|
|
Post by dem on Jul 6, 2010 22:15:04 GMT
I can't remember if I mentioned it earlier, but a few years back some of us tried to get an on-line ghostly reading group up and running based around ther Aickman Fontanas. It was an idea that would have worked if the timing had been right, but it ground to a halt after a few months. Sometimes the web is busier than others... Anyway the relics of the old threads can be found on the yahoo group: groups.yahoo.com/group/Haunted_Bookshelf/- chris hi Chris; i attempted to join when you first mentioned Haunted Bookshelf - this would have been around the time of the Wordsworth polls - but someone must have sussed i was that creepy one from Vault ... Very interested to learn that the group was restricted to the Aickman Fontanas. It really does seem as though for many aficionados the series died with Aickman's involvement and poor old RCH's efforts weren't worth the paper they were printed on. While I don't get on with everything he wrote he had his moments, and as an editor I honestly think he did OK. |
|
|
|
Post by cw67q on Jul 7, 2010 6:42:46 GMT
I can't remember if I mentioned it earlier, but a few years back some of us tried to get an on-line ghostly reading group up and running based around ther Aickman Fontanas. It was an idea that would have worked if the timing had been right, but it ground to a halt after a few months. Sometimes the web is busier than others... Anyway the relics of the old threads can be found on the yahoo group: groups.yahoo.com/group/Haunted_Bookshelf/- chris hi Chris; i attempted to join when you first mentioned Haunted Bookshelf - this would have been around the time of the Wordsworth polls - but someone must have sussed i was that creepy one from Vault ... Very interested to learn that the group was restricted to the Aickman Fontanas. It really does seem as though for many aficionados the series died with Aickman's involvement and poor old RCH's efforts weren't worth the paper they were printed on. While I don't get on with everything he wrote he had his moments, and as an editor I honestly think he did OK. Hi Demonik, They must have had you sussed yes  Although it might just be that the group has been moribund for so long that the moderators don't recieve emails or have changed emial addresses in the interim. From skimming through bits of that newsgroup last night I was reminded that it wasn't formed specifically to focus on the Aickman Fontanas, but that was pretty much the direction it took after a little faffing around over what to chose. We only got through the first couple of books IIRC and a few stories not in the Fontanas came up for discussion. Towards the end I think we tried to kick start the group after a hiatus by moving on to the Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, but I think we'd lost momentum by then. I can remember some very good posts on Aickman's "the Inner Room" by Jim Rockhill that I think reside in the archives of that group somewhere. It is the case though that within the Fontanas the intent would have been to do the Aickman volumes. And now that I think on it, the original suggestion for Haunted_Bookshelf might have been as an Aickman redaing group, but most of the interested participants thought that an anthology featuring different authors, or perhaps a single author that didn't divide tastes so much, might be a better option. The Fontana Aickmans would have been a good choice with that bakground (and they are/were also much easier to find cheaply than Aickman's books). - chris |
|
|
|
Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 9, 2010 7:25:10 GMT
And finally:
'Ex Private X' - The Sweeper. Some nice turns of phrase in this story of why you shouldn't get tramps to do jobs they're too disease riddled to cope with. I've not read any Burrage before but he's obviously another one for me to look out for.
And that's it for Fontana 9 - definitely one of the better anthologies in the series that I've read so far and one that even (gasp!) had an actual ghost in every story!
|
|
|
|
Post by dem on Jul 9, 2010 8:22:07 GMT
And finally: 'Ex Private X' - The Sweeper. I've not read any Burrage before but he's obviously another one for me to look out for. i'm sure you must have! anyway, yes, you really should look out for him, even if you don't intend venturing too far beyond greatest hits territory. His One Who Saw is one of very few ghost stories that ever got to me in the way intended (gave me a shudder) just as CB's A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts is one of a measly handful of horror stories to genuinely horrify and frighten me. of course, neither may have quite the same impact on another soul, .... you'll find One Who Saw in Cuddon's Penguin Book Of Ghost Stories, Fontana Ghost #14 .... we have a pretty passable A. M. Burrage/ Ex-Private X thread on the go Here |
|
|
|
Post by weirdmonger on Sept 13, 2022 15:57:00 GMT
'Ex-Private X’ (A. M. Burrage) – The Sweeper: Tessa Winyard, 22, is engaged as female companion to eighty-year-old Miss Ludgate of Billingdon Abbots. The old lady has a reputation for meanness which makes her extravagant gestures toward passing tramps and beggars all the more inexplicable. Miss Ludgate has her reasons. Eighteen years earlier an emaciated man called at the Abbots and after castigating him as a workshy scrounger she set him to work clearing all the leaves from the path. After a few sweeps he fell to the ground and with his dying breath promised to complete the job and “I’ll come for you, my lady, and we’ll feast together. Only see as you’re ready to be fetched when I come”. Since then his spectre has returned each autumn and with each passing year he draws closer to the house … . Miss Ludgate, seeming over age 80, “…presented a surface like a mountain range of unexpected peaks and valleys;” Just like the upsweep and downsweep of a broom, the piques and veils of a foreboding Fetch in Autumn. As we all enter Autumn now, in our own real-time in this country of Burrage, especially we older ones fear such a Fetch. Playing Patience with Fiction as I do by sweeping stories of their meaning. Often scooping new meanings to make each story last at least another season of teasing time by allowing the reading of it again and again. Hearing in the words and their meaning, forced or natural, that rhythm ever nearer, hoping my time remaining preserves itself by emptying the trees of extra pages and then collecting them up again in revised cycles….”the strokes were as regular as those of the pendulum of some slow old clock.” Tessa, 22, Miss Ludgate’s companion, lives in this large house with Miss Ludgate … “And here and there, in the most unexpected places, were garden gods, mostly broken and all in need of scouring. Tessa soon discovered these stone ghosts quite unexpectedly, and nearly always with a leap and tingle of surprise.” “…her slim hands—they at least would have pleased an artist—hovering like white moths over the keyboard”, she being induced to play on the loud pedal to block out the sound of what you once did wrong in your past, something now coming to “fetch” you, nearer and nearer, but never quite reaching… till it does! An annual recurrence, at the time that your wrong was first done. A wrong, as perceived by yourself or by others. “…to touch hands over the barrier between youth and age. Miss Ludgate inspired in Tessa a queer tenderness.” “She reminded Tessa of some poor actress playing the part of Queen, wearing the tawdry crown jewels,…” And by dint of ominous elbows, there seems to be triggered today the possible certainty of dying in the coming Autumn, as first mentioned, following these elbows, to Tessa by Miss Ludgate — thus to clinch something in this particular reading of it, something not noticed when I last read it; I had not fully learnt of such elbow triggers nor the need to watch for their increasing effect on what I read till now, viz. “…when she had taken out and arranged a pack of patience cards preparatory to beginning her evening game, she suddenly leaned her elbows on the table and rested her face between her hands.” Beggars can’t be choosers, and I infer young Tessa knows that tramps’ sleeves are increasingly worn away at such crucial hinges of happenstance. You see, in childhood, she and her brothers and sisters “had worn each other’s clothes, tramped the carpets threadbare,…” *** PS: AM Burrage aka Ex Private X Already quoted above: “…in the most unexpected places, were garden gods, mostly broken and all in need of scouring. Tessa soon discovered these stone ghosts quite unexpectedly,…” (my italics) |
|
Although it might just be that the group has been moribund for so long that the moderators don't recieve emails or have changed emial addresses in the interim.
