The Little Stranger (2018): adapted by Lucinda Coxon from the novel by Sarah Waters; directed by Lenny Abrahamson; starring Domhnall Gleason (Dr. Faraday), Will Poulter (Roderick Ayres), Ruth Wilson (Caroline Ayres), Charlotte Rampling (Mrs. Ayres), and Liv Hill (Betty):
In stripping Sarah Waters' very good, long novel of its first-person narration by protagonist Dr. Faraday, the film-makers turn The Little Stranger into a dull, decidedly unscary slog with an inert cipher at the heart of the action in Domhnall Gleason's Faraday. This is not Gleason's fault -- he has almost nothing to work with. It's a ghost story for people who find Perry Como music too exciting. Not recommended.
Ghost Storm (2011): written and directed by Paul Ziller; starring Carlos Bernard (Sheriff Miller), Chrystal Allen (Ashley Barrett), Cindy Busby (Daisy Barrett), Steve Bacic (Carl), and Aaron Douglas (Greg Goropolis): Straight-to-cable horror film isn't terrible.
A storm cloud made of ghosts threatens a small island off the coast of Washington state, I assume, though it's really British Columbia. Tony of 24's Carlos Bernard is suitably stoic as the town sheriff tasked with stopping the Ghost Storm. The plot borrows a lot from Storm of the Century and John Carpenter's The Fog. Certainly an adequate time-waster with a surprisingly high body count and a Police Squad ending. Also bears some resemblance to the 2009 novel Ghost Monster by Simon Clark. Very lightly recommended.
Thin Air (2016) by Michelle Paver: It's 1935. Upper-class British twits throng the unconquerable places of the globe seeking to conquer them. The poles have been penetrated. Only a handful of mountains remain upon which to plant the Union Jack. All a group of British mountain-climbers need to reach the summit of the third-highest mountain in the world, Kangchenjunga in the Himalayas, is fortitude and a small army of Sherpas and other native supply-carriers.
To Kangchenjunga come Stephen and 'Kits' Pearce and several others. The Pearces are semi-estranged upper-class brothers, older 'Kits' the adventurer and Stephen the doctor the expedition now requires, its previous doctor having fallen ill. Stephen wants to prove himself. 'Kits' just wants to emulate the heroes he spent his boyhood reading about. When it comes to Kangchenjunga, that hero was Edmund Lyell.
Lyell led an ill-fated, high-casualty expedition up Kangchenjunga in 1906. Then he grew rich and famous on his account of that expedition and the fame and adulation it brought to him. Lyell is now dead. On their way to Kangchenjunga, the Brits visit Charles Tennant, the last survivor. He lives close enough to Kangchenjunga to see it out his study window in the distance. But when Stephen questions him as to what really happened on that disastrous, lucrative foray into old and darkness, Tennant throws him out. Old nerves?
Well, we'll find out.
Michelle Paver does a marvelous job evoking so many things in this novel, from the privation of high-altitude mountain climbing to the petty bickerings of sibling animosity to the casual racism and classism of the typical upper-class Brit in 1935. It's made even more marvelous by her attention to brevity. Thin Air is almost a novella in length; all one wants at the end is more, even as one admires the skill required to tell a ghost story in short, sure strokes.
Or is it a ghost story? As in many ghost stories, Thin Air suggests human frailty and guilt as possible explanations for the seemingly supernatural at certain points of the narrative. That doesn't mean either/or -- the ghosts inside and the ghosts outside jostle for primacy in many of the greatest tales of the supernatural. Paver has written something at novel length here that can stand beside great ghost stories by Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, and Robert Aickman, all with a piquant taste of post-colonial cultural criticism. Highly recommended.
The Wine-Dark Sea (1988) by Robert Aickman; Introduction by Richard T. Kelly; Afterword by Leslie Gardner; containing the following stories: The Wine-Dark Sea (1966); The Trains (1951); Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen (1953); Growing Boys (1977); The Fetch (1980); The Inner Room (1966) ; Never Visit Venice (1968); and Into the Wood (1968) :
The great, unique English writer Robert Aickman preferred the term 'Strange Stories' for what he wrote, 48 published stories and a couple of published novels before he died in his 60's in the early 1980's. One could just call them 'Aickman Stories.' They're one of a handful of the most recognizable, idiosyncratic bodies of work in horror or ghost stories or The Weird or whatever you want to call this vast and shifting genre.
This is an excellent, posthumous collection, reissued by Faber and Faber in 2014 with a new introduction and a new afterword from one of Aickman's friends (and agents). Aickman started publishing fairly late in life and died far too early, making him an unknown to many who would find great enjoyment and reward in his peculiar literary universe of dread and wonder.
The stories included here are all fine pieces of work. The most traditional, "Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen," is nonetheless most peculiar. "Growing Boys" is a sort of bleak, black comedy that satirizes English reticence. "The Fetch" is also disquietingly funny, a rare foray into first-person narration for Aickman as a man chronicles his life-long flight from the eponymous Fetch of the title.
Aickman's stories set outside Great Britain are nightmarish travelogues. Greece is a world of barely hidden wonders and terrors in "The Wine-Dark Sea." "Never Visit Venice" does much the same and more for Venice. A business trip to Sweden unveils a strange underculture in "Into the Wood." A trip across the "wilds" of Northern England imperils two young women in "The Trains." "The Inner Room" offers a haunted dollhouse, but haunted in a strange way that takes decades to pay off for its protagonist.
Aickman was a great, very individual (and individualistic) writer. The backbone of most of his stories is a tension between weird events and the understanding of them. I'm pretty sure Aickman knew exactly what was happening and why in a story like "The Trains": however, the story does not offer a full, Basil Exposition-style explanation for its events.
And 'solving a mystery' isn't the point. The mystery may have many explanations. Or none. Even when a story is fairly explicit about its supernatural machinery, it's never comfortably final about these things. We pass from mystery into greater mystery. We're left with a great writer of the 20th century regardless of genre, one who deserves a far greater readership. Highly recommended.
See also:
The Unsettled Dust by Robert Aickman
Dark Entries by Robert Aickman
