My Top Ten Pagan Tales Of Terror!
Jul. 6th, 2007 06:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesI do love a good list, so I thought I'd make one about my favourite genre of supernatural fiction: pagan (or Panic) terror. I define a ghost story as 'pagan' if it evokes the hidden beauty and terror that lies beneath the natural world, and involves either Pan, other deities or simply disembodied elemental forces. My definition has nowt to do with Wiccans or Paganism with a capital 'P'. Anyway, here we go! (There aren't exactly ten stories here, because with some authors I just couldn't bring myself to choose just one story, but never mind...) I've ordered them by preference, but only in a very rough way.
10 - 'The Last Of The Valerii' by Henry James.
Those of you who are on my Friends List may be surprised to see a work of James' here - I slated him on my LJ a while ago for writing overly long, convoluted and ultimately rather thin psychological horror stories. However, after watching the film The Innocents I decided he was due a reappraisal, and read Leon Edel's collection of his tales again. My opinion is unchanged where the bulk of his works is concerned, but The Last Of The Valerii is an exception. It's an uncharacteristically concise, straightforward (if mysterious and unresolved) tale of a young Italian nobleman who marries an American girl. She pesters him to start digging the grounds of his ancient estate for archaeological finds, but when they excavate a statue of a mystery goddess, the bride finds she has reason to be jealous...James is good at writing about Italy, being a frequent visitor to Europe, and though no Machen masterpiece, this is 'a simple tale, well told'.
9 - 'Dionea' by Vernon Lee.
I'm a big fan of Lee's long stories, which fuse sex, sensuality, history, art and death in a way that represents the pinnacle of Decadent writing. Though not quite her best tale (that accolade goes to 'Amour Dure' and 'Oke Of Okehurst') Dionea offers a shimmering, zephyrous evocation of a Greek fishing island, with its olive groves, purple skies and deceptively calm azure seas. It is out of these seas that the eponymous heroine emerges one day, an orphaned child, who is not long at the local convent school before she starts to exhibit an unusual bond with nature. She grows into a raging, witchy beauty and that's when the trouble starts! Top marks for atmosphere, as always with Lee, and she's at home handling the theme which made her famous: the thin, thin line between savage love and death.
8 - 'The First Sheaf' by H Russell Wakefield
Wakefield is a pre-war author considered by many to have taken on M R James' mantle, and he steps up to the task rather well. Like James, he only writes the occasional truly pagan tale, but when he does, the results are pretty neat and he pulls few punches with the doom and violence. This story of a remote village community who turn to drastic measures to summon rain to their drought-ridden fields is savage and gory, but it's also about the loss of innocence and the burgeoning of teenage love under duress (the drama is seen through the eyes of the beleaguered new vicar's young son.) This makes it stand out from more typically Jamesian, emotionally dry fare.
7 - 'A Neighbour's Landmark'/'View From A Hill' by M R James
M R James is famous for depicting terrors lurking in the scholarly haunts of men, such as cathedrals and university libraries. However, he was also a dab hand with more rural horrors when he put his mind to it. Steve Duffy makes the case for James' forays into sylvan dread better than I could, in the article: They've Got Him! In The Trees! [Quiz time: name the film from which the title is taken AND the song in which the film is quoted, and I'll send you a spectral e-card!] Anyway, these two stories are my favourite of his more pagan efforts. If you're looking for sex or the feminine, you'll seek in vain, but there are few places more chilling than Betton Wood in ANL or that circle of stones in View From A Hill. Sadly, James' way with the English countryside was almost entirely lost in the latter's recent TV adaptation.
6 - 'The Music On The Hill'/'Gabriel-Ernest' by Saki
Saki's fame lies in a very different area to pagan horror - hilarious, lean and cruel comic tales lampooning Edwardian morals (he has been compared to an 'evil P G Wodehouse'.) However, he paid a few highly successful visits to the world of pagan terror. The tales above stand out for being darkly humorous (real humour with good horror is a rare combo), and for their homosexual colour. Saki was a great fan of young boys, and although no-one likes a dirty old man, you can't deny that his penchants do add real power and beauty to his tales. Gabriel-Ernest (online here)is about a prim bachelor's encounter with a wild, faun-like teenage boy in the woods near his home, all brown limbs, languid movements and tigerish yellow eyes. He takes the boy under his wing, only for disaster to strike his orderly bourgeois life. The Music On The Hill is a classic Pan story about a new wife who tries to meddle with the customs which thrive in her otherwise meek husband's woods. It goes for the jugular in a way that is still shocking today. You really share Saki's delight in making the forces of chaos, youth and sensuality triumph over stuffy social conventions, especially in G.E.
5 - 'The Man Who Went Too Far' by E F Benson.
I was going to quote some of this story, to convey the beauty and menace with which Benson imbues a June woodland scene, but found out I simply didn't know where to begin! Benson uses nature in all its guises with great skill in his ghost stories (especially the headlands and wooded valleys of Cornwall), and this cautionary tale of a young man who comes too close to piercing the Veil one hot Summer is one of his finest moments. Sultry heat, dappled glades, the gentle drone of bumblebees and the intoxicating perfume of flower and leaf appear to deny the local rumour of a 'goat that has been seen to skip with hellish glee about the woods and shady places', but appearances are always deceptive in the best pagan tales...As with Saki, there is a touch of 'the love that dare not speak its name' here, though it is subtle and more homoerotic than homosexual.
4 - 'The Wind In The Portico'/'The Watcher By The Threshold'/'Fullcircle' etc. by John Buchan.
Buchan's renown as a spy novelist often obscures his fame as a master craftsman of supernatural fiction. I find it makes sense that Buchan should write in both genres - ghosts, after all, are the spies of the ethereal world, hard to pin down and often melancholy in their lack of a resting place or roots. His pagan writing (of which the three mentioned above are only a tiny proportion) stands up against Arthur Machen, and as a whole may be slightly better than Algernon Blackwood's. The Wind... relates the fascination that an altar discovered in woods on his land begins to exercise on a young aristocrat. This is wonderful nature writing - Buchan gradually plants his reader right in the story, and sets the action over several contrasting seasons (why shouldn't Pan put forth his horns in Winter, after all?). Buchan also writes very well about the nature of obsession (The Watcher..., a story of pagan possession amid the bleak heather-clad Highlands, bears witness to this.) I can't stress enough how good Buchan is, he has been cruelly overlooked by anthologists for years and frankly I'm fed up of it!
3 - 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' by Steve Duffy.
I've praised this story in these pages more times than I care to think about, but here's the link again! (And I do recommend reading it online, as Duffy's almost impossible to come by in book form.) This is a pagan story with a difference - instead of featuring Pan, it channels the Welsh myth of Blodeuwydd, a woman made from flowers, then imbued with life by a wizard, to be a warrior's bride. The myth is tragic, with Blodeuwyyd being turned into an owl for bad behaviour (though I wouldn't mind that fate myself) and Duffy's story will both break your heart and chill your marrow. If you like this story, check out Alan Garner's novel The Owl Service, which makes use of the same legend.
2 - 'Ancient Lights' by Algernon Blackwood
Things all get a bit predictable now, with Blackwood and Machen vying for the top spot! I'm not an unconditional fan of Blackwood. He ruins many of his stories with his undisguised contempt for 'ordinary' people (especially the English middle-class) and his work can suffer from a great coldness, verging on indifference, where the joys and pains of human life are concerned. In fact, if I were making a list based on favourite authors, he'd probably end up in the lower reaches of the chart. But when he's good, Blackwood is almost peerless. I chose Ancient Lights (about a playfully evil copse that springs into shifting, mocking life when a surveyor tries to make a shortcut through the trees) because it deserves to sit alongside more famous Blackwood tales like The Willows and The Wendigo.
Typically, Blackwood's pagan tales are about the elements themselves (snow, wind, water) rather than deities existing in a natural setting, but this story is a more classical tale of Panic terror than usual. I also liked the mischevious air of the ethereal forces involved, as many pagan tales can focus too heavily on the horrific side of Pan, at the cost of overlooking the wicked but often charming mirth of the woodland gods. Of course, Blackwood's nature writing is spot on. The surveyor's journey is a wonder of contrast - from the sunlit Sussex weald, where a 'tearing, shouting wind' causes the hills to thrill with fresh life, into the quiet wood, where a pregnant green silence falls on him like a fairy-spun blanket, ferns put forth their curling tendrils, the branches of ancient oaks and beeches hang low and 'the smell of earth and foliage is rich and sweet'. This is actually a short story by Blackwood's standards, and this works in its favour, as there is none of his ponderous metaphysical speculation to encumber the enchantment.
1 - 'Change'/'The White People' by Arthur Machen.
Machen's novella The Great God Pan is hailed as the wellspring of all pagan supernatural literature, and much has been written about it, so I won't go into it here. In any case, I find these two short stories better written, with much of the lurid sex, violence and decomposition of the novella replaced with genuine supernatural terror. 'The White People' is about a young girl in rustic North Wales who takes up with some strange and spellbinding playmates, and it has the beauty of a wild bluebell peeping out from the mossy undergrowth of some forest floor. It is sad, too (it is said to be inspired by Machen's young wife Amy, who was barely out of her teens when she died of cancer), frightening, and sheds light on some fascinating local myths - it just has it all. 'Change' is a similar pearl, in which a holidaying family find themselves sorely punished for desecrating the countryside with orange-peel and raucous shouts...
Machen made it his life's work to churn out novels, stories and articles about Nature and her raptures. He also had a neat sideline in various kinds of ancient religion, and in stories like The Great Return and his novel The Secret Glory (both about the Holy Grail) Christianity dovetails with the worship of older, wilder Gods in an intriguing way. Machen taught me a lot about the possible worlds beyond the veil, the mystic and decadent world views, the hidden pathways of the soul, and the splendour of the spiritual world. He was equally at home writing about the vicious, amazing backstreets of London, 'city of resurrections', as he was with his native woods and valleys. He was the first author who I felt truly articulated my feelings about nature, and he also comes across as a deeply humane man, with a zest for life and a thirst for new experiences, who never let his many enthusiasms develop into tedious axe-grinding. He's a brilliant stylist too, never too didactic, full of fire and mystery, and I love him to bits. The trill of Pan's reed pipes will echo in your ears long after you've read closed one of Machen's books, I guarantee it.
Do any of you have a similar list on a supernatural topic that you'd like to share? If so, fire away! I'd love to read them :)
10 - 'The Last Of The Valerii' by Henry James.
Those of you who are on my Friends List may be surprised to see a work of James' here - I slated him on my LJ a while ago for writing overly long, convoluted and ultimately rather thin psychological horror stories. However, after watching the film The Innocents I decided he was due a reappraisal, and read Leon Edel's collection of his tales again. My opinion is unchanged where the bulk of his works is concerned, but The Last Of The Valerii is an exception. It's an uncharacteristically concise, straightforward (if mysterious and unresolved) tale of a young Italian nobleman who marries an American girl. She pesters him to start digging the grounds of his ancient estate for archaeological finds, but when they excavate a statue of a mystery goddess, the bride finds she has reason to be jealous...James is good at writing about Italy, being a frequent visitor to Europe, and though no Machen masterpiece, this is 'a simple tale, well told'.
9 - 'Dionea' by Vernon Lee.
I'm a big fan of Lee's long stories, which fuse sex, sensuality, history, art and death in a way that represents the pinnacle of Decadent writing. Though not quite her best tale (that accolade goes to 'Amour Dure' and 'Oke Of Okehurst') Dionea offers a shimmering, zephyrous evocation of a Greek fishing island, with its olive groves, purple skies and deceptively calm azure seas. It is out of these seas that the eponymous heroine emerges one day, an orphaned child, who is not long at the local convent school before she starts to exhibit an unusual bond with nature. She grows into a raging, witchy beauty and that's when the trouble starts! Top marks for atmosphere, as always with Lee, and she's at home handling the theme which made her famous: the thin, thin line between savage love and death.
8 - 'The First Sheaf' by H Russell Wakefield
Wakefield is a pre-war author considered by many to have taken on M R James' mantle, and he steps up to the task rather well. Like James, he only writes the occasional truly pagan tale, but when he does, the results are pretty neat and he pulls few punches with the doom and violence. This story of a remote village community who turn to drastic measures to summon rain to their drought-ridden fields is savage and gory, but it's also about the loss of innocence and the burgeoning of teenage love under duress (the drama is seen through the eyes of the beleaguered new vicar's young son.) This makes it stand out from more typically Jamesian, emotionally dry fare.
7 - 'A Neighbour's Landmark'/'View From A Hill' by M R James
M R James is famous for depicting terrors lurking in the scholarly haunts of men, such as cathedrals and university libraries. However, he was also a dab hand with more rural horrors when he put his mind to it. Steve Duffy makes the case for James' forays into sylvan dread better than I could, in the article: They've Got Him! In The Trees! [Quiz time: name the film from which the title is taken AND the song in which the film is quoted, and I'll send you a spectral e-card!] Anyway, these two stories are my favourite of his more pagan efforts. If you're looking for sex or the feminine, you'll seek in vain, but there are few places more chilling than Betton Wood in ANL or that circle of stones in View From A Hill. Sadly, James' way with the English countryside was almost entirely lost in the latter's recent TV adaptation.
6 - 'The Music On The Hill'/'Gabriel-Ernest' by Saki
Saki's fame lies in a very different area to pagan horror - hilarious, lean and cruel comic tales lampooning Edwardian morals (he has been compared to an 'evil P G Wodehouse'.) However, he paid a few highly successful visits to the world of pagan terror. The tales above stand out for being darkly humorous (real humour with good horror is a rare combo), and for their homosexual colour. Saki was a great fan of young boys, and although no-one likes a dirty old man, you can't deny that his penchants do add real power and beauty to his tales. Gabriel-Ernest (online here)is about a prim bachelor's encounter with a wild, faun-like teenage boy in the woods near his home, all brown limbs, languid movements and tigerish yellow eyes. He takes the boy under his wing, only for disaster to strike his orderly bourgeois life. The Music On The Hill is a classic Pan story about a new wife who tries to meddle with the customs which thrive in her otherwise meek husband's woods. It goes for the jugular in a way that is still shocking today. You really share Saki's delight in making the forces of chaos, youth and sensuality triumph over stuffy social conventions, especially in G.E.
5 - 'The Man Who Went Too Far' by E F Benson.
I was going to quote some of this story, to convey the beauty and menace with which Benson imbues a June woodland scene, but found out I simply didn't know where to begin! Benson uses nature in all its guises with great skill in his ghost stories (especially the headlands and wooded valleys of Cornwall), and this cautionary tale of a young man who comes too close to piercing the Veil one hot Summer is one of his finest moments. Sultry heat, dappled glades, the gentle drone of bumblebees and the intoxicating perfume of flower and leaf appear to deny the local rumour of a 'goat that has been seen to skip with hellish glee about the woods and shady places', but appearances are always deceptive in the best pagan tales...As with Saki, there is a touch of 'the love that dare not speak its name' here, though it is subtle and more homoerotic than homosexual.
4 - 'The Wind In The Portico'/'The Watcher By The Threshold'/'Fullcircle' etc. by John Buchan.
Buchan's renown as a spy novelist often obscures his fame as a master craftsman of supernatural fiction. I find it makes sense that Buchan should write in both genres - ghosts, after all, are the spies of the ethereal world, hard to pin down and often melancholy in their lack of a resting place or roots. His pagan writing (of which the three mentioned above are only a tiny proportion) stands up against Arthur Machen, and as a whole may be slightly better than Algernon Blackwood's. The Wind... relates the fascination that an altar discovered in woods on his land begins to exercise on a young aristocrat. This is wonderful nature writing - Buchan gradually plants his reader right in the story, and sets the action over several contrasting seasons (why shouldn't Pan put forth his horns in Winter, after all?). Buchan also writes very well about the nature of obsession (The Watcher..., a story of pagan possession amid the bleak heather-clad Highlands, bears witness to this.) I can't stress enough how good Buchan is, he has been cruelly overlooked by anthologists for years and frankly I'm fed up of it!
3 - 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' by Steve Duffy.
I've praised this story in these pages more times than I care to think about, but here's the link again! (And I do recommend reading it online, as Duffy's almost impossible to come by in book form.) This is a pagan story with a difference - instead of featuring Pan, it channels the Welsh myth of Blodeuwydd, a woman made from flowers, then imbued with life by a wizard, to be a warrior's bride. The myth is tragic, with Blodeuwyyd being turned into an owl for bad behaviour (though I wouldn't mind that fate myself) and Duffy's story will both break your heart and chill your marrow. If you like this story, check out Alan Garner's novel The Owl Service, which makes use of the same legend.
2 - 'Ancient Lights' by Algernon Blackwood
Things all get a bit predictable now, with Blackwood and Machen vying for the top spot! I'm not an unconditional fan of Blackwood. He ruins many of his stories with his undisguised contempt for 'ordinary' people (especially the English middle-class) and his work can suffer from a great coldness, verging on indifference, where the joys and pains of human life are concerned. In fact, if I were making a list based on favourite authors, he'd probably end up in the lower reaches of the chart. But when he's good, Blackwood is almost peerless. I chose Ancient Lights (about a playfully evil copse that springs into shifting, mocking life when a surveyor tries to make a shortcut through the trees) because it deserves to sit alongside more famous Blackwood tales like The Willows and The Wendigo.
Typically, Blackwood's pagan tales are about the elements themselves (snow, wind, water) rather than deities existing in a natural setting, but this story is a more classical tale of Panic terror than usual. I also liked the mischevious air of the ethereal forces involved, as many pagan tales can focus too heavily on the horrific side of Pan, at the cost of overlooking the wicked but often charming mirth of the woodland gods. Of course, Blackwood's nature writing is spot on. The surveyor's journey is a wonder of contrast - from the sunlit Sussex weald, where a 'tearing, shouting wind' causes the hills to thrill with fresh life, into the quiet wood, where a pregnant green silence falls on him like a fairy-spun blanket, ferns put forth their curling tendrils, the branches of ancient oaks and beeches hang low and 'the smell of earth and foliage is rich and sweet'. This is actually a short story by Blackwood's standards, and this works in its favour, as there is none of his ponderous metaphysical speculation to encumber the enchantment.
1 - 'Change'/'The White People' by Arthur Machen.
Machen's novella The Great God Pan is hailed as the wellspring of all pagan supernatural literature, and much has been written about it, so I won't go into it here. In any case, I find these two short stories better written, with much of the lurid sex, violence and decomposition of the novella replaced with genuine supernatural terror. 'The White People' is about a young girl in rustic North Wales who takes up with some strange and spellbinding playmates, and it has the beauty of a wild bluebell peeping out from the mossy undergrowth of some forest floor. It is sad, too (it is said to be inspired by Machen's young wife Amy, who was barely out of her teens when she died of cancer), frightening, and sheds light on some fascinating local myths - it just has it all. 'Change' is a similar pearl, in which a holidaying family find themselves sorely punished for desecrating the countryside with orange-peel and raucous shouts...
Machen made it his life's work to churn out novels, stories and articles about Nature and her raptures. He also had a neat sideline in various kinds of ancient religion, and in stories like The Great Return and his novel The Secret Glory (both about the Holy Grail) Christianity dovetails with the worship of older, wilder Gods in an intriguing way. Machen taught me a lot about the possible worlds beyond the veil, the mystic and decadent world views, the hidden pathways of the soul, and the splendour of the spiritual world. He was equally at home writing about the vicious, amazing backstreets of London, 'city of resurrections', as he was with his native woods and valleys. He was the first author who I felt truly articulated my feelings about nature, and he also comes across as a deeply humane man, with a zest for life and a thirst for new experiences, who never let his many enthusiasms develop into tedious axe-grinding. He's a brilliant stylist too, never too didactic, full of fire and mystery, and I love him to bits. The trill of Pan's reed pipes will echo in your ears long after you've read closed one of Machen's books, I guarantee it.
Do any of you have a similar list on a supernatural topic that you'd like to share? If so, fire away! I'd love to read them :)
