Glimpses of the Unknown - Lost Ghost Stories

[cauldronbrewer]

From the thread on mummy fiction:

Aug 25, 2014 10:39:15 GMT dem said:

Recently snagged a short academic paper, The Rape of the Mummy: Women, Horror Fiction and the Westernisation of The Curse by Dr Jasmine Day. According to the author, Louisa May Alcott's Lost in a Pyramid: or, the Mummy’s Curse was " the earliest known work of fiction with a mummy’s curse theme" until she and her colleagues rediscovered The Mummy’s Soul by the prolific and long-lived Anonymous (The Knickerbocker; or New York Monthly Magazine, 1862), and Jane G. Austin's After Three Thousand Years (Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art, 1868), both of which, from Dr. Day's synopses, sound like winners especially to those who like the idea of a mummified fly.

Editors Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf have included both "The Mummy's Soul" and "After Three Thousand Years" in Crawling Horror, and I thought both stories were winners as mummy tales and insect-themed weird tales. Austin's story features a deadly scarab necklace that hooks its claws--literally--into a love triangle. It's entertaining, but the "The Mummy's Soul" is even better. In the first few pages, the anonymous author gives us a tomb-specter, a mummy that disintegrates into dust, a curse, and a vase that contains a beautiful yet hideous fly. A mishap brings the embalmed insect back to life, and it proceeds to turn the victims of its bloody bite into living--or, rather, slowly dying--mummies. When the protagonist finally catches the fly, something even wilder happens. Dr. Day et al. unearthed a treasure in this one, and I'm grateful to the editors for bringing it back to the light of print (the aforementioned essay by Day is worth a read, too).

[dem]

Aug 2, 2021 23:06:14 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

Editors Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf have included both "The Mummy's Soul" and "After Three Thousand Years" in Crawling Horror, and I thought both stories were winners as mummy tales and insect-themed weird tales. Austin's story features a deadly scarab necklace that hooks its claws--literally--into a love triangle. It's entertaining, but the "The Mummy's Soul" is even better. In the first few pages, the anonymous author gives us a tomb-specter, a mummy that disintegrates into dust, a curse, and a vase that contains a beautiful yet hideous fly. A mishap brings the embalmed insect back to life, and it proceeds to turn the victims of its bloody bite into living--or, rather, slowly dying--mummies. When the protagonist finally catches the fly, something even wilder happens. Dr. Day et al. unearthed a treasure in this one, and I'm grateful to the editors for bringing it back to the light of print (the aforementioned essay by Day is worth a read, too).

It's ironic that Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf included this pair just when a few of us (mea culpa) were bemoaning the Tales of the Weird anthologies over-reliance on the same old 'classics.' Another I'd particularly like to see republished - this one brought to notice in Ailise Bulfin's paper The Fiction of Gothic Egypt and British Imperial Paranoia: The Curse of the Suez Canal (2011: free download here) - is the anonymous In the Sepulchre (Reynolds Miscellany, June 1868), "a Poe-ian revenge in which a thwarted English suitor mummifies and abandons his rival in an ancient Egyptian tomb."

[Dr Strange]

Cornish Horrors: Tales From The Land's End - ed. Joan Passey (British Library Tales of the Weird, 2021)



Contents:
Edgar Allan Poe - Ligeia
Anonymous - My Father's Secret
Robert Stephen Hawker - Cruel Coppinger
Mary Elizabeth Braddon - Colonel Benyon's Entanglement
M.H. - The Phantom Hare
Clara Venn - Christmas Eve at a Cornish Manor House
Mary E. Penn - In the Mist
Mrs. H.L. Cox - The Baronet's Craze
Bram Stoker - The Coming of Abel Behenna
Arthur Quiller-Couch - The Roll-Call of the Reef
Elliot O'Donnell - The Haunted Spinney
E.M. Bray - A Ghostly Visitation
F. Marion Crawford - The Screaming Skull

[dem]

Dec 1, 2020 23:58:16 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

Oct 15, 2020 14:56:53 GMT Dr Strange said:

G.G. Pendarves - The Laughing Thing (Weird Tales, May 1929). Hard-headed/cold-hearted millionaire businessman Jason Drewe moves himself and Tony, his 8 year old son, into the house that he bought from the dying Eldred Werne. Werne had wanted more for the house and the extensive woodlands around it, but was desperate - and Drewe hadn't got to be in his position in life by being nice to people. Werne tells Drewe that after he dies he will "come back" to extract "a more satisfactory price" from him...

I liked this one - it's not really anything special in terms of its plot or style, but it has a proper horror story ending.

I'm happy that Mike Ashley resurrected "The Laughing Thing" for Queens of the Abyss--it delivers on the pulp horror and is the high point of the book so far for me. I'd rank it as a top three Pendarves story, just below "The Eighth Green Man" and "The Withered Heart."

C. C. Senf

G. G. Pendarves - The Laughing Thing: (Weird Tales, May, 1929). Eldred Werne wielded more power dead than alive — a powerful ghost story. As is his usual practice, millionaire real estate agent Jason Drewe takes advantage of a desperately ill old man's financial woes to land Red Gables, a lovely old house in Tareytown Woods, on the cheap. Eldred Werne assures him, "You'll pay more, but not in money. Not in any material sense at all." Werne dies soon after, but his ghost returns nightly to rap thunderously on the door and laugh horribly, "You will pay! You will pay!" Drewe, unnerved but too proud and stubborn to move, takes out his frustration on his timid eight-year-old son, Tony, whom he detests as "mollycoddled" and wimpish for missing his dead mum. Werne, too, targets the child .... Agree with you both - this is another accomplished GGP horror. For me she's at her best when in all-is-misery mode.

[dem]

Charles A. Kennedy

Mary E. Counselman - The Unwanted: (Weird Tales, Jan. 1951). Eleven children were to be listed for Uncle Sam in that high mountain cabin. Yet were they really there ?

A census taker on Bent Mountain is unable to confirm just how many kids Martha Forney has running about the place — enough for her own football team, or none at all. Jared, her proud, one armed, fiercely protective husband, gets mighty upset that the official can actually see the Forney brood. He accuses her of making fun of his wife who, as everyone knows, is tetched in the head on account of being beaten as a little girl. Unable to have children of her own, Martha has adopted the ghosts of unwanted kids (trans: abortions) from around the world. "Me and Marthy don't bother nobody. Don't ask favours. Don't aim for nobody to push us around. We jest want to be left alone. Was anybody down in the bed, I reckon we'd help 'em. Rest 'o the time — leave us be!"

Alicia Ramsey - A Modern Circe: (The Novel Magazine, Dec. 1919). "Thou Breaker of Hearts, that wast to be my master, come now and be my dog!" Forenzza, a village in the hills of Southern Italy. Ferdinando, the village Romeo, falls foul of seemingly the one woman thereabouts he's not yet slept with, 'The Mad Virgin,' who, as title suggests, has much of the legendary Goddess about her. His bride-to-be resolves the matter by stabbing her rival to death. The local priest and doctor agree it would be better to turn a blind eye. Narrator sagely concludes "... Southern Italy is not England, fortunately for the little Marguerita. The taking and giving of life is a different thing among the primitive races from what it is to us."

I liked both of these. Out of perversity, I also read Frances Hogson Burnett's The Christmas in the Fog.

[dem]

Oct 16, 2020 10:30:27 GMT Dr Strange said:

Lady Eleanor Smith - Candlelight (The Story-Teller, March 1931). Some toffs with "complicated" but dull love lives get together for dinner at a country house. They find a gypsy girl lurking in the garden shrubbery and insist that she tells them their fortunes, which she does with amazing accuracy. The set-up seems to promise a Dr Terror sort of scenario, but unfortunately the pay-off is more like DH Lawrence.

Eleanor Smith - Candlelight: (The Story-teller, March, 1931: Satan's Circus, 1932). A Weekend dinner party at the Marriage's. Guests, Ian and Chloe Lethridge, and ex-Guardsman, Roderick Noakes. Were it not for retired stockbroker, Amos, it might be an adulterer's convention. But who's that watching all from the shrubbery? A young gypsy girl! Chloe Marriage, who has by now had a few and is furious at not being left alone for a crack at Noakes, invites the "tramp" inside as a partner for her dozy husband. That should pile humiliation upon humiliation! She insists the gypsy sing for her supper by telling their fortunes, starting with her own. This is inadvisable. Similar vibe to J. B. Priestley's The Inspector Calls (or so it seemed to me), though the - for supernatural horror enthusiasts - disappointing turn it takes might even qualify Candlelight as early paranormal romance.

[dem]

Oct 19, 2020 15:06:26 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

Oct 19, 2020 10:15:36 GMT Dr Strange said:

Margaret St. Clair - Island of the Hands (Weird Tales, Sept 1952). Definitely "weird", more like fantasy, probably Sci-Fi - I'm not entirely sure. Plane crashes on mysterious island (possibly on another planet) where there are these Giant Hands (an alien machine?) that can literally create whatever you imagine, exactly as you imagined it. There's an interesting idea in there (reminded me of PKD), but the story itself is a bit naff.

A while back I went to some length to track down a print copy of "Island of the Hands." I'd seen it on J. F. Gonzalez's list of "top thirteen obscure shockers from the pulps and beyond" in The Book of Lists: Horror, edited by Amy Wallace, Del Howison, and Scott Bradley. I eventually found the story in an Ace Double, Message from the Eocene / Three Worlds of Futurity (Message from the Eocone is a St. Clair short novel I recall as being terrible, while Three Worlds of Futurity is a St. Clair anthology short story collection). With all that buildup, I was somewhat disappointed in the story itself.

Jon Arfstrom

Margaret St. Clair - Island of the Hands: (Weird Tales, Sept. 1952). From his dreams she came: Joan was the magnet, he the steel. But Joan was dead. Joan is lost when her plane crashes on Garth, a water world of few islands and fewer inhabitants. Dick Huygens sets out in search of her, only for his own aircraft to plummet into the sea. Washed up on land, who should he meet but a near exact replica of the missing girl? In terms of beauty, 'Miranda', is, dare we admit, an improvement on the original. She explains. "The Island of the Hands was made by a great, by a supreme, man of science long ago. He had lost his wife, and he felt he could not live without her. He made the place of shaping so he could bring her back. You will understand that part better when you see the hands.

After he died, the island remained. People began to come to it, one or two a year, people who had desires they could not bear to leave ungratified ..."

An interesting, original premise, but somewhere it gets lost and ultimately the story underwhelms. That said, it's a sight more rewarding than;

Marie Belloc Lowndes - The Haunted Flat: May Murchison is warned by a friend that the top three-room flat at 6 South Palace Gardens is haunted. But a Kensington address is just too irresistible so she leases it regardless. According to the housekeeper, the ghost is believed to be waiting for someone who has yet to arrive. Turns out the unseen watcher is the new tenant's own sister, who died aged four when May was a baby. She's been malingering on earth to play matchmaker in May's love life.

[dem]

Another one in the pipeline, no idea of the TOC as yet. Tanya Kirk used up many of the usual suspects in Spirits of the Season so perhaps a more imaginative selection this time?

Lucy Evans & Tanya Kirk [eds] - Sunless Solstice: Strange Christmas Tales for the Longest Nights (Oct 21 2021)

Blurb:
'Like any other boy I expected ghost stories at Christmas, that was the time for them. What I had not expected, and now feared, was that such things should actually become real.'

Strange things happen on the dark wintry nights of December. Welcome to a new collection of haunting Christmas tales, ranging from traditional Victorian chillers to weird and uncanny episodes by twentieth-century horror masters including Daphne du Maurier and Robert Aickman. Lurking in the blizzard are menacing cat spirits, vengeful trees, malignant forces on the mountainside and a skater skirting the line between the mortal and spiritual realms. Wrap up warm - and prepare for the longest nights of all.

[Shrink Proof]

Sept 26, 2021 8:32:37 GMT dem said:

Another one in the pipeline, no idea of the TOC as yet. Tanya Kirk used up many of the usual suspects in Spirits of the Season so perhaps a more imaginative selection this time?

Hope so. That said, I reckon the British Library series has been more good than bad. I like the covers too.

[andydecker]

Hm, any bets if there will be Dickens and Doyle included? (They can't, can they?)

[dem]

They seem to be making a habit of these Christmas themed supernatural/ weird anthologies. This was last year's.

Tanya Kirk [ed.] - Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season (British Library, Oct. 2020)

Tanya Kirk - Introduction

Charlotte Riddell - A Strange Christmas Game
Hume Nisbet - The Old Portrait
Louisa Baldwin - The Real and the Counterfeit
Frank R. Stockton - Old Applejoy's Ghost
Algernon Blackwood - Transition
A. M. Burrage - The Fourth Wall
H. P. Lovecraft - The Festival
Marjorie Bowen - The Crown Derby Plate
Elizabeth Bowen - Green Holly
Andrew Caldecott - Christmas Re-union
Rosemary Timperley - A Christmas Meeting
L. P. Hartley - Someone in the Lift
Jerome K. Jerome - Told After Supper

[johnnymains]

Daniel Petersen [ed.] I am Stone - The Gothic Weird Tales of R. Murray Gilchrist (British Library Tales of the Weird, 2021)

Mauricio Villamayor

Contents

Introduction
A Note from the Publisher

Part I - Dead Yet Living

The Crimson Weaver
The Return
The Lover's Ordeal
A Night on the Moor
Midsummer Madness
The Pageant of Ghosts
The Priest's pavan
Dame Inowslad

Part II - Useless Heroes

The Mancuscript of Francis Shackerley
The Basilisk
Witch In-Grain
The Grotto at Ravensdale
Excerpts from Witherton's Journal: Also a Letter of Crystella's
Bubble Magic
Dryas and Lady Greenleaf
The Stone Dragon

Part III - Of Passion and Death

The Lost Mistress
The Writings of Althea Swarthmoor
The Noble Courtesan
The Holocaust
Roxana Runs Lunatick
The Madness of Betty Hooton
My Friend
Sir Toby's Wife

Part IV - Peak Weird

The Panicle
A Witch in the Peak
A Strolling Prayer

Notes on the Text
Story Sources

Has three more stories than the Wordsworth book, A Night on the Moor & Other Tales of Dread. These are The Holocaust, Sir Toby's Wife and A Strolling Player. I'm only familiar with The Basilisk, Witch In Grain, Dame Insowald and probably forgetting another couple - so looking forward to getting stuck in.

[Dr Strange]

Sept 29, 2021 12:37:16 GMT johnnymains said:

Daniel Petersen [ed.] I am Stone - The Gothic Weird Tales of R. Murray Gilchrist (British Library Tales of the Weird, 2021)

Has three more storis than the Wordsworth book, A Night on the Moor & Other Tales of Dread. These are The Holocaust, Sir Toby's Wife and A Strolling Player. I'm only familiar with The Basilisk, Witch In Grain, Dame Insowald and probably forgetting another couple - so looking forward to getting stuck in.

I really struggled with the Wordsworth collection - the overly ornate language and the repetition of similar themes across stories really put me off, and reminded me quite a bit of Clark Ashton Smith's writing (which I know will seem like a recommendation to some).

[andydecker]

Sept 29, 2021 12:43:34 GMT Dr Strange said:

reminded me quite a bit of Clark Ashton Smith's writing (which I know will seem like a recommendation to some).

Naah. C.A. is one of a kind. He cannot be duplicated. Some time ago I read a kind of Mythos tale by Molly Tanzer which reminded me of Smith. And still it lacked his imagination.

[Dr Strange]

Sept 29, 2021 15:53:01 GMT andydecker said:

Sept 29, 2021 12:43:34 GMT Dr Strange said:

reminded me quite a bit of Clark Ashton Smith's writing (which I know will seem like a recommendation to some).

Naah. C.A. is one of a kind. He cannot be duplicated. Some time ago I read a kind of Mythos tale by Molly Tanzer which reminded me of Smith. And still it lacked his imagination.

If there was any direct influence (and I am not saying there was), then it would have to be Murray Gilchrist (died 1917) being an influence on CAS: Murray Gilchrist actually was one of those Victorian "decadent" writers that CAS seemed to be aping. I tried google to see if I could find some examples of Murray Gilchrist's writing and found these, both from The Basilisk (1894) -

"It being autumn, the trees were tinted gloriously in dusky bars of colouring. The rowan, with his amber leaves and scarlet berries, stood before the brown black-spotted sycamore; the silver beech flaunted his golden coins against my poverty; firs, green and fawn-hued, slumbered in hazy gossamer. No bird carolled, although the sun was hot. Marina noted the absence of sound, and without prelude of any kind began to sing from the ballad of the Witch Mother: about the nine enchanted knots, and the trouble-comb in the lady's knotted hair, and the master-kid that ran beneath her couch. Every drop of my blood froze in dread, for whilst she sang her face took on the majesty of one who traffics with infernal powers. As the shade of the trees fell over her, and we passed intermittently out of the light, I saw that her eyes glittered like rings of sapphires."

"None save her people knew her history, but there were wonderful stories of how she had bowed to tradition, and concentrated in herself the characteristics of a thousand wizard fathers. In the blossom of her youth she had sought strange knowledge, and had tasted thereof, and rued."

Actually, right now, those passages strike me very positively - but I suppose I just had too much of it all at once when I was making my way through the Wordsworth collection.