James Hale - The Twilight Book

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James Hale - The Twilight Book (Gollancz, 1981)

Nick Bantock

Introduction

Alex Hamilton - A Helping Hand
Janice Elliott - Trystings
Steve Wilson - My Breath Is Inside You
Giles Gordon - Hamlet: The Ghost's Story
Jay Gilbert - Aunt Jude
James Hamilton-Patterson - Two Of You
Dominic Cooper - The Country Of The Gull
Salman Rushdie - The Avatar
Sarah Lawson - Spaniard's Rock
Fred Urquhart - The Saracen's Stick
Roger F. Dunkley - Zane Forsyth's Resurrection Affair
Frank Morley - The Cucullati

Blurb:

Here is a splendid collection of ghost stories, and a truly international gathering of ghosts: they come from India, medieval France, Denmark (a king, no less), Turkey, an Asian island; there's an alarming accident in Germany, an Aztec resur­rection, an Anglo-Saxon visitation, a Roman invasion of an unexpected kind, a Spanish tragedy, and a lost child in the English countryside.

Giles Gordon shows us the battlements of Elsinore; Janice Elliott's lovers cross the centuries in passionate reincarnation. Alex Hamilton hears a dialogue between a father in a mental home and his young son with unsafe friends; Sarah Lawson's sad ghost is a Spanish sailor from the Armada, cast up on a Scottish island. And Fred Urquhart brings back to life in our own day, for a fitting revenge, a boy sold into slavery on the Children's Crusade.

Frank Morley provides a grimmer haunt­ing, along Hadrian's Wall, and James Hamilton-Paterson is truly frightening about possession in the South Seas. And there's black humour in Steve Wilson's tale of scatological Aunt Alice and a revenge which involves an inflatable sex-prop.

Ghosts ancient and modern patrol the twilight of the pages; turn on the light, and then turn on the light.

Anybody read this? On the surface, it looks very literary, although Hale, Giles Gordon and Roger Dunkley have written some decent chillers in their time.

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Blimey, a haunted Sex Toy Story and it took me eight years to get around to it? Must be losing me touch.

Steve Wilson - My Breath Is Inside You: It's probably fair to say that sweary Aunt Alice , a formidable witch and one-time associate of Aleister Crowley, is a bit of a Tartar. But there's a heart in their somewhere, as demonstrated when her sister, Diana, dies in childbirth. Turns out that the father is Herr Willi Berners, Alice's then-fiancée, but still she begs the love-cheat to do the decent thing and look after his child. He laughs in her face. Alice raises the orphan as she would her own daughter - by packing her away to a board school at the earliest opportunity.

Sixteen years on and Nicky arrives home for the Summer from Swiss Finishing School. She's been invited to spend a fortnight as a guest of her closest school chum, Helga, who just so happens to be the acknowledged daughter of Herr Berners. The old Nazi (he served in German Intelligence and was a prominent member of the Thule Society), lecherous as ever, takes a shine to Nicky and makes no secret of his ambition to bed her. When Alice learns of this development she is, understandably, mortified. It is time she got even with "the pig" and, to this end, she hatches a diabolical scheme involving a blow-up doll ....

Good, clean kinky fun. Deadly effective double-whammy of an ending may take you by surprise.

Narrated by Valentine Parrinder, Nicky's very bitchy, gay American cousin. It is Valentine who is delegated to acquire the doll (aka Angelic Alice, Athletic & Appealing), necessitating a browse of Soho sex emporiums Belinda Belle and Love Job. At time of story, Valentine is rogering Sir Robert Maldon, a high ranking Civil Servant with a fondness for flogging.

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Alex Hamilton - The Helping Hand: The aged inmate of a psychiatric prison is visited by the ghost of his son, who seems to know an awful lot about the string of freak "accidents" which have claimed the lives of disliked acquaintances. Like Mr. Purvis and his bit on the side, crushed by a falling tree as they picnicked in the woods. Like the sadistic schoolmaster, Mr. Mottistone, and his equally crap wife, who took pleasure in whipping the kids. In short, father and son seem to have got up to plenty of mischief between them.

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Janice Elliott - Trystings: A century-spanning love affair conducted through several reincarnations, many of them short term (Henri was the asp who did for Cleopatra, Attila The Hun's trusty steed, "a flea from the midden of Nero's Rome!," & Co. ). The lovers might have been united sooner were not the male party so susceptible to death by burning at the stake. Henriette has had her ups and down's too. Very nicely told.

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Roger F. Dunkley - Zanine Forsyth's Resurrection Affair: That old faithful, THE FUTURE again. Zanine Forsyth, former Hollywood starlet and still the very UberDiva-est of all UberDiva's, simply has to be the first in everything. It does not sit the least well with her that bitter rival "that Wyndsor woman" has stolen a march with ther recent excesses.

As luck would have it, George, Zani's husband of the moment, has invented a Resurrection Machine, a device by which entire communities can be transported to a place in time of its controller's choosing. For her lavish do to end all lavish do's, Zani opts for the sacred monoliths of Quantahatapotel, Mexico, when virgin sacrifice was in vogue with the Aztec Empire.

Has our ghastly prima donna finally over-reached?