Some pickups from recent travels. Some people know that I read a lot of horror literature, with a specific interest in gothic literature and the classic British ghost story.
E.F. Benson is one of the most famous and highly regarded of British ghost story writers. What I didn’t know (and most people don’t) is that his two brothers also wrote ghost stories, although they didn’t have their middle brothers significant commercial success. But their stories too are quite well told, if not quite as crisp and high energy.
M.P. Shiel is little known now, but for a time he had a reputation for writing some early great novels in what became known as science fiction. He wrote horror stories too, and his story “The House of Sounds” was mentioned in H.P. Lovecraft’s book Supernatural Horror in Literature as one of the great tales in the genre. Shiel’s personal history as a criminal (you can read about this elsewhere) pushed him and his work out of the public eye nearly for good. But what’s equally fascinating, from the vantage point of now, is he was born and raised in the West Indies and his paternal grandmother was likely an enslaved person. Many photos of him show clearly that he is a person of color. And why this matters is that unlike Lovecraft and most of the 20th century British and American cosmic horror writers, Shiel in his fiction is not a racist, and his horror stories do not seem to dwell in a land of inferior and superior races. The style of his writing can be overwrought and unbearable to contemporary readers, but not all of it is.
E.F. Benson is one of the most famous and highly regarded of British ghost story writers. What I didn’t know (and most people don’t) is that his two brothers also wrote ghost stories, although they didn’t have their middle brothers significant commercial success. But their stories too are quite well told, if not quite as crisp and high energy.
M.P. Shiel is little known now, but for a time he had a reputation for writing some early great novels in what became known as science fiction. He wrote horror stories too, and his story “The House of Sounds” was mentioned in H.P. Lovecraft’s book Supernatural Horror in Literature as one of the great tales in the genre. Shiel’s personal history as a criminal (you can read about this elsewhere) pushed him and his work out of the public eye nearly for good. But what’s equally fascinating, from the vantage point of now, is he was born and raised in the West Indies and his paternal grandmother was likely an enslaved person. Many photos of him show clearly that he is a person of color. And why this matters is that unlike Lovecraft and most of the 20th century British and American cosmic horror writers, Shiel in his fiction is not a racist, and his horror stories do not seem to dwell in a land of inferior and superior races. The style of his writing can be overwrought and unbearable to contemporary readers, but not all of it is.
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