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Mar. 15th, 2006 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY irkthepurist)
as there appears to be a bit of a flurry of activity hereabouts, i'll post something as well... actually i've just posted this on my own lj so i'll just copy and paste it over for you. hope it's relevant!
in my desire to read around the world of the ghost story, i've stumbled across some of the most extraordinary writing ever ("the willows" by algernon blackwood, "the white people" by arthur machen), a lot of enjoyable whimsy ("miss hargreaves" by frank baker) and some enjoyable but slightly strained efforts ("the stoneground stories" by e g swain) but no one has really achieved the greatness of m r james. well not quite. there's a few moments in the stories of l t c rolt which get there, but rolt is generally a fine writer in his own right as comfortable with cosmic horror as he is with the general ghost story. he's a bit of a unique best. swain has a few ideas worthy of james but just not really the ability to do any justice to them. james is still to be surpassed. but he now has a bit of a challenge...
a n l munby, like e g swain, dedicated his slim book of ghost stories "the alabaster hand" to m r james as a pretty obvious indication of where the source of the ideas and the inspiration for the book came from. like swain it's fairly unapologetically cut from the same cloth as the great man, but the crucial difference is that munby just about reaches the heights of james at his best. whereas swain was even something of a friend of james and e f benson, now mostly known for "mapp and lucia" but at the time mostly known as the second greatest writer of british ghost stories after james (and the little of them i've so far read are pretty bloody good), munby sort of seems to have just walked in the footsteps of the great man. swain was a chaplain at cambridge at the time of james, but munby became the librarian at cambridge some time after james has died (as far as i can tell, there's scant information online - the posho expensive reissue of "the alabaster hand" has an introduction by michael cox which will no doubt have more information in it - and again cox is another cambridge acolyte) but something about this link to james and the fact he wrote most of the stories when in a POW camp during world war two, must have made him think back to james' stories as the inspiration for his own. it's a shame he never dabbled more. like swain, munby's book is pretty much based around one character - although where swain has rev batchel who is a thinly veiled, fictionalised version of himself, munby's nameless narrator is even closer to what you seem to find out about the man himself: a bit of a scholar, a book collector, lover of ephemera etc. there's a similar tendency for stories to be based off of cod historical manuscripts or bits of latin, which suggest as much of an influence of james as a working knowledge of latin, old manuscripts and book collectors. somehow his imprisonment must have led him to think of home, of the comfortable chill of the best ghost stories he'd read and add to it his own specialist knowledge because the result is an absolute corker. some of the stories are a bit disappointing - predictable, a little lacking in that central "oomph" needed for the best ghost stories - but the handful that really works...
"the alabaster hand" has a bit of a creaky conclusion, but is a brilliant mixture of latin pun (seriously) and striking imagery which almost anyone who has poked around an old british church must have stumbled across. "herodes redivivus" is a thrillingly nasty way to start any collection of stories, a really, genuinely creepy story this one. "the white sack" is very much a tribute to "oh whistle and i'll come to you, my lad" but pops in a bit of cosmic horror very reminiscent of l t c rolt's creepy "cwm garon". "the tregannet book of hours" is a lovely spin on "the mezzotint" by james. but the real classic, one of the single best ghost stories of them all, is "an encounter in the mist". an astonishing story, because it never quite lets you in on where it's going. first of all it seems to be going down the cosmic horror route, and then down the whimsical route, and then down the creepy route and then... and then. let's just say it has the single best twist in a ghost story i have ever read. it's an idea which is so utterly simple but also devestatingly brilliant. i have no idea how he thought of it, and i'm exceedingly jealous that he did. i've read it three times now and each time i get a little shudder of pleasure at how brilliantly executed it is. if anything, it's almost as wonderful as saki's "the open window" which is to me the greatest short story of all time. it took me a long time to dig around for a reasonably priced copy of "the alabaster hand" but my word was it worth it. you all owe it to yourselves to at least read "an encounter in the mist"
irkthepurist)as there appears to be a bit of a flurry of activity hereabouts, i'll post something as well... actually i've just posted this on my own lj so i'll just copy and paste it over for you. hope it's relevant!
in my desire to read around the world of the ghost story, i've stumbled across some of the most extraordinary writing ever ("the willows" by algernon blackwood, "the white people" by arthur machen), a lot of enjoyable whimsy ("miss hargreaves" by frank baker) and some enjoyable but slightly strained efforts ("the stoneground stories" by e g swain) but no one has really achieved the greatness of m r james. well not quite. there's a few moments in the stories of l t c rolt which get there, but rolt is generally a fine writer in his own right as comfortable with cosmic horror as he is with the general ghost story. he's a bit of a unique best. swain has a few ideas worthy of james but just not really the ability to do any justice to them. james is still to be surpassed. but he now has a bit of a challenge...
a n l munby, like e g swain, dedicated his slim book of ghost stories "the alabaster hand" to m r james as a pretty obvious indication of where the source of the ideas and the inspiration for the book came from. like swain it's fairly unapologetically cut from the same cloth as the great man, but the crucial difference is that munby just about reaches the heights of james at his best. whereas swain was even something of a friend of james and e f benson, now mostly known for "mapp and lucia" but at the time mostly known as the second greatest writer of british ghost stories after james (and the little of them i've so far read are pretty bloody good), munby sort of seems to have just walked in the footsteps of the great man. swain was a chaplain at cambridge at the time of james, but munby became the librarian at cambridge some time after james has died (as far as i can tell, there's scant information online - the posho expensive reissue of "the alabaster hand" has an introduction by michael cox which will no doubt have more information in it - and again cox is another cambridge acolyte) but something about this link to james and the fact he wrote most of the stories when in a POW camp during world war two, must have made him think back to james' stories as the inspiration for his own. it's a shame he never dabbled more. like swain, munby's book is pretty much based around one character - although where swain has rev batchel who is a thinly veiled, fictionalised version of himself, munby's nameless narrator is even closer to what you seem to find out about the man himself: a bit of a scholar, a book collector, lover of ephemera etc. there's a similar tendency for stories to be based off of cod historical manuscripts or bits of latin, which suggest as much of an influence of james as a working knowledge of latin, old manuscripts and book collectors. somehow his imprisonment must have led him to think of home, of the comfortable chill of the best ghost stories he'd read and add to it his own specialist knowledge because the result is an absolute corker. some of the stories are a bit disappointing - predictable, a little lacking in that central "oomph" needed for the best ghost stories - but the handful that really works...
"the alabaster hand" has a bit of a creaky conclusion, but is a brilliant mixture of latin pun (seriously) and striking imagery which almost anyone who has poked around an old british church must have stumbled across. "herodes redivivus" is a thrillingly nasty way to start any collection of stories, a really, genuinely creepy story this one. "the white sack" is very much a tribute to "oh whistle and i'll come to you, my lad" but pops in a bit of cosmic horror very reminiscent of l t c rolt's creepy "cwm garon". "the tregannet book of hours" is a lovely spin on "the mezzotint" by james. but the real classic, one of the single best ghost stories of them all, is "an encounter in the mist". an astonishing story, because it never quite lets you in on where it's going. first of all it seems to be going down the cosmic horror route, and then down the whimsical route, and then down the creepy route and then... and then. let's just say it has the single best twist in a ghost story i have ever read. it's an idea which is so utterly simple but also devestatingly brilliant. i have no idea how he thought of it, and i'm exceedingly jealous that he did. i've read it three times now and each time i get a little shudder of pleasure at how brilliantly executed it is. if anything, it's almost as wonderful as saki's "the open window" which is to me the greatest short story of all time. it took me a long time to dig around for a reasonably priced copy of "the alabaster hand" but my word was it worth it. you all owe it to yourselves to at least read "an encounter in the mist"
