When Churchyards Yawn

Cynthia Asquith (ed)
Arrow Books

Elizabeth Bowen – The Apple Tree
Hugh Walpole – A Little Ghost
L. P. Hartley – The Cotillion
Ann Bridge – The Buick Saloon
Algernon Blackwood – A Threefold Cord …
Arthur Machen – Opening The Door
Shane Leslie – As In A Glass Dimly
W. S. Morrison – The Horns Of The Bull
William Gerhari – The Man Who Came Back
Mrs. Belloc Lowndes – The Unbolted Door
Oliver Onions – “John Gladwin Says”
Philip MacDonald – Our Feathered Friends
Cynthia Asquith – “God Grante That She Lye Stille”

Originally published in 1931 I stumbled across this 1963 reprint in a small, scruffy animal charity shop recently. I obviously recognised the name gracing the cover from her other books that I have here and a glance inside showed a line-up as tantalising as it is obscure.

Elizabeth Bowen

As I've mentioned before these anthologies often overlap.  There are authors that appear regularly and this one has several in the shapes of Algernon Blackwood, Hugh Walpole, Elizabeth Bowen & L.P. Hartley and certain stories which seem to constitute a 'greatest hits' of the supernatural.  Well, refreshingly none of those are present here and indeed there was only two stories that I'd read before and neither of them to excess.

The book begins with Elizabeth Bowen's 'The Apple Tree', a story of grief and remorse made manifest in the form of the titular tree.  It's a moving piece but one that suffers at it's conclusion for an attempt at an enigmatic ending.  Such is not the case with Hugh Walpole's ' A Little Ghost' which is the story here I'm most familiar with and one I like very much indeed as two lonely souls find solace in each others company.

L.P. Hartley

There are a group of stories within the book that feel like they most express the books original publication date and L.P. Hartley's 'The Cotillon' is one of them.  It tells of the belle of the ball and of the man she has, potentially, wronged.  It's witty and charming in an Agatha Christie sort of way and just as macabrely bloodthirsty.

It's followed by the other story that I've previously read, Ann Bridge's 'The Buick Saloon'. With it's story of colonial heat and repressed emotions freed amongst the expats of Peking it's an odd little tale of curiosity and the thrill of the unknown that nevertheless stays much too much in the mundane for my tastes.

Never one for the mundane, globetrotter, author par excellence and bearer of the perfect ghost story author name, Algernon Blackwood provides us with 'A Threefold Cord...' where a bachelor, bewitched by a woman glimpsed at a party in his childhood home becomes drawn into events far beyond his control and fortunately discovers that friendship is more powerful than family.

Arthur Machen

And so we arrive at the reason this book kept sitting so restlessly on the shelf and demanding it's turn in the sun, the chance to read an Arthur Machen story that I hadn't already (there are many I'm pleased to say).  'Opening the Door' is a story with it's feet in his journalistic career that relates the disappearance and reappearance of an elderly, bookish clergyman.  It's a glorious read.  Restrained and mysterious and, as often seems the case with Machen, alive with the promise or perhaps menace of unseen worlds parallel to ours into which one can step as easily as opening a door but which perhaps aren't so easy to leave again.

Shane Leslie's 'As In A Glass Dimly' is a bit of a non entity sharing with Machen's piece a journalistic conceit it is a poor mimic that can only emulate the merest hint of the unease and imagination of its predecessor. W.S. Morrison's 'The Horns of the Bull' with it's folktale trappings feels particularly out of place and William Gerhardi's 'The Man Who Came Back' is a short, witty but essentially see-through read.

Oliver Onions

We're on sentimental ground for the next story, 'The Unbolted Door' by Mrs Belloc Lowndes which shares with it's successor - Oliver Onions' 'John Gladwin Say...', a theme  of loss and grief that has permeated a family in the first instance and a place in the case of the second, although any sense of melancholy is immediately shattered by the cacophony made by 'Out Feathered Friends' in Philip MacDonald's tale.

The book ends with it's longest story by Asquith herself - editors privilege.  'God Grant That She Lye Stille' is the story of a country doctor, his beautiful patient and her malevolent ancestor.  It's an engrossing read that made me desperately need to shout instructions at the ineffective (understandably but frustratingly so) Doctor as his patient slowly slips through his fingers.

I am so very pleased to have found this book.  I very much like these ghostly anthologies but every know and again one appears which just stands out as having been assembled with real care and insight and this is definitely the case here and any effort to track a copy down would be greatly rewarded in the reading.

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Ghost Stories

Various
Cathay Books

Twenty-two exciting stories from the twilight world of haunted houses and hair-raising spectres are contained in this spine-chilling anthology.
Each tale is illustrated with specially commissioned drawings.

The more of these anthologies I read the quicker I get through them.  They're generally a fairly fast read anyway being short stories but in many cases the same stories appear again and again and again.  In the case of this 1984 collection from Cathay Books I already knew 12 of the 22.  Some, like M.R. James' 'A School Story' and Captain Frederick Marryat's 'The Phantom Ship' I skip past on a fairly regular basis but as these things are meant to entice (as opposed to being a warning to) the curious into the charms of the genre that's something that one has to accept.  With that being the case the above are fine inclusions as are other regulars such as Hugh Walpole's poignant 'A Little Ghost', Lovecraft's non mythos short 'The Music of Erich Zann', the unsettling presence of the cupboard in Algernon Blackwood's 'The Occupant of the Room' or Fritz Leiber's sooty city spirit in 'The Smoke Ghost'.

R. Chetwynd Hayes

Elsewhere in the book the unidentified editor has made some fine, if maybe a tad unadventurous, choices.  Charles Dickens is represented by his macabre tale of avarice and murder, 'The Ghost in the Bride's Chamber' wherein a murderer is forced to feel the intensity of his punishment increasing with each passing hour of the night which is far more than the guilty party at the heart (if you'll excuse the pun) of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart' would have ever managed to endure.

The conclusion of Poe's tale signals the start of a run of rather inconsequential stories,  the black magic cat of R. Chetwynd-Hayes' 'The Cat Room', Catherine Crowe's somnambulist clergyman in 'The Monk's Story' and Saki's weakly witty 'Laura' before we hit a rich vein of the standards that I mentioned earlier.

Rosemary Timperley

The book makes another move towards the lesser known with Rosemary Timperley's tale of infatuation and fire, 'The Mistress in Black' and Guy de Maupassant's creepy little oddity, 'An Apparition'.

Undoubtedly the oddest inclusion here is an utterly pointless extract from Penelope Lively's 'The Ghost of Thomas Kempe' but it's easily skipped for the aforementioned Blackwood story and Jerome K. Jerome's practical joking ghost of 'The Haunted Mill'.

Guy de Maupassant

One of the biggest draws here was the opportunity to read something by another of the Le Fanu's.  The venerable Sheridan is here with 'The White Cat of Drumgunniol' but also his daughter Elizabeth who tells of a case of ghostly possession in 'The Harpsichord' which is a fairly told but lacks the invention of her father's work.

Closing the book are two authors who are anthology stalwarts, W.W. Jacobs, who is represented by a story I hadn't read before,'The Three Sisters' which reminded me entirely of 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and finally Joan Aiken's 'Sonata for Harp and Bicycle' allows the book to end on a romantic high even if it's a long way from being one of her best.

Some interesting stories make this a good but not essential anthology unless of course you're a newcomer to the delights of the genre then it's probably one to keep an eye out for.

The 4th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

Robert Aickman (ed)
Fontana Books

After finally getting to read some stories by Aickman, who over the last year had climbed to the top of my list of authors I wanted to track down, I noticed on my shelf this anthology of stories chosen by him.  It's the only one of the Fontana series I've managed to track down so far and it's a real delight.

For Aickman 'The essential quality of the ghost story is that it gives form to the unanswerable' and that key aspect of the unknown and mysterious is what guides the choice of stories.  There are few answers here and resolutions are often ephemeral.

Opening the book is 'The Accident' by Ann Bridge.  The pseudonymous Bridge was an avid mountain climber and her story reflects this as a psychiatrist attempts to help a young brother and sister menaced by sinister letters and footprints in the snow.  It's an attractive premise but one which is hampered by Bridge's
love of climbing and so much of the suspense becomes lost in the descriptions of the activity.

Barry Pain's 'Not On The Passenger List' is one in a long line of ocean traversing ghost stories. Here a widow on her way to England is haunted by a ghost that, unusually, is also seen by other passengers.  the story is told by another traveller and whilst not played for laughs has a lightness to it that indicates, to me at least, an author more at home with a more frivolous story style.

Oscar Wilde

The great Oscar Wilde is represented by a story called 'The Sphinx Without a Secret' wherein two men discuss a recent doomed romance and the enigmatic lady at the centre of it.  It is the most sparse of tales with the entire story revolving around the ladies behaviour and the endless connotations implied by the ambiguity of the ending.

The American writer (and friend of Wilde) Vincent O'Sullivan offers a fairly inconsequential but amusingly macabre little story of a belligerent ghost in denial of his own death in 'When I Was Dead' before we are provided with a translation of Alexander Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades' that reveals itself at the last to be an amusing tale of spectral revenge rather than a fairly typical tale of avaricious behaviour within the Russian nobility.

Whilst more renowned as a critic Desmond MacCarthy's 'Pargiton and Harby' shows him to have had a keen predilection for the weird as his tale of a man haunted by an event in his past reveals itself to be far more interesting than it's premise.

Hugh Walpole

Whilst we're on the subject of the weird Hugh Walpole's 'The Snow' is a brief, fiery examination of a marriage in tumultuous decline as the husband's placidity and the young wife's irascibility clash irrevocably in the shadow of his dead wife's memory.

I can find very little information regarding the author of the next story, Eric Ambrose, other than that he was English and his from and to dates.  His story, 'Carlton's Father', written in 1936 is a fabulous piece of proto-steampunk that any attempt to explain would spoil so onto the next which is by the peerless M.R. James.

'A School Story' is one of the fastest moving of James' tales with a rapidity of telling that takes it's tempo from the narrators bewildered retelling of the events surrounding the disappearance of a teacher.  It isn't one of James' most involved tales and the ending goes a bit too far but it's always fun to dip into any of James' works.

I've read a few of Saki's stories over the last couple of years and they're usually enjoyable but they've never grabbed me as much as some of his contemporaries.  His story here, 'The Wolves of Cernogratz'  is a rather gentle and poignant tale of the return to the ancestral home by the last of the von Cernogratz family.

Wilkie Collins

The book ends with the William Wilkie Collins novella, 'Mad Monkton'.  This wonderful tale by friend and contemporary of Charles Dickens tells of one man's attempt to avoid both the family curse and the family prophecy as he searches for the body of his dead uncle.  I've read a couple of Collins' stories before this and have been hugely impressed each time and this was the best of them all.  I find his way with words to be eminently readable and his imagination beguiling.

I picked up this book expecting to be entertained for a weekend and instead was treated to a number of old favourites alongside a number of intriguing authors whose work I was unaware of and who were of such a level of obscurity that it would have been no effort for me to have remained ignorant of them.

An excellent and extraordinary collection that explores the fantastical and the macabre in the most imaginative and enjoyable way.

Small Shadows Creep

Andre Norton (ed)
Puffin Books
1979

An antiquarian bookseller takes a sinister interest in a schoolboy who visits his shop; a pair of twins hardly old enough to walk, strike deadly terror into anyone who sees them; a young girl who died for love finds being a ghost much too enjoyable to give up. This assortment of ghost stories is eerie, touching or funny, and never quite what you expect.

One of a stack of old Puffin books I've been picking up lately and the one that jumped out at me from the pile. This is a selection of Victorian, and slightly later, ghost stories all of which feature children. It is split into three parts - Ancient Evils, Vengeful Spirits & Quiet Visitors - and features eight stories - split 3, 3, 2.

Opening, proceedings is 'Salooky' by Margery Lawrence, a very fine tale featuring her occult investigator Dr. Miles Pennoyer as he removes the deeply malevolent spirit of an Elizabethan sorcerer that is haunting his sisters new home and having a deeply troubling impact on his nephew. This is followed by what is easily the most vicious, and modern feeling, of the eight, 'Herodes Redivivus' by A.N.L. (here credited as A.B.L.) Munby. In this a young man meets a supremely creepy antiquarian bookseller and after a close call finds himself somewhat in tune with the going ons at the shop. Closing out this section was a cool little piece of rural horror - H.R. Wakefield's 'The First Sheaf' - involving intractable locals, pagan rites, an intrusive Christian and a something.

The second set features spirits of a more purposeful nature and begins with E.F. Benson's 'How Fear Departed From The Long Gallery' which is a humorous little tale whose fairly obvious ending isn't spoilt in the telling. Next is probably the book's weakest tale, Mrs Gaskell's 'The Old Nurse's Story' is a fairly transparent story of spinsters, children and past regrets. Not bad but as I said a bit obvious. The section ends with M.R. James' fabulous 'Lost Hearts' where the ghosts of children murdered in an alchemical procedure take gruesome revenge.

The final two stories are a very different kettle of fish with the ghosts being very much the benevolent heart of each tale. Hugh Walpole's 'A Little Ghost' puts a man mourning the death of his friend into a house filled with exuberant children. Escaping to his room he finds comfort and solace in the presence of a shy spirit of a young girl.

The final tale has an almost Dickensian feel to it with its tale of a crusty, aloof academic taking an orphan child into his home and allowing her free range over his library. The story, 'Playmates' by A.M. Burrage eventually finds the girl befriended by the seven ghosts who inhabit the old schoolhouse where they live. As time and circumstances soften the hearts of he and her (but not of his crotchety assistant) they both come to find a level of affection for each other and grow closer before he finally opens himself up in frankly fabulous finale.

It's a thoroughly enjoyable book. It's varied and intriguing and filled with invention, fear and finally, love.