The Times Anthology Of Ghost Stories

[dem bones]

The Times Anthology Of Ghost Stories (Corgi 1977: originally Jonathan Cape, 1975)

From a competition judged by Kingsley Amis, Patricia Highsmith and Christopher Lee

Alan Lee (?)

F. Terry Newman - Marius The Doll
Penelope Fitzgerald - The Axe
John Stevens - The Resident
Francis King - A Scent Of Mimosa
Elizabeth LeFanu - The Harpsichord
Michael Kernan - The Doll Named Silvio
Oliver Knox - Summer Shades
D. A. Koster - Nicola
Laurence Grafftey-Smith - The Locket
Julian Barnes - A Self-Possessed Woman
Paul Theroux - Dengue Fever
Brian R. Hall - The Sword Of Frey
Keith Miles - Sea Voices


"In The Bag is a ghost story I submitted to the Times ghost story competition., though it wasn't written with that in mind. I rather hoped it might appear in the anthology derived from the competition, but the judges must have decided otherwise. However, it did gain me my first British Fantasy Award ..." - Ramsey Campbell in his introduction to Dark Feasts.

The first prize went to Michael Kernan for his hypnotically terrifying The Doll Named Silvio, while the elegiac A Scent Of Mimosa won second prize for Francis King; the highly commended stories of F. Terry Newman and Sir Laurence Grafftey-Smith were awarded special consolation prizes.

Just been looking at the prizes: £500 for the winner, £200 for the runner up and £50 each to the two consolation prize winners (this was 1975, so I guess you could actually buy something with £50).

Christopher Lee was chosen as a judge because he is "celebrated for his range of supernatural film roles", - I'll bet that cheered him up - "less well known as a scholar who was examined at Cambridge by M. R. James himself." Very true. It's not as if he's name-dropped his association with MRJ in every samey introduction he's contributed to just about every vampire and ghost anthology under the sun.

The Axe reappeared in The Penguin Book Of Ghost Stories and Dengue Fever made vol. 23 of the Pan Horror Stories. (!). Michael Kernan's wonderfully creepy Doll Named Silvio, seems to have faded into undeserved obscurity.

[Calenture]

I remember this anthology as being pretty good, though unfortunately I don't seem to have begun writing up stories when I read it. Hence, Marius the Doll and The Doll Named Sylvio are now hopelessly mixed up in my memory until I re-read them.

But Paul Theroux's Dengue Fever is one I think I remember - if not terribly well - as being about a tree with a nightmare-inducing scent provoking ghastly wartime memories?

Must look at these again.

I suppose Francis King is the same guy who wrote those "how to do black magic" books? I went through a phase of reading a number of those.

[redbrain]

I entered the competition, came nowhere, and resented that so much (at the time) that I never even looked at the book.

[Calenture]

Marius the Doll by F Terry Newman: In the heat of a perfect Breton summer, Peter experiments by adopting the different styles and techniques of various painting schools, hoping to eventually find one which is right for him. He asks old Pierre about the child that he and his wife adopted. A silent boy, Marius was the only survivor of a boating accident which had claimed the lives of his parents and sister. When Marius was found, he was clutching a doll, presumably his sister's, once a beautiful thing but now damaged by time and the sea. Curiously, the doll is also called Marius, and the boy carries it with him always.

Helping Pierre pick apples one day, Marius falls from a tree with the doll. He isn’t seriously hurt but is distressed about the damage to his doll’s leg. The next day, Peter is disturbed to see that the damage to the doll has apparently been repaired, but the boy now has traces of almost-healed wounds on his limbs which Peter would swear were not there yesterday.

Unable to make sense of this, Peter returns to his painting and thinks no more of it until there is the sound of a child’s scream from the river.

Beside the idea of the eerily-connected boy and his doll, this story has a couple of other things going for it, the setting of the orchards and hills of Brittany and the artist’s search for his ideal form of expression – something which is perfectly resolved through the story’s conclusion.

The Axe by Penelope Fitzgerald: When redundancies are planned, the narrator has been given the unpleasant task of persuading several members of the Company’s staff to resign, to avoid the embarrassment of being given their cards. It’s a difficult time, and most difficult of all is speaking to his clerical assistant, Singleton.

Singleton is getting old and has spent his life working for the Company. A quiet man with no dependants, it could be said that the work is Singleton’s life. One worrying possibility is that after Singleton has resigned he might continue to turn up at the office from sheer force of habit.

The story takes the form of a report written by the narrator for his employer. The building, which has a sad history, has recently become a place of noxious smells. Then, disturbingly, after a Christmas party, he finds that there is blood on his coat. As he writes the report, he wonders about the sound that he has heard from Singleton’s room. Has Singleton indeed come back to his old place of work? He hears the desk drawers being tried, then there is silence. And the silence continues in the otherwise empty building as the listener’s fear grows.

Very chilly.

The Resident by John Stevens: The Society of Ghost Writers is holding its annual conference at Ruymp’s Hall in Norfolk. Some of its members are concerned that the Society’s title might evoke a misleading image; for these Ghost Writers are the anonymous scribes who provide the books for people in the public eye to append their names to.

Discussing this, Austen points out that another member, an unfriendly, sinister and ugly man named Eliot, looks like a character out of an M R James story. “He reminds me very much of Count Magnus.”

It struck me that this very old-fashioned story with its comments on editorial matters might have been written for Charles Black.

[Calenture]

A Scent of Mimosa by Francis King: Lenore’s story has won the Katherine Mansfield prize and she is escorted to the Menton hotel by the judges, Theo, Tom and Lucy, for the presentation. That night, a strange tickling in her throat provokes a coughing fit which leaves her wash-basin spattered with blood. But when she looks later, the blood is gone.

The next day is armistice-day and they attend the wreath laying at the mountain-side war memorial. Lenore becomes aware of a strange bitter scent, then sees a young man watching her, a khaki rucksack propped against his leg. She’s been told to expect a fellow New Zealander and the young man confirms that he’s a fan of Katherine Mansfield’s writing. Lenore is disappointed when he fails to join them that evening at the restaurant.

At the villa Isola Bella, where Katherine Mansfield had lived for nine months ‘in a fever of illness and activity,’ Lenora smells the bitter scent of mimosa again and is frustrated when she can’t reach the plant where it grows further up the hill.

Then she meets the young man again and is surprised that he has read her story. “It’s the only one that she herself might have written, of all the ones that have ever won the prize.”

The Harpsichord: A Ghost Story For Children by Elizabeth Le Fanu: When her brother Giles is in contact with scarlet fever, Alicia goes to her Aunt Sophie’s. It’s a dreadful disappointment, but at least she will be able to play the piano. But the second disappointing bolt from the blue descends when she learns that the piano has been removed to Mr Bagenal’s shop to have the felts replaced.

Despondently she wanders to the top of the house, and enters a small white-panelled room. There is a low window-seat with bookshelves on either side and a view of the garden. And there was something which looked almost like a piano. The harpsichord is horribly out of tune, but the notes it makes are still brilliant and exciting. And there is a strange burn mark lying across its keys.

After supper, her Uncle Frederic point out a portrait on the drawing-room wall which shows Alicia’s great-grandmother playing this very harpsichord, while a white-haired man in black listens with his hand over his eyes. Her aunt and uncle can tell her nothing about the man, whom Alicia thinks looks very sad. The figure in the portrait fascinates her and she is determined to learn more about him.

The Doll Named Sylvio by Michael Kernan: Miss Coker takes the post of governess at Cay Doge where her ward is to be sixteen-year-old Kathy. Cay Doge is a mansion, “a remote, sickly, lush, jasmine-smelling hideaway on the coast of Florida.” The place is a fake, a mess of conflicting architectural styles and tastes, “a Victorian millionaire’s vision of paradise or...a Renaissance scholar’s rarebit nightmare.”

Cathy is never lonely. She has her dolls. All two hundred and thirty-one of them. These, Cathy explains, are the “Reserbees”, Mr and Mrs Reserbee and Samuel and Lawrence and the twins Bert and Nancy. Mrs Reserbee has a voice (supplied by Cathy) suggesting poverty and gentility. Another doll family is the de Revenants, an elegant childless couple. Miss Coker is astonished to find that every doll not only has a name but also a personality. And Cathy holds dolls tea-parties where they meet and squabble, Cathy manipulating them and speaking for them in an astonishingly talented display.

One night Cathy doesn’t come downstairs for the evening meal, and when Miss Coker asks why, she’s told that the girl always has her dinner by herself on the nineteenth.

“It’s a special night. She has them dolls out.”

“But we’ve had the dolls every night.”

“Them other ones. The Boones.”

Miss Coker goes to Cathy’s room and hears voices from behind the locked door. At last Cathy lets her in.

“Dolls of all sizes sat around on the floor. At least two dozen. There were no chairs or tea-tables. The dolls were humped stiffly forward or lay flat on their backs. They were unkempt, many in rags, some with the hair entirely gone and their bare pink pates shining dully in the soft light. Some of the skulls had been dented or smashed in the back. Then, as I looked from one doll to the next, all around that unlovely circle, I saw something else.

“Every doll was blind. The cloth ones had ragged holes where the glass had been plucked clean out. The hard plastic ones with moveable eyes all showed the whites. A few had nothing more than dark empty sockets.”

Then Miss Coker sees the big doll.

“I saw at once it was no Punch. Malice glowed from its lacquered face, brown with age. The feet had evidently been sawn through at the base, doubtless by the thief or antiquarian who had removed it from the great portal or crypt it had once adorned...

“Of all the thousand stolen treasures in this spurious place, this doll alone was absolutely authentic.”

By Matt Schudel Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 6, 2005:

Michael Kernan, a writer whose graceful versatility helped define the tone and literary flair of The Washington Post's Style section, died May 4 of pancreatic cancer at his home in Bennington, Vt. He turned 78 last Friday.

Plucked from his job as a reporter with The Post's Metro section, Mr. Kernan was named to the original Style staff in 1969. He wrote for Style for 20 years, and it is a mark of professionalism and skill that he never had a specialty. He wrote about candy bars, train trips, Nobel prize winners, film stars, sleds, old photographs and his own history of stuttering.

Michael Kernan, shown on Capri last year, also had two books published and wrote more than 100 articles for Smithsonian magazine.

"He was a glorious writer who could make anything interesting," said Mary Hadar, former editor of Style. "He never talked down or showed off in his writing, but somehow he connected."

This part of Michael Kernan’s obituary has been copied from this page:

Michael Kernan

[dem bones]

The Times Anthology Of Ghost Stories (Corgi 1977: originally Jonathan Cape, 1975)

From a competition judged by Kingsley Amis, Patricia Highsmith and Christopher Lee

F. Terry Newman - Marius The Doll
Penelope Fitzgerald - The Axe
John Stevens - The Resident
Francis King - A Scent Of Mimosa
Elizabeth LeFanu - The Harpsichord
Michael Kernan - The Doll Named Silvio
Oliver Knox - Summer Shades
D. A. Koster - Nicola
Laurence Grafftey-Smith - The Locket
Julian Barnes - A Self-Possessed Woman
Paul Theroux - Dengue Fever
Brian R. Hall - The Sword Of Frey
Keith Miles - Sea Voices

The first prize went to Michael Kernan for his hypnotically terrifying The Doll Named Silvio, while the elegiac A Scent Of Mimosa won second prize for Francis King: the highly commended stories of F. Terry Newman and Sir Laurence Grafftey-Smith were awarded special consolation prizes (£500 for the winner, £200 for the runner up and £50 each to the two consolation prize winners).

"In The Bag is a ghost story I submitted to the Times ghost story competition, though it wasn't written with that in mind. I rather hoped it might appear in the anthology derived from the competition, but the judges must have decided otherwise. However, it did gain me my first British Fantasy Award ..." - Ramsey Campbell in his introduction to Dark Feasts.

The first time I read this collection, I dismissed it as 'pleasant', a decent selection of mostly trad ghost stories, but something of a one-trick pony, the one trick being the gloriously horrible winning entry, The Doll Named Silvio, featuring a very disturbed little girl and her colony of dolls, one of whom has a thing for plucking out eyes. Recently landed a copy of the hardback for 25p and a refresher course reveals The Times Anthology Of Ghost Stories as a stronger, far more varied collection than I'd given it credit for. There are at least three effective horror stories - The Doll Named Silvio, Brian Hall's The Sword Of Frey and Paul Theroux's Dengue Fever, later to resurface in Pan Horror # 23. It would still have benefited from In The Bag, mind.

Includes;

F. Terry Newman - Marius The Doll: Shortly after the war, Marius lost his parents and beloved sister Yvette when they drove over a stray mine on their way home from Normandy. Adopted by a kindly Breton farming couple, the boy carries his sister's doll, also named Marius, everywhere. Should anything happen to the doll Marius - say, it receives a dent in its leg - the boy Marius develops a sympathetic limp. Comes the day when the doll is disfigured after falling in the pond and Marius is stricken with a deadly fever. An English painter works through the night to mend the battered dolly, but will his efforts save the day? like i said, 'pleasant', but a pause to fondly imagine this material in Charles Birkin's hands ....

Penelope Lively - The Axe: W. S. Singlebury, a shy, lonely, nondescript clerical assistant lives for his job, so when he's bullied into accepting the company's "generous" redundancy package, he's obsolete, completely unable to function without his routine. As befitting a man who has been given the chop, he does away with himself in commendably unpleasant fashion and returns to his poky office. Later selected by J. A. Cuddon for The Penguin Book Of Ghost Stories, thirty five years on, distressingly The Axe is as relevant as the day it was written.

John Stevens - The Resident: The first annual conference of the Society of Ghost Writers at Raymps Hall, Norfolk, is infiltrated by the real thing. Between arguing over the correct use of hyphens and trips to the bar, a small group discuss a particularly pompous member of their profession, Meredith Eliot. "I don't believe I have ever seen anyone so disconcertingly ugly ... He reminds me very much of Count Magnus ... Horrible little devil. Central character in M. R. James's least probable stories." The resident agrees and decides to give him a jolly good fright.

Oliver Knox - Summer Shades: Seemingly shunned by his friends, Paul, a neglected child packed off to West Cork on a holiday, vows to get his own back by giving the foursome a terrible scare when next they visit their favourite hang out - the local 'haunted house' at Driscoll Farm. Draped in a sheet, his mouth dripping tomato juice, Paul sneaks up to the window and moans. His friends seem inordinately terrified by his little pantomime, and at first he thinks they're just being nice, taking off like they had the Devil on their tails. It's only later, when he calls at Lucy's house, he learns the tragic truth. Surely this is the solitary occasion when the scheduling of an episode of The Archers has played a pivotal role in a ghost story?

[Jojo Lapin X]

Apr 30, 2011 10:23:44 GMT dem bones said:

"In The Bag is a ghost story I submitted to the Times ghost story competition, though it wasn't written with that in mind. I rather hoped it might appear in the anthology derived from the competition, but the judges must have decided otherwise. However, it did gain me my first British Fantasy Award ..." - Ramsey Campbell in his introduction to Dark Feasts.

To my mind, "In the Bag" is the story of children putting plastic bags on their heads and suffocating. In fact, I am unable to think of any other.

[dem bones]

jojo, the only other plastic bag horror i can think of is Charles Birkin's typically unpleasant The Lesson from The Smell Of Evil - Little Milo thinks his comatose drunk uncle Oscar might like to try on a 'martian space helmet' - which ends on quite the loneliest note. The Times anthology is tidy enough, but i can't help but think it would have been improved by In The Bag. Of the stories that made the cut, i'd go along with the judges' choice of winning entry. Michael Kernan's The Doll Named Silvio is excellent (did he write anything else in the genre?) - and how refreshing that it's by far the nastiest thing in here!

[Jojo Lapin X]

Birkin---what a pioneer! I am sure plastic bags had barely been introduced when he found a use for them.

[David A. Riley]

May 24, 2011 8:58:32 GMT Jojo Lapin X said:

Birkin---what a pioneer! I am sure plastic bags had barely been introduced when he found a use for them.

And in his own inimitable way!

[dem bones]

Michael Kernan - The Doll Named Silvio: No question in my mind that, of the stories to make the cut, Michael Kernan's was a worthy winner and i can only assume there are copyright issues that have prevented it reappearing in subsequent compilations of the 'Great Horror Stories' variety? Miss Coker takes a job as governess to Kathy, an imaginative sixteen year old, shut away in Cay Doge, a tastelessly decorated Victorian mausoleum off the Florida coast. Cathy is at her happiest throwing tea parties for her hundred dolls, all of whom she has provided with a unique personality. "Them other ones, the Boones" only come out to play on the 19th of every month, and it's a private affair, Cathy locking herself in the room with them for the occasion. Miss Coker pries at the keyhole. Cathy always provides tables and chairs for her favoured dolls, but the Boones are strewn around like corpses. Several have sustained nasty injuries to their oversized heads. All of them are missing their eyes. And salivating over the misery, the tall, black-eyed figure of Silvio, dusty, worm holed, his legs sawn off at the heels - "doubtless by the thief or antiquarian who had removed it from the great portal or crypt it had once adorned" - and quite the most horribly impressive doll the governess has ever seen. Miss Coker is soon to witness Silvio in action after Kathy slyly lets slip that the little Betsy Mipps doll has gone "missing" ...

*i just realised we had two ongoing threads for this book so made sense to merge them. apologies for any repetition seem somehow redundant on this board *

[jayaprakash]

I have the edition with the more sedate green cover. I picked this up last year and it helped revive my interest in horror anthologies from this era.

'Dengue Fever' was my favourite story, followed by 'The Doll Silvio', 'The Axe' and 'Sea Voices'. I remember thinking Julian Barnes' story was a bit too gimmicky for its own good. Is this the same Julian Barnes who wins Bookers and things like that?

[Shrink Proof]

Just finished this. "Sea Voices" was good in a no-loose-ends sort of way but my favourite was "The Axe". I really enjoyed the "official memo to senior management" tone and the ending. More managers should receive memos like this I think...

[paulfinch]

Learning that In The Bag didn't make the final cut set me against this anthology from the start. Having read the book twice now, I see no reason to change that viewpoint. A Doll Named Silvio is an exceptional horror tale, and I remember Sea Voices being pretty good too, but IMO, none of the others eclipse Ramsey's offering. There is no good reason to my mind why it wasn't included.

[Jojo Lapin X]

Nov 10, 2014 9:16:53 GMT paulfinch said:

There is no good reason to my mind why it wasn't included.

Indeed! I am aware of no better story on the topic of children suffocating themselves with plastic bags. If that is what you want, "In the Bag" is it. Sir Charles Birkin came close, but, perhaps in a moment of uncharacteristic weakness, he made the asphyxiated party be an adult.