothered to leave England for his own ‘Lobsang’ material.

When it comes to H P Lovecraft, whilst we doubt the direct link to any particular theosophical author, he certainly had access at various points to copies of their wilder tales. So what we will do is to give you a flavour of some of the connections, including quotes supplied by Mr Derie from relevant letters (quotes in order of date of letter). This is, of necessity, a skim over the material, our own main interest being the Edwardian Arcane side of the British connection, but it’s nice to see the inter-linkages.

One of the certainties is that HPL read William Scott-Elliot. An active theosophist, Scott-Eliot wrote two very pertinent books entitled The Story of Atlantis (1896) and The Lost Lemuria (1904), which were combined into a single volume in 1925.

I’ve also been digesting something of vast interest as background or source material—which has belatedly introduced me to a cycle of myth with which I have reason to believe you are particularly familiar—i.e., the Atlantis-Lemuria tales, as developed by modern occultists & the sophical charlatans. Really, some of these hints about the lost “City of the Golden Gates” & the shapeless monsters of archaic Lemuria are ineffably pregnant with fantastic suggestion; & I only wish I could get hold of more of the stuff. What I have read is The Story of Atlantis & the Lost Lemuria, by W. Scott-Elliot.

HPL to CAS, 17 Jun 1926

Scott-Elliot expanded on ideas from Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888), which, you’ll remember, was prepared for publication with the assistance of the older Fawcett brother, Henry Fawcett. Scott-Eliot drew on information which had come to a fellow-theosophist, Charles Webster Leadbeater, via astral transmission.

A Lord of Venus

charles_webster_leadbeater-007 — c w leadbeater

Leadbeater (1854-1934) returned from India in 1889 to live in England, and eventually lived at the London headquarters, and Scott-Elliot was an active member of the London Lodge. There seems little doubt that these two and Fawcett encountered each other.

Charles Leadbeater and later adherents of Theosophy such as Alice A. Bailey believed that a Lord of Venus, Sanat Kumara, descended from the etheric plane of the planet Venus to Earth 18,500,000 years ago. To many theosophists Venus, The ‘Planet of Love’, is the most spiritually advanced planet in the solar system. The beings living on the etheric plane of Venus are said to be hundreds of millions of years ahead of us in their spiritual evolution.

(We’re not here to knock anyone’s beliefs, only to explore weird literature. You can easily read more about Sanat Kumara from the point of followers online.)

And speaking of astral transmission or clairvoyance:

It is good to know that you liked this last story. As to that problem of transmission—well, it seems to me that the author has to be omniscient or nothing: though one might get the story out of the “astral records” (preserved somewhere in the ether, and accessible to adepts) which are mentioned in the literature of esoteric Buddhism! The tradition of Hyperborea, Mu and Atlantis were supposedly preserved in these records! […] I have never seen The Riddle of the Pacific, nor the book by Scott-Elliot either, and must find out if they are locally procurable.

CAS to HPL, 16 Nov 1930

Reference to the Book of Dzyan crops up later in the correspondence:

What you say of your new tale, and of the Pushkara-Plaksha-Kusha-Shâlmali-Mt. Wern-Senzar-Dzyan-Shamballah myth-cycle which you have dug up, interests me to fever heat; and I am tempted to overwhelm you with questions as to the source, provenance, general bearings, and bibliography of all this unknown legendry. Where did you find it? How can one get hold of it? What nation or region developed it? Why isn’t it mentioned in ordinary works on comparative folklore? What—if any—special cult (like the theosophist, who have concocted a picturesque tradition of Atlanteo-Lemurian elder world stuff, well summarised in a book by W. Scott-Elliott) cherishes it?

For gawd’s sake, yes—send along those notes, and I’m sure that Klarkash-Ton, High-Priest of Tsathoggua, would (unless he knows about the cycle in question, appreciate them as keenly as I. Incidentally—Klarkash-Ton tells me that his Semitic oracle de Casseres never heard of Zemargad. Tough luck! But the hint so strongly appeals to HIgh-Priest Klarkash that he is going to use the name Zemargad—in conjunction with more synthetic nomenclature—in his new and hellish conception, The Infernal Star. Meanwhile, as I said before, I’m quite on edge about that Dzyan-Shamballah stuff. The cosmic scope of it—Lords of Venus, and all that—sounds so especially and emphatically in my line!

HPL to E. Hoffmann Price, 15 Feb 1933

Please return the epistle, since I want to save those references to the Dzyan-Shamballah myth-cycle which Price has just uncovered. As you’ll see, this stuff looks decidedly interesting!

HPL to August Derleth, 16 Feb 1933

The Book of Dzyan was supposedly the source of sections of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. We noted last time the mention of Dzyan in The Diary of Alonzo Typer, by Lovecraft and William Lumley, and here again there is a nice reference in the letters:

Lumley is naturally in touch with all sorts of freak cults from Rosicrucians to Theosophists.

HPL to REH, 8 Jun 1932

The Soup of the Ancients

weird tales 1938, courtesy of will hart (cthulhuwho1) — weird tales 1938, courtesy of will hart

The author E Hoffman Price (1898-1988) was certainly fascinated by Eastern mysticism, though he became a Buddhist rather than a theosophist.

Price has lately come upon some genuine folklore closely resembling my pre-terrestrial Yog-Sothoth stuff—he promises particulars later.

HPL to Donald Wandrei, 17 Feb 1933

In the context of our trail, note that these latter quotes are from 1933, which is nearly seven years after H P Lovecraft wrote Call of Cthulhu, and five years after The Dunwich Horror. Lovecraft was already well along the road of his Yog-Sothery. It appears that HPL’s ideas fermented as part of a soup made from many different sources. We can see no direct ‘steal’ from theosophy, despite superficial connections. Theosophy has so many mystic strands that it would be hard not to bump against them at some point.

Price has dug up another cycle of actual folklore involving an allegedly primordial thing called The Book of Dzyan, which is supposed to contain all sorts of secrets of the Elder World before the sinking of Kusha (Atlantis) and Shâlmali (Lemuria). It is kept at the Holy City of Shamballah, and is regarded as the oldest book in the world—its language being Senzar (ancestor of Sanscrit), which was brought to earth 18,000,000 years ago by the Lords of Venus. I don’t know where E. Hoffmann got hold of this stuff, but it sounds damn good…

HPL to CAS, 18 Feb 1933

By the way—it turns out that Price’s mystical legendry was, after all, only the stuff promulgated by the theosophists—Besant, Leadbeater, &c. I thought it sounded like that. Do you know anything of the origin of that stuff? It pretends to be real folklore—at least in part (of India, I suppose)—but I have a certain sneaking suspicion that the theosophists themselves have interpolated a lot of dope. There are things which suggest a knowledge of certain 19th century conceptions.

HPL to August Derleth, c. 27 Feb 1933

A few days after, Clark Ashton Smith wrote to express his interest:

The Book of Dzyan is new to me—I haven’t read any great amount of theosophical literature. I’d be vastly interested in any dope you or Price can pass on to me. Theosophy, as far as I can gather, is a version of esoteric Yoga prepared for western consumption, so I dare say its legendry must have some sort of basis in ancient Oriental records. One can disregard the theosophy, and make good use of the stuff about elder continents, etc. I got my own ideas about Hyperborea, Poseidonis, etc., from such sources, and then turned my imagination loose.

CAS to HPL, 1 Mar 1933

That Besant, Leadbeater stuff originates undoubtedly from Indian folklore, though as you suspect, the English have unquestionably interpolated much material.

HPL to August Derleth, 6 Mar 1933

Leadbeater you know. Annie Besant (1847-1933) took over the Theosophical Society after Blavatsky’s death in 1891.

And here are the same theosophical folk again:

Another cycle of impressive-sounding folklore or pseudo-folklore is that sponsored by the modern theosophists. Some of this is undoubtedly genuine Hindoo myth, but I suspect that the cult of theosophists has mixed with it a great deal of synthetic fakery of 19th century origin. The best books of this sort of thing to read are the following:

Besant, Annie—The Pedigree of Man
Blavatsky, Helena—The Secret Doctrine
Leadbeater—The Inner Life
Scott-Elliot, W.—Atlantis & the Lost Lemuria
Sinnett, A. P.—Esoteric Buddhism

More of this stuff can be found in the catalogues of the Occult Society, 604 Locust St., Philadelphia, Pa. Those theosophical mystifications involved vast gulfs of time & cycles of change—pre-human aeons & life coming from other planets—not found in other folklore.

HPL to Natalie H. Wooley, 18 Jul 1933

There’s more of interest, but we’re out of space. We’ll end this part with a note which shows Lovecraft had not actually read The Secret Doctrine as late as 1936. He may never in fact have finished reading it.

Thanks, by the way, for the loan of the Blavatsky opus—which I shall read with the most intense interest. I’ve never read any of the classics of theosophy, though I’ve always been meaning to. I wonder if anybody has ever tried to isolate the real Oriental folklore in them from the 19th century fakery & interpolations? I may have fumbled the allusion to the Book of Dzyan, since all I know about it is something in a letter of Price’s which spoke of the early parts as having been brought from an older solar system than ours. Of course the text ridiculed in the Necronomicon is the merest imitation!

HPL to Henry Kuttner, 30 Nov 1936

Less than two months later, Arthur C Clarke and others gathered formally at the Theosophical Hall in Leeds for the first Science Fiction convention. Three and half months later, H P Lovecraft was dead.

We’ll return to the Fawcetts and many other tangled threads in Part Three of the Fawcett Saga, but to close we go to Bobby Derie. You may know him as the author of a rather fascinating book, Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos, which we mentioned a while ago ( cthulhu may not live here any more ), or as a regular commentator on Lovecraft, Robert E Howard and the others.

What you may not know is that he also writes rather neat short fiction, which he mostly keeps to himself. In the process of going theosophical, we came across a recent piece of his fiction which we thought deserved a more public airing. And here it is:

Babelech

by Bobby Derie

There had not always been a babelech, though none now lived that remembered the nights before it. It was the local bogey, complete with its own cave where the children were admonished never to play, though a few every generation dared each other on as the days started to shorten, and of winter nights mothers would threaten their kinder that they would be left out in the cold, where the babelech would come on its long thin legs and gobble them up.

Every child knew the babelech, and told the stories over and over, just as on dark Christmases by the fire the old men would smile and tell of “The Feast of the Babelech” – the great blizzard when the legend had full reign through the streets of the town, scratching at windows and doors, frightening cattle and horses, and parents would awaken at night to find only broken windows and empty, frost-coated cribs with a few gnawed bones, or stiff little fingers still clutching a rattle… a story told with much relish and in such gorey detail, in infinite variations as each teller tried to top the previous one, while the fire burned on into the night and the wind howled and shook the trees.

Children grow. Lovers unite; spouses are unfaithful; children are born in joy and sorrow, and taken by illness or accident or murder, leaving only the bereft and bloody-handed behind. The factory closes; the bills go unpaid; houses are reclaimed, lie vacant, their lots unkempt, windows boarded up, roofs sagging, rusting monsters on the lawn, some slowly being reclaimed by thorny vines and weeds. Feral things roam the night, root through trash, disappear down storm drains and into shadows. Hunger and want begin to creep in; illness and injury and arrest more common, the very punctuation of life. The very features of the people become marked by thinness, scars, unhealthy colors made all the more stark by poor decisions, garish attempts at escape, to reclaim some of the vital energy and joy of life once again.

Yet there was always the babelech – and there were stories that they did not tell the children.

Dierk’s boots crunched through the snow toward the babelech’s cave. It was, really, simply a kind of hollow created by glacial remnants – massive stones left behind by the retreating ice, so that one like a great shelf rested on top of two rounded, lichen-covered boulders; the whole thing half-buried in the hill, to form a kind of hollow. He rested as it came into sight, a darker shadow against the night. Pain lanced up from his midsection; it had been hurting all day – for days – and the junk had run out a long time ago.

Using the trees for support, he made his way up the steep path to the gap between the boulders – a path beaten hard by the feet of many adventurous little climbers, like Dierk himself, years ago. He paused at that entrance, breathing harder than he should have, sweating a little despite the chill, which set him chattering. Beyond the entrance, he knew, the floor dropped down a few feet. There was nothing in the hollow itself but earth and stone – no creature ever made its burrow there, as far as Dierk knew.

When they were kids, they had talked about how it would be full of bones…or maybe the scratchings of cave people, explorers, something. He remembered how he’d wanderd around almost blindly in the dark, a space not ten feet from one side to the other, and never saw so much as a candy wrapper or used condom, no names or declarations of love scratched or sprayed on the walls. A quite, unsullied place.

Dierk felt bad for a moment – not panic, exactly, but regret for…littering. He imagined the next child coming this way in the summer, finding the nasty clothes on the floor, and knowing someone had been there. He shook his head, then easing himself away from the entrance, he made his way to a broken stump, a natural witch’s cauldron, and began to disrobe. Frost bit into the pale flesh, the veins running through it like cheese, bringing up fancies of hidden colonies of blue fungus eating away at him from the inside, dissolving him with acid. With numb hands he covered the clothing with snow, then looked up at the clear sky. They would find them come March, probably, but not in the cave.

He lowered himself down into the hollow carefully. It was almost pleasant, out of the wind, though the cold earth seemed to suck the heat from his bones. Dierk’s hands and feet were already numb, though he didn’t think the frostbite had set in properly yet. It had been too long since he had been out in the snow…too long in hospitals with their wan artificial suns and cheerless antiseptic smiles; in alleys where dead-eyed drop-outs set the price on his “medicine”; in the empty house with its blaring television muted to a low roar…

In the cave, Dierk waited for the babelech to gobble him up.

There had not always been a babelech, though everyone in town knew it was there. Waiting for them. It was always hungry, the mothers whispered as they drew the covers tight, but it was patient. It waited for them, for all of them, and it would get them someday. That was the end of every story, of course. No one escaped the babelech.

You can obtain a copy of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos by Bobby Derie below. Despite the ‘adventurous cover’, it’s a nicely researched book and a great reference volume for H P Lovecraft enthusiasts.

sex-and-the-cthulhu-mythos-556111-MLB20478354464_112015-F sex and the cthulhu mythos, amazon

Next time on greydogtales – nothing about theosophy whatsoever. We promise. Maybe a nice picture of a doggie instead…

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The Name’s Ash. Benjamin Turn to Ash.

December 10, 2016 greydogtales Leave a comment

We usually say that our interviews are a pleasure. Our lawyer advises it. But this one really was. A delightful, extensive ramble with Benjamin Holesapple, editor and publisher of the new weird and horror fiction magazine Turn to Ash. Interesting thoughts for writers, readers and editors. The second issue is about to come out, so this seemed an ideal time to get with it…

old-radio-931432_960_720 — coming to you from a radio station somewhere in untamed ohio

“Uh… hello. Is that you? Is that Mr Leek? This is my first time calling, so I might not get it right. I’ve never used a phone before and I’m a little nervous. I found this one, you see, and it has so many buttons and lights that I almost gave up. I knew that you wanted to hear from me, though. That you’ve wanted to hear from me for a long time, even if you didn’t realise it.

“My name? Maybe… maybe we could come back to that. Let me wipe the front of this thing, it’s a bit sticky. I might have fibbed a little when I said I found it. I suppose you could say that I took it, but he didn’t want it any more, the man who was walking around the woods. He was bent up kind of odd, and he’d dropped it on the moss.

“I haven’t rung the police, no. I don’t want to talk to them, only to you. Please don’t think I’m strange, but I don’t like calling you Chuck. It seems disrespectful. Mr Leek is better, unless we got to know each other. I wish we could, but you’d have to come out here, and I’m not sure the others would like that…”

What’s that about? You’ll find out later.

An Interview with Mr Holesapple

greydog: Welcome to greydogtales, Benjamin. Great to have you here. Usually before we go into the burning topic of the day (Turn to Ash in this case), we like to know a bit about folk. So, what is a Benjamin when it comes down to it? A hard-bitten enthusiast of twisted transgressive fiction, a relaxed explorer of weird fantasy, or a lover of old-style pulp? Give us a quick picture.

Benjamin: I did that thing that I think a lot of people do: I grew up reading a ton of horror and other fantastic fiction, but around the time I started college, I decided that I needed to focus on the “serious” stuff. I left King, Barker, Jackson, Bradbury, HPL, etc. on the shelf for several years while I read primarily literary fiction and non-fiction. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties (I’m 35 now) that I started sniffing around horror fiction again, and stumbled into, first, Ligotti, and then Pugmire. From there, I was in a frenzy to catch up on everything I’d been missing.

So, while I’ve been a fan of horror and the weird for most of my life, I still feel like a bit of a neophyte, as it’s only been the last 7 years or so that I’ve re-immersed myself in the genre. Becoming reacquainted with horror fiction in the age of the internet has been overwhelming, to say the least. Not only do I have to catch up on all the good stuff that was being released in my 20’s, now I have ready access to all the stuff from the last hundred years or so that I didn’t even know existed in my previous incarnation as a reader of horror lit. That wasn’t a very quick picture. TL;DR version: I’m a tulip in a thunderstorm.

greydog: How did you get into the genre(s) right at the start? What were your introductory books, films, comics or whatever, the ones which really hooked you when you were younger?

Benjamin: I was a creepy kid. I don’t really recall ever not being interested in monsters. Creature from the Black Lagoon and Them! were on constant rotation throughout my childhood. I accidentally caught most of Hellraiser when I was about 7 or 8. My older sister and her friends were watching it, and I snuck a viewing in from the next room. There have not been too many days where I haven’t had a vision of ol’ skinless Frank dancing through my head ever since. At grade school book fairs, I stocked up on the Bunnicula and My Teacher is an Alien series. Corny little books, but they were indicative of what was to come.

I was also extremely interested in the “real life” weird at an early age, and checked out every book in the library on ghosts, UFOs, and cryptids again and again. I grew up about an hour north of Point Pleasant, WV, where the Mothman flap happened in the late 1960’s, and in the 80’s people in the area still discussed it as a matter of fact. In the 5^th grade, I read Something Wicked This Way Comes, and that really sealed the deal. By the following year, I’d read Christine and Salem’s Lot, and picked up a couple of the Del Rey paperback editions of Lovecraft. One of them, The Lurking Fear and Other Stories contained “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” which was, and probably still is, my favorite Lovecraft story. Man, all this reflecting on my childhood is going to save me a fortune in therapist’s bills.

greydog: That’s the sole purpose of this site, but don’t tell anyone. And when did all this coalesce into the idea for putting out a magazine?

Benjamin: From roughly 2004 to 2014, I ran a very small record label and recording studio with a good friend of mine. When he moved to Texas, we decided to fold the operation, and after a few months of trying to get used to enjoying all the free time I suddenly had, I started looking for other outlets in which to keep myself occupied and entertained.

Very briefly, I tried putting together amateur electronics kits, but I’ve always hated soldering things, as I tend to burn myself quite a bit. A friend and former bandmate and I had been discussing modern horror fiction, and he asked if he could send me something that he’d been working on. I said yes, and wound up making some notes on how I thought he could improve it, and after further discussion, I told him I’d publish it whenever he was finished if he wanted me to.

I’d spent ten years producing and selling records, so I thought “why not books?” I’m still waiting on that novella, but the idea to start publishing books started gnawing at me after our conversation. I was thinking about other things I could publish while waiting for my friend’s novella, and the idea of doing a zine really appealed to me. I’ve been collecting issues of Whispers and Crypt of Cthulhu for years, and I’m an avid follower of The Lovecraft eZine.

isfdb, cover - peter smith — isfdb, cover – peter smith

In January 2016, I settled on the idea of doing a zine in the style of Whispers, using the Lee Brown Coye tribute issue as my Bible. I’d been kicking names for the press around in my head for months. I wanted something that tangentially tied the endeavour to the punk/avant-whatever music scene I’d been a part of since I was a teen. “Turn to Ash” is the name of a song by the seminal 90’s Columbus, OH, punk band, Gaunt. They are one of my absolute favorite bands ever, and largely the reason I came to Columbus to make music in the first place.

“Turn to Ash” also happened to sound quite good as the title of a repository of dark fiction, so I ran with it. I registered the business name, the website, and recruited my friend and fantastic artist, Julian Dassai, to whip up a logo. In February, I put out the call for submissions, and at the end of August, Volumes 1 and 0 went live. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind year.

Turn to Ash Emerges

greydog: Turn to Ash 0 was a striking collection of stories, made available as part of your launch campaign. What was the thinking behind that?

Benjamin: Thanks! Volume 0 served a few key purposes. First and foremost, I had a glut of stories that I wanted to publish. When I put out the call for subs, I really didn’t think I’d get much of a response; maybe a few friends of friends, that kind of thing. In six weeks, I got just south of 500 fiction submissions. I didn’t want to overstuff the first issue, so I thought about the idea of doing a smaller, promotional issue.

I ran with that idea for a while, and was working on the layout for Vol. 0 while I was still doing edits and such for Vol. 1. I’d never done layout for so much as a pamphlet before, let alone a book, so I was able to learn a few valuable lessons working on Vol. 0 (from redoing it three times from scratch), and since it was a significantly smaller book, it didn’t cost me as much time redoing all the formatting as it would have if I had tackled Vol. 1 first.

Eventually, I decided instead of using it as a promotion for the first volume, I’d just include it as a bonus to the first 50 people who ordered Vol. 1, and kept it under wraps until ordering went live. People love their super limited edition stuff, so I thought it would be a good way to motivate buyers to try out a book from a brand new micropress. There are four original pieces of fiction in Vol. 0, and I really love them. That’s the only bummer about the limited-edition thing, those stories won’t be available anywhere else until they get collected or picked up for reprint in another publication.

greydog: This is a peculiar time for weird, horror and speculative magazines, in that so many new ones are being launched. Many of these are obviously a labour of love. Any idea as to why we’re suddenly in this publishing boom?

Benjamin: I think it’s a natural response to readership and authorship expanding in the genre. I think there is a strong DIY element in the community that’s mirrored in the punk, metal, and noise communities. In those communities, there’s a lifecycle that’s something like, “go see a band – ok, now go start a band – ok, so there are 5 new bands now, somebody start a label – ok, somebody bought your record/tape and came to your show, now they’re going to start a band – ok, somebody went to their show, and now they want to start a band, so now there are 10 new bands, somebody start another label…” and that kind of grows in that way until it can’t any more.

That blurring of the line between creator and consumer is one of the things that drew me to this community in the first place. I spoke earlier about finding W. H. Pugmire early on in my return to horror fiction, and he really personified that connection to the punk ethos for me. Obviously, you need a few more consumers than creators or the house falls down, and that’s my only worry with the recent explosion; that the ambition of those of us making these things will outpace the readership and many of us will fall flat on our faces. So far, so good, though, so I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts.

greydog: What was the most difficult part of the process of getting your magazine into print?

Benjamin: Thus far, Turn to Ash is a one-man operation, and there’s been a steep learning curve. I was somewhat familiar with Photoshop before I started doing this, but learning how to use InDesign and Illustrator was daunting. Making sure I’m staying communicative with my collaborators whilst doing all the other work has been tough, too. My memory is terrible. Spreadsheets are my friend.

greydog: And if you’ll excuse the marketing term, what would you say are the unique selling points of Turn to Ash? Its tone, its direction, or just a commitment to quality fiction? Do you see yourself as having some definable or indefinable difference to other new arrivals?

Benjamin: Well, I’d say since Travis Neisler has declared us bitter rivals, the most important thing to note is that Turn to Ash is not Ravenwood Quarterly. I kid, of course! We have the most courteous of bitter rivalries. I have the first two issues of Ravenwood, and I love them, and Travis is an excellent guy.

I would like to think that the range of fiction presented in Turn to Ash will become a hallmark. The weird is my bread and butter, but I am going to strive to include more fiction that lays outside those boundaries. Adrian Luden’s “Sod Webworms” from Vol. 1 is a good example of that. Nothing potentially supernatural going on there, just a good punch in the gut. I’m very lucky to have regular non-fiction columns from Jose Cruz and James Newman, too. They both do great stuff in very different realms, and I think they do a lot to elevate the zine. I hope that any future themed issues will continue to be very unique in theme and format.

greydog: For any writers reading this, is there a sentence (or two) which encapsulates what you want from them?

Benjamin: Dark fiction of any flavour with a strong, emotional resonance. Monsters are cool, too.

greydog: You began with print, but we understand that you’re considering an e-format version as well. Was that due to demand?

Benjamin: Yeah, I got a lot of feedback about that. The print edition will still be priority #1 for me, but I understand the way a lot of people read is changing, and I owe it to the authors to get their work in front as many eyeballs as I can. I will continue to try and incentivise the purchase of the print edition as best I can, and I’ll likely work on a way to sell the two in a package, but the e-book thing is another one of those steep learning curves that I’m in the middle of tackling right now.

greydog: Turn to Ash 2 will have a specific, and rather unusual, theme – the radio caller. Tell us a bit about Chuck Leek and where he came from.

Benjamin: Charles “Chuck” Leek and the town of Orion, Ohio have been bouncing around in my head in various incarnations for about four years now. The character obviously owes a great deal to Art Bell, whose Coast to Coast AM program I’ve been obsessed with since I was a teenager, but the initial idea was to have a town that existed in one of John Keel’s “window areas,” and a sort of paranormal news man who reported on the weird goings-on in town.

Late one night, working on Vol. 1, the idea occurred to me to have a selection of fiction modelled after one of the old Ghost to Ghost Halloween specials that Coast used to do. I returned to the idea of the paranormal news man, turned him into a talk show host whose name is a reference to both Charles Fort and John Keel, put Don Imus’ cowboy hat on his head, and we were off to the races.

Turn the Radio On

greydog: Great idea. Because we’re UK-based, we’ll ask a question we tried out on Matthew Bartlett and Tom Breen a while ago (see our mega double interview – tag team horror ). Local radio seems to be more influential in North America than over here, and comes up in a lot of US horror stories. What’s your take on that?

Benjamin: I appreciate you trying it out on Matthew and Tom first. This way, I know it’s not a cursed question or hex or something. There are already two canaries in this coal mine! I’m sure they probably gave better answers than I will, but I’ll drop my two cents and see if they bounce.

I don’t know if it’s at all the same in the UK, but just about anywhere in the US, a quick scan of the AM dial will yield a handful of staticky, barely-there transmissions – usually a fire-and-brimstone, old-time-religion sermon or someone shouting some kind of extreme political ideology. The airwaves are haunted with flickering, ephemeral ghosts shrieking strange gospels. It’s creepy stuff, and it makes you wonder what sort of lean-to or underground bunker these yahoos are broadcasting from, who, if anyone, is actually listening to this stuff, and if any of the parties involved have furniture made of human remains.

greydog: We sort of wish we’d grown up with that now. And you can show off some of the authors/pieces for Issue Two right here if you want to – give folk a taste of what they can expect.

Benjamin: The very first person I contacted about the issue was Jonathan Raab, author and imperator at Muzzleland Press. His Gonzo take on high-strange horror is perfect for the frame story in the issue – Chuck’s rather unusual night hosting his paranormal call-in show. The rest of the fiction is presented as calls from Chuck’s audience. I don’t want to give away too many specifics, but the stories hit a lot of the notes you’d expect if you’ve ever listened to Coast or any of the shows like it. Though many of the tales are far, far weirder than anything ever heard on late-night radio.

The line-up of “callers” includes Rebecca J. Allred, Joseph Bouthiette Jr, Evan Dicken, Kurt Fawver, Joanna Michal Hoyt, S. L. Edwards, Thomas Mavroudis, Betty Rocksteady, Joseph Pastula, A.P. Sessler, and Martin Rose. There’s also the aforementioned non-fiction pieces by Jose and James, and an interview with Matthew M. Bartlett by Gordon White.

greydog: Excellent. We have to ask about ‘Them!’ while we have you – you even brought it up yourself, earlier. Seminal, a highpoint in old cinema, a commentary of the risks of atomic power and lots of other good things, as far as we’re concerned. Are we right that you feel the same way about the film?

Benjamin: Absolutely. It’s near the high-water mark of the “atomic power run amok” genre in my mind, second only to Godzilla, and one of only a handful of 50’s creature features that still holds up pretty well today. The film has a quick pace, but manages to remain downright spooky in the first third, up to and including the bit where the until-then catatonic kid starts screaming “Them! Them!” when she smells the formic acid. I’ve always felt that Them! must’ve been a big influence on Cameron’s Aliens, from the queen alien, right down to Ripley going to town on the eggs with a flamethrower.

greydog: It’s a joy. It even features an early appearance by Leonard Nimoy (uncredited), for goodness sake! Finally, any ideas for Turn to Ash 3, or is that too far in the distance to contemplate?

Benjamin: I’m still busy putting the finishing touches on Turn to Ash Vol. 2, but once that is ready to ship (sometime in December) I’ll be open to submissions once again. I’ll put out the word in the usual places, and I’ll probably stay open until mid-February, with the goal to have the issue out by early spring. It’ll be another non-themed issue, like 0 or 1, and will probably land somewhere between the two in terms of the number of stories and page count. I already have two stories purchased for Vol. 3, and I’ll be looking for six or eight more.

greydog: Many thanks for joining us today and giving us the lowdown. We wish Turn to Ash great success.

Benjamin: Thanks for inviting me to hang out in the land of Lurchers!

You can find out more, and get hold of issues of Turn to Ash below:

www.turntosash.com

www.turntoash.storenvy.com

Next week on greydogtales, more stuff. More weird stuff, with the occasional added longdog. Do pop your email in top left if you want to be warned…

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Ghost Hunting at Hanging Rock

December 7, 2016 greydogtales Leave a comment

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.

61qdubjkk8l giving up the ghosts

Unfortunately, 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:

those who haunt ghosts

Hanging Rock

from the film, sbs — from the 1975 film, sbs

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.

aboriginal history of yarra

the hanging rock reserve, freeaussiestock.com

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:

murders ansible editions

We 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.

cf571ef2c226c2d06456697c853452a2_original holmes away from home vol one

Or 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.”

a study in grey uk

a study in grey us

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…

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M R James on Ghost Stories

The Drained Land

The Church of St John

Napoleonic Remains

A Lord of Venus

The Soup of the Ancients

Babelech

An Interview with Mr Holesapple

Turn to Ash Emerges

Turn the Radio On

A Multitude of Ghosts

Hanging Rock

The Wurundjeri

Hanging Rock Secrets

The greydog Writes

Literature, lurchers and life