Where I Began: Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

 

This book became the basis of my independent life as a reader and a writer. Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Herbert Wise and first published in 1944 by Modern Library. Before it came books that my parents read to me, or gave me to read, many wonderful works, children’s books, but this one I chose myself from my father’s shelves and read through and through repeatedly. I must have read Poe stories at around the same time too. I don’t remember now how old I was, some time between third grade and fifth, I can’t be more accurate. I read them many times for years. These stories set my mind off on all sorts of journeys and gave me a list of writers to read.

This photo isn’t of the original copy I had. That fell apart long ago.

The best thing you can do for some children is to give them the keys to their own imagination.

Happy Halloween to those who celebrate it. 

Brief Review: The Holy Book of the Beard (1996) by Duff Brenna

 

Although it’s set significantly in the Clairemont Mesa area, reading The Holy Book of the Beard I came to feel that it was the closest representation I’d seen in fiction of the culture of the East County San Diego that people in San Diego have often told me about. Published in 1996, the book feels like it could equally be describing the 70s and the 80s and forward. It’s a culture that may be changed by now, but don’t ask me because I wouldn’t know.

It’s a very white culture, one that’s an odd and in many ways unique combination of post-60s-revolution hippie looseness with the reality that these southern Californians are only a few years away from their escape from small U.S. towns in the midwest and south. The book is a reminder that Beat generation freedom-at-all-costs was often a white cultural phenomenon only, one that wasn’t necessarily leftist politically, since an “I’m doing it it my way” attitude doesn’t contain in it a whole lot of concern for others.

But the remnants of Beat Generation behaviors in these characters isn’t that of East Coast intellectual Ginsberg or West Coast adventurers Snyder and Kerouac (the west coast portion of Kerouac). This book portrays something that’s more Bukowski-style beat behavior, men with shitty jobs and behavior problems that start with drunkenness and go from there, and the women they take it out on. Here, freedom includes your right to be constantly bombed and punch out anyone, especially if she’s smaller than you. One of the characters is literary, and wow does he especially spout a lot of nonsense about how the world has mistreated him. For this one character, if few of the others, it seemed clear that Brenna’s intentions were satirical.

The women characters in the book are pretty tough-minded and tough-acting. They’d have to be to put up with the kind of behavior they have to put up with. The more sympathetic characters, usually women and at least one of the men, are the people who remain upset that the others behave as badly as they do. Everybody in the book is insular and full of themselves, but at least a few of them recognize that behaving that way is a problem.

The cultural environment of this book was for me its main fascination. But I could never quite tell whether Brenna realized that he was describing a deeply odd cultural context or whether he saw the depiction of sleazy half-tough drunkards with delusions of grandeur as a semi-hardboiled description of life as it is. The conclusion of the book, not entirely convincing, traipses into being southwestern Gothic. It made me think that the book was partly an Erskine Caldwell-like half-mocking, half-horrified exposé of some strange ignorant weirdos who think of themselves as wise. But I have to admit I’m not sure.

I had mixed feelings about the writing. The sentences and paragraphs have great energy and kept me involved, but every chapter is about twice or more as long as it needs to be. There’s a lot of writing in this novel that could have been cut back, and some characterizations are slammed home well past the point of tedium. Still, whenever I wasn’t bored, I was fascinated.

Ultimately I felt like the padding in the writing was in keeping, usually for worse rather than for better, with the self-indulgent rambling of the characters themselves. But the fact that they, and it, aren’t as interesting as they present themselves to be made me wonder. Maybe this undeniably talented writer absorbed a bit more than he ought to have of the heady combination of pot, sea air, fumes of gasoline and oil, and gallons of whiskey and Budwiser in which these sad, mostly unredeemable, and finally grotesque characters are drowning themselves and anyone unlucky enough to come in contact with them.

Fools Crow by James Welch

 

James Welch’s novel Fools Crow (first published 1986) is one of the great works of American fiction. It's certainly the best novel I’ve ever read about American Westward Expansion. Set in Montana Territory in 1869-70, it deals with the struggle of the Pikuni branch of the Blackfeet tribe against the complex divisions within the tribe as well as against the encroachment of white settlers and the U.S. Army.

The narrative collapses the conventional western distinction between realism and the magical, as well as balancing on the often terrifying line between hopelessness and hope. The subtlety and complexity of the characters brings to the forefront the dynamic between brutality and care for others that is one of the main tensions of the story. And the prose is remarkably and uniquely beautiful and unlike anything else I’ve come across in the English language.

Honey Mine (Collected Stories) by Camille Roy

 

There’s a lot of brilliant writing in this book. Camille Roy has a remarkable style: crisp, vivid, energetic. Although the subtitle of Honey Mine is Collected Stories, this is a profoundly hybrid collection. Short stories, memoir, poetry, essays, all of these ways of writing weave in and out through individual pieces and the text as a whole so that genre categories never remain stable.

One of the key themes of this book is that underground and alternative communities, whether based in sexual identity or identities and politics of other kinds, can form genuine and meaningful alternative values. And if Roy wants readers to understand that those communities and values sometimes thrive by being opaque to the rest of the world, everything in Honey Mine communicates powerfully, even when it chooses what not to speak of.

October Hauntings: Ghost Tales in my Book Collection originally posted Oct 1-31 2022: The Fifth Group

The following brief responses to some of the ghost fiction in my book collection were posted on Facebook between Oct 1 and 31, 2022. I didn’t post every day though I tried to post as many days as possible. The original Facebook posts contained photos of the books.

The Fifth Group

E.F. Benson, The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson (1992)

E.F. Benson was a prolific and successful writer and not just of ghost stories. He is maybe most well known now for his series of Mapp and Lucia novels, a comedy of manners set in a seaside town and that has been made into two British TV series, but his ghost stories too continue to be widely known and read. He’s a key writer in bringing the British ghost story into the 20th century, with his haunted tales set in a variety of believable environments, country and town and city, and with a wide range of ordinary people among his cast of characters. His 1906 story “The Bus Conductor,” whose key elements were borrowed by the famous British multi-episode horror movie Dead of Night (1944), is just one example of the kinds of ordinary daily life contexts in his ghost stories.

Benson’s style is sort of a streamlined Victorian that, like his subject matter, also rides the line between the 19th and 20th centuries. And if neither his style or his stories have the incredible precision of M.R. James, Benson can still tell a ghost story with some nicely chilling twists. His stories also seem to me a key link between the classic British ghost tale and what became modern British horror fiction. I imagine, for instance, that what was once a new generation of British horror with a basis in realism, established by Ramsey Campbell’s The Face That Must Die (1979), might have been significantly influenced by these crisply told tales.

J.S. LeFanu, Best Ghost Stories of J.S. LeFanu (1964)

And now, my personal favorite. The ghost and related horror tales of Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (1814-73) are historically just early enough that they neither conform to or create a standard for ghost fiction except to the extent that these highly original tales remain some of the highpoints of all supernatural literature. LeFanu is not as inventive as Poe, but his tales can be very psychologically acute and disturbing, and he can be quite effective in his characterizations (and of women as well as men).

Like some other collections in the Dover series of supernatural writing, the work in these two books is by no means all ghost stories. LeFanu covers a big range of supernatural concepts and unique perspectives like those in “Carmilla” and “Green Tea,” stories which are either too obvious to need mentioning or else you need to go out and read them right away if supernatural fiction appeals to you. A story like “The Haunted Baronet” contains complexities of psychology and symbol that make it a ghost tale like no other written before or since. It has no predecessors, and no imitators though it anticipates some elements of surrealism and of Robert Aickman’s even later concept of the “strange story.”

Le Fanu’s more conventionally ghost-oriented tales have a clear basis in the folk stories of the Irish. His work is filled with a powerful sense of time and location and how to distort it. In his stories, the past is dangerous, the present is just as bad, and people are complex and often unforgettably horrible. The woods and the fields hide stories that his characters realize too late that they never wanted to find out about. Along with mystery and the unexpected, there’s loss and tragedy of a vividness that the ghost stories of the British isles rarely otherwise reach.

“Schalken the Painter,” half ghost story and half something more terrifying, and among the greatest of the stories collected here, was years ago made into a British TV movie that’s well worth seeing. The movie’s sense of dread and precision of detail is heightened by the relatively minimal amount of dialogue.

Paul Gallico, Too Many Ghosts (1959)

Well, writing this series has been fun for me, and darkness on All Hallow’s Eve is nearly upon us. I thought I’d end this series for this haunted season with a ghost farce by Paul Gallico. You can call Too Many Ghosts a cozy horror comedy, with all the classic features of the British ghost story gathered together: a mansion that may or not may be haunted, a cast of characters with conflicting and conflicted goals, and all the moving furniture and turning doorknobs and seances and poltergeist experiences you could want. It’s like the ghost novel that Agatha Christie never wrote, although Gallico’s style takes a bit of getting used to it at first.

The novel is a mystery too. I’m not going to give anything away, but if you want a funhouse of light-hearted affects and plenty of chances to skewer the British aristocracy without really doing them any harm, plus, who knows, maybe even a love story, then this novel and all the many many ghosts in it is about as much silly fun as any ghost book I can think of.

October Hauntings: Ghost Tales in my Book Collection originally posted Oct 1-31 2022: The Fourth Five

The following brief responses to some of the ghost fiction in my book collection were posted on Facebook between Oct 1 and 31, 2022. I didn’t post every day though I tried to post as many days as possible. The original Facebook posts contained photos of the books.

Fourth Five

Mary Butts, From Altar to Chimney Piece: Selected Stories of Mary Butts (1992)

Maybe these aren’t exactly ghost stories in a conventional sense, but the hovering, not always graspable presence of the supernatural definitely has enough consistently ghostly qualities for me to think it belongs in this category. These are subtle, elliptical Modernist stories written between 1923 and Butts’ death in 1937. This collection, and a more recent edition of her complete stories, both feature introductions by John Ashbery, which makes sense because many of Butts’ stories have an oblique, suggestive, and disconcerting feeling that have more than a few similarities to Ashbery poems. From Altar to Chimney Piece is literature exploring the supernatural that you can read without feeling like you’ve sullied yourself with genre trash, if feeling sullied by genre trash is something you happen to worry about.

R.B. Russell, Ghosts (2021)

Anybody who thinks that the classic British ghost story is played out or is now just a nostalgia trip has not read R.B. Russell. These stories have some of the expected shape of ghost tales (and not all of them are about ghosts), but their turns are subtle, psychologically fascinating, and surprising. You might think you know what’s happening, but you don’t, and the ideas here about perception, memory, and longing are very contemporary in their perspectives while retaining a certain classic haunted story feel. Ghosts is a compilation of Russell’s first two short books, both published in 2009, the story collection Putting the Pieces in Place and his fabulously titled novella Bloody Baudelaire. One thing I especially love about these stories is that I don’t stop thinking about them after I’m done reading them. They continue to be disturbing and disorienting when I think back on what they are. And sometimes when one pops back into my head unexpectedly, I shudder.

Henry James, Stories of the Supernatural (Hardback 1970, Paperback 1980)

The material collected in this 750+ volume contains the most psychologically complex ghost literature I’ve read. James doesn’t confine himself to the realm of ghosts, of course, so there’s a range of supernatural subject matter, but all of it’s brilliant, and all of it is connected to people and their problems. The Turn of the Screw deserves all its praise as one of the best stories about a haunting ever written. And the thing is, as that short novel and some of the other stories in this collection show, the refinement and subtlety of James doesn’t mean that he holds back on the vicious. In his stories, it’s not just the supernatural that attacks people; it’s James understanding of what’s wrong with those people and exactly what it is that’s going to crumple them.

M.R James, Collected Ghost Stories (2011)

M.R. James is more or less the gold standard of the classic British ghost story. Compact tales, gentle by modern standards, but rich in history and moments of chilling surprise. If you want a precise 30-40 minutes by-the-fire-on-a-rainy-night ghost story, you can’t do better than these.

By ideology, James was the opposite of a materialist. He was a deeply closeted gay man (saying this so directly is still considered rude by some James fans) whose taste in literature and politics was very much traditionalist conservative, although he was often as closeted in his political positions as he was in his sexual orientation (he was provost for many years at King’s College, Cambridge, and later at Eton College). He believed that his important writing was his medieval scholarship and wrote ghost stories to entertain his colleagues, and it’s his knowledge and interest in history that makes his tales models of materialist precision about detail and location.

His stories are set in a precise real world against which their supernatural mysteries stand out. His horrors are often revealed only partly or indirectly. He’s not great with characterization; his bachelor scholar main characters aren’t particularly distinct from each other, with many of them being given to a scholarly curiosity that sometimes passes into dangerous obsession.

My Oxford Collected Ghost Stories hardback has great annotations and an essay by James on the ghost story, but I first read a lot of his stories in the two little Dover books which feature his first and second collections, the most essential of his four collections, although the later ones also have some great stories. The Dover books were given to me one Christmas by my father; I had read a few James stories in anthologies before and it was great to read his fiction more thoroughly.

By now I’ve read all these stories more than once, and I read them again from time to time, and I’ve watched them in various televised versions, and I don’t imagine I’ll ever be tired of them. Their suggestiveness about the strange things that lie just outside the narrow minds of human beings are for me among the most fully pleasurable of literary experiences.

Susan Hill, The Small Hand and Dolly (2012)

I own more than one book by many of the authors I have posted about this month, but Susan Hill is the only author I’m going to feature more than once. That’s because these two novellas are so different than her famous novel The Woman In Black. Written in the 1980s, The Woman In Black was a conscious attempt to write in the 20th century a 19th century ghost story that would outdo the originals, an attempt that pretty much succeeded.

The Small Hand, and Dolly, two novellas published together in 2012, are contemporary in setting, though they still have the classic feel of British countryside horror. They’re also sleek, precise, chilling, and relentless. They’re still part of the history of the understated ghost story as opposed to effects-heavy horror gore, but ultimately they’re also much more vicious than you might expect. Dolly might make you want to rush right back to the overexcited silliness of Chucky in order to feel less disturbed.

October Hauntings: Ghost Tales in my Book Collection originally posted Oct 1-31 2022: the Third Five

The following brief responses to some of the ghost fiction in my book collection were posted on Facebook between Oct 1 and 31, 2022. I didn’t post every day though I tried to post as many days as possible. The original Facebook posts contained photos of the books.

Third Five

Edith Wharton, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (1973)

Edith Wharton’s “Afterward” is rightly among the most highly regarded of English-language ghost stories, with a title that’s perfect for the story in several ways. The rest of the stories in this collection are quite effective too. “The Lady Maid’s Bell,” “The Eyes,” “The Triumph of Night, and “The Pomegranate Seeds” are among my favorites. Wharton (1862-1937) has style, restraint and much more political consciousness than many Americans, writers or otherwise, of her era and elite background. A very enjoyable read!

Oliver Onions, Widdershins (first published 1911; Dover Books edition 1978)

One thing that distinguishes the ghost stories of Oliver Onions (1873-1961) from others in the classic British ghost story is their air of urban bohemian decadence in a tradition that has often been placed in the rural and the remote. Onions shares with writers like Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen an interest in the mystical, the magical, and the pagan, but unlike them he creates a kind of stylish urban decay, exploring the world of strange artists and those who have fallen or are falling outside the conventional British social order. There’s more than a hint of Huysmans, if you know the work of that famous French decadent.

Today, Widdershins is Onions most well-known book, and it starts with one of the most rightly famous stories in the British ghost story tradition, “The Beckoning Fair One,” a slow burn of dark and dangerous enchantment set in a growing urban wasteland. The mood it creates makes it one of the best ghost stories ever. His later collections are worth reading too. He also wrote novels and stories without ghosts dealing with problems of magic, psychology, and even using detective elements, which were equally well known as his ghost stories in the decades of his greatest fame but which are never mentioned by anyone any more, at least not that I know of.

Richard Matheson, A Stir of Echoes (1958)

Not his best novel (that’s I Am Legend, followed closely by The Incredible Shrinking Man) but A Stir of Echoes is still quite an enjoyable ghost novel, not the least of whose horrors is the claustrophobic life of 1950s Southern California suburbanites. The novel was also made into a 1999 movie starring Kevin Bacon that’s well worth watching although it moves the setting of the story to urban Chicago. Matheson (1926-2013) is the source of many great movie scripts (both as a fiction writer and screenwriter), some of which are among the best movies of their kind.

F. Marion Crawford, ghost stories (many different editions; mine is called For The Blood Is The Life)

For nearly 20 years, from the late 1880s until the early 1900s, F. Marion Crawford (1854-1909) might well have been the best-selling of all American fiction writers. No kidding. It’s a pretty long run. He wrote historical novels of many kinds, most notably on the subject of Italian crime families and stories set in what Americans often then called “Arabia.” These books have been out of print for many decades, although the digital environment has recently brought them back, though I can’t say I’ve done much more than glance at them. Their emphasis on non-English-language criminal societies likely suggests something about their cultural perspective. They were combinations of romance action adventure and relatively flimsy realism and were often willing to incorporate magic and fantasy. Crawford also wrote plays, some of which became movies late in his life and after his death. I often use Crawford as an example in my classes of the strange fate of many writers immensely popular in their times, but who within not that many decades become almost completely unknown. Of course, none of my students have ever heard of him.

Crawford could tell a high energy story and was quite an entertaining writer. His eight ghost stories are the work of his most read today and are very much worth reading, probably because they’re so enjoyable and don’t focus on dated portrayals of supposedly exotic environments. “The Open Berth” is probably his most famous story, and it sure is good, and the others are similarly fun and sometimes genuinely haunting. The same eight stories published in the collection I have from the 1990s have been republished in numerous editions. If Crawford is remembered today mostly because of these eight stories, that’s not the worst fate a writer might meet.

César Aria, Ghosts (2009)

This book by Argentinian writer César Aira gets lumped in often with South American magical realism, and I suppose it meets at least the technical definition. To me though it seems more like straight realism, although a bit dreamlike, that also happens to have ghosts in a major role. The narrative is about the relationship between infrastructure (buildings under construction) and people and reads at times nearly like an allegory in service of political critique, except that it’s more subtle than such a description would suggest. It’s not a horror novel really, although there are quite a few odd and chilling moments that make it a good read both for more adventurous genre fans and for those who don’t reject serious fiction just because it has ghosts in it. I think it’s fair to call Ghosts a successful example of slipstream work.

October Hauntings: Ghost Tales in my Book Collection originally posted Oct 1-31 2022: The Second Five

 The following brief responses to some of the ghost fiction in my book collection were posted on Facebook between Oct 1 and 31, 2022. I didn’t post every day though I tried to post as many days as possible. The original Facebook posts contained photos of the books.

Second Five

Kingsley Amis, The Green Man (1969)

This book has a better reputation than it deserves, I think, and the same might be said of its author Kingsley Amis and even his son, novelist Martin Amis. Still, the horror and haunting elements of The Green Man are very effective and suggestively extreme. I wish I could say the same about the dated sex romp satire portions regarding a group of bored families of the suburban British middle class.Those sections take up more than half of the book and are tedious to get through and I found myself skipping chunks of them. Bonus points for the very funny characterization of a parson who tells his congregation at an afternoon drinking party that they need to get beyond the mythological elements of Christianity, but demerits because the novel seems to suggest that he’s wrong. This book is an interesting lesson in the potential dangers of trying to write slipstream fiction: The supposedly trashy horror elements are much better (and classier!) than the actually trashy and supposedly more important human relationship elements that have led this book to be considered a significant work of literary fiction.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Collected Ghost Stories (1974)

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) was an American writer of primarily realist fiction set in New England. She is most known for her feminist perspective in creating strong, often independent women who stood out at the time from more standard late 19th century portrayals of women in American fiction. Her stories have a firm grounding in culture and place. Her precision and insight in connecting character and environment carries over to these quite well done, understated ghost and horror stories. In fact she didn’t draw a hard line between ghost and horror stories and her other writing; although she did publish one book of ghost stories during her lifetime, others of her ghost stories were published in other books alongside her realist stories. Collected Ghost Stories is a posthumous publication from 1974.

Peter Straub, If You Could See Me Now (1977)

Peter Straub claimed that this was one of his favorite books, and I understand why. It might be my favorite of his too. His horror scenarios are often mixed with mystery, action, and adventure, and sometimes take place on an epic scale, but If You Could See Me Now always feels intimate (not to mention occasionally cosmic), an intimacy no one could possibly want. Also, in most of his books, Straub usually goes for subtle, often effectively understated horror. While the story here still works through understatement, it’s probably his most viscerally frightening book, with a number of really scary moments. One scene in it is, for me, one of a handful of the most memorably frightening moments in all of horror literature. Yes, like other early books of his, this is a ghost book. And this ghost is not messing around.

Jean Ray, Malpertuis (1943)

What do you get if you cross gothic narrative, surrealist dream lunacy, plenty of ghosts, and high energy pulp-style trashy writing from the first half of the 20th century that just keeps coming and coming? Jean Ray’s Malpertuis, of course, and there’s nothing like it except for other writing by Jean Ray. 

Susan Hill, The Woman in Black (1983)

The 2012 film version of The Woman In Black is at least energetic and entertaining. However, the 1989 British ITV version is terrifying, one of the best film adaptations of a classic ghost story ever. The ITV version was hard to come by for some years, but it now seems to be available again.

Really, though, the 1983 book (published in 1986 in the U.S.) is the place to start. It was written as a consciously retro version of a 19th century British ghost story, and it outdoes almost all its predecessors. Mood, shadows, tension, menace, chills, and many truly terrifying moments. For anyone interested in the history of the ghost story, The Woman In Black is essential reading, by far the best 19th century ghost story written in the 20th or 21st centuries that I’ve come across (and yes, many others have tried). The version of the book I have has some fun illustrations too.

October Hauntings: Ghost Tales in my Book Collection originally posted Oct 1-31 2022: The First Five

 The following brief responses to some of the ghost fiction in my book collection were posted on Facebook between Oct 1 and 31, 2022. I didn’t post every day though I tried to post as many days as possible. The original Facebook posts contained photos of the books.

First Five

The Lost Stradivarius (1895), J. Meade Falkner

One of the great ghost novels of the 19th century and in fact of any century. One of the best stories about a sustained haunting that I can think of. The novel is also as much a classic gothic as it is a ghost story and succeeds at being both. The moral smugness of the British characters, probably shared by the author, might turn off some contemporary readers, but seemed to me to contribute to the power of the haunting and of the incomprehension of conventional morality in the face of it.

There aren't many ghost stories I like better.

The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J.H. Riddell (Dover 1977)

These are tightly crafted, subtle ghost stories. A bit on the gentle side compared to the genre as a whole, calm and with a clear (overly clear for later standards) sense of right and wrong. Pleasant and comforting (mostly) and eerie fireside ghost reads. E.F. Bleiler, who probably read and wrote about more ghost stories than any other scholar, says of her that “apart from J.S. LeFanu, no other writer of the Victorian period could handle better the emergence of the supernormal.” I can’t think of any reason to disagree.

Ueda Akinari’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain (1776)

This book is often called the first collection of ghost and supernatural stories ever published. More or less all ghost stories are based in folk tales, part of what in western culture have often been the low or populist traditions of writing as opposed to the traditions of high literature. I’m not informed enough to know whether the placing of folk literature in the category of the low rather than the high also exists in Japanese literature (I suspect it might), but I do know that the folk tale quality of these stories will be clear to readers in English. These stories have a familiar weird fairy tale quality but the structures and motivations of these folk-based ghost tales are quite different from English-language folk tales. Still, folk tales from both contexts share a similar rejection of the real vs. the unreal dichotomy that dominates much western literature. Strange and alienating and pleasurable reading.

H.R. Wakefield, The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield (1978)

H.R. Wakefield (1888-1964) didn't always like people very much, and his ghosts don’t either, and that makes them just a bit more vindictive than the ghosts in your standard British ghost story. And if he’s sometimes sentimental, well, it’s not usually human beings that he’s sentimental about.

Wakefield had a bad reputation among some writers and critics of the ghost story, like M.R. James, but that seems to have been partly because Wakefield was much more politically left-wing than most of the relatively conservative writers of British ghost stories during his time. His perspectives on war and animals in particular would have marked him as an outsider to many writers of this kind of work.

This book collects most of the best-known stories of his maybe five or six books of ghost tales and is well worth reading. There are good stories not in it. Luckily, Wakefield’s other books are now available in ebook format after decades of little availability.

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Consider how rare it is that a book offers the most exact definition of a book of its kind while also being the best book of its kind; I’m talking specifically about haunted house novels. Also, note that most haunted house novels are really about a person (dead of course) who haunts a house, but in this book, the house itself does the haunting. Maybe. I’ve gone through a number of editions of this novel; this is the one I taught from most recently. It’s also possible that The Haunting of Hill House is not even Jackon’s best book, although it remains my personal favorite.

The Snake Tree by Uwe Timm

 

Translated from German and published by New Directions in 1989, Uwe Timm’s The Snake Tree is a book in which pretty much every sentence is tense with anxiety and foreboding. The story does not either let up or let go. It belongs to that category of novels, like the books of Paul and Jane Bowles and Alejo Carpentier, or Peter Mathiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord, in which Europeans or Americans find themselves in remote third world contexts. Both the people and the physical conditions of that context are simply not subject to Western thought-control and machine-control, however much that control harms them.

The main character Wagner, “an all-efficient German engineer,” finds himself in a place, whether on his worksite or off, whose logic escapes him and whose people he can’t fathom. Even more so than books by the other authors I’ve mentioned, The Snake Tree presents an increasing spiral of terror and goes both differently and farther than readers might expect (even readers of this kind of fiction). It’s also an especially good example of showing how wrong bureaucracy can go and how much it can make bad problems worse.

Reading up on Timm, I find that he’s still alive as of summer 2022 and has been a tremendously popular writer in Germany. The book reads like an excellent blend of streamlined narrative and complex and sophisticated literature that would never be popular in the United States. It’s simply too good at what it’s trying to do.

The Last Time I Saw These Copies of Thomas Pynchon

 

These rank among the most life-changing books for me. Now that these copies are falling apart, I wanted to photo them and comment on them before the copies (not the books themselves) exit my life.

I first found out about Thomas Pynchon in a graduate class taught by William Spanos (RIP) on Postmodern Fiction at SUNY-Binghamton. We really did read Gravity’s Rainbow, over at least two weeks if I recall, although I don’t recall, not entirely. Other books we read in that class included Calvino’s On A Winter Night a Traveler, Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Borges’ Labyrinths. I loved most of the books in that class, but right now I don’t remember the others.

But Pynchon, wow. Gravity’s Rainbow sent me into another universe of possibility entirely. The politics, the open-ended quality, the nearly impossible combination of humor and seriousness, the huge geographical and historical worldview. Not long after, I published my first work of fiction on the graduate level (I had published some stories in undergraduate magazines). It was called “The Last Time I Saw Thomas Pynchon,” a series of vignettes in which I as narrator encountered Pynchon as character in a series of absurd, urban, postpunk environments (I was very much a postpunk at the time) and he told me things I needed to know.

I picked up and soon read V and The Crying of Lot 49 as well. At that time, Pynchon hadn’t published a new novel in more than 15 years, so this was the era when these three books, and the short story collection Slow Learner, were all the available Pynchon fiction there was, the later avalanche still unforeseen. He was sometimes referred to in print as a 60s satirist whose half-earned moment of fame was long gone.

Anyway, I’m wishing these near-pulp editions goodbye. They have long since pulped themselves. I suppose, human or book, sooner or later we all pulp ourselves, although some pulp gets under our skin a lot deeper than others. In fact it’s just as I write this that I remember one scene from my now lost story “The Last Time I Saw Thomas Pynchon”: he as character and me as narrator met at a garbage dump, where he told me that I could learn more about people’s lives by going through their garbage than by looking at the objects they kept in their houses.

To prove his point, here’s some garbage of mine.

The House on the Borderland (1908) by William Hope Hodgson

I enjoyed this brief trip into grand cosmic horror as a pleasant antidote to the restricted Virus Life I’m currently living in summer 2020. The book is an intriguingly original and very trashy combination of 19th century Gothic novel and 20th futuristic sci-fi by a British author who had clearly read H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel The Time Machine. Hodgson sets his time machine in an exaggerated campy version of a Gothic castle in a remote portion of the British countryside.

The characters are mostly cardboard but the mood is rich and the action constant, with many fun and illogical twists. Hodgson doesn’t care about realism or logic. The book is filled with a great combination of creepy images and playful concepts about space and time and infinity by an author who doesn’t try to be scientifically accurate although he likes metaphors that sound scientific.

Apparently H.P. Lovecraft didn’t read this book or any of Hodgson’s work until 1934, which seems surprising because The House on the Borderland feels like a clear transition between 19th century Gothic haunted house horror and Lovecraftian 20th century cosmic horror.

The fun, vivid and moody action is rarely emotionally gripping, which made it an easy-going pleasure despite the terror of the infinite that the author wants to explore. It’s a shame though that Hodgson isn’t a better writer on the level of sentences. Often he doesn’t seem to know how to use commas or more precisely know when not to use them.

I first read Hodgson years ago now after picking up one of the books in his Carnacki, Ghost Hunter series, similar works of campy, trashy horror fun, a series that Hodgson began writing in the early 1910s in an attempt to make more money.

Hodgson died in World War I at the Fourth Battle of Ypres in April 1918. He was 40 years old.

Support Independent Bookstores and Order Crab from Indiebound

Maybe the way to buy a copy of my novel Crab that’s most supportive of the world of literature is through Indiebound.com, a community of independent local bookstores (link below). You can buy the book directly from Indiebound or use the page to locate a local, independent bookstore that will order Crab for you.

http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781943899036