Uncanny Stories

May Sinclair
Wordsworth Editions

May Sinclair was an innovator of modern fiction, a late Victorian who was also a precursor to Virginia Woolf. In her Uncanny Stories (1923), Sinclair combines the traditional ghost story with the discoveries of Freud and Einstein. The stories shock, enthral, delight and unsettle.
Two lovers are doomed to repeat their empty affair for the rest of eternity... A female telepath is forced to face the consequences of her actions... The victim of a violent murder has the last laugh on his assailant... An amateur philosopher discovers that there is more to Heaven than meets the eye.
Specially included in this volume is The Intercessor (1911), Sinclair's powerful story of childhood and abandoned love, a tale whose intensity compares with that of the Brontës.

 I first came across May Sinclair a few months back in the 'Mortal Echoes' anthology from The British Library which featured her story 'Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched' a truly terrifying tales of a very personal Hell.  Not long after that I watched the TV adaptation of her 'Intercessor' which was a rather beautiful ghost story about loss, blame and guilt.  I was already hooked after the former and by the end of the second I was besotted.  As it happened sat unread on a shelf here I had this collection of her work so I happily waded in.

Following what seems to have been a fairly difficult childhood and a problematic relationship[ with her mother, Sinclair took to writing to support them at a time when she was also becoming an active supporter of the women's suffrage movement.  All these factors have a presence in her stories where independent and sexually liberated women find themselves at the mercy of oppressive control either from family, tradition or religion.

Those two previously mentioned stories bookend this collection and do so in a manner that shows the extremes of her tales; the cruel, inescapable brutality of the former and the poignant delicacy of the latter joined by the quality of the prose.

Between the two reside various shades of fear with the standout moment being the psychic shenanigans of 'The Flaw in the Crystal' that, with it's lead character of a confident and sexually liberated young woman is a real breath of fresh air although that's not to belittle any of the remaining five stories.  Admittedly some, like 'The Token' are a little slight but they don't hang around and make for nifty quick reads between the more developed tales.

Sinclair's supernatural output was small but substantial and it's a shame that she isn't better regarded as stories like 'Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched' have a timeless quality that still resonates.

Buy it here - Uncanny Stories (Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural) (Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural)

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In A Glass Darkly

J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Wordsworth Editions

This remarkable collection of stories, first published in 1872, includes Green Tea, The Familiar, Mr. Justice Harbottle, The Room in le Dragon Volant, and Carmilla. The five stories are purported to be cases by Dr. Hesselius, a 'metaphysical' doctor, who is willing to consider the ghosts both as real and as hallucinatory obsessions. The reader's doubtful anxiety mimics that of the protagonist, and each story thus creates that atmosphere of mystery which is the supernatural experience. 

This is my first time digging into a book full of Le Fanu's stories and I found it to be a bit of a pick 'n' mix.

The book tells 5 stories from the files of Dr. Hesselius, an occult detective of sorts, although he himself appears only in one of tales with the 5 being presented as being posthumously selected from his archives.

It's the final story here that's undeniably the most renowned and justifiably so.  'Carmilla' is an unsettling tale of vampirism which while lacking in suspense due to the delivery method (it's told by the 'victim') it manages to hold a tantalising level of menace.

At the other end of the scale is 'The Room in Le Dragon Volant' a frankly risible locked room mystery that was a chore to plough through.

The opening two stories, 'Green Tea' and 'The Familiar' are odd little tales of manifestations induced by overindulgence and guilt and neither tale really sparkles although the latter has the edge but it's the fourth story, 'Mr. Justice Harbottle', that was probably the great surprise of the book with it's deliciously macabre tale of a corrupt judge and his unearthly comeuppance.

I have to admit I struggled a little with this book; mostly with Le Fanu's now quite dated prose style - which had never previously been an issue when encountering his stories in various anthologies - but also because I just didn't think all that much of the opening story, 'Green Tea', ground to a halt and put the book down for a while.  When I returned to it more prepared for it's idiosyncrasies I got more out of it and with the exception of that lousy crime story it proved to be an enjoyable read.

Buy it here - In A Glass Darkly (Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural) (Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural) by Sheridan Le Fanu ( 2007 )

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The Shadow On The Blind & Other Stories

Louisa Baldwin & Lettice Galbraith
Wordsworth Editions

The late Victorians had an insatiable appetite for the macabre and sensational: stories of murder and suspense, ghosts, the supernatural and the inexplicable were the stuff of life to them. The two writers in this volume well represent the last decade of the nineteenth century, and are of interest in themselves as well as for their contribution to the chilling of the Victorian spine. Mrs. Alfred Baldwin attempted as a child to contact her dead sister through a séance, and took to writing when stricken by a mysterious illness six weeks after marriage. She was also the mother of the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. Lettice Galbraith is herself no less mysterious than the stories she wrote. She appeared on the literary scene in 1893, published a novel and two collections of stories in that year, a further story ( The Blue Room ) in 1897, and then nothing more. Readers of 'The Empty Picture Frame', 'The Case of Sir Nigel Otterburne', 'The Trainer's Ghost' and 'The Seance Room' will recognise the Victorian spirit at its finest.

A twofer this one with the book split pretty much straight down the middle and featuring a selection of stories by two less celebrated authors.

Louisa Baldwin is perhaps more notable for being the mother of a British prime minister (Stanley Baldwin) but she produced a number of ghostly tales.  On the whole they are a slightly forgettable bunch.  I'm writing this review a couple of weeks after reading the book and looking forward at the contents page I can only recall one of her stories, the ghostly visitor from 'The Empty Picture Frame', but a quick skim reminds me of other highlights.

Louisa Baldwin

Title piece, 'The Shadow On The Blind' is a particularly unremarkable haunted house tale which makes for an inauspicious opening for the book but the following story 'The Weird of the Walfords' is much more satisfying with it's attempts at breaking a family curse.  The next two stories both deal with premonitions of death, 'The Uncanny Bairn' with it's annoyingly written Scots dialect that, for me, felt contrived and kept bogging the story down was the least successful with it's story of a young boy growing up with second sight whilst 'Many Waters Cannot Quench Love' drops a young holiday maker into a house with a sobbing ghost.  'How He Left the Hotel' is an insubstantial little ditty while 'The Real and the Counterfeit' is a nondescript practical joke with an inevitable conclusion whereas 'My Next Door Neighbour' tells you the ending early on and then allows you to enjoy the journey.

Of the final two stories that make up Baldwin's half of the book, 'Sir Nigel Otterburne's Case' deals with a family curse in much the same way as all the other stories of it's ilk whilst the final one, 'The Ticking of the Clock' eschews supernatural themes for a tale of cross-generational familial love and is all the better for not trying to shoehorn any in.

And so we move on to the Lettice Galbraith half of the book.  Her first story, 'The Case of Lady Lukestan', makes it abundantly clear right from the off that we are dealing with a very different writer.  Her prose is more forceful and her manner less, well, mannered as she tells of a spurned and vindictive vicar's revenge from the beyond the grave in a story filled to the brim with suicide, gossip, illegitimate weddings, children and death.

She follows this with a tale of gambling, touts and 'The Trainer's Ghost' just in case you weren't scandalised enough by the lady's knowledge of indelicate events in the previous story and by this point I'm liking this lady very much indeed. Tales of infernal bargains ('The Ghost in the Chair'), mesmerism and murder ('In the Seance Room'), spectral retribution ('The Missing Model' & 'A Ghost's Revenge') and finally occult detection and black magic ('The Blue Room') all confirm my early opinion that the lady had much to offer and of whom so little is known - you'll notice there's no author image attached to this half of the review.

These Wordsworths regularly offer up surprises and whilst the first half has it's enjoyable moments it is a little too well mannered and reserved for my tastes and I quite like well mannered and reserved.  Galbraith's second half on the other hand is a delight of unpleasantness, retribution and death and it's a real shame that there's so little work by her to explore.

The Right Hand of Doom & Other Tales of Solomon Kane

Robert E. Howard
Wordsworth Editions

The sixteenth-century Puritan Solomon Kane has a thirst for justice which surpasses common reason. Sombre of mood, clad in black and grey, he 'never sought to analyse his motives and he never wavered once his mind was made up. Though he always acted on impulse, he firmly believed that all his actions were governed by cold and logical reasonings...A hunger in his soul drove him on and on, an urge to right all wrongs, protect all weaker things, and avenge all crimes against right and justice'.

I've never really had a hankering to read the Conan books.  The films were OK but I'm not much of a fantasy buff so the stories themselves held little appeal. The Solomon Kane stories on the other hand have always been an intriguing prospect.  The sword wielding puritan adventurer was always an enticing image.  The look of him always seemed correct to me for good, gutsy, godly vengeance type sword and sorcery romps.

The 10 stories and 3 (dreadful) poems that make up the book are - I believe - the entirety of the original Kane stories and tell of a man driven by his desire to serve his god by hunting down and dispatching evil wherever he finds it.  From his native Devon he travels several times to Africa battling murderers, rapists, pirates, vampires, flying creatures, slavers and an entire lost civilisation armed only with a sword, a couple of flintlock pistols and a magic staff given him by an African magician.

The stories are all pretty much the same as each time we join Kane at the culmination of a quest where with a last mighty effort of both iron will and iron limbs he reaches his goal and variously stabs, shoots or bludgeons his nemesis to death.  Howard takes great pains to repeatedly describe Kane's physical attributes giving the whole thing an unintentionally homoerotic quality which sits oddly next to some of the racism inherent in Howard's views of Africans although this certainly wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be.  

I was hoping for a big silly sword and sorcery romp filled with daring do and that's what I got.  The fact that it was all that I got was a little odd but here, now and in the particular mood I was in at the time it was enough, just.

The Werewolf Pack

Mark Valentine (editor)
Wordsworth Editions

The wolf has always been a creature of legend and romance, while kings, sorcerers and outlaws have been proud to be called by the name of the wolf. It's no wonder, then, that tales of transformation between man and wolf are so powerful and persistent.

On a recent visit to Hay on Wye I scored a big stack of these Wordsworth Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural books (and then three more in Cardiff three days later) so expect a few of them to crop up here over the coming months.  One of the first books in this series that I read was Mark's other Wordsworth Editions anthology, 'The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths', which was about as much fun as a book is capable of being so I jumped at this new discovery even though a fan of monster stories I am not.

Count Stenbock

I've not read many werewolf stories before - there was a short in one of 'The Sandman' volumes and I've vague memories of flipping through an adaptation of one of the 'Howling' movies as a kid and there's a Wyrd Britain regular that I'll come to later - but I've seen a whole host of movies, it is a most filmable creature, but the books have never really interested me.  There are some really interesting moments but I didn't really find this volume as satisfying as the other.  Much of that must be put down to my love of of the occult detective angle and my ambivalence to monsters but also far too many of the stories here had the feel of a folktale which, as regular perusers of my scribblings will know, aren't my favourite things.

There are though several interesting stories lurking here, Saki's 'Gabriel-Ernest' (which I alluded to earlier) is a perennial anthology entrant but I'd not come across his tale of bluster and comeuppance, 'The She-Wolf', before and won't be sorry if I never do again.  'The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains' by Captain Frederick Marryat is a worthy opener with elements of folk tale providing a backbone for a much more interesting story than I assumed from it's first few pages.

R.B. Russell

Count Stenbock's 'The Other Side' is a delicately hallucinatory tale of forbidden flowers and beguiling women and an ambiguously supernatural Sherlock Holmes pastiche called 'The Shadow of the Wolf' by Ron Weighell sticks out dynamic duo on the roof of an old house in the country tracking a savage murderer.  The book closes with R.B. Russell's wonderfully strange 'Loup-Garou' which I'm not even going to try and describe to you as it's something you need to experience yourself.

Around these stories are a host of other tales that are all worthy of your time as they display interesting takes on the mythos but the above were, for me, the standouts. As I said at the beginning, creature stories aren't my favourites but as a toe dipping exercise into the genre this book has much to recommend it.

Buy it here -  The Werewolf Pack (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

The Haunted Hotel and other stories

Wilkie Collins
Wordsworth Editions

This is a unique collection of strange stories from the cunning pen of Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone. The star attraction is the novella The Haunted Hotel, a clever combination of detective and ghost story set in Venice, a city of grim waterways, dark shadows and death. The action takes place in an ancient palazzo converted into a modern hotel that houses a grisly secret. The supernatural horror relentless pace, tight narrative, and a doomed countess characterise and distinguish this powerful tale.
The other stories present equally disturbing scenarios, which include ghosts, corpses that move, family corpses and perhaps the most unusual of all, the Devil's spectacles, which bring a clarity of vision that can lead to madness.
Collins is one of the great storytellers. He excels in presenting narratives that both disturb and engross the reader, as this fine collection demonstrates. 

I've read a fair few of Collins' stories over the last couple of years and enjoyed them all.  They are lively, imaginative and written with a real readability, an easy way of phrasing that many of his contemporaries and successors lacked.  That said though, I've little interest in reading any of his longer works - or those of the other writers of the era - as I've, for the most part, come to think of these writers as providing my short story kick.  So, the novella that makes up a large - 149 page - chunk of this book was my longest excursion by far into the realms of the Victorian ghost story.

The story itself tells of a jilted woman, her usurper in her ex's affections and his extended family.  The tale moves between London, Ireland and Venice as a seemingly inevitable and perhaps fated meeting between various parties at the hotel of the title.  For most of the novella it feels like a fairly slight story extended beyond its bounds and supported in it's telling by Collins' readability but when the uncanny and the odd begin to appear it is all the more effective for it and the novella culminates in a most satisfying manner.

Making up the rest of the page count are several shorts of varying quality of which I was only previous acquainted with the first, 'The Dream Woman' which tells of a grooms (the horse variety) unrelenting fear of his ex wife.

A marriage is at the heart of the third tale also, 'Mrs Zant and the Ghost', in which a chance encounter with a lady in a park brings a widower and his young daughter  into her life in time to save her from an unpleasant fate.  I've admitted in these pages before that I am a real sucker for a happy story so this proved to be a real favourite.

'A Terribly Strange Bed' is, along with 'The Dead Hand' & 'Blow Up With The Brig!', one of several stories here with no supernatural content.  All are enjoyable, the latter being the least so, but aren't what I read these books for and so my enjoyment is limited but, as I say, the first two are certainly enjoyable in what they are.

Of the three remaining stories, two deal with apparitions, in one 'Miss Jeromette and the Clergyman' this is in the context of a story told about a murder committed whilst the other 'Nine O'Clock' tells of a premonition of death.  Both stories have a sense of inevitability about them as their denouements are telegraphed from the off but the journeys to the ends is enjoyable enough.

The book closes with the frankly absurd 'The Devil's Spectacles' that begins with a story of cannibalism and ends with madness via mistrust, greed, jealousy and a very ugly pair of glasses.

As ever with these Wordsworth Editions what you get is a collection of unusual tales that are often engrossing, sometimes intriguing and occasionally puzzling but every now and again though these stories are written by a master of the craft and manage to be all three at once.

Aylmer Vance: Ghost Seer

Alice & Claude Askew
Wordsworth Editions

A collection of classic supernatural tales from the Edwardian period. Originally published in 1914 between 4 July and 22 August in The Weekly Tale-Teller, the stories were belatedly collected into the current volume in the late 1990s by Jack Adrian.
This is a collection of eight ghost stories, written by the remarkably prolific husband and wife team of Claude and Alice Askew, centering on Aylmer Vance, an investigator of the supernatural. Dexter, the narrator, meets Vance during a fishing holiday and Vance tells him three ghost stories on successive nights, each story involving Vance more closely in the action. The fourth story brings Dexter himself into the action, and reveals him to have unsuspected clairvoyant powers. The remaining stories feature Vance and Dexter as a sort of Holmes-and-Watson team investigating incidents not all of which prove to have supernatural causes.

Another in the fabulous Wordsworth Editions series of 'Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural', Aylmer Vance: Ghost Seer is a short collection of Edwardian ghost stories featuring the titular psychical investigator and his 'Watson' the clairvoyant barrister Dexter.

Over the 8 tales that make up the book Vance initially tells Dexter of a number of his encounters with the supernatural; a possession from the ancient past in 'The Invader', an encounter with an old god in 'The Stranger', a love story featuring a beautiful ghost exeriencing one last soiree in 'Lady Green-Sleeves' and a tale of heartbreak, love, poetry and fire that transcends death in 'The Fire Unquenchable'.  It's following this fouth story that Dexter becomes Vance's apprentice and takes a more active role in the proceedings.  Like the aforementioned Watson he is very much the junior partner and serves mostly as narrator but also as pupil as result of his psychic abuilities.

The second four stories explore hauntings and possession in the 'The Vampire', haunted houses in 'The Boy of Blackstock' and 'The Fear', and the enduring influence of past lives in 'The Indissoluble Band'.

It's a great shame that the eight stories here are all that the husband and wife authors completed as both Vance and Dexter are enjoyable company and the stories are entertainingly creepy.

In Ghostly Company

Amyas Northcote
Wordsworth Editions

A grey cloud formed on the summit of the altar, diminishing, thickening and turning into a Shape, a shape of evil and fear. The silent group by the fire once more broke forth into wild gesticulations and cries, Stella prostrated herself, the Form on the altar grew clearer and with a cry of horror Mr Fowke turned away and rushed madly across the moor'. Amyas Northcote's In Ghostly Company is a rare and splendid collection of strange and disturbing tales from the golden age of ghost stories. His style is akin to that of the master of the genre M.R. James: it is measured and insidiously suggestive, producing unnerving chills rather than shocks and gasps. Northcote's tales make the reader unsettled and uneasy. This is partly due to the fact that the hauntings or strange occurrences take place in natural or mundane surroundings - surroundings familiar to the reader but never before thought of as unusual or threatening. Long out of print, this book remains an enthralling and chilling read.

Amyas Northcote was an English writer of the Edwardian era with just this single volume of ghost stories published in 1921 to his name.

The intro by David Stuart Davies makes note of how Northcote's short tales were described as being written in an 'unemotional style' and indeed this is well noted as throughout the author feels very distant from his subject matter.  Emotions, other than fear, are kept at a respectable distance and he offers up his stories with a very British reserve.  Happily, this isn't something that bothers me to any particular extent and I like a fairly hands off author.

The stories themselves hail from what must be described as the halcyon days of the ghost story.  Northcote was a student at Eton during M.R. James' tenure at the school and it is to that venerable author, along with others such as E.F. Benson that Northcote's work draws parallels.

In the classic tradition of the genre and the era Northcote's characters are, for the most part innocents caught up in events over which they have little understanding and even less control.  For some their lack of comprehension proves to be their saving grace.  In other situations it's their innate goodness or the self destructive nature of evil or even their pet but equally often the innocent are sent to their grave through nefarious actions.

An aspect of the works here that particularly appealed is that in Northcote's hands the landscape becomes a character in itself.  His stories, unlike those of his eminent peer, are more definitely attached to their British landscape.  There are a few obvious exceptions but they could easily have been relocated to the wilds of Wales, Scotland, Cornwall or Devon.  In the story of the same name the nature of The Downs being as much a character as the spectral figures that haunt it and the horror of the actions of 'The Late Mrs Fowke' are intensified through both the unsavoury establishment she visits and the befouled rural setting within which she conducts her evil conjuring.

His writing seems embedded in a changing age;  the almost fully mechanised industrial society of the early twentieth century that remembers the wild places of the countryside but as a place of superstitious fear and dangerous magics.  Equally there's a sentimentality within his work that serves to make the prospect of the afterlife one here wrongs, both great and small and both slight and slights can be addressed and redressed.

I've become very much a fan of these Wordsworth Editions over the last few years and it's always a good day when I stumble across a new one especially one that I become as besotted with as I have with this one.  Northcote, I suspect, will always remain a peripheral figure in the pantheon of authors of the macabre but to those that seek him out and to those who fall upon him unexpectedly he will prove to be a fortuitous treat.

The Bishop of Hell & other stories

Marjorie Bowen
Wordsworth Editions

Another in the fabulous Wordsworth Editions Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural.  This one is the work of a lady by the name of Gabrielle Margaret Vere Long writing under her most prolific pseudonym Marjorie Bowen in the early 20th century.

The stories here show a writer of singular imagination and the ability to distill her story into a very neat parcel.  These stories tell of dreams ('The Fair Hair of Ambosine'), obsession ('The Crown Derby Plate'), revenge ('Florence Flannery'), greed ('Elsie's Lonely Afternoon'), cruelty ('The Bishop of Hell' & 'The Scoured Silk') and more.

I think it a grave disservice that the lady is not more celebrated as these are a fine selection of excellently crafted tales of the supernatural.

- There are a large number of her short stories and a novel listed for free reading on the following website - 
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/bowen/marjorie/https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/bowen/marjorie/

The Crimson Blind and Other Stories

H. D. Everett
Wordsworth Editions

Mrs H.D. Everett was the last in a long line of gifted Victorian novelists who knew how to grip the reader through the invasion of everyday life by the abnormal and dramatic, leaving the facts to produce their special thrills without piling on the agony. 'I always know', says one of her characters, 'how to distinguish a true ghost story from a faked one. The true ghost story never has any point and the faked one dare not leave it out.' From the chilling horror of The Death Mask to the shocking violence of The Crimson Blind, from the creeping menace of Parson Clench to the mounting suspense of The Pipers of Mallory, these thrilling stories were enthusiastically received by readers and critics when they first appeared, and are sure to delight and terrify the modern reader in equal measure.

 Most every bit of information I can find online regarding Mrs H. D. Everett comes from this book's blurb and that isn't much.  She was a Victorian and Edwardian author very much in the tradition of time with a nice turn of phrase at times although the dearth of remarkably creepy tales here probably goes some way to explaining her obscurity.

There are some really interesting stories amongst the 16 tales but most suffer, at least somewhat, from a lack of refinement. I'm here though to talk about the good stuff and truly there were some particularly good bits.

The book gets off to a very promising start with 'The Death Mask' a wonderfully creepy tale of possessiveness from beyond the grave which unfortunately peters out into a pretty unsatisfying flop of an ending.  The following tale 'Parson Clench' takes a similar sort of theme, this time a recalcitrant and deceased vicar refusing to relinquish his parish and runs with it to create a ghost story that never really manages to raise any chills with a ghost that does nothing but sit there like a sulky child.

'The Wind of Dunowe' is fluffy and easily forgotten but 'Nevill Nugent's Legacy' had a very nice little dark twist to it but title piece, 'The Crimson Blind' refuses categorically to live up to it's early promise and 'The Fingers of a Hand' belied it's nicely creepy set-up with a feel good ending. 'The Next Heir' takes it's time to establish what promises to be a tale of fratricide, ancient nature spirits and sacrificial offerings before it all comes crashing down in the most uninteresting way possible this side of 'and it was all a dream'.

Fortunately at this point, just over halfway through the book, things take a turn very much for the better.  'Annes Little Ghost' tells a short and essentially pointless (as intimated in the story itself - see the quote in the blurb above) of a lonely childless couple adopted by a ghostly child.  'Over the Wires' is by far my favourite here as a soldier home on leave searching for his refugee love that he'd sent on ahead starts to receive strange phone calls from her.

'A Water Witch' offers the most straight forward tale of rural horror here as a pair of young women try to avoid unwanted attention from both the living and the dead. I'm always a fan of a dog tale (sorry) and 'The Lonely Road' is another feel good piece that leaves you smiling to yourself.

'A Girl in White' is one of the weirder tales here but one which feels very much like it was written as a feel good response to the horrors of first world war that hang over many of the stories in the collection as a wounded soldier finds love in a most unusual way. Indeed, war and injury again feature in what is easily the books oddest story, 'A Perplexing Case' as doctor's try to unravel the damaged minds of two wounded soldiers.

The lure of the wild west proves too much for our author in 'Beyond the Pale' which puts an English couple into an environment where they are subjected to the revenge of an affronted Indian shaman.

The final two stories return us to the impact of the war firstly on those left at home with the ghostly 'The Pipers of Mallory' and lastly on those serving with 'The Whispering Wall'.  Neither takes it's subject matter more seriously than a piece of escapist ghostly fiction probably should but equally they remain affecting in their stories of friendships made, broken and maintained.

As I said at the beginning, it's a mixed bag of goodies and it seems unlikely that Everett will ever be viewed in the same light as her contemporaries and peers within the ghostly and the strange but perhaps that doesn't really matter as in the lovely Wordsworth Editions we are allowed a glimpse of the outsiders and the also-rans and often that's where you'll find some real real gems.

Collected Ghost Stories

M. R. James
Wordsworth Editions

These stories have been on my wish list for years and I simply have never had either the time or the head space for them. When the time finally came I made it into an event and made it last as long as I could.  I've been eking them out for months. I'm glad I did too as there is a fairly strong similarity between the stories and I think I would have got quite bored and missed out on just how good many of these stories actually are.

Here in the UK James' stories have become something of a Xmas tradition with adaptations of 9 of his stories having been produced for the BBC.  As such I knew some of the stories, particularly 'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come  To You, My Lad' and 'Lost  Hearts'.

Montague Rhodes James spent  a large chunk of his adult life within the academic environs of Cambridge and it was there that he began producing ghost stories as a way of entertaining friends and colleagues.  His stories very much reflect his audience as they often feature fusty men of letters,  often an object found or collected - a book, a pair of binoculars, a whistle - that triggers the events or even something as simple as greed that initiates terrible events.

He is rarely, if ever, particularly overt in describing the horrors that befall.  In James' stories it is that something unpleasant has happened within what  is generally first established to be a genteel, mannered, respectable or polite setting.  The horror is in the shattering of the ordinary by the extraordinary and strangely, for a man with religious convictions these rarely feature.  Instead there is often an almost pagan rural horror to the stories, an air of the old times influencing the new.

As I said earlier I've been reading this for most of the last year.  I'd finish a novel and then pick this up and read a tale or two before disappearing into the next novel.  This helped.  I'm not the worlds biggest fan of short story anthologies and so this method made it feel like a real treat.

The stories, though maybe a little mild by modern tastes still maintain a fine level of creepy.  The obvious classics like the ones I mentioned earlier here have stood the test of time beautifully and are every bit as horrific as they ever were; 'Lost  Hearts' for example would need very little alteration for it to be the most modern of tales.

So, an ambition fulfilled.  The ghost stories of M. R. James read and thoroughly enjoyed.  They are very much recommended to anyone with an interest in the ghost genre or rural horror but I think perhaps there's much here to satisfy even a passing curiosity.

The Casebook of Carnacki: Ghost Hunter

William Hope Hodgson
(Wordsworth Editions)

Edited with an Introduction by David Stuart Davies 'I saw something terrible rising up through the middle of the 'defence'. It rose with a steady movement. I saw it pale and huge through the whirling funnel of cloud - a monstrous pallid snout rising out of that unknowable abyss. It rose higher and higher. Through a thinning of the cloud I saw one small eye... a pig's eye with a sort of vile understanding shining at the back of it. Thomas Carnacki is a ghost finder, an Edwardian psychic detective, investigating a wide range of terrifying hauntings presented in the nine stories in this complete collection of his adventures. Encountering such spine-chilling phenomena as 'The Whistling Room', the life-threatening dangers of the phantom steed in 'The Horse of the Invisible' and the demons from the outside world in 'The Hog', Carnacki is constantly challenged by spiritual forces beyond our knowledge. To complicate matters, he encounters human skullduggery also. Armed with a camera, his Electric Pentacle and various ancient tomes on magic, Carnacki faces the various dangers his supernatural investigations present with great courage. These exciting and frightening stories have long been out of print. Now readers can thrill to them again in this new Wordsworth series.

A year or so ago I heard the ‘Weird Tales for Winter’ version of ‘Gateway of the Monster’ and shortly after that I read ‘The Whistling Room’ as a back-up story in one of the Doctor Who novellas – ‘Foreign Devils’ by Andrew Cartmel – these sent me looking for the full anthology.

The two I already knew are amongst the best of the 9 Carnacki stories here. ‘The Hog’ was also pretty fab as was ‘the Horse of the Invisible’ even if part of the ending was maybe a little poor.  'The House Among the Laurels’ was a silly but fun Sherlockian short. ‘The Find’ was too brief by far and felt undeveloped. ‘The Haunted Jarvee’ had its moments but didn’t really go anywhere.  ‘The Thing Invisible’ was another basic Sherlock investigation and ‘The Searcher of the End House’ had nothing to offer in the end to live up to the build-up.

At best Hodgson was a journeyman writer. There are some nice ideas in there and the fact that Carnacki doesn’t always come across supernatural causes to the crimes he investigates is very satisfying. The stories though, often feel underdeveloped and the character himself is too dry and stunted and just doesn’t have the personality to truly carry the story, he really needs a Watson. Perhaps if Hodgson had survived WWI he would have developed his style and the character. It would have been interesting to see how his experiences would have influenced his words. Alas it was not to be.

The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths

Mark Valentine (ed)
(Wordsworth Editions)

The Gateway of the Monster… The Red Hand… The Ghost Hunter
To Sherlock Holmes the supernatural was a closed book: but other great detectives have always been ready to do battle with the dark instead. This volume brings together sixteen chilling cases of these supernatural sleuths, pitting themselves against the peril of ultimate evil.
Here are encounters from the casebooks of the Victorian haunted house investigators John Bell and Flaxman Low, from Carnacki, the Edwardian battler against the abyss, and from horror master Arthur Machen's Mr Dyson, a man-about-town and meddler in strange things. Connoisseurs will find rare cases such as those of Allen Upward's ‘The Ghost Hunter’, Robert Barr's Eugene Valmont (who may have inspired Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot) and Donald Campbell's young explorer Leslie Vane, the James Bond of the jazz age, who battles against occult enemies of the British Empire. And the collection is completed by some of the best tales from the pens of modern psychic sleuth authors.

This is a pretty nifty little compilation of stories featuring detectives of the paranormal and the occult such as Thomas Carnacki and Valentine's own Connoisseur. The selection has been put together by the very lovely Mark Valentine of Tartarus Press and features some really wonderful tales alongside a couple of duffers.

There are moments here that had me rapt; the aforementioned Carnacki, Ray Russell's tale of Clockwork revenge gone wrong, Rosalie Parker's gorgeously frustrating haunted house tale, Mark's own Machen-esque tale of folklore and obligation and Vernon Knowles' beautifully sad and odd tale of Basil Thorpenden.

Other tales moved me not at all - Donald Campbell's tale 'The Necromancer' was particularly woeful - but on the whole this was an eminently readable selection that provides a deliciously enticing intro to this most interesting niche genre.

Buy it here -  Black Veil & Other Tales (Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural) (Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural)