A Haining Anthology
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darkling_talesHere is a little review of the Mammoth Book Of Haunted House Stories, edited by the enduring Peter Haining.
I enjoyed this anthology, which made a pleasant change from some of the collections of purely modern horror that I have been reading lately. Haining has chosen works from the Victorian era through to the present day, kicking off the anthology with arguably the first real haunted house tale, Bulwer-Lytton's The Haunters and The Haunted, and he has also selected many classics by the likes of Sheridan Le Fanu, M R James and Algernon Blackwood. The problem with such classics is that they have been so frequently anthologized that you can't face reading them again, however classic they are, but luckily Haining has also included many rarely-seen tales - I was persuaded to buy the book by the promise of L P Hartley, A E Coppard and H Russell Wakefield material. Nor is post-war and present-day fiction excluded - Stephen King, crime novelist Ruth Rendell and Basil Copper all make an appearance. The book also boasts some obligatory "extras" - in addition to a light-hearted and amiable introduction by Haining (who claims to have lived in a haunted house for years) there is an Appendix of major haunted house novels, and each story is fronted by a flippant introductory pastiche of an estate agent's leaflet about the house in question.
In all anthologies there is bound to be some variation in quality, and the Mammoth book contains its share of damp squibs - though admittedly, several of the stories that disappointed me (those by Coppard and Penelope Lively, for instance) did not seek to truly scare in the first place. I have a horror of the "humorous" ghost story, which almost always ends up being neither scary nor amusing enough to warrant reading for laughs alone, and my main criticism of this anthology is that there are too many examples of this rather dodgy genre here. The Basil Copper story, "The Grey House", took up a lot of pages but failed to scare or ignite the reader's imagination in any way, and left a nasty taste in the mouth from the lecherous way the narrator seemed to linger over descriptions of sadism and the torture of hapless women who are repeatedly described as "fresh young girls", innocent virgins etc. etc.- I hadn't seen this side of Copper before, but I knew the quality of his work is very uneven so I wasn't too surprised. One story, "The House Of Dust" by Herbert de Hamel, was a blatant rip-off of Oliver Onions' excellent story "The Cigarette Case" which was published 7 years earlier - I genuinely cannot believe that de Hamel escaped a court case with his inferior re-jig, which replaces Onions' atmosphere of wistful eerie beauty by cheap and xenophobic bawdiness. Definitely one to avoid!
Now we've had the bad and the ugly, I suppose I should wind up with the good! E F Benson delivers the goods as usual with "Bagnell Terrace",a neat and romantic little tale of ancient Egyptian evil rearing its head in a quiet suburban street; Stephen King's "The Boogeyman" was surprisingly good, though also blackly depressing, as was Robert Bloch's "The House Of The Hatchet". Bloch's story of a feuding couple who stop to visit a tourist-attraction "haunted house" on the way to a dubious second honeymoon woke a feeling of real dread in me and his insights into the act of murder and speculations on what motivates ghosts to haunt were fascinating. The H Russell Wakefield story, "Ghost Hunt", interested me because it is inspired by the same house that features in Wakefield's other, famous tale "The Red Lodge". Though not of the same calibre as the latter story, "Ghost Hunt" was probably quite original at the time. There were more fun stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Louisa Baldwin...but if I were to list all the stories in this weighty tome I'd be here all night! All told, I recommend this anthology to anybody who seeks to augment their diet of modern horror with a few chills from the "Golden age of the ghost story".
I enjoyed this anthology, which made a pleasant change from some of the collections of purely modern horror that I have been reading lately. Haining has chosen works from the Victorian era through to the present day, kicking off the anthology with arguably the first real haunted house tale, Bulwer-Lytton's The Haunters and The Haunted, and he has also selected many classics by the likes of Sheridan Le Fanu, M R James and Algernon Blackwood. The problem with such classics is that they have been so frequently anthologized that you can't face reading them again, however classic they are, but luckily Haining has also included many rarely-seen tales - I was persuaded to buy the book by the promise of L P Hartley, A E Coppard and H Russell Wakefield material. Nor is post-war and present-day fiction excluded - Stephen King, crime novelist Ruth Rendell and Basil Copper all make an appearance. The book also boasts some obligatory "extras" - in addition to a light-hearted and amiable introduction by Haining (who claims to have lived in a haunted house for years) there is an Appendix of major haunted house novels, and each story is fronted by a flippant introductory pastiche of an estate agent's leaflet about the house in question.
In all anthologies there is bound to be some variation in quality, and the Mammoth book contains its share of damp squibs - though admittedly, several of the stories that disappointed me (those by Coppard and Penelope Lively, for instance) did not seek to truly scare in the first place. I have a horror of the "humorous" ghost story, which almost always ends up being neither scary nor amusing enough to warrant reading for laughs alone, and my main criticism of this anthology is that there are too many examples of this rather dodgy genre here. The Basil Copper story, "The Grey House", took up a lot of pages but failed to scare or ignite the reader's imagination in any way, and left a nasty taste in the mouth from the lecherous way the narrator seemed to linger over descriptions of sadism and the torture of hapless women who are repeatedly described as "fresh young girls", innocent virgins etc. etc.- I hadn't seen this side of Copper before, but I knew the quality of his work is very uneven so I wasn't too surprised. One story, "The House Of Dust" by Herbert de Hamel, was a blatant rip-off of Oliver Onions' excellent story "The Cigarette Case" which was published 7 years earlier - I genuinely cannot believe that de Hamel escaped a court case with his inferior re-jig, which replaces Onions' atmosphere of wistful eerie beauty by cheap and xenophobic bawdiness. Definitely one to avoid!
Now we've had the bad and the ugly, I suppose I should wind up with the good! E F Benson delivers the goods as usual with "Bagnell Terrace",a neat and romantic little tale of ancient Egyptian evil rearing its head in a quiet suburban street; Stephen King's "The Boogeyman" was surprisingly good, though also blackly depressing, as was Robert Bloch's "The House Of The Hatchet". Bloch's story of a feuding couple who stop to visit a tourist-attraction "haunted house" on the way to a dubious second honeymoon woke a feeling of real dread in me and his insights into the act of murder and speculations on what motivates ghosts to haunt were fascinating. The H Russell Wakefield story, "Ghost Hunt", interested me because it is inspired by the same house that features in Wakefield's other, famous tale "The Red Lodge". Though not of the same calibre as the latter story, "Ghost Hunt" was probably quite original at the time. There were more fun stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Louisa Baldwin...but if I were to list all the stories in this weighty tome I'd be here all night! All told, I recommend this anthology to anybody who seeks to augment their diet of modern horror with a few chills from the "Golden age of the ghost story".
