Darkling Tales

Regular sufferers of this community may be familiar with my general dislike of the new genre of "paranormal romance". However, I was tempted to pick up Deborah Harkness' fat novel A Discovery of Witches from a charity shop a little while ago, because it had a nice cover and cost 50p. Plus I always like to know just what I'm slagging off - or perhaps I would even be pleasantly surprised if the book was good. But did I end up mourning the loss of the king's ransom I paid for it?

( Malleus Maleficarum )

Well it looks as if my New Year's resolution to spend less money on books has already gone up in smoke. Only joking, of course I don't do resolutions. And in any case I simply had to bag Fourbodings, a quartet of supernatural novellas by Terry Lamsley, Simon Clark, Tim Lebbon and Mark Morris, edited by Peter Crowther (all from 2005). It's a rare book and generally unavailable in the UK, so when I saw a signed copy for £12 I had to pounce! The retail price is usually quite starborgling (starting at around $50), but is it worth it? I'm sure you're all dying to know before you part with your hard-earned moolah.

( Hung, Drawn and Quartered )

Well, it has been a while but Phil Rickman has finally produced another Merrily Watkins novel: The Secrets of Pain. Regular readers may know that I'm a huge fan of Phil Rickman, especially his novels about Church of England "deliverance consultant" (or exorcist) Merrily Watkins. They feature a beguiling mixture of police procedural, ecclesiastical goings-on and supernatural or mystical content. They have been described as "The Vicar of Dibley meets Cracker",though that doesn't do justice to the numinous feel of the novels or the fascinating, vital way they evoke modern rural Britain at its most beautiful and horrific. I first checked out Rickman after reading a glowing review of The Fabric of Sin by Steve Duffy, which should tell you something about the quality of the writing in these books!

I ended up giving The Fabric... a good review myself, and after moving on to A Crown of Lights I was irretrievably hooked on the series. Though I've been a bit slack about reviewing them all here they are all of a high standard (my favourite The Remains of an Altar, has the numinous turned up to 11 and is a remarkable, haunting story.) However, I found 2009's To Dream of The Dead a bit lacking. The Watkins series is into the double figures now and I was a bit scared that the author might be falling into a cookie-cutter approach. To Dream of the Dead had an unusually heavy emphasis on the police procedural side of things, focussed on incredibly depressing subjects (global warming and Richard Dawkins-style fascist atheism) and generally lacked the magic of the earlier novels. But can The Secrets of Pain repair the damage to Rickman's reputation?

( Our Friends Ecclesiastic )

A while ago my fancy was taken by a newish collection called The Weird by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer. It had a good line-up of weird fiction old and new, so I ordered it, but somewhere along the line I made a mistake and a different Vandermeer book, The New Weird, came instead. After roundly cursing the editor for calling both books such similar names, I forgot to send the book back for a refund in time and so I figured I might as well read it.

( What I Thought )

Now for my second Halifax purchase! Terror Tales of East Anglia is the latest of Paul Finch's regional anthologies, where stories by some of Britain's most famous modern horror authors alternate with short, to-the-point chunks of local folklore and supernatural phenomena. And all in a cheap(ish) paperback! I enjoyed Terror Tales of the Lake District, but issues with Paypal prevented me from buying the daftly-named Terror Tales of the Cotswolds. So I was delighted to find this latest number in Halifax, in tangible form on Reggie Oliver's bookstall with no bloody "payment gateways" (actually Portals to Hell) to navigate.

( Ours was the marsh country )

As I should've mentioned ages ago, Issue 11 of the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies is now online. It contains many interesting articles on a range of topics - white noise in horror, Charles Fort, dark pop art, and the class politics of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - but I my appetite was especially whetted by Fiona McCulloch's essay "'Looking Back': Scottish Queer Gothic Returns in Zoe Strachan's Ever Fallen in Love. I didn't even know there was a Scottish Queer Gothic genre and after reading a couple of paragraphs decided to buy the book and read it before continuing with the essay, to avoid spoilers!

( We All Fall Down )

Due to popular demand (one person's request does count as popular by my standards, yes) here is a little account of my day at the Halifax Ghost Story Festival last weekend. As I mentioned before, we arrived on Friday night and spent the night at the Dean Clough Travelodge, part of the Clough's complex of Victorian factories. I like the place a lot and thought it was a great place to talk ghost stories - the factories are set apart from the town and face onto a huge, windy expanse of square, and about a third of the towering soot-blackened stone buildings have evaded the hand of the restorer. The various buildings holding the Clough's museums, restaurants etc. are joined by a network of stone walks and tunnels also suggesting great age, with a canal running through it all. It actually felt a bit like a medieval castle complex. The Travelodge is in a restored part of the site but was surprisingly nice for a £30 a night chain hotel - the rooms seem to follow the original layout of the five-storey factory and the original stone walls and small factory windows remain, giving the rooms more character than is usually found in such places. After our terrible experience with the Imperial Crown hotel in Halifax town centre in 2010 (an appalling place costing twice as much as the Travelodge) we were also relieved to find a high level of cleanliness in the rooms! It was also very quiet at night, but I didn't manage more than an hour of sleep overnight due to issues with my body-clock.

Consequently I was rather knackered by the time we made it to the Crossley Art Gallery (a pleasant, modern space) at 11 the next morning for the panel on M R James and his modern descendants. Ray Rusell, co-owner of Tartarus Press, chaired the panel which consisted of modern Jamesian master Reggie Oliver, horror behemoth Ramsey Campbell (standing in at the last minute for John Probert) and Joel Lane, a talented writer of contemporary urban horror who Ray described as the "sceptic" of the line-up. Ray began with a question that has been much-discussed by supernatural fiction fans: what makes James different from those who came before him, and why is he such a big deal?

( More about the talk )

( Afternoon and Sunday events )

As regular readers may have noticed, I'm a fan of Reggie Oliver, but my attempts to secure a whole book of his stories have been thwarted for years by the rarity and price of hardback editions of his work. But all that's just changed! Tartarus Press have wrested Oliver's first collection, The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini from the clutches of small-press loony soapbox The Haunted River and this year they've brought out a much-awaited second edition in....PAPERBACK!!!

Since the beginning of his career nine years ago Oliver has established himself as the number one contender for the title of the New MR James. His understated, concise prose, frequent use of antiquarian themes and impressive panoply of lurking horrors ensure that the spectre of Old Monty pervades a lot of his work. Oliver has even completed the unfinished James story 'The Game of Bear'! However, Oliver is far from being a lazy copycat and usually manages to imbue his stories with a charm all his own (at least if the ten or so tales I've read are anything to go by.) But as I eagerly cracked open my copy of The Dreams..., I had to wonder whether this early collection would match later stories such as 'The Children of Monte Rosa' and 'A Child's Problem'?

( The Things that Dreams Are Made Of )

Although I seem to be constantly mentioning Robert Westall in these pages, it's been a while since I reviewed any of his books. So here are my thoughts on The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral, a collection of two unabashedly supernatural novellas.

( Old Jack City )

All in all it's a good way to discover Robert Westall's fiction without committing to a longer novel. I don't know if this book is still in print, but it can usually be had from Fantasticfiction.co.uk for a matter of pence!

As some of you may know, my especial favourite strand of supernatural fiction is pagan or sylvan horror. Although fear of the woods has been with us since for ever, and has always appeared intermittently in ghost stories by classic genre authors like J S LeFanu and M R James, the full-blown "pagan horror" story only really appeared at the turn of the 19th century, with the writings of Arthur Machen and later Algernon Blackwood followed by a raft of fine writing by the likes of John Buchan, Saki and Walter de la Mare in the first half of the 20th century.

But going back to the beginnings of the subgenre, we encounter an author who is often overlooked - all but unheard-of today, in fact - but who made a big splash at the time just like Machen did with the succes de scandale that was The Great God Pan (1890) I'm talking about Edgar Jepson and his 1910 novel The Garden at No.19. I first heard about this novel when John Pelan's Nightshade Press published a new edition of it a few years ago, but was sadly unable to afford a copy at the time! Luckily, a few weeks ago, Fate (or possibly Pan himself?) threw me a bone. Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprints have now done a facsimile reprint of the first edition of The Garden... - which is available in paperback for under £10 via the Fantasticfiction website! Naturally I leaped at the chance to order it.

But was it worth the excitement? Does the novel live up to the hype? Let's find out, as they say on Blue Peter.

( Pan's People )

If you want more Jepson facts check out the wikipedia page, and you can even read his most famous short story 'The Tea-Leaf' here at the Gaslight website.