Review: The Wine Dark Sea, Robert Aickman

Sometimes, it's all about synchronicity. Like how I was walking across town shortly after Time's Fool had been released when a nice local gentleman stops me, tells me he's read it and enjoyed it. Have I, he asks, ever read any Robert Aickman?
Who?
Wrote ghost stories. Apparently my work reminded him of it.  

And what should my excellent godparents have got me for Christmas this year but a copy of Aickman's The Wine Dark Sea? With such a lovely co-incidence in place, how could I resist reading it?

And reader, I must say, I am terribly flattered.

Aickman is nasty. Cold, a little detached, his writing is wonderfully chilling, creating quiet, horrible ghost stories with some moments of gorgeously dry observation cutting through it all. This is the real world, stifling and mundane, shot through with horror that is never lessened by explanation. This is not the vaulting, heartless skies of Lovecraft, this is an insiduous little curl of darkness in your very heart.

Of the collection, my favourites were probably The Fetch, and Never Visit Venice, just because... *shudder*. Perfect build of atmosphere against the gothic set pieces. Love it.

Look, alysdragon dot blogspot isn't a book reccomendation site, really, or a review blog, or even - as I'd once hoped it would be - a criticism blog, really it's just a place I come to write about books in whatever form I see fit. Normally, this takes the form of reviews because normally my response to reading is weighing the good and the bad of any given book and trying to work out who else might enjoy - even if I didn't. Sometimes, my emotions hijack me and I want to rave about something, or else throw it in to the firey pits of perdition. But occasionally, a book is simply mine. I'll read something and not want to judge it, or pull it to pieces, or even reccomend it. I just want to put it on my eternal reread shelf and stroke it occasionally because it is mine and I have just discovered it.

I could talk about Aickman's politics, or his prose, or my analysis of his stories, or the fact that he actually seems to like women and the surprising amount of lesbianism in this book, and I might do all of that when I get a chance. 

But for now I just want to say with credit to a local reader and to my godparents, I've just discovered Robert Aickman.

This book is mine.

Review: My Glass is Runn, Die Booth

Zombie stories I actually liked!

Okay, that isn't a review. Let's try again.

Die Booth's latest collection of short stories My Glass is Runn is a delightfully ambiguous mix of terror and tenderness. These are stories that are not afraid to look at the dark places, but are capable of remarkable grace, and it is in this tension that the collection works.

Take a story like 'The Ghost Bride' where a bereaved mother is haunted by a white clad apparition - the victim of a terrible crime. The sense of eireeness, of the uncanny, of the awful things one does for love are intense - but Booth never looses that human dimension, giving the denoumont it's power. These are tales that slip through cracks, offering different constructions on horror truisms, motivations that come at you from the left field. These twists of perspective can be used to offer a redemption, even a happy ending. Sometimes, they can throw you headlong in to the shockingly dark. Perhaps most unsettling, however, is when Booth decides to bring the two into ambiguous synthesis.

This is a collection that is wary of authority, or conventional success. It sides against parents, bosses, peers groups and urban life, in favour of more equitable, human connections, life lived on a smaller scale. There a real tenderness here, even in the most uncomfortable moments - a sense of outsiders tenuously clinging to one another, seeking some desperate relief. This is not to say there aren't some distinct and impressive scares - 'Don't Be Afraid of the Lights' is a glory of skin-crawling horror - but Booth deals in a quieter unease which I found remiscent of Kate Mos.

However, for all its strengths, My Glass is Runn is an uneven collection; many of the stories have previously been published elsewhere and some of the shorter examples have the abruptness I associate with a tight word cout. It isn't that they aren't perfectly satisfying ghost stories as they stand, it is only that compared to the longer pieces in the collection it becomes clear that they could could have done with a little more space to breathe.

Indeed, Booth's fiction seems more suited to a slightly longer tale - with the exception of 'Dust Bunnies', my favourites tended to be those where more time was allowed for character development and the slow build of terror. And, where this suceeds, it is sublime. 'Maketh the Man' is probably my favourite, and a nightmarishly intense look at infatuation and its consequences, but 'The Fourth Ape' is also a fantastic take Gothic, while 'To Be Heard' is a wonderful ghost story in the old style.

Also, zombie stories that I liked.

There really is an awful lot to love here. Booth balances the familiar ghost story form with a fresh and unconventional voice. Not only is My Glass is Runn a book to read - he is an author to watch.

Review: Pharos by Alice Thompson

I love this cover

What to make of Pharos, eh?

I picked this one up at my fabulous local library who have - I think - forgiven me for what I did to their Algernon Blackwood and are happy to let me borrow books again. And it's winter, so I want ghost stories and this one looked very interesting.

Yes. Yes, and it was. Set in the early years of the nineteenth century, Pharos is the story of a young woman shipwrecked upon the shore near a remote lighthouse. Having lost her memory, the keepers take her in, but her presence on the quiet island soon uncovers dreadful secrets and a terrible, haunting.

Thompson is a very skilful writer. Her use of ellipsis through the novel gives you bright glimspes in a way that clearly calls to mind the sweep of a lighthouse beam across a dark sea, the sudden bursts of comprehension in a mind darkened by amnesia, or (of course) the way the tellingly named Lucia shines into the dark places of the lighthouse itself. Other images are drawn through the novel in a way that is pleasing to untangle, creating a plot that moves slowly, that broods and builds in menace, that threatens wonderfully.

It's a novella of atmosphere, rather than character or narrative, and that was at once its weakness and its strength. It made wonderfully uneasy reading, but when examined its resolution was too simplistic. To my mind, the strength of a ghost story tends to reside in its enduring mystery, but Thompson ties down the twisting threads of the first two thirds of the book into a clear pattern of cause and effect. Yet, had she not done this, the earlier chapters would have drifted unmoored, beautiful to read but frustrating. Indeed, she ran rather close to this risk as it was.

At the same time, I appreciate it; a work of the Literary Gothic that does not hide away behind realism, but embraces the supernatural as an integral part of the form, and indeed the world. This is not a ghost story without a ghost, but rather a ghost story which uses the supernatural as its literary device to explore questions of knowledge, identity and culpability. In its literary qualifications it is excellently realised, my complaint would be with its somewhat heavy-handed resolution of the supernatural. So, yes. Very good, but no Woman in Black.

(And, as I won't post again until after the mince pie fest, Merry Yule!)

Please, tell me a ghost story

Oh, I do love ghost stories. The staple of my late childhood reading, if you count out Narnia and Diana Wynne Jones, were stories of revenants and warnings from beyond the grave, beginning with my Dad's copy of Tales of Mystery and Imagination (not the Edgar Allan Poe compilation of the same name, but a TV tie in to what I'm guessing is this series and a lifelong confusion regarding that particular title) and going from there.

But, you see, I wasn't just surrounded by adults willing to hand me totally inappropriate books, I grew up surrounded by a rich tradition of the oral ghost story. Family tales, polished by time and hyperbole; odd, unresolved fragments of 'something strange that happened to me'; weird co-incidences; Urban (or perhaps rural) legends; and of course the "I live in the middle of nowhere, and the best form of fun is to make up shit and terrify my friends."

I know hundreds, and most of them gained from that opening gambit, or a book passed to me in desperation upon hearing it. Just because I know them doesn't mean that I can tell them, but there are a few that I can. Many of them have never found their way into print, or if they have only as part of a compilation of real life ghost stories. Because that's the thing about ghost stories, once you encounter them. The best ones are true, or at the very least 'true'.

"My Grandmother, who was not a fanciful woman..."

Do you believe in ghosts?

We are always assured that the original teller does not. M.R James, master of the form, understood this. Ghost stories do not - or at least, should not - happen to believers. A credulous person cannot be trustedin these things. They will always jump to the most sensational conclusion. No. What you need is someone calmer, someone rational and a little sceptical. At the very furthest reach, we need an open mind, an 'I've not seen enough evidence to persuade me either way." In James' work, his narrator is usually taken in hand by a older acquaintance, wry or solemn, who is older, more experienced, and more comfortable with the truth in Hamlet's words, "There are more things..." Even the believers do so quietly, without fuss.

In our own tales, we are equally discriminating. Our source is always reliable. My Great-grandmother was not a fanciful woman, but... My friend, who doesn't believe any of this stuff... It's the classic urban legend source, two removes. It does not happen to you, the listener, or the one telling the story, but someone with whom they could have direct contact, their great aunt, their cousin's friend, their next-door-neighbour's mum. It is close enough that belief is conceivable but, ah, always just that little bit too far to check the facts.

First hand ghost stories, in my experience, are generally told ruthlessly, without embellishment. Unless there is a gap of many years, they are dropped in a way that makes telling them to someone else a bore, "Yes, but you did you notice that..." Perhaps it takes some distance to spin a proper tale around them.

So do you believe in ghosts? According to this article, which I read about two years ago (and got angry at), 38% of the population of Britain believe in ghosts. But of that 62% who ticked the 'no' box, how many of them love a good, scary tale? How many of them will, in he right conversation, divulge some curious little fragment of their own life, or a family recollection by which they will swear? How many of them are undecided? Asking someone if they believe is almost invariably a prelude to getting a tale, a much more effective way than my childhood efforts. "Well, no. I don't. But..."

Review: An English Ghost Story, Kim Newman

More in the mood of Jago than the Anno Dracula books, An English Ghost Story sees us returned to the West Country as the wonderfully named Naremores flee city life, attempting to escape the tensions and neuroses that almost destroyed them. Coming to the idyllic Hollow, they begin to rebuild their relationships, aided by the strange, magical atmosphere of the house. Yet, as they grow closer and more confident in their magical surroundings, things take a rather more sinister turn.
First things; this book is addictive. Newman is a master of pace, and An English Ghost Story has a real nightmarish intensity. It sneaks into your head, making a world both treacherous and real. What's more, as one would hope from the title, it is very English. The first 'movement' as the family discover and fall in love with the Hollow captured all the wonder and mystery of an ancient house, and succeeded in being distinctly eerie without ever being openly menacing or distractingly twee. For me, it recalled Lucy M Boston's Green Knowe series, where fear was balanced with magic, so that a child reader suffered anxiety as to the benevolent intentions of the house's other inhabitants,whilst feeling cared for and protected by the narrative - and indeed the house - itself. Newman taps into this vein of national consciousness, conveying the confidence which the protagonists have in their story, whilst our more adult awareness renders their hopefulness creepy in the extreme.

However, as the novel moves into its second and third phases this slow build of anxiety, this hat-tip to the traditional ghost story, is dispelled by Newman's trademark focus on characters, and the self-destructive tendencies of the human mind. The drama leaves the dream-house itself and refocuses upon the hell apparent in the human mind. This section has all of the strengths and weaknesses of Newman's work; his characters are alive, brilliantly realised and compelling. However, the text is at times difficult to follow, the sudden changes of mood and behaviour a little jarring. There is madness here, and it is powerfully portrayed, but sometimes off-putting.

As I would have expected it is also gloriously nasty. This is not going to be everybody's thing, but I found some laugh out loud moments, as well as a couple of sly jokes that were at once hilarious and devastating. Artfully gruesome, Newman takes no prisoners with either his prose or his themes. His characters are not especially likeable. They are (to quote another novel) strugglers rather than saints. Jordan is the best of the bunch, but she is still a teenage girl with all that entails. Speaking of characters, there is at least one familiar face - as I would expect - but in a much more minor role than in many of Newman's other cross-novel references.

If I had any major complaints, they would be structural. While it hangs together better than last year's Johnny Alucard and is more cohesive than Jago, the different sections of the book don't always gel perfectly, and the reader is at times bombarded by with information, subjectivity and events. Things leap and lurch in places, the p.o.v. and narrative focus shifting as often as the territory inside the characters' minds. I feel like I need to give it a careful rereading, which for me is a plus, but might be annoying for others. The ending, which obviously I won't spoil, left me uneasy - but I'm not entirely sure as to why.

Generally, though, yes. A quick, affecting and occasionally vicious novel about the flexibility of identity, about the roles we play and the ways they can control and destroy us. A fabulous read for Hallowe'en - just as I expected it to be.