Robert Aickman - Fontana Ghost 6

[Johnlprobert]

Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched - May Sinclair. Here's another cracker, with our unlucky-in-love heroine whose suitors either die or marry other women, eventually entering into an unsatisfactory affair with married Oscar Wade. His death allows her to move on, but when she dies they find themselves in hell, which for them is the hotel room where they used to meet up for their ultimately empty and unsatisfactory indiscretions. There's a very cruel 'morality' to this tale. It's not really our heroine's fault that she ends up as she does and yet she then finds herself condemned forever.

It does make me want to read more of this author as well, though. Good thing I've got the Wordsworth collection Dem has just listed elsewhere.

[Johnlprobert]

The Door in the Wall - HG Wells. Not really a ghost story but more a piece of whimsy. It's slightly more fun if you play at guessing what the door is meant to represent. Childhood? Latent homosexuality? Suicidal desire? Or just the portal into a lovely garden? If you're in a hurry with this book this could be the one to miss.

[cw67q]

Aickman could sure pick 'em couldn't he?

I reread this tale recently and it gets worse (better) with each visit. Forget "Hell is Other People", "Hell is Ourselves" at our lowest moment of self deception when all else is reduced to its worst. Forced to relive our own lives through the prism of that horrible defining moment that tainted everything else before and after with its corruption: Eeeeek!!!

- Chris

[dem]

Inspired by this thread, I reread Whitehead's The Lips last night for the first time in a decade, and was delighted/ relieved that it still did it for me. Whitehead's attitude toward the blacks is refreshingly sympathetic for the pulps of the day (Try some of the more notorious Not At Night/ Weird Tales efforts like Arthur Woodward's Lord Of The Talking Heads) and I'm sure he had a good time destroying Martin the loathsome slave-trader. The story still strikes me as the diseased bastard offspring of Edward Lucas White's celebrated Lukindoo and the ending - wonder if the hint of eroticism was deliberate on Whitehead's part? - brings to mind the cover artwork for 'Linda Lovecraft's More Devil Kisses!

As to Vernon Lee, this lacks Oke Of Okehurst and Marsayas In Flanders but still comes pretty close to a greatest hits collection.

Vernon Lee - The Virgin Of The Seven Daggers (Corgi, 1962)

Cover: Fritz Wenger

L. Cooper Willis - Introduction

Prince Alberic And The Snake Lady
A Wedding Chest
Amour Dure
A Wicked Voice
The Legend Of Madame Krasinska
The Virgin Of The Seven Daggers

Blurb:
GHOSTS says the author of these macabre stories, are the instruments of fate, the signs of evil that invade the bodies and half-innocent imaginations of guilty souls.

Here are stories of ghosts; stories filled with the blood-stained shadows of 15th-century Italian revenge, with the passion of holy and profane love breathing its way through to a terrifying climax.

"Astonishing, brilliantly specific and frighteningly controlled are these tales of ghosts, obsessions, and revenge." - New York Times

[cw67q]

The Corgi has a great cover doesn't it?

I had this and the companion volume "Ravenna and her Ghosts " at one time. They might still be in a box somewhere, but I think I gave them away a few years back.

I'm going to try and paste in an image of Ravenna's cover here (wish me luck )


... nope couldn't do it

On another note, I thought 'Sorworth Place' was one of Aickman's few missteps, a poor choice to represent Russell Kirk.

- Chris

[Johnlprobert]

The Grey Ones - J. B. Priestley. Here's another 'ordinary' tale for Volume 6 (but then the bar's been set pretty high by what I've already read). You can see the ending of this one coming almost from the outset. Interestingly this is the first Priestly I've read but unlike some of the other authors discussed here it doesn't make me want to read any more of him.

[dem]

May 19, 2010 9:40:43 GMT cw67q said:

The Corgi has a great cover doesn't it?

I had this and the companion volume "Ravenna and her Ghosts " at one time. They might still be in a box somewhere, but I think I gave them away a few years back.

I'm going to try and paste in an image of Ravenna's cover here (wish me luck )


... nope couldn't do it

- Chris

hey Chris, don't have a copy of Ravenna & Her Ghosts, but have seen the cover you mention, another by Mr. Wenger if I am not very much mistaken, and it is indeed a beauty - I prefer it to Virgin Of The Seven Daggers artwork, striking as it is. if you want to email me a copy, will put it on here?

[cw67q]

Thanks Demonik I will do, although I just saved the image I have from a website in order to post it. It isn't a scanned image.

-c hris

[cw67q]

May 20, 2010 9:22:28 GMT cw67q said:

Thanks Demonik I will do, although I just saved the image I have from a website in order to post it. It isn't a scanned image.

-c hris

actually I don't know how to attach an attachment to the "personal message" function here If you want to drop me an email I can send an image by reply. My adress is:
<my user name at the vault>@yahoo.com

Alternatively I just lifed the image from the amazon page here:
www.amazon.com/Ravenna-her-ghosts-Corgi-book/dp/B0007JRWJ6

I couldn't find many images of this book cover on the web.

- chris

[dem]

thanks Chris, that link will do just fine. have you a contents list?

[jamesdoig]

This has identical contents to the Corgi book, published by Arena in 1987 (an imprint of Hutchinson/Arrow).

[Johnlprobert]

And finally...

Priscilla & Emily Lofft - George Moore. Very ordinary after some of the other stories in here. Priscilla & Emily are inseparable sisters, but after Priscilla dies of TB there's something she needs Emily to do. Sadly it's not that interesting.

Sorworth Place - Russell Kirk. From comments above I was expecting this to be be fairly poor. It's not bad but again it'svery ordinary, although I wouldn't mind checking out more of Kirk sometime. Ralph Bain MC comes to the aid of a pretty widow being haunted by her evil husband. It all ends in tears, but a bit perfunctorily

[cw67q]

May 20, 2010 19:20:15 GMT dem said:

thanks Chris, that link will do just fine. have you a contents list?

No problem. I'll have to look for a contents listing though, off hand I can't remember.

-chris

[cw67q]

May 21, 2010 5:24:05 GMT Johnlprobert said:

And finally...

Priscilla & Emily Lofft - George Moore. Very ordinary after some of the other stories in here. Priscilla & Emily are inseparable sisters, but after Priscilla dies of TB there's something she needs Emily to do. Sadly it's not that interesting.

Sorworth Place - Russell Kirk. From comments above I was expecting this to be be fairly poor. It's not bad but again it'svery ordinary, although I wouldn't mind checking out more of Kirk sometime. Ralph Bain MC comes to the aid of a pretty widow being haunted by her evil husband. It all ends in tears, but a bit perfunctorily

Maybe I'm just down on the Kirk as it doesn't like up to his other stories. I was also left cold by the plight of the blighte aristocrats (compare and contrast the authors treatment of their problems with his attitude towards the impoverished local miners, some of whome are communists !!! why would *that* be boss-man? .

Kirk doesn't usually let his politics spill over into his stories, but I think he let his attuitudes mar this one, at least for this reader. Maybe I'm over sensitive to this and let is colour my appreciation of the tale, but Kirk has written much better.

I'd compare this to Aickman's "the Unsettled Dust" which also explores the problems of the modern aristocrat and (to my amazement) managed to evoke even in this unrepentent sans culotte a personal (though not political) sympathy for their plight. It's also a far better tale, on of my fvaourite aickman stories.

I have no recollection whatsoever of the George Moore story.

As far as Kirk goes, tehre is a pretty comprehensive hb volume that can be obtained for about £7.5uk on Amazon (and possible cheaper elsewhere). "Ancestral Shadows". I think this includes almost everything from the two ATP volumes except for 2 or 3 short mood pieces. I haven't actully seen a copy of this volume but is is on this page:

www.amazon.co.uk/Ancestral-Shadows-Anthology-Ghostly-Tales/dp/080283938X

At that price I might someday shell out for a copy even though I have the 2 vol ATP. Kirk wrote some excellent ghost stories.

- Chris

[weirdmonger]

WHERE THEIR FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED by May Sinclair

“Her mind had no past and no future, no sharp-edged coherent memories, and no idea of anything to be done next.”

From elder flowers to electric dynamos, this is probably the most powerful ghost story ever written. No exaggeration. It tells of Harriott, who effectively becomes a recurrent widow without ever getting married. A story of unrequited love with one or more men and forbidden sex with another man who was married with children, so not a completely celibate audit trail for her, but certainly in an apotheosised resonance with this book so far…and she fails to confess in “solemn holiness” the forbidden aspects of her love life when upon her death bed. The religious lockdown from the Clarimonde syndrome onward into an eternal timeless stalking by that forbidden lover through an attritional Null-Immortalis (wherein each man morphs into another of the men), a brand of “Immortality” for which I had this ready name, one that is intensely shocking and nightmarish to all sinners who read this story, their guilts never to be shaken off because vibrations of them last into shadows of infinity that ever stalk us. That fateful cracking of fate in Sorworth is now forever and yours! And threaded through all these experiences are the earthly hotels and houses (“grey columns”, “great grey-carpeted staircase”, “grey house pricked up”, “high, grey garden”) where they happened. Those dynamos, you ask? Well, think about it… when comparing the forbidden lover’s essence at the end, the sight of “his long bulk stood before her” and feeling the “vibrations of its power”, yes, compare that with an earlier almost ludicrously salacious concept of Harriott wanting to be shown his “great dynamos”… however innocent the root.

=========================


“Then she unlocks the toad’s dire head,
Within whose cell is treasured
That pretious stone, which she doth call
A noble recompence for all,
And to her lar doth it present,
Of his fair aid a monument.”
— from ‘The Toad And Spyder: A Duell’ by Richard Lovelace (the Cavalier poet of the seventeenth century, upon whom Christopher Lovelock is possibly based?)

OKE OF OKEHURST by Vernon Lee

The bullet’s final release. The killing of one’s loved one to love them the more in a more ghostly territory… To play that game of fancy-dress charades to its fullest extent. With half-moon specs of the age?
The toad with its gash in its maniac-brow’s frown of her husband (also her first cousin) whom she leaves behind by having him mad enough to shoot her. Her second miscarriage of self?
You need to read this famous attritional Gothic house novelette for yourself, in order to appreciate its relentless description of Alice Oke, not just the glimpse of her at the beginning of the above Sorworth story*, where the gash in the brow of her saviour in this Paget work was there a crack in the back of his head! So, yes, not just a telling glimpse or impression, but teems and teems of teasing tantalisations of her, borrowing the attritionally descriptive effects in the above Clarimonde. Suffering endless boredoms of such heartfelt samenesses, now reaching for a fulfilling apotheosis of self.
Much of her husband adumbrated, too, with his own conflicting traits, obsessionally couched by both the narrator in cahoots with his creator the author Violet Paget masquerading as Vernon Lee.
Here the Angel and Jacob wrestling duel is explicitly mentioned, and it seems to be the same one as at the end of the Sorworth story, if there it was on a rooftop.
Many tantalising qualities imparted by the Alice-obsessed narrator about her, the man who was her would-be portrait painter invited to thus capture her by the husband, long paragraph after long paragraph of obsessional but beautifully textured samenesses of traits. A self-projected Narcissus complex.
The writer Violet Paget now a version of Virgil Pomfret? A woman as man transcending the mad-woman she had created. Not forgetting the gratuitously pervasive yellow of the drawing-room….as a co-instinctive symbol of such feminist release?
To transcend the immortal nullity in the May Sinclair? Leigh to Lee.


*Full context of my review of Fontana Ghost 6 — dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/12/27614/