Ghost Stories (2017)

Ghost Stories (2017): written and directed by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman; starring Andy Nyman (Professor Goodman), Martin Freeman (Mike Priddle), Paul Whitehouse (Tony Matthews), Alex Lawther (Simon Rifkind), and Paul Warren (Woolly):

Adapted from a play by co-director Jeremy Dyson and starring co-director Andy Nyman as a psychic debunker, Ghost Stories creeps up on the viewer, building towards a harrowing final 20 minutes or so. The three ghost stories investigated by Nyman's rigid, unsympathetic Professor Goodman have changed their participants irrevocably, and not necessarily for the better. Goodman tries to remain unchanged as weirdness increases in his own life. 

Some viewers (like me!) will be initially put off by the characterization of a psychic investigator as a bad guy, even as he exposes a fraud early in the movie in pretty much exactly the way that longtime debunker James Randi did. Stick with it, though. What seems like a general observation on the part of the movie may turn out to be something very much else. 

I'd love to see how this play was originally staged. The movie has done such a terrific job of 'opening it up' that I'd be hard-pressed to cite any moments in which it seems like an adaptation of a stage play. Recommended.

Victorian Secrets

Gaslit Nightmares: An Anthology of Victorian Tales of Terror (1988): edited by Hugh Lamb, containing the following stories:

• The Undying Thing (1901) by Barry Pain
• The Serpent's Head (1886) by Lady Dilke
• The Phantom Model(1894) by Hume Nisbet
• The Black Reaper (1899) by Bernard Capes
• The Accursed Cordonnier (1900) by Bernard Capes
• The Vengeance of the Dead (1894) by Robert Barr
• The Beckside Boggle (1886) by Alice Rea
• Maw-Sayah (1893) by Charles J. Mansford
• In the Court of the Dragon (1895) by Robert W. Chambers
• The Old House in Vauxhall Walk (1882) by Charlotte Riddell
• The Drunkard's Death (1836) by Charles Dickens
• Luella Miller (1902) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
• A Psychological Experiment (1900) by Richard Marsh
• The Mystic Spell (1899) by Dick Donovan
• The Late Mr Watkins of Georgia (1898) by Joel Chandler Harris
• The Ghost in the Mill (1870) by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• A Derelict (1895) by J. A. Barry
• The Haunted Mill (1891) by Jerome K. Jerome
• An Unexpected Journey (1893) by J. H. Pearce
• The Pride of the Corbyns (1875) by Isabella Banks
• The Page Boy's Ghost (1896) by The Countess of Munster
• Mysterious Maisie (1895) by Wirt Gerrare.

'Late Victorian Tales of Terror' would be more accurate, as the 1836 story by Charles Dickens is an outlier by nearly 40 years. This is the sort of anthology that I think would appeal more to someone with a historical interest in the horror genre. The stories aren't great for the most part, but I had only encountered four of the 22 stories before (oddly enough, those include the two worst stories in the anthology, by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Jerome K. Jerome, and the best, Mary Wilkins-Freeman's terrific all-timer "Luella Miller").

There's no general introduction, but editor Hugh Lamb is generous with the introductions to the individual stories, giving brief bios of the writers and publication information. You might be surprised how rare both those things are in anthologies. 

Some stories are barely vignettes masquerading as 'true' stories, representing the vast array of such ghost stories that appeared during the Victorian era, especially once the whole medium craze kicked off in the second half of the 19th century and ghosts were everywhere, pretending to be real.

Other than "Luella Miller," which is a great and unusual and under-stated vampire story that deservedly gets reprinted a lot, my favourite stories tend towards the pulpy and baroque. "Mysterious Maisie" by Wirt Gerrare(!) is fast-paced and pulpy as Hell, filled with monsters, a monstrous medium, and a 4-foot-long crocodile guarding the kitchen. It's the sort of story in which the ghost is the good guy. Or good girl, in this case.

I also enjoyed "The Pride of the Corbyns," a somewhat racist story set in the Barbados that involves angry white people rising in their mausoleum to protest the burial of mixed-race bodies among them (!!). "The Undying Thing" isn't quite as great as its title, but it still works. "The Accursed Cordonnier" is a bit of an oddity, dealing as it does with the Wandering Jew. Or is it the Anti-Christ? This being 19th-century England, we first encounter him in a Gentleman's Club.

If you're looking to be consistently scared, I'd probably look elsewhere. But if you're interested in a wide variety of approaches to horror, some excellent and some a little stinky, Gaslit Nightmares is well-worth seeking out. As should be the case, a decent number of female writers are represented here, as ghost stories were one of those genres in which women writers could successfully seek publication during the Victorian era. Oh, and that Dickens story, written when Dickens was a young writer, still packs quite a wallop. Recommended.

Soul Cages & Batting Cages

How Life Imitates the World Series by Thomas Boswell (1976-1981; collected 1982): Thomas Boswell became one of our two or three greatest regular chroniclers of baseball in the mid-1970s when he was about 30 and has continued as such ever since. He manages something extraordinarily rare in sports writing -- a mix of the poetic and the carefully observed normative. 

He's also extremely but unfussily literate in these essays, most of them stories and columns for the Washington Post. And while he's a poetic fellow, he's also statistically inclined. One of the stories included herein has Boswell introduce one of the first new baseball stats in years at the time, Total Average, as a better indicator of baseball hitting greatness than the batting average, on-base percentage, or slugging percentage.

As these essays were written in the late 1970's and early 1980's, they at times shine a light on a baseball world that's still dominated by players that include Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose, and managers that include Earl Weaver. These and others are profiled sympathetically but occasionally critically by Boswell. So, too, owners, innovators, Cuban baseball, the enigmatic Steve Carlton, Boswell's own history in baseball, the vanishing adult hard-ball leagues which are being supplanted by softball leagues, the care and feeding of baseball bats, and many other topics. Boswell's style is a joy to read, and his subject matter never disappoints in the general or the specific. Highly recommended.

The Wild Night Company: Irish Tales of Terror (1971): edited by Peter Haining, containing the following stories: 

A Wild Night in Galway (1959) by Ray Bradbury
'Hell Fire' [Section of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)] by James Joyce
Julia Cahill's Curse (1903) by George Moore
Legends of Witches, Fairies and Leprechauns (1919) by Lady Wilde
Teig O'Kane and the Corpse (1918) by Traditional
The Banshee's Warning (1862) by Charlotte Riddell
The Canterville Ghost (1887) by Oscar Wilde 
The Coonian Ghost (1970) by Shane Leslie
The Crucifixion of the Outcast (1897) by William Butler Yeats
The Dead Smile (1899) by F. Marion Crawford
The Fairies' Revenge (1970) by Sinead de Valera
The Friendly Demon (1726) by Daniel Defoe
The Haunted Spinney (1904) by Elliott O'Donnell
The House Among the Laurels (1910) by William Hope Hodgson
The Legend of Finn M'Coul (1830) by William Carleton
The Man from Kilsheelan (1923) by A. E. Coppard
The Man Wolf (1970) by Giraldus Cambrensis
The Moon-Bog (1926) by H. P. Lovecraft
The Parracide's Tale (1820) [Section of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)] by Charles Maturin 
The Soul Cages (1825) by Thomas Crofton Croker
Wicked Captain Walshawe of Wauling (1864) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Witch Wood (1947) by Lord Dunsany

One of those many Peter Haining-edited anthologies with a fundamental problem in the title. These are tales by or about the Irish. Many feature the supernatural, though not all. But there's not a whole lot of terror involved. Throw that false claim away and enjoy instead a pretty enjoyable mixture of folk tales, excerpts from novels, and short stories.

Haining certainly gets bonus marks for including the terrifically horrifying sermon from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and a grimly jocular section from Charles Maturin's seminal 19th-century Gothic Melmoth the Wanderer. And if you know the Sting song "The Soul Cages," you'll be intrigued to discover a much less sinister Irish version of the story from folklore, recorded in the early 19th century, that nonetheless still involves the souls of dead sailors kept in lobster traps by a supernatural being. But it won't be "magical wine" that knocks the creature for a loop -- it will be Irish poteen. Oh, go look it up. I'll wait.

The anthology ranges from folklore to genre writers to the famous literary elite and back again. I can criticize Haining for his odd choices in titling, but I can't criticize his range as an anthologist or his enthusiasm as an essayist introducing the tales. The drollness of the Ray Bradbury story that concludes the anthology is something to behold. I'm pretty sure no other ostensive horror anthology selection has so hilariously undercut a brief spate of terror with the revelation that the story serves up as its epiphanic (or is it anti-epiphanic?) moment about just what a wild night in Galway entails. Recommended.

This House is Haunted by John Boyne (2013)

This House is Haunted by John Boyne (2013): A quick look around the Internet shows how wildly divisive John Boyne's ghost story is, whether the reviewers are the denizens of Goodreads or singer Josh Ritter in the New York Times (seriously). I enjoyed the novel. Is it great? No. Was I entertained? Yes.

For all the novel's other influences, many of which it wears on its sleeve or perhaps even on its chest like sponsor logos on a NASCAR driver's chest, This House is Haunted really comes down to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. This novel is almost programmatically the anti-matter opposite of James' famous (and famously ambivalent) ghost story. Boyne's set-up is very similar: a governess, two children (a girl and a boy), an absent guardian, and two ghosts.

How does it reverse James? Rather than a first-person narration nested inside a frame narration some fifty years after the events of the story, we instead get a first-person narrator still somehow in the thick of things. The girl is the older child, and the one most in peril from at least one spectral presence. The female ghost is the most dangerous one. The male ghost is benevolent. There's no coyness about whether or not a haunting is involved: from the title to the first overtly spectral act, there really is no doubt. This house really is haunted. Really, really haunted.

The choice of title -- a simple declarative sentence -- offers one of the interesting counterpoints to James' novella. James' chosen title has to be explained by the story itself for its true meaning to be understood. The screw that's being turned is the screw of suspenseful narrative, as discussed around a fireplace near the beginning of a novella. A ghost story with a child in peril represents an extra turn of the screw from a ghost story without an imperiled child. It's a title that springs from a discussion of narrative theory. Contrast this to 'This house is haunted.'

Further mirrored images proliferate. Certain signs and portents and bits of ghostly business dead-end, in opposition to the architectural tidiness of James' novella. The prose is mostly plain style, not Jamesian. While both the character and the works of Charles Dickens play a role in the novel, the prose is not "Dickensian," as some reviewers oddly claim.

What do you get? A fairly short ghost story set in 1867 England (London and Norfolk, to be exact), with a plucky governess, endangered children, family secrets, angry animals, and a lot of very physical ghost business. While The Turn of the Screw seems to be the primary mirror, the secondary homages and allusions are legion: Rebecca; Jane Eyre; A Christmas Carol; "The Fall of the House of Usher;" and The Uninvited are just a few. 

Moreover, This House is Haunted counters more than a century of somewhat misogynistic theorizing about the governess in The Turn of the Screw. Critics who claim that the ghosts in James' story are the products of the governess' mind have generally done so while claiming that this derangement is a sort of hallucination caused by sexual frustration linked to the governess' crush on the absent guardian of her two charges. This is both pretty sexist and psychologically loopy: scientifically speaking, people don't generally suffer from full-blown audio and visual hallucinations simply because they need to get laid.

Boyne's protagonist instead consciously and vocally fights against Victorian-era sexism at every turn. And a scene in which an unhelpful Anglican minister suggests to an enraged Eliza Caine that the ghosts are simply the product of the weak female mind strikes me as being a very direct rebuke to The Turn of the Screw's misogynistic interpreters.

Are there problems? A few. Anachronisms occasionally pop up in the language of the narrator. The loose ends may irritate readers who want everything in a story to be a version of Chekov's Gun. And the climax seems about 50% too cinematic, not so much a nod to "The Fall of the House of Usher" as a superhero battle between two invisible adversaries. The ghosts are almost absurdly powerful, though I do think that's part of the Mirror: Henry James' ghosts were almost entirely non-physical in their malign effects. For me, in any case, recommended with a few caveats. But I'll be damned if I understand how this novel made so many people so bloody angry.

Several Pounds of Horror Stories

The Giant Book of Ghost Stories (Edited version of The Mammoth Book of Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories): edited by Richard Dalby (Original version 1995/This version 2005), containing the following stories::

Ghosts (1887) by Anonymous; Schalken the Painter (1851) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; M. Anastius (1857) by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik; The Lost Room (1858) by Fitz-James O'Brien; No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman (1866) by Charles Dickens; Haunted (1867) by Anonymous; The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868) by Henry James; John Granger (1870) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon; The Ghost in the Mill  (1870) by Harriet Beecher Stowe; The Ghost in the Cap'n Brown House (1870) by Harriet Beecher Stowe; Poor Pretty Bobby (1872) by Rhoda Broughton; The New Pass  (1870) by Amelia B. Edwards; The White and the Black (1867) by Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian; The Underground Ghost (1866) by John Berwick Harwood; Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk (1889) by Frank Cowper;  Dog or Demon? (1889) by Theo Gift; A Ghost from the Sea (1889) by Dick Donovan; A Set of Chessmen (1890) by Richard Marsh; The Judge's House (1891) by Bram Stoker; Pallinghurst Barrow (1892) by Grant Allen; The Mystery of the Semi-Detached (1893) by E. Nesbit; Sister Maddelena (1895) by Ralph Adams Cram; The Trainer's Ghost (1893) by Lettice Galbraith;  An Original Revenge (1897) by W. C. Morrow; Caulfield's Crime (1892) by Alice Perrin; The Bridal Pair (1902) by Robert W. Chambers; The Watcher (1903) by R. H. Benson; The Spectre in the Cart (1904) by Thomas Nelson Page; H. P. (1904) by Sabine Baring-Gould; and Yuki-Onna (1904) by Lafcadio Hearn.

Enjoyable and wide-ranging anthology of 19th and early 20th century ghost stories selected by the always reliable Richard Dalby. One will run across this volume and a few others with a fair bit of regularity, as it's an edited-down version of an earlier anthology, created by Barnes&Noble as an "instant remainder."

Dalby goes for breadth as well as non-typical selections in many cases -- while the Dickens story is oft-anthologized, entries from Fitz-James O'Brien, E. Nesbit, Robert W. Chambers, Amelia Edwards and other stalwarts are much less typical, which is to say I haven't come across them before.

Among the stand-outs are Grant Allen's "Pallinghurst Barrow", a fascinating entry in the Sinister Hidden British Race sub-genre that Arthur Machen would make his own, and "Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk" by Frank Cowper, which has one of the greatest titles ever. "Schalken the Painter" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is my top pick of the bunch, an early effort by the fine and prolific Mr. Le Fanu that actually gave me a nightmare after I read it the first time.

There are a few piffles here, many from the better-known writers. The Nesbit story, for example, is almost a fragment. In all, though, and even truncated by the last eleven stories of its original version, the anthology offers a solid overview of time and writers, with an eye towards reprinting stories by the legion of female ghost-story writers that dominated the genre in the 19th century. Recommended.

Masters of Horror & the Supernatural: The Great Tales (Edited version of The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural): edited by Bill Pronzini, Martin H. Greenberg, and Barry N. Malzberg (Original version 1981/ This version 2010), containing the following stories:

"Man Overboard!" (1899) by Winston Churchill; A Teacher's Rewards (1970) by Robert S. Phillips; Bianca's Hands (1947) by Theodore Sturgeon; Black Wind (1979) by Bill Pronzini; Call First (1975) by Ramsey Campbell; Camps (1979) by Jack Dann; Come and Go Mad (1949) by Fredric Brown; Hop Frog (1849) by Edgar Allan Poe;  If Damon Comes (1978) by Charles L. Grant; Namesake (1981) by Elizabeth Morton (aka Rosalind M. Greenberg); Passengers (1968) by Robert Silverberg; Pickman's Model (1927) by H. P. Lovecraft; Rappaccini's Daughter (1844) by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Sardonicus (1961) by Ray Russell; Squire Toby's Will (1927)by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [as by J. Sheridan Le Fanu ] Sticks (1974) by Karl Edward Wagner; The Crate (1979) by Stephen King; The Doll (1980) by Joyce Carol Oates; The Explosives Expert (1967) by John Lutz; The Fly (1952) by Arthur Porges; The Girl with the Hungry Eyes (1949) by Fritz Leiber; The Hand (1919) by Theodore Dreiser; The Jam (1958) by Henry Slesar; The Jolly Corner (1908) by Henry James; The Middle Toe of the Right Foot (1890) by Ambrose Bierce; The Mindworm (1950) by C. M. Kornbluth; The Oblong Room (1967) by Edward D. Hoch; The Party (1967) by William F. Nolan; The Roaches (1965) by Thomas M. Disch; The Road to Mictlantecutli (1965) by Adobe James; The Scarlet King (1954) by Evan Hunter; The Screaming Laugh (1938) by Cornell Woolrich; The Squaw (1893) by Bram Stoker; The Valley of Spiders (1903) by H. G. Wells; Transfer (1975) by Barry N. Malzberg; Warm (1953) by Robert Sheckley; You Know Willie (1957) by Theodore R. Cogswell; and Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (1943) by Robert Bloch.

With three stories removed from its previous edition as one of the Library-Ubiquitous Arbor House treasuries of the early 1980's, Masters of Horror & the Supernatural: The Great Tales remains a bit of a Frankenstein's Monster of an anthology.

Co-editor Bill Pronzini's background was primarily in mystery and suspense at the time, while Martin H. Greenberg and Barry Malzberg worked primarily in the science fiction field. How this got them a gig editing a comprehensive horror anthology is anyone's guess. Well, actually my guess would be that they worked on other Arbor House treasuries as well.

So many of the selections aren't, in my appraisal, actually horror. Instead, they're short thriller and suspense stories. They shouldn't be in a horror anthology. One of these mis-selected stories is by Pronzini himself ("Black Wind"), which doesn't increase my appreciation of the selection criteria. Two other slight, very slight, selections come from Malzberg ("Transfer") and Greenberg's wife Rosalind ("Namesake"), the latter appearing under a pseudonym. Apparently, Rosalind Greenberg has only published three stories in her life. One of them is here! And it's sort of pointless!

There are some worthy entries here, from perennials like Stoker's "The Squaw" and Henry James' "The Jolly Corner" to re-discoveries like Theodore Dreiser's "The Hand" and to then-recent stories like Jack Dann's haunting "Camps". For an anthology dedicated to the prolific and influential Cornell Woolrich, however, its Woolrich selection is completely baffling. "The Screaming Laugh" is an overlong mystery story; its one horror element has been seen before and since in much better stories, including Ray Russell's "Sardonicus," reprinted in this same anthology!

As this book seems to have been created as an instant remainder (it's a mainstay of the ChaptersIndigo Remainder pages, anyway), it shouldn't set a person back much in the purchasing. The selection is odd and self-serving, but there are many fine stories here. There's also Stephen King's "The Crate," adapted by King and George C. Romero for the movie Creepshow but never included in any of King's prose collections. Lightly recommended.

The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986): edited by Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert

The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986): edited by Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert, containing the following stories:

⦁ The Tapestried Chamber (1828) by Sir Walter Scott
⦁ The Phantom Coach (1864) by Amelia B. Edwards
⦁ Squire Toby's Will (1868) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
⦁ The Shadow in the Corner (1879) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
⦁ The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford
⦁ A Wicked Voice (1890) by Vernon Lee
⦁ The Judge's House (1891) by Bram Stoker
⦁ Man-Size in Marble (1886) by E. Nesbit
⦁ The Roll-Call of the Reef (1895) by Arthur Quiller-Couch
⦁ The Friends of the Friends (1896) by Henry James
⦁ The Red Room (1896) by H. G. Wells
⦁ The Monkey's Paw (1902) by W. W. Jacobs
⦁ The Lost Ghost (1903) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
⦁ "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" (1904) by M. R. James
⦁ The Empty House (1906) by Algernon Blackwood
⦁ The Cigarette Case (1910) by Oliver Onions
⦁ Rose Rose (1910) by Barry Pain
⦁ The Confession of Charles Linkworth (1912) by E. F. Benson
⦁ On the Brighton Road (1912) by Richard Middleton
⦁ Bone to His Bone (1912) by E. G. Swain
⦁ The True History of Anthony Ffryar (1911) by Arthur Gray
⦁ The Taipan (1922) by W. Somerset Maugham
⦁ The Victim (1922) by May Sinclair
⦁ A Visitor from Down Under (1926) by L. P. Hartley
⦁ Fullcircle (1920) by John Buchan
⦁ The Clock (1928) by William Fryer Harvey
⦁ Old Man's Beard (1929) by H. Russell Wakefield
⦁ Mr. Jones (1928) by Edith Wharton
⦁ Smee (1929) by A. M. Burrage
⦁ The Little Ghost (1922) by Hugh Walpole
⦁ Ahoy, Sailor Boy! (1933) by A. E. Coppard
⦁ The Hollow Man (1933) by Thomas Burke
⦁ Et in Sempiternum Pereant (1935) by Charles Williams
⦁ Bosworth Summit Pound (1948) by L. T. C. Rolt
⦁ An Encounter in the Mist (1949) by A. N. L. Munby
⦁ Hand in Glove (1952) by Elizabeth Bowen
⦁ A Story of Don Juan (1941) by V. S. Pritchett
⦁ Cushi (1952) by Christopher Woodforde
⦁ Bad Company (1955) by Walter de la Mare
⦁ The Bottle of 1912 (1961) by Simon Raven
⦁ The Cicerones (1967) by Robert Aickman
⦁ Soft Voices at Passenham (1981) by T. H. White


Lengthy reprint anthology with numerous flaws, including the annoying omission of biographical information and publication dates for the individual stories at the beginning of each story.

There's also a certain nebulousness to the volume's construction of an "English ghost story." It's not necessarily written by an English-person. It isn't necessarily set in England. And it doesn't necessarily involve a ghost.

The editors' introduction does indicate where they come down on the issue of graphic violence in horror -- they're against it. Huzzah! I'll tell you, if nothing else, the introduction comes across as almost parodically upper-class-academic English. Blah blah, woof woof.

There are some excellent stories here. There's also an awful lot of time-wasting with stories that are very polite with their ghosts and don't seem to have any interest in scaring anbody. We get a few sentimental stories of sad, lost ghosts. We get a lot of one-twist stories in which the twist is, there's a ghost! Oh my heavens! That character is actually a ghost? Really? I did not see that one coming.

Thankfully, there are also some old stand-bys. "The Upper Berth" by F. Marion Crawford is a genuinely great story in one of my favourite horror sub-genres, that of the story in which someone gets into a fist-fight with a ghost. "The Cicerones" is one of horror-master Robert Aickman's shortest stories, and one of his most enigmatically potent.

"A Visitor from Down Under" by L. P. Hartley contains one of the most sinister (yet morally justified) ghosts in the genre, deployed in a story that has its droll moments (the ghost takes public transit) amidst the awfulness. And the short, very short, "The Clock" by  William Fryer Harvey is a neglected masterpiece of brevity and ghastly wit, with one of the more remarkably quick-witted and quick-moving protagonists in the history of ghost stories.

The editors really aren't all that interested in ghosts stories after about 1950. The entry by the usually fine de la Mare is neglible. The entry by T.H. White that closes the book was actually written in the 1930's, meaning that the editors don't bother with any writers of ghost stories between 1967 and 1986, the time of the greatest horror boom in publishing history. Nice work, boys. Recommended for many of the stories but not all of them, and what a lazy bit of editing and scholarship this book turns out to be. Editorial hackwork.

Scary Antiquary

Canon Alberic's Scrap-book and other stories by M.R. James, containing the following stories: "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book", "The Rose Garden", "The Mezzotint", and "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" (This edition 2010): Nice little entry in Penguin's 50th anniversary Modern Classics series collects four of early 20th-century ghost-story master M.R. James' ghost stories.

James continues to resist becoming dated, and his ghost stories remain a model of economy and terror at their best. Three of the stories here are major, while "The Rose Garden" is a curious inclusion. It's not bad, it's simply not among his best, as it comes to an oddly sputtering end after a terrific start. It is emblematic of one of James' fictional concerns, however -- the dangers that a lack of specific knowledge can bring when one starts mucking about.

Of the other three, "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book" is the scariest, and is one of the finest examples of James' technique of gradually introducing a supernatural menace. It's also the most antiquarian of the stories included here (James titled his first collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary). The protagonist encounters Something Awful as a direct result of his interest in an old, small-town French church.

"The Mezzotint" and "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" follow similar paths into the past, with an old Mezzotint and old journals, respectively. "The Mezzotint" offers horror at one remove, as the protagonist views the past through the eponymous object in far more detail than is usual for a mezzotint.

"The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" wouldn't be out of place in a revenge-oriented horror comic book of the 1950's. While it involves a supernatural event of the distant past pieced together by a contemporary protagonist from a box of papers and letters, the story still manages some of James' most effective creep-out moments. As we learn in ghost story after ghost story, if you don't know who's at the door, don't invite them in. Highly recommended.

The Crime-fighting Horse of Newfoundland and the Mummy That Sank the TITANIC

The World's Strangest Mysteries by Rupert Furneaux (1962): I bought this paperback on a lark, figuring it would be chock-full of loopiness. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that for books of this type, it's surprisingly even-handed. It's certainly no Cosmos, but neither is it like modern-day History Channel stupidity.

Obviously, much of the material explored here has become dated -- the book is more than 50 years old, after all. Nonetheless, sections on Kaspar Hauser, the Man in the Silk Mask, Anastasia, and other mysterious figures lay out and evaluate the various cases for who these people were or weren't.

We also get some stories of things that would turn out to be hoaxes after the book's publication (the infamous Brass Plate of California being one of them), or that were always hoaxes if one knew where to look for decent information (Welcome to Oak Island, suckers!). The book may be wrong in its conclusions about some of these things, but there is an argumentative process at work: Furneaux isn't completely gullible and accepting.

Well, OK, sections on the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti seem to have been thrown together, though Furneaux at least explains the overall reasoning for why they may exist (which is to say, cryptids were still showing up in 1961 with some regularity).

His section on the Shakespeare authorship (non)controversy is solid, though he appears ignorant of the simple fact that we know more about the life of Shakespeare than we do of virtually any other person of his socioeconomic class from the same time period: his was not a mysteriously under-chronicled life, and Furneaux repeats some misinformation about the Shakespeare statue in Stratford-Upon-Avon (and seems ignorant of the fact that the "second bed" was actually the best bed to will somebody -- as the guest bed, it hadn't been used).

Overall, fun stuff, with some interesting mysteries to follow up from other sources. Worth picking up if you see it lying around in a used bookstore for a fair price. It's also deceptively long, hailing as it does from a time when the paperback publishers tried to save money on paper by printing everything in tiny, tiny type. Recommended.

The Strange and Uncanny by John Macklin (1967): I'm pretty sure I read this unsourced compendium of weird, 'true' stories when I was about ten. And ten is pretty much the Golden Age for this sort of book. Now we can just download these strange sorts of tales directly from the Internet into our neocortexes. Truly this is a disturbing universe.

One can assess the probably verity of its contents by noting that it rehashes the completely fabricated story of Princess Amen-Ra and her mummy's role in the sinking of the Titanic, a story that still pops up a lot in stories about unexplained mysteries. Alan Moore even offered a version of it in the graphic novel From Hell.

However, more because of the ridiculous claims of the book than despite them, there's a lot of fun to be had. I can see how some of the stories creeped me out when I was a lad (including that of the malevolent Egyptian mummy). Others are actually reined in a bit too much for maximum enjoyment. If a story tells me that a demon killed someone, I'd like to discover that the guy was ripped apart by an invisible assailant. I don't want to learn that he was found with a single gunshot wound to the head. Pistol-packing demons would be cool in certain circumstances, but they lack a certain oomph in this situation.

Some of the 'true' stories here bear remarkable resemblances to fictional ghost stories I've encountered. And there's absolute no sourcing here -- no notes, no bibliography. Ah, well. You get to read about the telepathic, precognitive Newfoundland horse called Lady Wonder, who helped police in that province solve a couple of missing persons cases. Is this true? I'll have to look it up. Recommended.

Endure or Avoid

Madame Crowl's Ghost: written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, edited and introduced by M.R. James (Original edition 1923; this edition 2006) containing the following stories: Madam Crowl's Ghost, Squire Toby's Will, Dickon the Devil, The Child That Went with the Fairies, The White Cat of Drumgunniol, An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street; Ghost Stories of Chapelizod, Wicked Captain Walshawe, Sir Dominick's Bargain, Ultor de Lacy, The Vision of Tom Chuff, and Stories of Lough Guir.

Mid-to-late 19th-century Irish Protestant writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu is really the second giant with a career output mostly in what we'd now call horror, dark fantasy, and the supernatural (or even Weird) fiction, after Edgar Allan Poe. It's a testament to his skill and vision that this is a fantastic collection, even though it omits the two horror stories he's best-known and most-anthologized for, the seminal vampire novella "Camilla" and the psychological chiller "Green Tea."

Dracula's Bram Stoker clearly knew Le Fanu's work, as Dracula borrows mightily from "Camilla" (which remains a far superior story) and from Le Fanu's recurring occult investigator Dr. Martin Hesselius, the latter in the person of Professor Van Helsing.

The stories collected here span the 1840's, 50's, and 60's, but for all their period-appropriate language and narrative approach, they are nonetheless imaginatively modern on the topic of ghosts. Le Fanu's ghosts seem to obey certain nebulous rules, even as to who they can or cannot appear to. They are not, however, easy to get rid of. Mid-19th-century Great Britain may have been a more Christian place than it is today, but there are no exorcisms here, and no deus ex machina endings. Ghosts are things to be either endured or avoided.

The Fairie also appear in some stories, most strikingly in "The Child That Went with the Fairies." They aren't nice. Really, really, really not nice, and this story really works as an epitomal tale of stolen children, a recurring trope in traditional stories of the Fairie in the British Isles. One calls them The Good Folk or The Kind Folk in the hopes of flattering them, not because they are.

Throughout the stories, Le Fanu deftly establishes setting and regional dialect, regardless of where the story is set. There are both urban and rural tales of the supernatural here. There are disturbingly fluid spectres, at least one Devil, ghosts whose touch corrupts and kills, innocent lives stolen or ended by all manner of unearthly beings, and terrible discoveries behind hidden doors.

Le Fanu has what would be now called a "cinematic eye" at points -- there are some marvelous visual descriptions in "Squire Toby's Will" of strangely mutating, threatening shadows that resolve into figures but dissolve when closely regarded; this skill manifests in several other stories as well. Some of Le Fanu's ghosts resemble those 3-D posters that suddenly resolve into an image when looked at the correct way. Except the posters aren't out to kill you.

M.R. James originally selected and introduced this collection in the 1920's, which is fitting given James' place as perhaps the most accomplished and influential writer of ghost stories in history. All in all, an excellent collection. Highly recommended.

Ancient Images

Sinister: written by Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill; directed by Scott Derrickson; starring Ethan Hawke (Ellison Oswalt), Juliet Rylance (Tracy), Fred Dalton Thompson (Sheriff), and James Ransone (Deputy) (2012): From the producers of the Paranormal Activity movies (which I mostly enjoy) comes another supernatural tale pitting dumber-than-average humans against the forces of darkness.

The title, as with the similar Insidious, has no specific relevance to the movie. It's a generic horror title, so don't start watching with the expectation that the monster's left-handed or anything.

Ethan Hawke plays a formerly best-selling true-crime writer who needs a bestseller to pay the mortgage. Juliet Rylance plays his wife, who's never in the house during the day but doesn't seem to have a job, either. Their older boy suffers from a combination of Night Terrors and sleep-walking, which seems a bit odd to me given that Night Terrors generally involve sleep paralysis, but I'll go with it. Their younger daughter likes painting on walls.

Hawke's character cleverly moves the family into a house where a brutal multiple murder took place about a year earlier. Ah ha, but he doesn't tell his wife! And as his wife apparently neither speaks to anyone in town or is in any way curious as to why they moved where they moved, she doesn't find out the truth until fairly late in the movie.

Anyway, the supernatural forces in this movie really enjoy recording everything on Super 8 film. Then they stick the Super 8 projector and carefully labelled film canisters in the attic for the next family to find. Yes, there are a series of serial murders taking place across America. As one of the murders involved setting fire to a car inside a garage in the dead of night, I'm a little unclear as to how the house in that case survived for someone else to move into. I assume they had really good fire suppression installed. But not monster suppression, more fools they!

Sinister is nicely photographed. Much of the horror comes from the voyeurism of watching (fictional) snuff films along with Ethan Hawke. But boy, is everybody in this movie dumb except for Sheriff Fred Dalton Thompson and Vincent D'onofrio in a cameo as an expert in occult mythology and iconography. There's probably a pretty good movie to be made about D'Onofrio and his trusty coffee-dispensing sidekick Jessica, but I'm not sure these filmmakers could make a movie about what happens when smart people deal with occult forces, and do so by actually going to a library instead of relying solely on the Internet for potentially life-saving information. Lightly recommended.

　

The Awakening: written by Stephen Volk and Nick Murphy; directed by Nick Murphy; starring Rebecca Hall (Florence Cathcart), Dominic West (Robert Mallory), Imedla Staunton (Maud Hill) and Isaac Hempstead Wright (Tom Hill) (2011): Broody ghost story set in 1921 follows the efforts of professional debunker Rebecca Hall to solve the mystery of whether or not a boy at a boarding school in the North of England was a-scared to death by a ghost.

World War One is the major intertext here, as Hall lost her fiance and several of the teachers fought in the conflict and came home with both physical and mental wounds. Hall's character also has a somewhat bizarre past, as she was adopted after her parents were killed and she was mauled by lions.

Debunking and debunkers are again portrayed as sad bastards screwing it up for everyone else, which seems to be the default setting of every fictional movie that ever dealt with debunkers. Given the real-world cost that awful, awful 'psychics' such as Sylvia Browne exact when they insert themselves into police investigations (which Browne has never once actually helped solve) and the lives of the bereaved (whom Browne has put through the wringer on numerous occasions by describing horrible modes of death for victims who in fact did not actually die the way she described), it would be nice if a movie dealt with this fairly important aspect of debunking: namely, that it keeps 'psychics' from doing terrible things to innocent people in the name of publicity.

In any case, once you realize that Hall's character is indeed another sad orphan who really wants to believe, you know where the movie is going. Well, sort of. The final major plot twist verges on O. Henry Playhouse territory, though it is somewhat foreshadowed. Enjoyable and atmospheric. Lightly recommended.


Trouble with the Curve: written by Randy Brown; directed by Robert Lorenz; starring Clint Eastwood (Gus), Amy Adams (Mickey), John Goodman (Pete) and Justin Timberlake (Johnny) (2012): Once you get through the hilarious scene of octogenerian Eastwood talking to his bladder, this is a slight, pleasant movie about an old baseball scout, father-daughter issues, and how wily old baseball scouts are way better than computers at locating baseball talent, even though in the real world they actually aren't. Lightly recommended.

The Real Monster Homes of Maine

Hell House by Richard Matheson (1970): Matheson's great ghost story pays homage to Shirley Jackson's earlier, great haunted-house novel, The Haunting of Hill House, in many of its attributes. As in Jackson's novel, Hell House gives us a quartet of psychic investigators led by an academic and weighed down by personal issues who've been brought together to stay in an extremely haunted house for several days.

Matheson's novel focuses on the always fuzzy world of "psychic research" far more than Jackson's did. The psychosexual issues are much more overt. And unlike Hill House, where the haunting seemed to be a matter of a Bad Place rather than individual Bad Ghosts, Hell House appears to be the domain of the ghost of Emeric Belasco. Matheson loosely bases Belasco on Aleister Crowley, black magician and self-proclaimed "wickedest man in the world." Belaso is much wickeder: his remote Maine mansion was the site of mass murder, suicide, and worse. But when the authorities finally broke into the mansion in the 1920's, Belasco was nowhere to be found among the dead.

Hell House is set in 1970. Two previous attempts to probe the mysteries of Hell House, the last in 1940, ended in the deaths or institutionalization of all those involved but one. And that one, a then-16-year-old boy judged to be one of the greatest psychics ever, is along for this expedition. Why? Because a dying millionaire is paying him and the others $100,000 each to try to figure out from the evidence of Hell House whether the human soul survives death.

As with his great, rational vampire novel I am Legend, Matheson herein sails the edge between the supernatural and the scientific. The physics professor who leads the expedition believes that ghosts are a product of human minds interacting with a charged psychic environment left behind by traumatic events in a specific location. There is no life after death except as an amorphous energy field subject to the fears and hopes of the living. The academic's wife isn't so sure. And the two psychics know that there's something more than that going on. But what?

Matheson doesn't write 'long.' Hell House is fairly brief and to-the-point, and its structure is as much mystery novel as horror novel. But the horrors are quite potent, and the characters sympathetically drawn even as they wrestle with their fears and their failings. Highly recommended.

When Wallpaper Attacks

Midnight Frights: A Collection of Ghost Stories edited by Charles Eastman containing "The Signal-man" by Charles Dickens, "Man-size in Marble" by E. Nesbit, "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Cigarette Case" by Oliver Onions, and "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant (1980): Nifty little collection of ghost stories that doesn't really seem to have been selected for the audience it nonetheless ostensibly seems to be aimed at. The chills are a bit rarefied. And Onions deploys Britishisms that gave me pause at certain points. Odd selection for a young-adult collection put together in 1980.

The Dickens story is an understated character study. The Nesbit story goes pretty much exactly where one thinks it's going to go, and does so in style. "The Cigarette Case" is a nice little piece, though not one of Onions' scarier offerings (the scariest being "The Beckoning Fair One", one of the ten or twenty greatest ghost stories ever written in English). "The Horla" is a fascinating bit of proto-science fiction from the prolific de Maupassant, himself doomed to die young and insane.

And there's "The Yellow Wallpaper." It's scary as Hell. It's also considered a piece of proto-feminist fiction (as indeed it is), so it gets a lot of love in the Academy. It's a terrific story that, while traditionally read as a tale of pure psychological horror, does leave a slight amount of room for a supernatural explanation. Totally bravura, one might say, in its first-person narration that slides gradually into horrifying madness, a madness that seems somewhat justified by the way the female narrator is treated by her well-meaning but controlling husband. You can also read it as a parable about post-partum depression. Seriously. Overall, recommended.

Unreal Estate

Dream House: written by David Loucka; directed by Jim Sheridan; starring Daniel Craig (Will Atenton), Rachel Weisz (Libby), Naomi Watts (Ann Patterson), and Elias Koteas (Boyce) (2011): A talented director (Sheridan directed Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot) and a solid cast result in a major stinker. Studio tampering fingerprints this production, though I'm not sure how much better the film would have been without interference. The grim lifelessness of many of the scenes doesn't seem to have anything to do with the whims of focus groups.

Daniel Craig quits his job and moves his family (a wife and two daughters) into a dream house in a small town. He's going to write a novel. But a family was murdered in that house, a fact the real-estate broker didn't tell Craig. The father apparently killed the mother and two girls but got shot in the head by the wife in the process, a head wound that put the father into a mental asylum for five years. But now the father's out, never convicted of the crime. And a mysterious watcher lurks outside the windows at night, scaring Craig's wife (Weisz) and children. A divorced neighbour (Watts) seems to know more than she's telling.

And then, 45 minutes in, the movie implodes with a twist that really needed a lot more build-up. The movie wanders off into the woods, bumping into trees. There's a half-hearted attempt at another twist in the final scene, though the scene is ambiguous enough to explain away as just another plot development and not another reversal.

You can at least add Dream House to that long list of films in which fire is only dangerous if it actually touches you, even when it surrounds you. These movies exist in a universe in which air doesn't transmit heat, and what a marvelous universe that would be.

Craig acts a lot like late-career Harrison Ford here, joyless and withdrawn. He looks like he's ready for a brawl with the key grip at any second. Watts's character seems to have had all her character-development scenes edited out of the movie: she's all plot device. Weisz is fine in a thankless role as a loving yet sexy wife. Sheridan pretty much disowned this film, and I can see why -- it's not even bad in an enjoyable way. It induces 80% boredom and 20% rage. Avoid! Not recommended.

Bits and Pieces

Strange Things and Stranger Places by Ramsey Campbell containing Cat and Mouse, Medusa, Rising Generation, Run Through, Wrapped Up, Passing Phase, A New Life, The Next Sideshow, Little Man and Needing Ghosts (collected 1993) : A rather odd collection from Campbell, seeing as nearly two-thirds of its length comes in two novellas ("Medusa" and "Needing Ghosts") while most of the rest of the stories are homages of some sort to classic horror tropes that include the Mummy, Frankenstein's monster, cats from hell, and zombies.

Of necessity, the two novellas are the main attraction here. "Medusa" is unusual in that it's straight science fiction, a genre Campbell writes within infrequently at best. It's an interesting story, reminiscent in some ways of Stanislaw Lew's Solaris. The short stories are fine for the most part, though mostly brief. The longest of them, "Little Man", could really be longer -- the put-upon teenaged protagonist's plight could use more fleshing out, especially given the unique, creepy weirdness of the supernatural entity in the story.

"Needing Ghosts" is one of Campbell's great short works, a novella in which the presence of the seemingly surreal in the midst of daily life gains greater and greater terror as the novella progresses. As in many of Campbell's strongest works, reality itself seems perched on the edge of dissolution throughout, with the most normative things and events weighted with frightful portent. Recommended.

Waking Nightmares by Ramsey Campbell

Waking Nightmares by Ramsey Campbell (1991) containing "The Guide" (1989) "Next Time You'll Know Me" (1988) "Second Sight" (1987) "The Trick" (1980) "In the Trees" (1986) "Another World" (1987) "Playing the Game" (1988) "Bedtime Story" (1986) "Watch the Birdie" (1984) "Old Clothes" (1985) "Beyond Words" (1986) "Jack in the Box" (1983) "Eye of Childhood" (1982) "The Other Side" (1986) "Where the Heart Is" (1987) "Being an Angel" (1989) "It Helps If You Sing" (1989) "The Old School" (1989) and "Meeting the Author" (1989): This mid-career collection from Campbell contains a lot of dandy stories published over the space of ten years and written over the space of about 20.

　

It opens with one of the odder 'inspired by a true story' horror stories I've ever read, "The Guide", which takes the fact that British ghost-story writer M.R. James also wrote a guidebook to the Lancashire area of England and uses that starting point in one of Campbell's most Jamesian, antiquarian horror stories. It closes with a tale of a disturbing children's book writer, a disturbed child, and a story in which the presence of the supernatural remains ambiguous throughout, "Meeting the Author."

　

In between are some fairly horrifying meditations on childhood horrors ("The Trick", "Eye of Childhood", "Bedtime Story", "The Old School"), zombies ("It Helps If You Sing"), religious nutjobs ("Another World"), writers with major problems ("Beyond Words", "Next Time You'll Know Me"), supernaturally altered landscapes (the increasingly malign nature trails of "In the Woods"), guardian angels ("Being an Angel"), and what appear to be a possessed raincoat ("Old Clothes"), a sinister-yet-familar board game ("Playing the Game"), and a malign pub washroom ("Watch the Birdie").

　

Throughout, Campbell's eye for telling detail and sympathetic characterization shines. The endings of many of the stories may be ruthless, but the impact of many of them relies on Campbell's ability to elicit sympathy for a character within the confines of a few thousand words. Highly recommended.

Unnerved

New Terrors I, edited by Ramsey Campbell (1980; 1982), containing the following stories:

The Stains by Robert Aickman; City Fishing by Steve Rasnic Tem; Yare by Manly Wade Wellman; A Room With a Vie by Tanith Lee; Tissue by Marc Laidlaw; Without Rhyme or Reason by Peter Valentine Timlett; Love Me Tender by Bob Shaw; Kevin Malone by Gene Wolfe; Chicken Soup by Kit Reed; The Pursuer by James Wade; The Spot by Dennis Etchison and Mark Johnson; The Gingerbread House by Cherry Wilder; .220 Swift by Karl Edward Wagner; The Fit by Ramsey Campbell; and Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game by Stephen King.

　

American paperback cutdown of Campbell's massive British anthology of new horror stories. Pocket Books seemed to be keeping one eye on the bottom line, so the limited page count in this and the subsequent volume caused several novelettes from the British anthology to be left out of the two American volumes. So it goes.

The stories are mostly excellent. The late, great Robert Aickman's novelette dominates the anthology -- it's weird and unnerving and inexplicable in that peculiar Aickman way that seems to be some odd combination of Franz Kafka and M.R. James. Gene Wolfe, Campbell himself and Karl Edward Wagner all contribute solid, disparate stories. Wolfe's echoes Shirley Jackson and Edith Wharton. Wagner's novelette feels like a novel that's collapsed into itself -- it needs more length to avoid the sudden narrative shifts and jumps that threaten to completely undo suspension of disbelief, but it ultimately holds together.

Dennis Etchison supplies a story that could be held up as an exemplar of Etchison's dry, allusive work about the assorted weirdnesses of Los Angeles life. Tanith Lee supplies a less dire, funnier story than I'm used to from her, about a very oddly haunted hotel room.

And there's Stephen King's surreal little gem "Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game," which Campbell cites as King's strangest story circa 1980 and which remains so circa 2011. All in all, a fine anthology (or at least part of one), and a testament to Campbell's underrated excellence as an anthologist. Highly recommended.

Book-making

Needing Ghosts by Ramsey Campbell (1990): Dandy standalone novella about one incredibly bad, odd day in the life of a writer. Campbell's command of the limited third-person voice is, as always, razor sharp in terms of working through the thoughts of a protagonist while maintaining a slight, objective distance.

Campbell's recurring tropes get full play here: strange shapes just slightly off-centre, seen in the distance or through something obscuring vision; a reality which baffles the protagonist more and more as the narrative develops; cool or even hostile reactions from the people whom the protagonist meets. The story occupies a day in the life, but there doesn't really seem to be any day as time itself (or is it just light?) bends and collapses.

Some of the fears explored here are indeed writerly. The protagonist's attempt to speak to a writers' group goes nightmarishly wrong, as do his attempts to find copies of his books in the baffling number of bookstores he stumbles across in close proximity to one another. But these are all yoked to more universal fears of bodily and mental disintegration, of fight or flight, of terrible and increasingly justified paranoia. It's a lovely, dense little tale. Highly recommended.

The Horror of 1986

DAW Year's Best Horror Stories Series XV (1986) edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1987):

Contents:

Introduction: What's in a Name? • essay by Karl Edward Wagner
The Yougoslaves by Robert Bloch
Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back by Joe R. Lansdale
Apples by Ramsey Campbell
Dead White Women by William F. Wu
Crystal by Charles L. Grant
Retirement by Ron Leming
The Man Who Did Tricks With Glass by Ron Wolfe
Bird in a Wrought Iron Cage by John Alfred Taylor
The Olympic Runner by Dennis Etchison
Take the "A" Train by Wayne Allen Sallee
The Foggy, Foggy Dew by Joel Lane
The Godmother by Tina Rath
"Pale Trembling Youth" by W. H. Pugmire and Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Red Light by David J. Schow
In the Hour Before Dawn by Brad Strickland
Necros by Brian Lumley
Tattoos by Jack Dann
Acquiring a Family by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

Another year (1986, that is), another great Year's Best Horror anthology edited by Karl Edward Wagner. Horrible things happen in biker bars, country estates, tourist towns, travelling carnivals, Hallowe'en parties and haunted houses. There's a lot more indeterminate, atmospheric horror here than in other Wagner Year's Best anthologies, epitomized in an emblematically Etchisonesque Dennis Etchison story ("The Olympic Runner") which disturbs even as it leaves one unsure of what, exactly, has happened (it also contains a terrifically handled shift in third-person narrative POV, for those who enjoy that sort of thing).

Horror grandmaster Robert Bloch contributes one of his last, great stories; Ramsey Campbell contributes one in a long line of odd, ruthless stories about childhood horrors. Joe R. Lansdale wrings some gruesomeness from the end of the world and what happens after, with some of the most unlikely predators ever arising from the irradiated remains of North America to finish off the survivors of WWIII.

For an anthology in the heart of the rise of splatterpunk, there's a surprisingly lack of graphic violence (fine by me, BTW), though what there is seems justified by the narratives in which it's contained. The R. Chetwynd-Hayes story pretty much embodies a sort of British drollness in horror, a blackly comic vision of a pitiful person undone by a ruthless evil from an unexpected source. Highly recommended.