Manon Burze-Labrande (Ed.) Spectral Sounds

[Swampirella]

Manon Burze-Labrande (ed.) - Spectral Sounds: Unquiet Tales of Acoustic Weird (British Library Sept. 22, 2022)

Blurb:

From the ringing of a disconnected bell to footsteps in the halls of an abandoned house and the whisper of an unexplained voice in the ear, uncanny sounds are often the heralds of danger and terror in Gothic and supernatural fiction. Yet, when examining the range of stories which best manipulate our aural sense it is clear that there is more room to explore how significant sound is to our experience of fear. This new collection presents tales in which ghosts interact with the corporeal world through noise, bodiless voices wander through the ether, and the objects whose sounds we trust, like the telephone, betray us. Featuring obscure pieces alongside some of the pioneers of the weird including B M Croker, Algernon Blackwood, H D Everett and Sheridan Le Fanu.

Manon Burz-Labrande is a researcher based at the University of Vienna who specialises in the content, history and literary influence of penny bloods and penny dreadfuls. Her research has also explored scientific romances and the crossover of literature with medicine, as well as a long-held interest in the role of sound in Gothic and strange fiction.

Contributor: Manon Burz-Labrande

[iant]

I love these various imaginative choices of theme.

[helrunar]

Color me intrigued. "Spectral sounds" is such a frequently occurring theme in actual hauntings.

Might have to add this one to my electronic device.

Thanks Miss Scarlett for the thread!

cheers, Hel.

[helrunar]

As it happens, on my late lunch break today I was reading a story by Shamus Frazer that would be perfect for this anthology. But it was first published in 1967 (and presumably was one of the last things written by this author, who died of cancer in 1966), so perhaps falls too late in the calendar for the Brit Library's bailiwick. "The Tune in Dan's Cafe" was dramatized for the Rod Serling series Night Gallery, but I don't recall the TV film having anything as potent as this description of Dave, whose ghost haunts the title cafe and is obsessed with spinning the same platter over and over again on the jukebox:

"He wasn't no regular," said Dan, "at least not while he was alive. But he came in some weekends with his girl. He was a London Ted, duck-arsed hair dyed red, shoestring tie, pale blue eyes that bulged so you saw the bloodshot rims, slack mouth sucking a cigarette, or a bit of gum, or his teeth. But his girl? Oh, she was really something to look at. Dark and pale, tight black sweater and slacks, and great eyes painted with blue shadow, and pouted lips pale as a corpse's with that kind of off-beat lipstick: she had her hair wound up like a beeskep, and she sat there quiet as a statue drinking her coffee and smoking while Dave worked the jukebox. Moira he called her: some kind of model, I suppose."

Over the weekend I started reading a novel a friend loaned me, published 2017: Paul takes the form of a mortal girl by one Andrea Lawlor, epigraph supplied by Miss Gertrude Stein. It's amusing and effective but I observe that most 21st century prose is banal and write-by-numbers compared to the kind of thing I have excerpted above.

H.