A Touch of Chill: Stories of Horror, Suspense and Fantasy byJoan Aiken. Fontana Lions, 1981 (1979).
These fifteen short stories, six published for the first time in this collection, are full of mystery and surprises, not least because UK and US editions feature — apart from a core of eight — different selections.
I first read these tales in the early eighties, but apart from the odd déjà-vu moment I regret I didn’t remember any of them in this reread — my failing, not Joan Aiken’s, because these are wonderfully dark narratives.
I don’t know who made the final choice for the order of the UK edition but it was curious that pairs of succeeding stories are often linked — witches both black and white, Irish or Welsh characters, youngsters climbing through windows, murder intentional or otherwise, sinister automatons, and finally tales which somehow become true. But despite commonalities each story is very different, very distinct.
Rag doll, David Wyatt (for ‘The Time of the Ghost’ by Diana Wynne Jones)
The Ragwitch by Garth Nix. HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2005 (1990).
Dolls can be ambiguous playthings: recipients of affection, they might be assumed to return that love unconditionally; but what if they assumed a personality of their own – could they, would they, turn nasty or even malevolent?
Garth Nix’s early children’s fantasy, The Ragwitch, opens on a beach – perhaps somewhere in Victoria, Australia – which siblings Julia and her younger brother Paul are exploring. Julia is strongly drawn towards an aboriginal midden of shells, bones and feathers.
And it’s on this midden, in a kind of nest, that Julia finds an old, abandoned rag doll with a disturbing expression, and despite Paul’s anxious urgings his sister picks it up. It’s the start of an experience that willy-nilly takes the pair into another far more dangerous realm.
“This fairy tale begins in 1968 during a garbage strike…”
3rd November: Witch Week midpoint
Hi everyone! Lizzie here. Welcome to our Read-along Discussion of Victor LaValle’s 2017 fantasy/horror novel, The Changeling. Chris and I were excited to have Ola, of Re-Enchantment of the World, join us this year, and we hope you’ll add some comments of your own after you’ve read this.
The discussion has been edited down, for length and clarity, but if you’re interested in reading the full discussion, you can find that document here. WARNING: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.
Hieronymus Bosch: ‘The Last Judgement’ (detail) c 1500
The Cockatrice Boys by Joan Aiken. Edited by David G Hartwell, illustrated by Jason Van Hollander. Tor Books, Tom Docherty Associates, 1996 (1993).
Her strong enchantments failing, Her towers of fear in wreck, Her limbecks dried of poisons And the knife at her neck,
The Queen of air and darkness Begins to shrill and cry, ‘O young man, O my slayer, To-morrow you shall die.’ […]
— A E Housman
The ozone layer helps to protect both the environment and life on earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Through the 1980s and 90s however the depletion of stratospheric ozone, creating holes in the layer over the poles, increased alarmingly, only significantly lessening at the turn of the millennium, largely due to the phasing out of ozone-depleting substances in manufacture.
This comic horror fantasy first appeared in 1993; mostly set in a United Kingdom fast descending into chaos made possible by the enlarging ozone holes, the story rapidly takes us not along conventional lines associated with speculative fiction but into curious byways such as only the creative imagination of the likes of Joan Aiken could conceive.
The reader is advised to buckle up for the ride, because it’s certain to be bumpy.
Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver. Line illustrations by Stephen McNally. Head of Zeus, 2019.
“‘Tis the eye of childhood, That fears a painted devil.” —Macbeth Act II Scene II, 64-5
Michelle Paver’s historical novel, a combined murder mystery, Gothick fantasy and supernatural thriller, is a rich blend of psychological drama with elements of folklore, local dialect and period details, set in the East Anglian fens near Ely during the years leading to the Great War.
It’s also a tale of class divisions, domestic abuse and coercive control, set on an estate on the cusp of great changes, environmental as well as social. In addition to looking forward to the future – principally the 1960s, when fashions and attitudes had altered beyond all recognition – Wakenhyrst draws heavily from a past characterised by superstition and perilous existence.
And for those who love words and their meanings Wakenhyrst is chock-full of puns and allusions which can further enrich the reader’s enjoyment or, alternatively, merely add to the mysteries surrounding our young heroine Maud.
The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III, cover art by Dave McKean. Introduction by Patrick Rothfuss, foreword (1995) by Karen Berger. 30th anniversary edition, DC Vertigo 2018 (1988-9).
In his 1991 Afterword to this volume the author describes how he proposed reviving “an almost forgotten DC character […] and doing a story set almost entirely in dreams.” Editor Karen Berger suggested that the Sandman be created as a new character, “Someone no one’s seen before.”
And so it turned out: Gaiman had an image in his mind of a man, “young, pale and naked, imprisoned in a tiny cell […] deathly thin, with long dark hair, and strange eyes; Dream. That was what he was. That was who he was.”
It’s extraordinary how that initial image survived as the opening chapter of Preludes & Nocturnes, and how the scenario of an imprisoned Lord of Dreams was arrived at and then resolved. What’s even more extraordinary is how the series developed into The Sandman Library, with its thirteen volumes all going on to achieve cult status and, more than three decades later, to morph into an adaptation for a streaming service. But for someone like me coming completely new to it is it, was it, worth the hype?
The cover blurb gives it away: Is the Holy Grail buried at Glastonbury, or something much darker? Well, of course, you know the answer to that, because this would otherwise be a rather tame young adult novel.
Townies Marco and Rosa find themselves separately set down in Somerset, both saddled with parents who don’t seem to understand them and set about both by bullies and by strange and very unsettling psychic experiences.
Pretty soon they find themselves thrown together and flung into a claustrophobic labyrinth under Glastonbury itself (reminiscent of the endings of both Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen) in a narrative that is hard to put down and preferably not to be read at night. Well, not by adults anyway.
Illustration by Virgil Finlay for ‘Weird Tales’, 1936
‘The Haunter of the Dark’ (1936) by H P Lovecraft, in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, edited by S T Joshi. Penguin Books 1999.
With its suitably macabre title ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ was the last published fiction of H P Lovecraft, who died from intestinal cancer in the year following its appearance. It follows the narrative pattern of much that he wrote in this genre: a student of the occult, inevitably a male, sticks his nose into a place or situation which any sensible person would steer clear of, ignoring all the telltale signs. But then, we wouldn’t have a story if they really were as sensible as the rest of us!
Set in contemporary Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft’s home town, this short fiction conceals beneath its lugubrious exterior a glee that incorporates in-jokes shared with fellow writers and acolytes, along with his individual literary style marked by a superfluity of favourite adjectives and repeated words which conversely risks becoming banal.
But then one doesn’t read collections of Lovecraft stories for its range but for the familiar slow build-up of immanent alien presence and the inevitable demise of the protagonist, or the narrator’s reduction to a gibbering wreck or, at best, transformation to a sadder and wiser man.
‘Holbeins Totentanz: der Sterndeuter’ (Holbein’s Dance of Death / The Astrologer)
Edgar Allan Poe: The Masque of the Red Death (1842)
in Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Everyman 1975 (1908)
The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and horror of blood.
Of Poe’s many Gothick tales this is one of the foremost and famous, and it unsurprisingly stuck in my mind more than the others I read many years ago. And why, especially when there’s so little to the plot?
Essentially Prince Prospero holes up in a castle with a load of his friends and plenty of provisions, leaving the populace outside to die from a horrible plague — after half a year he throws a masked ball in a suite of rooms — yet Death still manages to enter the castle, regardless of quarantine.
Given the coronavirus crisis it seemed an appropriate time to read this short story, especially as I forgot to mention it in a previous post about literary treatments of contagion until another blogger’s comment brought it back to mind.
Jen Campbell: The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night
Two Roads 2018 (2017)
A dozen short stories do not a novel make — this last was what the author’s agent was originally expecting, but at least she didn’t shout when informed otherwise. Yet for all that these are diverse pieces – some, one suspects, semi-autobiographical, others sweet, yet more being fractured fairytales or freeform musings – they share themes and points of view which, in a weird way, could connect them into one long rambling narrative.
In fact the epigraph quotes Frankenstein’s Creature declaring, in the hopes of his creator furnishing him with a mate, that “It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.” This suggests that there are indeed connections between these tales, however curious and eccentric they may appear if we are expecting conventional narratives; but it also hints at a personal apologia. A self-declared queer writer with physical deformities, Jen Campbell brings a distinct perspective into her writing while managing to render her stories universal, a task that she somehow manages effortlessly. Or so it appears.
I shall avoid listing and discussing all twelve tales as being an arid exercise; instead I want to draw out from a select few the aspects that appealed to me most in the expectation that you may find my remarks useful.
John Polidori: The Vampyre: a Tale (1819), and a Fragment of a Novel by Lord Byron (1816)
in Three Gothic Novels (edited by E F Bleiler).
Dover, 1966.
Buttressed by an editor’s introduction, the author’s own introduction, an extract from a later letter to Polidori’s publisher, and Byron’s original vampire tale fragment, this — the first completed modern vampire story in English — already contains many of the clichés now expected from the genre. Here is the pale nobleman with a dark secret, and here the young female victims; not unexpected is the vampire’s resurrection after death and the connection with Eastern Europe and the Levant.
But you can forget any mentions of bats, sinister castles or pointy teeth, though there are allusions to stakes, peasant huts, antiquarian structures and blood all over a victim’s neck and breast. Whether these are enough to summon up a vicarious thrill in the reader will really depend on how much one empathises with the characters depicted and the degree to which one is susceptible or immune to High Gothick style and sensibility.
Ruins of gatehouse and keep of inner ward, Ludlow Castle, Shropshire
Jeannette Ng: Under the Pendulum Sun Angry Robot Books 2017
“Two-thirds of the way through Shirley Caroline Helstone’s eyes change from brown to blue. This is not an unparalleled phenomenon in a novel. In Shirley however it is unexpected, for here Charlotte Brontë is much occupied with the looks of her characters.” — from the abstract to J M S Tompkins, ‘Caroline Helstone’s Eyes’ Brontë Society Transactions Volume 14, 1961, Issue 1
I very much wanted to like this novel. Described as a ‘gothic fantasy with a theological twist’ Under a Pendulum Sun paraded a magnificent range of tropes and themes for our enjoyment, all centred around that staple Gothick cliché, the mysterious castle. In the 1840s Catherine Helstone travels from her native Yorkshire into the North Sea, en route to the realm that her missionary brother, Laon, has chosen to proselytise. This realm is called Arcadia, also known as the land of the Fae, what we now call fairies. But forget the little people with gauze-like wings from nursery tales, these are more altogether more mysterious, even sinister: and do they even have souls to save?
Jeanette Ng has, uniquely it seems, wedded together two unconnected themes, fairyland and theology, to produce a hybrid that’s pregnant with possibilities. She’s added into the mix the age-old British imperialist dream which in the 19th century sailed under the flags of free trade and converting heathens; she’s then buttressed her narrative with faux extracts from 19th-century texts each prefacing a chapter. So far so intriguing. But then the more we hear of Catherine, the narrator of the story, her secretive brother, a companion Ariel Davenport, castle servants Benjamin Goodfellow and the housekeeper known as the Salamander, plus a rarely glimpsed woman in black, the more mysteries the plot reveals. That’s all before we come to Mab, the Queen of the Fae, and her subjects.
I had high hopes for this unconventional fairytale set in a land with its own out-of-kilter cosmology (the sun really does swing from a Pendulum, and the moon, well, let’s just say it’s unexpected). That I wasn’t entirely won over is not because of the multiplicity of themes — which in fact was what most entertained me and kept me going — but because of other crucially important aspects of successful novel writing. Before I come to those negatives I want to apologise for the longer-than-usual digressions which now follow.
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus The 1818 text edited with introduction and notes by Marilyn Butler 1993
Oxford World’s Classics 1998
“[A] tale so strange, that I should fear you would not credit it, were there not something in truth which, however wonderful, forces conviction. The story is too connected to be a dream, and I have no motive for falsehood.” — Victor Frankenstein recounting the story so far, Volume III Chapter 6
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was first published on March 11th 1818,* and for two hundred years has never been out of print. Popular culture has led us to picture the Creature as portrayed by Boris Karloff (despite the name, an English actor called William Henry Pratt) in numerous films and parodies; but readers new to the novel might be surprised to first find themselves in the Arctic wastes, as revealed in a series of letters from Robert Walton to his sister Mrs Margaret Saville. He writes from St Petersburgh (sic), then Archangel (Arkhangelsk), and then from somewhere in the polar regions.
As we quickly discover, though, this is merely a framing device; the author then introduces us to Victor Frankenstein marooned on an ice floe. We no sooner get to what appears to be the meat of the story when we realise that Victor’s narrative is also a framing device, with the Creature’s story at the heart of it. And at the heart of the Creature’s story we read about a penniless French family, the De Laceys. Frankenstein is, structurally, nothing less than Russian matryoshka dolls, one nesting inside the other. Once we grasp this we can begin to rid ourselves of the popular modern stereotypes and start to come to grips with Shelley’s original, in its first incarnation as it were.
Joan Aiken: A Bundle of Nerves:
stories of horror, suspense and fantasy Cover illustration Peter Goodfellow
Peacock (Penguin) Books 1978 (1976)
Nineteen short stories are collected here, the majority originally appearing in Argosy — a British magazine which appeared between 1926 and 1974 and for which Joan Aiken was Features Editor (from 1955 to 1960). They are indeed ‘stories of horror, suspense and fantasy’, and though rather mild — if occasionally racy — by today’s tastes they were, and still are, perfect for the young teenage readership the collection aims at.
Collections of short stories can complicate the reader’s fiction experience. In particular, when the pieces are drawn from a range of the writer’s oeuvre — even when especially selected because they share a theme — they may vary in tone, in pace, in quality and in length, and may thus lack the uniformity of style and purpose that a single novel usually supplies. And this may only be the start of possible difficulties for the reader.
One way to bypass such anxieties could be to only consider the stories on a one by one basis. Thus it is that I am spreading out my appreciation of two writers by only reading single pieces interspersed with longer work by other writers. Angela Carter’s Black Venus tales (also published as Saints and Strangers) and a collection of H P Lovecraft’s horror stories entitled The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (edited by S T Joshi) are being enjoyed singly in between my tackling other longer works. And two of these pieces I’ve selected as being the last of my 2016 Reading New England choices. (This, you may remember, is one of Lory Hess’ challenges on her Emerald City Book Review blog, due to end on the 31st December.)
Anita Loughrey's blog. This is my journal about my experiences and thoughts on writing. As well as news about me and my books, it includes writing tips, book reviews, author interviews and blog tours.
For more information about me and my books see my website: www.anitaloughrey.com. Follow me on Twitter @amloughrey, Facebook @anitaloughrey.author and on Instagram @anitaloughrey
Because life is better served with a good book and a cup of tea. Book reviews and general bookish writings. I love many genres, so all manner of books may appear on my blog.
For award-winning, internationally-acclaimed author Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92). By Anthony Lawton: godson, cousin & literary executor. Rosemary Sutcliff wrote historical fiction, children's literature and books, films, TV & radio, including The Eagle of the Ninth, Sword at Sunset, Song for a Dark Queen, The Mark of the Horse Lord, The Silver Branch, The Lantern Bearers, Dawn Wind, Blue Remembered Hills.
Calmgrove 