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.
Solomon Kane: The Hills of the Dead by Robert E. Howard with Ramsey Campbell containing the following stories:"The Hills of the Dead", "Hawk of Basti" (Completed by Ramsey Campbell), "The Return of Sir Richard Grenville" (poem), "Wings in the Night", "The Footfalls Within", "The Children of Asshur" (Completed by Ramsey Campbell), "Solomon Kane's Homecoming" (poem) and "The Mystery of Solomon Kane" (Introduction) by Ramsey Campbell (1928-1968; 1979):
Bantam's second (and last) 1970's volume of the adventures of Robert E. Howard's quasi-Puritan monster-fighter takes place mostly in Africa. Not historic Africa, but an Africa almost as fantastic as the world of Conan the Barbarian. Howard aficiando and acclaimed horror writer Ramsey Campbell finishes two Howard fragments here, to solid effect -- the seams don't show.
This time out, Kane battles an army of vampires, an army of carnivorous hawkmen, a couple of lost civilizations, and an unnameable Cthulhuian horror. He gets a lot of help from his African magician pal N'Longa and from the ancient staff N'Longa gives him to fight evil with, a staff the stories tell us may predate the existence of the Earth itself. Solomon Kane fights for an ostenibly Christian God, but he does so within a fantastic framework that resembles H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, one in which evolution is taken as a given.
Howard's racial sensibilities will offend some, though they seem surprisingly progressive in a "White Man's Burden" sort of way. N'Longa is a great help, and Kane spends a lot of time liberating African slaves or fighting to save villages from terrible supernatural menaces. He's a real gent. Highly recommended.
