Tag Archives: English Ghost Stories

Dark Company

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Dark Company: The Ten Greatest Ghost Stories [Amazon, Abebooks, Author, Local Library] ed and introduction by Lincoln Child, with stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Henry James, M R James, W W Jacobs, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Oliver Onions, William Hope Hodgson, and H P Lovecraft.

Child Dark Company

I picked up this collection from the local public library in order to read Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night.” Since I had already read half of the contents under other covers, I decided to go ahead and finish the remaining ones. Dark Company is a sort of “best of the best” anthology. Although the subtitle boasts “Greatest Ghost Stories,” the selection really ranges across supernatural horror, regardless of ghosts. 

Editor Lincoln Child identifies probably the ten most lauded American and English authors of the genre from the 19th through the early 20th century, and then offers a “best” story from each. Many of these are obvious: Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” Machen’s “Great God Pan,” and Blackwood’s “The Willows,” for example. The stories are arranged in some sort of chronological sequence. In each case, Child gives the birth and death dates of the author, but he omits the (to me) more relevant and interesting date of the first publication of the story in question. A one-paragraph introduction to each story characterizes the author and gestures at situating the story in his oeuvre. 

The Hodgson is a remarkably brief and effective piece, notable for the naturalism of its horror, along with a certain shocking perversity of the outcome. After that, I was most interested to read “The Green Tea” by Sheridan Le Fanu and “The Beckoning Fair One” by Oliver Onions, two esteemed authors that I hadn’t yet read. In the case of the former, my cinematically-educated mind couldn’t help but picture the protagonist Dr. Hesselius as Peter Cushing, with Christopher Lee as the Rev. Mr. Jennings. The Onions story starts off in a somewhat Machen-like mode, but the final result is comparable to the blackest work of H. Russell Wakefield (an author who could easily have been the eleventh of this company).

The Lovecraft selection that concludes the book is “The Shadow Out of Time,” a perfectly representative piece to exhibit some of the features that make HPL distinctive, but not often held up as his best. In this case, Child’s introduction to the book and his preamble to the story both exhibit a Derlethian emphasis on the “Cthulhu Mythos” as a carefully-programmed system — a forgivable critical error in 1984, I suppose.

As a library book giving access to the canon of supernatural horror, Dark Company fulfills its task quite economically, in contrast to the short-fiction omnibi that now seem to be the vogue. It is possible to create a satisfying volume out of just ten stories, rather than fifty!

Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by M. R. James, ed Michael Cox, part of the Oxford World’s Classics series.

James Casting the Runes

M.R. James is an acknowledged master of the form of the modern ghost story, and this volume collects a sizeable number of his best. These are stories for the telling, effectively calculated to disturb their hearers, and they mix the aims of entertainment and (I hesitantly suggest) initiation after the fashion of a spookhouse event. 

All of these tales are set in England, and the Englishness of them is pervasive. The narrators and most of the central characters share the well-off intellectual background of James himself, and the texts actually inhabit an impressively narrow cultural spectrum. And yet there is a fair amount of variety to the ways in which James can scare you. He never makes the error of providing too much detail, and he is very efficient in leaving inessential issues undefined, and even critical ones ambiguous, when that won’t undermine the chilling effect.

James was an author favored by H.P. Lovecraft, and he also seems to have been read by Thelemic magician Jack Parsons, whose notion of “the Black Pilgrimage” evidently derives from the story “Count Magnus” included here. The title story “Casting the Runes” (1911) has so many points of similarity to H.R. Wakefield’s “He cometh and he passeth by…” (1928), that I suspect Wakefield of using James as a model there. (Wakefield also used Aleister Crowley as a model for the villain of “He cometh…” and it is just possible that James’s Karswell in “Casting the Runes” is also predicated on Crowley, although with much less supporting detail.)

The edition I read was the 2002 Oxford World’s Classics reissue in hardback (checked out from my public library). It is a delightfully portable little tome, considering how much material it contains, and it boasts a new introduction by Michael Chabon, which is full of interesting observations on James’s biography and the role of the ghost story in Western literature. But the edition had one drawback. Beyond the author’s own occasional numbered footnotes (supplementary explanations in his narrative mode of a friendly scholar) the book is full of asterisks, usually after proper names and geographic references, suggesting that it once included a further apparatus of editorial annotation. The corresponding notes are absent from this edition, however, and the vestigial reference marks are — considering the general mood of the writing — a little unnerving.

The Best Ghost Stories of H Russell Wakefield

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield [Amazon, Local Library] by H Russell Wakefield, ed Richard Dalby.

Wakefield The Best Ghost Stories

This collection of Wakefield’s stories is very good. Although there is a slightly larger range of supernatural horror than might be suggested by the title’s category of “ghost stories,” most are in fact about spectral hauntings and the effects of genii locorum — always malign. “The Red Lodge” and “Blind Man’s Buff” are, for example, almost painfully traditional haunted house tales in terms of plot, but told with great skill and effect. Wakefield’s curses and ghosts are never exorcised; at best (and that rarely), the living characters manage to flee and escape their further influence.

A couple of the stories are concerned with sport. “The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster” drew on the author’s own long-term enjoyment of golf, and is in many ways a solid example of his work in the ghost story genre. As usual, the origin and nature of the spirits are much murkier than their effects. “Professor Pownall’s Oversight” is a chessghost story, and not only a good one, but perhaps the best chess ghost story possible.

Another notable feature is in the two stories featuring characters modeled on the magus Aleister Crowley. In “He cometh and he passeth by …” Crowley is made over into the homicidal sorcerer Oscar Clinton, while in “A Black Solitude” Apuleius Charlton is based on an older and more benign Beast: “He was sixty odd at this time and very well preserved in spite of his hard boozing, addiction to drugs and sexual fervour, for it was alleged that joy-maidens or temple-slaves were well represented in his mystic entourage. (If I were a Merlin, they would be in mine!)” (128)

The stories are a rough mix between those in which evildoers meet some justified comeuppance, and others where the supernatural afflicts characters merely mediocre or already cursed with unusual talent. In several cases, there are both, or it is left to the reader to judge which of these categories applies. Wakefield’s work had the admiration of M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft alike, and it is easy to see why.