Tag Archives: Ghost Fiction

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 Hellfire Files of Jules de Grandin

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Hellfire Files of Jules de Grandin [Amazon, Abebooks, Publisher, Local Library] by Seabury Quinn, see also The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin series.

Quinn The Hellfire Files of Jules de Grandin

This 1976 mass market paperback collects a half dozen of the ninety-three tales about occult detective Jules de Grandin. This set were all written for publication in Weird Tales from 1926 to 1933. Although all of these books by Seabury Quinn under the Popular Library imprint boast “SCIENCE FICTION” on the cover, they don’t conform to the genre as it is currently understood. They are pulp-era action stories in mundane settings. The “Hellfire” title here is reasonably apposite, since each story has something to do with diabolism or a nefarious cult.

One yarn is called “The Great God Pan,” and although it compares unfavorably to identically-titled stories by Arthur Machen (1894) and M. John Harrison (1988), it is still a palatable romp regarding a neo-pagan cult in the wilds of New Jersey. This one is actually the earliest included here, although it appears second.

Quinn, in the voice of de Grandin, supplies a little occult theorizing around the notion of “psychoplasm.” (A likely proximate source for the term and concept was the 1920 Adventures of a Modern Occultist by Oliver Bland.) The supernatural element in the stories is highly variable, and the final pair of tales furnishes an admirable contrast between “The Hand of Glory” where exorcism is the effective solution to thwart genuine demonic influence and “Mephistopheles and Company Ltd.” where sleuthing and physical combat overcome a criminal gang who use superstition and trickery to terrify their victims. Both stories, like nearly all of these, derive motivation from a young woman in peril. Quinn seems to have preferred such ladies to be tall, slender, and pale.

The selections here include both a vampire story and a werewolf story. The latter, “The Wolf of Saint Bonnot” was the basis for the Hugh Rankin cover art of its December 1930 issue of Weird Tales (scene on pages 125-6 of this book). “The Hand of Glory” inspired the July 1933 cover by Margaret Brundage (pages 174-5). Both covers were racy illustrations typical of their genre and era, and pretty accurate to Quinn’s text.

The book includes an appendix by editor Robert Weinberg that furnishes full biographical sketches of de Grandin and his amanuensis Dr. Trowbridge, as abstracted from Quinn’s stories. For readers new to the de Grandin material, it might be helpful to read this end matter before the stories. Steve Fabian’s map of Quinn’s fictional Harrisonville, New Jersey appears at the start of the book, but the printing is a little muddy and hard to read in my copy.

Ghost Story

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Ghost Story [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Peter Straub.

Straub Ghost Story

Ghost Story was Peter Straub’s breakout novel in 1979, and I remember seeing it in the “new” section of my local public library at the time. The publisher flogged it as a supernatural horror book with literary merit, and it was a fair boast. Straub was an admirable prose stylist, and his monsters have come a long way from their folklore and pulp origins. I found precursor comparanda in some of Seabury Quinn’s semi-traditional creatures and most especially Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You Think. Straub, who would eventually edit the two-volume American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny for Library of America, consciously adverts to his more literary antecedents Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, even going so far as to name two central characters Ricky Hawthorne and Sears James.

It’s a big book, with the storytelling heft of, say, a full season of the Stranger Things television horror drama. Like that show, it is multigenerational in scope, although Straub’s key ensemble is geriatric rather than adolescent. And Straub’s imagined town of Milburn, New York provides the Hawthorne-to-HPL New England sense of a lost frontier buried deep in the unconscious, rather than the vulnerable bucolic Midwestern sensibility of Hawkins, Indiana. All sorts of characters are powerfully drawn, with relationship tensions extending in every direction.

The body of the book provides several layers of background for the frame story focused on the horror novelist Don Wanderly. There is naturally some metafictional positioning that results, both from Wanderly’s metier and from the ghost-storytelling preoccupation of the Chowder Society, the clique of old friends around whom most of the novel is constructed. The climax takes place in late December, thus attaching the book to the English tradition of the Christmas ghost story, for which those of M.R. James are paragons. While there was less metafictional meat here than in Straub’s later book The Hellfire Club (i.e. Wanderly’s The Nightwatcher is neither so well-developed nor so pivotal to the story as Hugo Driver’s Night Journey), it still put a shine on the writing.

I have not yet seen the 1981 movie which was “loosely based” on the novel, but the book itself gives more than a little attention to cinema. Attorney Ricky Hawthorne is a movie aficionado given to describing people in terms of old screen icons, and he is friends with the proprietor of the local picture show. A key background character Eva Galli was a film actress, having appeared in a single silent film China Pearl (1925), and there is also important business involving a more recent actress Ann-Veronica Moore. The film of Ghost Story turned out to be the final screen appearance of Fred Astaire (in the role of Ricky Hawthorne), and Astaire is actually name-checked in the novel: “… Clark Gable in a bush jacket turning into Dan Duryea in a gangster’s nipped-in-suit turning into graceful, winning Fred Astaire in a Chowder Society tuxedo” (465).

My copy of this book is the first edition, which has a feature of interest extirpated from later re-issues. The chapter “Alma” (181-221) details Wanderly’s previous marital engagement during a brief university gig in Berkeley, California. By way of making the Alma character mysterious and creepy, Straub associated her with something presented as more dreadful than “California lunacy at its worst,” to wit: “O.T.O. … Ordo Templi Orientis … raw material for nightmares” (194-5). Some incidental details demonstrate that Straub’s awareness of O.T.O. was almost certainly based on press coverage of the Solar Lodge pretender organization. In any case, he never presents any specific characters or activities as being part of O.T.O., he just uses the allusion for nebulous menace. Since the actual O.T.O. was operating in Berkeley in 1979, they felt a bit slandered and reached out to Straub, who graciously apologized and made an edit for later printings to change the name to an occult order of his own invention: Xala Xalior Xiati.

The rich character development in this book is the feature that makes it most effective as supernatural horror, in my opinion. You can’t be very afraid for people you don’t care about. On the other hand, there are doubtless adrenaline junkies for whom the pace of this novel with its nested retrospection is just too slow to keep them engaged. (I’ve certainly read complaints to that effect online.) It continues to find a place in “best of” horror indices, and it deserves one.