Richard Dalby (ed.) - Ghosts for Christmas (O'Mara, 1988: Headline, 1989)
Cover illustration. Clifford Harper
Jerome K. Jerome - Our Ghost party
Charles Dickens - The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton
Mark Lemon - The Ghost Detective
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - The Dead Sexton
Robert Louis Stevenson - Markheim
Sir James M. Barrie - The Ghost of Christmas Eve
Louisa Baldwin - The Real and the Counterfeit
Mrs. B. M. Croker - 'Number Ninety'
John Kendrick Bangs - Thurlow's Christmas Story
Elia W. Peattie - Their Dear Little Ghost
Grant Allen - Wolverden Tower
Bernard Capes - A Ghost-Child
Algernon Blackwood - The Kit-Bag
E. Nesbit - The Shadow
Elinor Glyn - The Irtonwood Ghost
E. G. Swain - Bone to his Bone
Algernon Blackwood - Transition
M. R. James - The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance
Marie Corelli - The Sculptor's Angel
Hugh Walpole - The Snow
'Ex-Private X' (A. M. Burrage) - Smee
Marjorie Bowen - The Prescription
J. B. Priestley - The Demon King
H. Russell Wakefield - Lucky's Grove
George H. Bushnell - 'I Shall Take Proper Precautions'
Rosemary Timperley - Christmas Meeting
L.P. Hartley - Someone in the Lift
Ramsey Campbell - The Christmas Present
Daphne Froome - Christmas Entertainment
David G. Rowlands - Gebal and Ammon and AmalekCelebrate the season with spirits of a creepier kind…
Stoke the fire, fill your glass and prepare yourself for an evening of stories from the impressive collection of authors who have turned their hand to the supernatural.
A touch of wit from Charles Dickens as Mr Wardle recounts the mysterious disappearance of Gabriel Grub; a pistol-wielding ghoul from the pen of J.M. Barrie; the shadowy figure of a tall gentleman in a lift from the vivid imagination of L.P. Hartley. These are just a few of the spine-tingling classics, from the historical to the present day, with which to while away the winter hours.
Ghosts for Christmas — the perfect present for those who yearn for a little extra seasonal shiver. It being the "season of goodwill" and all that, we'll ditch the hideous Headline cover just this once and go with Clifford Harper's far more comely illustration for the O'Mara hardcover. I still don't rate this quite as highly as Dalby's
Chillers For Christmas but then I rate that very highly indeed and when all is said and done,
Ghosts ... is a top compilation of old favourites, forgotten gems and even the odd modern classic. Speaking of which:
David G. Rowlands - Gebal and Ammon and Amalek: In his youth, 'Old Bill' was visited in a dream by three devils who told him that if he neglected his litany and catechism they would be better able to protect him from Hicks, the local bully. Naturally he agrees and when next he encounters Hicks it is for the last time. Pursuing Bill through a field, the tough is gored by a bull.
Now, many decades later, having been manipulated into resigning his position in the choir by the new curate, Bill is again ill met by the evil trio and in his anger sets to making the blood sacrifice they require to carry out a dreadful vandalism on the despised new prayer books.
Meanwhile, little Sarah Carter is enduring terrifying nightmares of her own. A sinister figure "like a toffee bitten off at the end" worries over her at night and after each visitation the smell of hot jam pervades her room.
It's left to Rowlands' psychic sleuth Father O'Connor to save the (Christmas) Day in a brief but vital cameo after the church has been set ablaze. O'Connor puts a stop to all the malarkey by laying to rest the spirit of Jasper Fortesque, child molester, who was done to death by Sarah's ancestors - they tossed him in a vat of boiling jam!
Nope, I can't do it justice so you'll just have to take my word for it that, like so much of David Rowlands' work, (
The Apples Of Sodom,
On Wings Of Song,
Sins Of The Fathers, etc.) this is excellent.
Marie Corelli - The Sculptor's Angel: Sentimental but cute story of the Monk Anselmus who falls in love with a beautiful village girl. When his conscience gets the better of him, he blames her for leading him astray and sends her packing. Heartbroken, she dutifully commits suicide.
When Anselmus is commissioned to carve an angel to fill an empty alcove in the Church who should put in a reappearance but his dead love who has attained a pair of heavenly wings since their last fateful meeting. She poses for him until, his statue complete, he dies on Christmas day just as his masterpiece is unveiled. Lovers reunited, etc.
But screw all this joy and niceness because here comes:
L. P. Hartley - Someone In The Lift: The Maldons are spending Christmas at the Brompton Court Hotel and six year old Peter is insistent that he can see a man in the lift, a still figure in shadow whose features he can’t discern. oddly, the only times this mysterious individual is absent is when Peter tries to show him to his dad. His father tells him it must be Santa Claus.
On the 23rd the lift breaks down and the workmen go flat out to repair it. Peter is desperate for them to succeed but, come the big night, he has reason to wish they hadn’t.
L. P. Hartley: a good man to have around if you want to celebrate a really gloomy Christmas. Unlike;
Charles Dickens - The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton: Dicken's dry-run for
A Christmas Carol.
Who makes graves at a time when all other men are merry, and takes pleasure in it? Despite the inclement conditions and the fact that everyone else is off gallivanting, Gabriel Grubb, the surly gravedigger, is diligently going about his work in the frozen cemetery when he's set upon by evil goblins. Yeah, right! As if
they'd act as Dickens' goon squad in his campaign to ruthlessly enforce his 'Tis the season to be Jolly' bollocks on mankind!
Anyway, these goblins are obviously plenty thick as, far from pinning a medal on Grubb for his services to morbidity, before you know it, they've dragged poor, honest Gabriel through the freshly dug grave and into their subterranean cavern where they subject him to Dickens' usual brand of mawkishness and misery - the mother sobbing over her dead baby as starving infants look on: the jovial little poor people toiling in the field all contented with their lot - they're wiser than rich folk, you know.
As if this wasn't bad enough, they give the poor bastard a kicking for being misanthropic and leave him crippled for life!
Jerome K. Jerome - Our Ghost Party: A cautionary tale. If you're thinking of sleeping over at somebody's house on December 24th and you have an aversion to ghosts then beat it out into the blizzard instead. Ghosts have it in for guests.
"Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murder, and blood." Of course, that's OK for once a year lightweights I
suppose. Of course,
some of us are at it 365 days a year.
A. M. Burrage - Smee: At the Simpson’s Christmas party the twelve guests decide on a game of Smee (a superior variation of hide and seek) as the evening’s diversion. Mr. Simpson warns them to avoid the door leading to the back staircase as the descent is all but a sheer drop and eight years earlier young Brenda Ford broke her neck when she fell through in the dark. As the game gets underway it becomes clear that the group have been joined by an extra player …
Rosemary Timperley - Christmas Meeting: A schoolma’am is spending her first Christmas alone. A young man, flamboyantly dressed, enters her lodging room thinking it’s his own. He apologises for his mistake, makes mention of the fact that he’s a poet and and she persuades him to take tea with her. Before she can bring in the cups he’s gone. She finds one of his books on the shelf with a note from the publisher that he died on Christmas day 1851. The last entry in his diary records how he encountered the ghost of a middle aged woman in his study. Roald Dahl, E. F. Bleiler and Richard Dalby are ardent admirers of this three pager but it doesn’t do much for me.
Hugh Walpole - The Snow:
“She looked around her everywhere. All the familiar things, the pictures, the little tables, the piano were different now, isolated, strange, hostile, as though they had been won over by some enemy power.” Polchester. Herbert Fairfax’s first wife Elinor was a fiercely devoted woman and Alice, young and headstrong, doesn’t meet with the dead woman’s approval. Now even Herbert is losing patience with her. On Christmas Eve he suggests a separation whereupon Alice strikes him and he storms out of the house. Elinor’s vindictive ghost brutally sees off her successor.
Marjorie Bowen - The Prescription: Verall Hall, Bucks. Christmas at Mrs. Janey’s and the hostess arranges for Mrs. Mahogany the famous medium to have one of her turns by way of amusement for the guests. It’s all breathtakingly dull stuff which is why the party react with scepticism when the medium goes into one, uttering cries of “Murder!” and describing in detail the demise of a young woman who’s been administered a lethal dose of arsenic, location unknown but nearby.
As Mrs. Mahogany departs she encounters latecomer Dr. Dilke. “You’re very psychic, aren’t you?” she states and so it proves when, that night, he’s aroused from his bed and ushered aboard an ancient coach by a man desperate to save his dying wife. Dr. Dilke recognises a case of poisoning when he sees it and writes a prescription although he’s a hundred years too late to save her life.
J. B. Priestly - The Demon King: The company assembled for Mr. Tom Burt’s boxing day premier of
Jack And Jill at the Theatre Royal, Bruddersford are a motley crew, the solitary performer with any kind of track record being their Demon King, Kirk Ireton, whose talent has been somewhat diminished by his capacity for alcohol. When he disappears after a session in
The Cooper’s Arms mere hours before the pantomime it looks as though even the dubious talents of the Happy Yorkshire Lasses won’t salvage this turkey. But come the eleventh hour and Ireton - or, at least, somebody dressed in a most impressive Devil’s costume - shows up. The troupe go on to play a blinder.
H. R. Wakefield - Lucky’s Grove: Christmas Day, 1938, and “the cream of North Berkshire society” descend on the Braxton’s snowbound Abindale Hall. Unfortunately, Mr. Braxton’s land agent, Curtis, has retrieved their splendid tree from the locally shunned Lucky’s Grove. The larch in question, furious at being uprooted and festooned in Disney characters, wreaks spectacular Norse God-assisted vengeance, and deforming the snowman is the least of it. It all makes for an interesting holiday and gives the survivors much to ponder.
Daphne Froome - Christmas Entertainment: Fusty old Professor Harold Conway is imposed upon to give over his cottage to host the Christmas party for the children of the college staff. By way of entertainment, he settles on giving the youngsters a thrill with a spectre fashioned from a dummy and mirrors. He models his “ghost” on the cottage’s previous owner, his old sparring partner Sir Arthur Stanbrock with whom he fell out over their conflicting beliefs toward the supernatural. The illusion is rather more successful than he’d prepared for and unleashes a vicious poltergeist.
More to follow .... maybe
