Night Time Logic: Interview with Cemetery Dance

I've been interviewed by the weird fiction author Daniel Baum as part of his Night Time Logic column over on Cemetery Dance. Daniel and I share a love of Robert Aickman, so the interview inevitably touches on that, strange stories in general, and my recent anthology from Hersham Horror, Ebb Tides

You can read it here.

Ebb Tides: UK | US

Hallowe'en Horrors

I'll be appearing at the Hallowe'en Horrors event at the Derby Quad on October 30th, running a workshop  on writing weird, strange, off-beat, and creepy fiction. Details and a link to get tickets are below:

Join us for the first part of a very special day of horror writing, with five workshop sessions looking at a wide range of aspects of the genre! QUAD’s Literature Officer Alex Davis will be your host throughout, and will be joined by acclaimed authors Sophie Draper, James Everington and Angeline Trevena for an exciting day of dark inspiration, imagination and information!

3:30pm-4:30pm: James Everington – The uncanny: making the everyday seem strange in fiction

Anyone can make a werewolf or spectre sound scary, but how do writers approach more mundane horrors? This workshop will focus on picking out those details in apparently innocuous, everyday situations and making them seem just that little bit ‘off'. Perfect for making your readers uneasy without them knowing quite why….

Further details & tickets here.

Guest Post: The Strange Stories of Marie Luise Kaschnitz by Tilman Breitkreuz

Today's post comes courtesy of Tilman Breitkreuz, who emailed me after reading the Strange Stories piece I wrote about Joanna Russ's The Little Dirty Girl, to ask me if I'd ever heard of a German author called Marie Luise Kaschnitz; I had to confess I hadn't, and after a few emails back and forth Tilam agreed to write me a piece about her work for this blog. Her stories sound fascinating (I hope not just to me but other readers of this blog) and although difficult to find in English translation there are copies out there.

Thanks to the author for this wonderful piece and for drawing my attention to a new author of the strange..


The Strange Stories of Marie Luise Kaschnitz
An elderly couple imposes a blackout on their home because they are afraid that their adopted son and his street gang might come and kill them (Thaw). Realizing that she has literally lost all feelings, a woman sets herself on fire (Die Fuesse im Feuer). A young man takes part in a superstitious ritual and evokes a malevolent homunculus (Der Tunsch). On the face of it, it is hard to imagine why Marie Luise Kaschnitz once stated that she wanted to express "commiseration with people…"

Born into a family of high nobility and a military background in 1901, Marie Luise Kaschnitz did not rise to fame until the 1950s. While these years are often glorified on account of an economic boom and a regain of confidence, Kaschnitz shows them in a different light: despite their relative security and comfort, her characters seem to be wedged between a guilty and traumatic past and an impending doom in the future (sometimes identified as the nuclear threat).

Like Flannery O´Connor, who wrote her classic stories in the same era, Kaschnitz often implies supernatural elements in order to confront her protagonists with crucial questions and unwelcome answers. But it is not these supernatural features, usually adopted from myths or folk lore, that make her stories worth reading. Using a sober style of writing comparable to Dino Buzzati (with whom she shared the experience of having to live in a totalitarian state) and shy of graphic content, Kaschnitz's central point is not about conjuring a supernatural apparition (maybe that is why her only classic ghost story - bluntly entitled Ghosts - turns out somewhat flat). Wraiths (like in Polar Bears) and demons only serve to reveal a state of general uneasiness, some sort of gloomy detente based on knowing that what has happened to others might as well happen to you. Remedies are scarce. In one of Marie Luise Kaschnitz's strongest pieces the ghost of a woman painter who starved herself to death lets us know that human existence is inevitably tragic and therefore happiness can only be found in tragedy (Zu irgendeiner Zeit). This approach - probably based on Schopenhauer's philosophy instead of rive-gauche-existentialism - resonated with a large audience. So did the accessibility of her prose and Marie Luise Kaschnitz became sort of a household name in Germany.

English-language collections of Marie Luise Kaschnitz´ stories usually feature her own favorite Das dicke Kind (The Fat Girl). The caterpillar-like stranger who invades the life of a single woman (note the similarity to Truman Capotes Miriam) is too ugly to be pitied and only provokes the narrators contempt and curiosity. When the two of them go ice-skating the fat girl becomes a menace first and finally she isn't a stranger any more. There is a striking resemblance to Joanna Russ's The Little Dirty Girl. The bottom line in both The Black Lake and Musical Chairs is that certain conditions require a human sacrifice. Kaschnitz's interest in Greek myths and rites of passage resounds in Home Alone when a young boy finds out that his parents have thrown away his shabby toys (one of them being a toy SA-man) because they think he has outgrown playing with them. He finally agrees - and ignites the gas stove trying to find out if he might talk to the flames like he once talked to his toys. Other non-supernatural stories of note are the aforementioned Thaw and Christine, a grim piece told from the perspective of a woman who once urged her husband not to interfere when a criminally insane man killed a little girl.

In Street Lamps we find the supernatural competing with the horrors of reality. A teenager who has always been eager to do heroic deeds without actually being noticed learns a strange trick that controls other peoples minds. When he challenges the most powerful mind controller of his times (whose name is not mentioned because it is obvious), he fails and later lives a bleak and unhappy life trying to make up for his mistake. In the end we find him a soldier, dying on the pavement somewhere in Russia. Realizing what has gone wrong he has finally found peace as well as freedom but both seem to equal death.

A swim in the Mediterranean sea takes a wrong turn in A Noon Hour In Mid-June while back home an uncanny stranger calls at the neighbour's door. Marie Luise Kaschnitz´s own fate somehow resembled this story. In the fall of 1974 she over exhausted herself swimming in the cold Mediterranean sea, caught pneumonia and died in Rome on the 10th of October 1974.

Some of her work might seem dated and some readers might wish for more action. But those who would like to explore the frailer parts of the human condition could do worse than look into what Marie Luise Kaschnitz has to offer.

Strange Story #22: The Graveyard Reader by Theodore Sturgeon (Guest Post by Anthony Cowin)

Strange Story #21: The Graveyard Reader

Author: Theodore Sturgeon

Anthologised In: The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology

JE: Another guest post on an author's favourite 'strange story'; this time Anthony Cowin talks about a Theodore Sturgeon. Anthony's own damn fine strange story, is available now. 

Take it away, Anthony:

I was a fan of Theodore Sturgeon years before I even knew he existed. What I mean is I’d enjoyed some of adapted work when I was a kid from his original Star Trek scripts to the classic B-movie Killdozer. I’d read a few of his short stories in anthologies over the years too without registering his name. I never used to check on author names when I was younger. I just assumed these were one off, long dead writers who didn’t need investigation. When people would discover my love for genre fiction they’d often tell me to check out Sturgeon. “But I don’t like sci-fi” I’d say. They’d look at my shelf with Vonnegut, Clarke, Boulle, Robert J. Sawyer, Matheson, Philip K. Dick, Bradbury, Jack Finney and raise a weary eyebrow. I thought Science fiction was about new worlds, huge spaceships and invented languages I couldn’t be bothered to read, all packaged in paperbacks with colourful worlds and sexy aliens on the covers.

Then one day I picked up a handful of tattered anthologies from a local charity shop. The stand out book was The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology that contained one story in particular that blew me away. It was The Graveyard Reader by Theodore Sturgeon.

The story lives beneath the words, almost hidden. I don’t mean it’s vague or trying to be self-consciously obscure, just that it runs deeper than what you see on the page. Like the silence between the notes of a powerful Requiem. It’s also a story about language. It examines how we use language, the way we absorb it and how people have their own grammar.

Sturgeon makes us question the quantity of truth we allow ourselves to tell. How retelling can make lies from truth, or elevate monsters into saints. Graveyard reading gives everything. It never subtracts from the truth, it shows without exception however uncomfortable.

The Graveyard Reader is also a story of anger. The anger born from betrayal. A poisonous rage that curls nettles around the heart until the only beat is an echo of love. The story is a simple one. A man tending the grave of his dead wife, a wife who he discovered through her death was cheating on him. Her headstone remains unmarked; all he feels are the flint spark words cut in his own stone heart. During this ceremony of weeding and tending the newly dug plot, that seems designed purely to purge his anger and assuage his dented pride, he encounters a stranger. A man who claims he’s to be a graveyard reader.

The man teaches him how to read the fall of leaves, the turn of soil, how shadows cast across the grave tells a story. Every element from rain to the blaze of sunshine reveals more secrets. It’s an atavistic language of symbols and definitions. How two sticks lay across each other will reveal how the person loved in life, or a snowflake that melts slowly may unveil hidden secrets they kept from loved ones for example.

After a year the widower masters the language and reads the story of his wife. The nuances of the symbols tell him everything he wanted to know, perhaps too much. What he does with this information is astounding, a final act that will surprise you. Sturgeon gives the reader a real cutting ending, a stone cutting ending you may say.

The Graveyard Reader had a enormous influence on my own writing and the stories I seek out. I like to add layers to my stories that need digging out. I plant flowers throughout my plots that look like nettles on closer inspection. I use symbolism, though not to seem clever or abstruse, I use it to add richness to my stories. These usually come naturally and I often only discover them myself after finishing. I hope I add those tones between the notes, the whispered timbre in the silence between words. All of these aspects I took from Sturgeon’s strange tale The Graveyard Reader. Mostly I hope the lesson I took from Sturgeon and The Graveyard Reader in particular is that emotion is as vital to a story as any other component. But the real emotions should never be revealed too early, let them hide behind the opposite feelings for a while.

Strange Story #21: Mortmain (Guest Post by MR Cosby)

Strange Story #21: Mortmain

Author: John 'Jack' Metcalfe

Collected In: Nightmare Jack & Other Tales

JE: Some time ago I was thinking about resurrecting the Strange Stories column with a series of guest posts. Unfortunately only one person ever actually completed a piece for me & so I forgot about the idea. Having just remembered that I never posted this piece by Martin Cosby I've posted it now... If anyone reading this has a strange story they'd like to write about on here, do get in touch. 

Martin's début collection, Dying Embers, is out now. So without further ado....

John Metcalfe, often known as 'Jack', lived a life as strange and enigmatic as many of his tales. Married to the manic-depressive novelist Evelyn Scott, they led an unlikely, globe-trotting and nomadic existence, until poverty and bad health intervened. Both their literary reputations declined over their years together; and after Evelyn's death, Metcalfe was left penniless and reliant upon the charity of friends until a fall led to his demise.

Nonetheless, in the midst of such a turbulent life he managed to write a number of novels which, despite critical acclaim and commercial success, have since disappeared without trace; and several collections of short stories, which almost managed the same fate. Luckily, Ash-Tree Press produced Nightmare Jack and other Stories in the late-1990s, thereby bringing his little-known short fiction back to print.

His best-known tale must be Nightmare Jack, famously judged by Robert Aickman to be "one of the finest supernatural tales in English literature", and included in his second Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1966). Of similar stature are the much-anthologised Brenner's Boy, The Double Admiral, and The Bad Lands. All are masterpieces of creeping dread, creating both disturbing imagery and a cumulative sense of unease.

Mortmain (first published in his collection Judas in 1931) is typical of his best work and is surely influential; it's not just the subject matter that recalls Elizabeth Jane Howard's Three Miles Up from two decades later.

It starts as it means to go on. "In the cabin the rescued girl Salome, now his wife, was washing up the plates from supper." This juxtaposition of the intriguing alongside the everyday sums up the story. John Temple is on a boating holiday with his new wife, the recently widowed Salome; and despite both their best intentions, shadows of her previous marriage loom ever larger as the trip progresses. To begin with, the spectre of Salome's late husband Humphrey Child is embodied by the house they shared. 

"It must have stood within his view a quarter of an hour before he noticed it. From Penny Mile they had come dropping through the windless evening with the falling tide, and it had crept upon him unawares."

They leave the house behind, and make their way along the river. On the face of it, nothing could be more relaxing and familiar than the peaceful, easy rhythm of nature on the Hampshire coast, so familiar to them both. In contrast with this, however, is the rising sense of unease created by repeated sightings of what may or may not be the ghost of Humphrey Child's boat; a 'prestidigitating, pestilential hulk'. At first Temple tries to ignore the apparition, half-seen on distant moorings, hoping that his wife has not noticed its brooding presence. However, he soon realises that despite it being impossible, it cannot be ignored; and that Salome has been seeing it too, in fact more frequently than he.

By this time Salome's health seems to be deteriorating and Temple's state of mind is worsening. Nonetheless, she insists upon them persevering with their trip, and during the second week the sightings of Child's boat increase in frequency, getting relentlessly closer. Then, the encounters with the moths begin; and there can be no denying they are venturing recklessly into the land of the dead. Indeed, Temple's realisation that Salome's cannot resist the lure of Child's attraction from beyond the grave comes far too late. Is it too late for Temple too? 

I won't spoil the ending, but suffice to say the climax of this story is a triumph of the ambiguous story form, and must also be a pretty early example of such. As with most of Metcalfe's work, Mortmain is graced with economical yet beautiful descriptions of the featured landscape, under which lurks a more forbidding and at times frightening side to the natural world. The power comes from when and how this nether world bubbles to the surface.

Strange Hotels

I've been thinking for a while about why so many horror stories seem to be set in hotels or hotel rooms. Some of these stories, of course, are just using a hotel as a version of the haunted house, which I'm not really talking about here. Rather, I'm talking about such stories of shifting identity as Nicholas Royle's The Reunion, Hannah Kate's Great Rates, Central Location, Ramsey Campbell's Double Room... and even parts of The Shining. (And I’d be lying if I said I wasn't also thinking about my own The Other Room, and to a lesser extent The Time Of Their Lives from Falling Over.) Each of these stories seems to share a number of similar ideas and tropes: there are seemingly multiple version of the same character, overlapping timelines, and hotels with layouts that don’t make sense. (They’re all excellent, too.) But why are hotels such fertile settings for twisted weird tales like these, when staying away from home is normally considered a luxury?

 You’re Outside Of Your Comfort Zone: firstly, of course, when you stay at a hotel you’re in an environment outside of the one you know best. And within that environment you might be doing some fairly intimate things like sleeping or shitting or... well, you get the picture. All somewhere where the dimensions of the room aren't as you are used to, where the duvet feels heavier atop you than you’d like, and the pictures and mirrors aren't in the places you’d choose. (Of course, in the Other Room there are no mirrors at all.) And the sight outside their window isn't even your home town.

 

You’re Alone: in a few of these stories you’re not a part of a family or couples, but a lone business-person or someone else who has a reason to stay in a hotel on their own. (For a fiction convention, maybe...) There’s the boredom of sitting in your room watching TV alone, drinking alone and eating alone, despite the fact there might be others watching you do so, who seem equally alone. Which brings us to:

You’re Not Alone: there's the staff of course, and the other guests. Strange faces at the breakfast table; disturbing sounds through the adjoining wall. People you have to stand too close to in the lift. They could be anyone. But then also:

You Could Be Anyone: and this I think is the key to a lot of it. Staying alone, in a city you've never been to before and don’t plan to return to, you can be anyone. Or at least, that’s the fantasy. Slip off your wedding ring (or slip a different one on…),  drink more than you normally would, say things you’d never normally say to people you would normally not dare speak to. Somehow it all seems more permissible than at other times, it seems like there is less consequence to the things you do…

But in that, these stories seem to tell you, you are horribly wrong.

I’d be interested to hear about any other hotel-horror stories you can think of in the comments. Surely there’s a themed  anthology or two along these lines as well?

Review: Night Voices - Robert Aickman

I've not reviewed any Robert Aickman books on this blog before, despite how much I admire his writing. The final Tartarus Press reissue of his work is a fine time to rectify that. Night Voices was originally published as a posthumous collection which gathered together Aickman stories not available elsewhere. This lovely Tartarus edition omits The Trains (which they reprinted elsewhere) but adds the novella The Model, a selection of Aickman's non-fiction writing, and Robert Remembered by Ramsey Campbell - a nice tribute.

It starts brilliantly - The Stains is a classic Aickman story, with his trademark slow build, exquisite prose, and tantalising symbolism. That sense that more is being implied that is said. It's a showcase of Aickman's ability to delineate a realistic, English setting and characters but yet evoke a faint, surreal sense of disquiet. I don't want to spoil the plot, but I will say the stains themselves are one of Aickman's more hideous little touches.

Just A Song At Twilight is almost as good; a shorter tale with an ending that took me by surprise. I like the fact that Aickman can still surprise me; that I don't yet know all his tricks and techniques. This is the first one I'll reread, seeking out all those tantalising Aickman details...

After that strong start, I have to say the rest of the short stories were definitely second-rate (the presence of The Trains is missed). Aickman, even second-rate Aickman, is always worth reading and his prose is always a pleasure, but I found Laura a somewhat derivative retelling of a common supernatural trope, and I must confess that all I took from a Rosamund's Bower was a sort of pleasurable bafflement. Mark Ingestre: A Customer's Tale is better, another of Aickman's patented 'strange stories' but not quite first-rate, covering themes Aickman did better in  his masterly The Swords. Nevertheless it's a suggestive tale and the historical setting is a nice change.

The novella The Model is an interesting read, but nothing like Aickman's other fiction, being a picaresque tale set in pre-revolutionary Russia, about a young girl who wants to be a ballerina. It's not a realistic piece, having a dream-like, fairytale atmosphere. It was a lovely journey, but I can't say I felt I actually arrived anywhere.

The non-fiction section of the book largely consists of Aickman's series of introductions to the Fontana Book Of Great Ghost Stories series, which he edited. Taken together, they form a virtual manifesto of the ghost story, which Aickman is at great pains to distinguish from the horror story. Although I disagree with a lot of what he says, the manifestos of geniuses are always fascinating. Suggestive ideas abound; I will quote just one:

"I should like to suggest that the now the word 'ghost' should be seen more as the German geist: that ghost stories should be concerned not with appearance and consistency, but with the spirit behind the appearance..."  

These essays are full of such gems, and any writers of horror (sorry, Robert!) are certain to find much to think over, much inspiration.

Overall, this book is like one of those rarities albums bands release when they're no longer together - interesting to the fans and obsessives, but hardly the best place to start for someone new. Night Voices contains much of Aickman's brilliance but, for this reader, some misfires and duds as well . If you're new to Aickman, start with Cold Hand In Mine or Dark Entries. But if you're already under his spell, you'll find nothing in this volume to break that spell; Aickman was one of the best there's ever been, it's simple as that.

Robert Aickman Word Clouds

So, I've been participating in a fabulous group read of The Wine Dark Sea by Robert Aickman - no need to explain to regular readers how much I admire Aickman's stories, I'm sure I've banged on about him often enough...

Anyway, I wanted to do a post about some of the stories in the book, and I've decided to do something a bit different. Because reading Aickman is so subjective I'd hesitate to offer my interpretation of one of his stories as definitive; so (with their permission) I've decided to use other people's words from the group read to create these 'word-clouds' for the title story and for The Trains. The phrases are just ones that struck me from the discussion, be they people's view on what the story meant, or other stories it reminded them of, or whatever. The idea was to get a more impersonal, multi-layered, ambiguous description of each story than if I'd just waffled on myself.

I think the results look quite good, and if there's a positive response I'll probably do a couple more.

The Wine Dark Sea

The Trains

Strange Story #20: House Of Leaves

Strange Story #20: House Of Leaves

Author: Mark Z. Danielewski

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say...

Most of the strange stories I've featured in this column to date have been short, controlled tales – paranoia and fear mounting to a single moment of horror. Whilst the best of these stories might imply a lot, they definitively state very little.

House Of Leaves is not that kind of story.

This is a huge novel (and one you must read in its physical version rather than as an ebook, as the photographs in this post will indicate) with multiple plots and sub-plots, typographical tricks, footnotes and diversions. It tells the story of ‘The Navidson Record’, a film by a renowned photographer about a very singular house.

The book takes the form of an academic treatment of the film, discussing its themes and veracity. This has apparently been written by Zampano, a blind man who dies in mysterious circumstances. His manuscript is recovered by a second character, Johnny Truant, who interprets the Zampano notes and The Navidson Record in his own way, as well as chronicling the breakdown he suffers whilst reading the material, despite the fact that he can find no evidence that the film even exists.

So the book is in effect one narrator annotating the notes of another narrator about a film neither can ever have seen (one doubting it is real, the other being blind) and that even if it does exist might just be a fake anyway. I think.

Added to this, the book is a labyrinth (and that word is chosen deliberately) of other stories, from Johnny’s tall-tales told to impress girls to historical accounts of people shipwrecked in the Arctic. The book also features seemingly never-ending lists (of architectural features, famous photographers, ghost stories etc.), mirror-writing, poems, and letters with a secret code. There are 'quotations' about the Navidson Record from people like Derrida, Camile Paglia, and Stephen King. There are a number of seemingly trivial mysteries that nevertheless prey on the mind: why is the word house (or any translation thereof) in a different colour & font to the rest of the text? Why is every reference to the Minotaur myth crossed through?

This book achieves ambiguity not through sparseness of detail but through a surfeit of it.

And there remains the fact that, despite the interruptions and longueurs, there is at the core of this book a truly frightening and original horror story. The Navidson Record starts with the Navidson family moving into a new house, and Navidson realising his house appears to be a fraction of an inch bigger on the inside than the outside: Lovecraft’s crazy geometry rewritten on a domestic scale. Soon after, a door appears in the house that wasn't there before, that appears to open onto a small, dusty corridor… which is clearly occupying the same physical space as the garden outside the house. Navidson, and later others, explore the corridor, and they soon realise the space behind the door is potentially huge (infinite?), and shifting and protean... and there might be something in that impossible space with them. The sheer impossibility of the house, initially represented by that small fraction of an inch, becomes something experienced on a far vaster scale. Added to this is the very human drama played out between Navidson and his wife Karen, who desperately wants her husband to stop exploring the house, and between Navidson and his estranged brother Tom. The book contains several moving moments of catharsis as well as it's brain-frying detail.

House Of Leaves seems to me a stunning achievement, a book that will become a true classic of the genre (despite the fact that no genre can really contain it). It meshes post-modernism with a strong knowledge of horror tropes, and comes up with something absolutely original. It contains enough intellectual stimulation to fuel a thousand post-graduate essays, but with enough twists and turns of the plot to turn it into an addictive page-turner too. Despite its size it’s compulsively readable, and re-readable – I've read it three times now and found new pleasures and confusions each time.

In fact, typing this, it occurs to me it's a love story, too.

Absolutely essential reading.

Strange Story #19: The Beautiful Stranger

Strange Story #19: The Beautiful Stranger
Author: Shirley Jackson
Collected In: Come Along With Me
Anthologised In: The Dark Descent

What might be called the first intimation of strangeness occurred at the railway station...

For me, the best of Shirley Jackson's novels and short stories are among the very best the genre has to offer. (Frustratingly, not all her books are easily available in the UK, although I believe Penguin is rectifying that in 2013.) The Lottery is by far her most famous story but she wrote many others equally as good if not better. The Beautiful Stranger is one such tale, a mini-masterpiece in a few thousand words. Warning: it's hard to describe without spoilers.

It begins with the words I quoted above, but then proceeds to describe a rather mundane, humdrum situation: a wife waiting at a train station for her husband, who is returning from a work trip to Boston. Margaret is slightly worried because she argued with John before they parted, but other than that everything seems normal. (Jackson is always spot on when writing about families and their interactions.)

But back at home, Margaret looks at John and thinks:

Who? .... Is he taller? That is not my husband.

The story describes Margaret's conviction that the man who has returned from Boston is not her husband, (despite his acting the same, speaking the same, dressing the same) but the beautiful stranger of the title. Beautiful - for this isn't a body-snatcher tale of paranoia and fear; Margaret doesn't want the man to be her husband. And whether he is or not (somehow it almost seems a moot point to the story itself) there does seem to be a genuine relief and happiness felt by Margaret; a genuine, albeit small, realignment of their marriage that was perhaps troubled. How could that be, if 'John' wasn't actually the same person? But then, how could it be if he was? 

It is he reader, not Margaret, who is unnerved - how much of what is happening is in Margaret's head? Her own behaviour to 'John' changes when she thinks he is someone else; is that the cause of his supposed differences? Who changed first?

The ending of the story is troubling and ambiguous - it's probably no surprise that Margaret's new happiness was more fragile than she might have supposed. The last few sentences seem to hint at a whole different explanation for the proceeding events, without being quite clear what that explanation is. Certainly the tale as a whole seems to be a (feminist) warning about the dangers of living your life through and for other people and of the seductive danger of fantasy (many of Jackson's heroines are dreamers). But there's room for endless interpretations here, and endless rereading. It truly is one of those tales that can be read again and again; one that despite its short length is bottomless.

Fiction & Unreality

Back when I was a student, a girl I knew moved in with her boyfriend.

A few months later she turned up at the door of my shared house one evening, shaking with tears and clutching herself.

"He hit me!" she said.

We ushered her inside, made her cups of tea, put on music we knew she liked. "It just doesn't feel real," she said. "I don't know what to do, I can't even think about it..."

Of course for us outside it seemed real enough, and we knew exactly what she should do: phone the bastard to tell him he was dumped; have some wine and stay the night on our couch, and then tomorrow we'd go round with her to help her collect her things and...

"It just doesn't seem real," she said as we suggested these things to her.

I think a lot of people have had this feeling - when something traumatic happens, it just doesn't seem real. The implications might be so vast, so life-changing that temporarily our brains just don't want to deal with them. This can be a helpful coping mechanism (particularly if it doesn't last long) but it can also leave us with a feeling of dislocation from reality, a shell-shocked inability to understand the world any more.

But conveying this feeling in fiction is tricky, because if the writer just simply and realistically depicts the events that might affect his or her characters in such a way, if doesn't follow that the reader will feel such a dislocation - they are outside events and whilst they might well find the story disturbing or depressing it will likely seem real enough to them. After all, traumatic events happen every day to other people.

And I wonder if that's where the appeal of 'strange stories' comes from - by depicting events that are literally unrealistic do they allow the writer to explore these very real feelings of unreality in a way that realistic fiction, for all its mimetic triumphs, can't?

Strange Stories #18: Objects in Dreams May be Closer Than They Appear by Lisa Tuttle

Strange Story #18: Objects In Dreams May Be Closer Than They Appear
Author: Lisa Tuttle
Anthologised In: The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012; House of Fear

I didn’t know why he felt the need to revisit the past like that...

Looking back through the sixteen ‘Strange Stories’ to date I noticed something disturbing the other day – not a single haunted house story…

Let’s rectify that with Lisa Tuttle’s thoroughly haunting Objects in Dreams May be Closer Than They Appear.

The most obvious way to define a haunted house would be to say it’s one that contains a ghost (or ghosts). But that’s a bit boringly literal, and I prefer to think of these stories are being ones where our dwellings, our homes - where we should feel at our safest - turn out to be some kind of trap. Houses are not the same as other things that we buy, and not just because of their price. We buy a certain kind of house because we want a certain kind of life. Because we can imagine a certain kind of life there.

I would have been happy to go on for months, thinks the narrator in this story, driving down to the West Country, looking at properties and imagining what our life might be like in this house or that... 

People talk about finding their ‘dream house’… and the one in Tuttle’s story might be just that. It is first glimpsed by a young couple house hunting – their dream house seen in a glimpse whilst they are driving. But despite hours of trying, and checking with the local estate agent, they can’t find the road, or any road, that leads to it. The house seems to remain like a mirage on the horizon.

There it was, so close it must be just beyond the next curve of the road, yet forever out of our reach. The faint curl of smoke from the chimney inspired another yearning tug...

They don't find a route to that house - to their dream, if you like. And the story is narrated from the vantage point of years later, after the breakup of their relationship in the thoroughly normal, non-dreamlike house that they did end up living in.

Years later they meet up - and Michael (her old husband) has found the house again... and found a route to it.

“You’re not talking about our house,” she says. Outwardly she has her misgivings about going to look for the house - not out of fear, but because she doesn't want to relive the past. But maybe some part of her has been dreaming all these years - "our house" she says.

And they do find a way to their ‘dream house’ from all those years ago, and foolishly enter. The trap springs shut, and it’s an utterly compelling and unnerving one which I won't spoil here. But it is note-perfect, Tuttle managing to make it both incredibly disturbing and a perfect demonstration of how old dreams can curdle and warp.

Next Time: Strange Stories #19:  The Beautiful Stranger by Shirley Jackson

Review: House Of Fear

 So, holiday reading.

House Of Fear from Solaris is billed as an anthology of 'haunted house' stories, but that's not quite true. For one thing there's a haunted windmill, a haunted camper-van, a haunted doll-house... And for another, if 'haunted' means merely inhabited by a ghost then not all these places are haunted (although some most definitely are). If, however, 'haunted' means infected fear, guilt, and secrets then yes, these stories most definitely tell of hauntings... 

How do you judge whether an anthology is good or not? One can't expect to love all of the stories, after all. But by any objective criteria I can think of House Of Fear isn't a good anthology; it's a great one:

• Is the 'strike rate' of brilliant stories to merely average ones amazingly, impossibly high? Check
• Do the stories selected illuminate and contrast well with each other? Check
• Does the anthology introduce you to a load of great new authors you've not read before? Check, check, check

Here were a few of my favourite stories; I plan to write about some of these in more detail in my Strange Stories feature at some point.

Objects in Dreams May be Closer Than They Appear - Lisa Tuttle. Okay, Lisa Tuttle is not a writer who is new to me, but this story was, and it might be the best thing by her I've ever read. It's a story of our dream house (and dream life) as a trap, and it's deeply unnerving. And it would be the winner of the best titled story in the anthology, if not for:

The Dark Space in The House in The House in The Garden at The Centre of The World - Robert Shearman. Manages to combine the haunted house theme with an off the wall creation myth, a satirical look at modern middle-class life, and humour that genuinely made me laugh (especially the bits about cancer). The kind of bravura story you feel like applauding after you finish it.

Florrie - Adam L.G. Nevill. I've not read anything by this author before (despite the fact he's always cropping up in my Amazon recommendations) and I've obviously been a fool not to. A brilliant re-imagination of the tired old ghostly possession story.

The Room Upstairs - Sarah Pinborough. Another author new to me, and another where I think I must have been missing out. I've talked a lot on this blog about ambiguity as it relates to ghosts, but in this story the reality of the haunting and its metaphorical aspects dovetail together so well it almost doesn't matter. The ending is inevitable (and brilliant) either way.

Inside/Out - Nicholas Royle. A truly bizarre tale of identical girls, Hitchcock references, dream-like logic, and a house with two doors (like Doctor Jekyll's). Excellent.

There are lots of other really strong stories in this book though, and none of them are anything less than worth a read. Heartily recommended.

Strange Stories #17: THYXXOLQU by Mark Samuels

Strange Story #17: THYXXOLQU 
Author: Mark Samuels
Collected In: The Man Who Collected Machen & Other Weird Tales



“Please,” she said, “let’s not jhjkzz, there’s no juxxchu fzzzghal..."

We don't really stop and think about words very much, do we? Which is odd because we rely on them to think about everything else. We rely on them so much it would be pretty scary if words went wrong... which might sound ridiculous, but is it really any more a ridiculous concept than others in horror fiction: more unlikely than ghosts? less plausible than vampires?

Of course writers have extra special reasons to be wary of words; I've written about how the loss of words might lead to the loss of self in my story A Writer's Words; my fellow Abominable Gentlemen Alan Ryker's story The New Words deals with the same theme but showing the external fall of society (it's my favourite story of his). And those two examples illustrate an important point: words are both internal and external to us; they are the bridge between inside and outside.

The author Mark Samuels seems drawn to the theme too; his excellent collection The Man Who Collected Machen & Other Weird Tales from Chomu Press contains the stories A Contaminated Text and the utterly captivating and disorientating THYXXOLQU.

The story starts with a character called Barclay on his daily commute, observing some writing on a billboard that he can't read:


...the characters were not in Western, Arabic, Cyrillic, Mandarin, Japanese nor any other type of alphabet that he recognised... Although he didn't recognise the language, it seemed somehow distantly familiar...

The unknown languages preys on Barclay's mind all day; and also his ability to concentrate on correspondence in English and other languages appears to weaken. His attempts to find out about the unknown language prove futile. The next day he sees it in a newspaper article and on a T-shirt worn by a colleague... which he claims to have bought in a country called 'Qxwthyyothl' whose native language is 'Thyxxolqus'

Barclay continues to research the language, finding somewhat disturbing references in De Quincey. But this is no ordinary language, and Barclay starts to see and hear it more and more, replacing English and other languages. He also starts to see more and more people with decayed mouths full of rotten teeth...

The invading language is explicitly compared to Samuels to an infectious disease, one which has disturbing physical manifestations:


...the mouths of the patients listening were the same; like a soggy hole in a crumpled sheet of paper...

This mingling of body-horror revulsion and the metaphysical horror of the 'new words' of Thyxxolqus is one of the real triumphs of Samuels' story; another is the way that everyday sayings come to have double meanings: "let's find somewhere we can talk".

I won't reveal any more of the story, but suffice to say that the final scene is a dizzying one set in the British Library (where else?)

Intelligent, scary, and profound, THYXXOLQU is a stunning example of a 'strange story'. It alone it would make Samuels one of my favourite authors, and I look jhjkzz to reading more of his fzzzghal in jkzz hjkfffhj.


Next Time: Strange Stories #18:  Objects In Dreams May Be Closer Than They Appear by Lisa Tuttle

Strange Stories #16. The Little Dirty Girl by Joanna Russ

Strange Story #16: The Little Dirty Girl
Author: Joanna Russ
Collected In: The Hidden Side Of The Moon
Anthologised In: The Weird 


She said sleepily, 'Can I stay?' and I (also sleepily) 'Forever.'


The Little Dirty Girl by Joanna Russ is a great example of how the trappings of weird fiction can be used for effects other than generating horror. There is a sense of unease running through this story (as there is in so many stories that I like) which is generated by the reader’s uncertainty about who the titular little girl is and what she means. But this unease doesn’t climb an arc into fear and outright terror, as it does in many a horror tale; instead it is a steady-state doubt, a distant but distinct thrum in the background of the story, and one that continues after its ‘resolution’.

The little girl in question starts appearing in the life of a prominent, childless academic, first in a supermarket, then at her home. The girl seemingly has no family, no friends, and there are hints that the girl exists only in the narrator’s story (which she is telling in a letter to unnamed friend). 

'What's your name?'

'A.R.' Those are the initials on my handbag. I looked at her sharply...

'I don't believe that,' I said finally.

But the girl is seemingly too physical to be an ambiguous ghost: dirty and grubby as the title suggests, and boisterous, hungry, energetic and uninhibited. She dirties up the bath (the main character ends up caring for the little girl more and more as the story progresses) and runs around naked and full of energy and an appetite for unhealthy snacks afterwards. As I said, there’s little threatening or scary about the mysterious girl in herself, at least in the main body of the story. The worrying things are where the girl has come from; where she goes to when not with the narrator; whether she gets any maternal affection from anyone else… Is there anything supernatural about her, or is she ‘weird’ only in the sense that all children are weird to those unused to them?

This, surely, is what we mean by strange fiction – to take something normal and make its inherent strangeness obvious by context and implication?

There is a sort of denouement that hints at the supernatural, at a needy, vampire-like being:

'Tell me what you need!' I said, and A.R. raised her horrid little face to mine, a picture of venomous, uncontrolled misery, of sheer, demanding starvation.

'You,' she whispered.

(I love the control of this writing, the word-choices making you veer between pity and fear.) But there's nothing so obvious as vampirism here, nothing violent or even fully comprehensible - both the dirty little girl and the narrator end up crying and bawling and the next morning it is only the narrator who remains, for the girl has vanished.

I said "sort of denouement" because this isn't actually the end to the story either; indeed there's a sudden detour (or seeming detour, because no good short story actually deviates from its chosen path) where the narrator meets her mother for lunch. She's never had a good relationship with her mother, and a reason for this is revealed, and a tentative understanding reached. And obviously the little girl, and what she in fact represented about the narrator's own childhood, has something to do with this and again the thought - was she just a figment of the narrator's mind, a symbol of something repressed? A ghost of something that never was?

 But then you remember the raw physicality of the shouting, precocious, little dirty girl, and begin to doubt your doubts...

Next Time: Strange Stories #17: THYXXOLQU by Mark Samuels

Strange Stories #15. Mal De Mer by Robert Dunbar

 

Strange Story #15: Mal De Mer
Author: Robert Dunbar
Collected In: Martyrs & Monsters



She who had gone to such lengths to deny her own 

capacity for emotion believed the beast to be experiencing one...

The story Mal De Mer was for me the stand-out from Robert Dunbar's great collection Martyrs & Monsters. It's a tale that certainly features some monsters, but exactly how many and who they are, is another question. As is that of whether it features any martyrs, too.

It is told from the point of view of a nameless young (?) woman who is looking after an older, sick woman in a house by the sea. Neither of them seem to have any friends or connections with any neighbours. At the start of the tale the narrator doesn't like the sea, and this fact is used both to show her distance from normal people and her somewhat morbid frame of mind:

Did other people truly find this noise agreeable? Waves slid with an oily crunch; each grating hiss marked the extinguishment of time she could never regain.


The narrator is also differentiated from 'normal' people by her lack of emotion; on encountering some odd children playing alone on the beach she can only think about the situation intellectually, not emotionally: children often did foolish things, did they not? She believed this to be the case. And despite her job as a carer she appears to feel no real empathy for her charge, and to be just waiting for the old lady to die (the lady is stubbornly refusing to do so).

As I said, there are multiple monsters in this story: the odd children for starters, and maybe a man who, before the day the story is set, appears to have provided the one source of genuine, physical feeling for the narrator. He is someone she met and had sex with on the beach. Yes despite this he is described almost like a scarred walrus thrown up on the beach. Her encounters with him are pleasurable but lustful only, and described in terms like drowning...

...and the source of his scars is never fully explained.

And yet more monsters: the odd children, the scarred lover, and something vast and hideous that comes from the depths of the sea. (It shows Dunbar's skill, incidentally, that he manages to make the story unified and of a piece despite all these differing elements to it.) And towards all of them, in a way, the narrator feels more emotional connection than with the dying old lady she is looking after... (This emotional, wordless connection between the central character and the so-called monsters is a recurrent theme in the stories in this collection.)

But maybe, the story seems to suggest, she still doesn't feel enough.

Next Time: Strange Stories #16. The Little Dirty Girl by Joanna Russ.

A Dream about Robert Aickman

A Dream about Robert Aickman

Last night, I dreamt I was in a bookshop. All the books were on rotating carousels; they were square and very thin with covers seemingly made of canvas or some sort of woven fabric. They only displayed the author’s name on the front, not any titles, and to tell who the book was by you had to run your fingers over the embossed writing like Braille.

I was turning the carousel looking through the books and I wondered why there weren't any by Robert Aickman. As soon as I thought this, the carousel (which turned of its own accord) presented a book to me; I traced Aickman's name on the cover and then opened it.

All the pages were folded into each like the leaves of a map, but a thousand times more complicated and intricately layered. As I unfolded more and more pages I held them up to the light, and the paper was tough but almost see through, like an insect's wing. Each page spawned more and more pages. The next might have writing in all the alphabets of the world, or diagrams that drew themselves, or colourful illustrations like the Book Of Kells, or brand new periodic tables, or anatomical drawings of imaginary creatures.

I looked around the bookshop, and all the other people there had similar books open, their open pages unfolding and connecting like paper streamers between us. Everyone was smiling and everyone was reading, and I knew I’d never be able to shut the book that was opening and opening in my hands.

Strange Stories #14. Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

Strange Story #14: Dark Matter: A Ghost Story
Author: Michelle Paver

All day I've been trying to get it straight in my mind. What did I see? Should I tell the others?

Ambiguity is a term of I've used many times in the course of this series, and I've been looking for a story that illustrates a certain specific kind of ambiguity. Namely the 'is it real or is it all in their minds?' kind. A Turn Of The Screw is the classic example, but surely done to death (no pun intended). I wanted something a bit less obvious.

This kind of ambiguity is in some ways more simplistic than that found in other strange stories: it's basically a binary ambiguity, with either everything the main character tells us being real (in which case reality = A) or it's all a delusion (in which case reality = B). So I tend to think of these kind of stories as being less 'pure' types of weird fiction as some of the really ambiguous stuff we've been talking about - a story like Tell Me I'll See You Again doesn't just offer you a straight A/B choice of meaning, but a whole damn alphabet.

That's not to say that these kind of stories are any weaker or less interesting than other types of weird fiction - indeed I think they have several strengths, one of which is the ability to stretch out the ambiguity for a longer period of time without annoying the reader. It's no coincidence I think that Dark Matter is the first novel I've featured in this series.

And what a novel. Set in the Thirties, it tells of a group of researchers travelling to Spitsbergen in the Arctic Circle. One of them, Jack Miller, is already somewhat isolated from the others dues to reasons of class, and due to a combination of bad luck and Jack's own character flaws, he ends up alone at the camp as the six month Arctic night begins...

Paver uses the Arctic setting masterfully - the early stages of the voyage are set at the time of year where daylight lasts twenty-four hours, but Jack (and the reader) are constantly aware that the darkness is coming:

The birds are leaving and the nights are getting longer.

This light/dark pathetic fallacy seems to mirror the A/B ambiguity at the story's core, and it's only the Arctic setting that allows Paver to get away with it, for there day and night are contrasted in a starker way than anywhere else in the world (except the Antarctic, obviously). The white/black colour scheme of the setting seems to have the same kind of thematic effect.

I don't want to give too much away, for that's not what this series is about, but I'm sure it will surprise no one to learn that Jack's solitary sojourn doesn't go well. And the novel's subtitle gives away that a ghost is involved... but is the ghost real or imaginary?

Maybe this question is at the heart of all ghost stories, but rarely is it so starkly exposed as here. Cabin fever is a reality to the Norwegian trappers and sailors who accompany Jack's expedition in the early stages - not a psychological theory but something very real that can happen to those trying to get through "the dark time" alone. Tales of it are used as forewarnings so the reader is fully primed to not take everything Jack says on trust. And soon he is telling us about the strange, dripping, lopsided figure he sees around camp...

It can't hurt you. All it can do is frighten Jack tells himself. But since the reader is equally afraid that Jack is losing his mind as that the haunting is real, this isn't exactly comforting.Paradoxically the hints that the ghostly figure isn't real are the more scary - because then all we are left with is the idea of an isolated figure, going slowly mad against the perpetual backdrop of white snow and dark, dark night.

Next Time: Strange Stories #15. whatever the best strange story I encounter in my copious holiday reading is..!