December’s Shivery Hand Upon Us

December’s shivery hand upon us and you know what that means…ghost stories. Unlike my fellow North Americans I do not subscribe to October as the month for ghosts and ghoulies. I prefer the British tradition of Christmas ghosts. (I won’t lie, I like the Halloween variety too. I think of October-December as ghost season.) Here is Canada it is particularly nice to spice up the coming of the snow and minus temperatures with some haunted houses in dark London streets. We are far too practical to believe in things like ghosts when the wind is blowing around your ankles and you have half a foot of snow to shovel off the driveway. Robertson Davies, that fine scholar of Ontario, called it “the rational rickets” in his fine collection of humorous ghost stories, High Spirits (1982). It is time to be a little less rational and enjoy the season.

Now multiple books by a single author is uncommon. Algernon Blackwood and M. R. James were the exceptions. Most ghost story writers were holiday jobbers who published a single volume of tales (sometimes two if we were lucky). This was a good thing in that it maintained quality. Anthologists like Richard Dalby, Peter Haining, Christine Campbell Thomson, Michel Parry, Dennis Wheatley, even odd ones by Dashiell Hammett and Dorothy L. Sayers, had plenty of chestnuts to share between them. That is why I choose Hugh Lamb (1946-2019) at times like these. Hugh made it his mission to seek out the less known and uncollected stories in books like Victorian Tales of Terror (1974), Tales from a Gas-Lit Grave 1984) and Gaslit Nightmares (1988). Lamb focused on the forgotten stories from the greatest era of ghost story writing, the Age of Victoria.

This year I have started a new project. Looking through Hugh’s wonderful introductions I have been identifying the volumes that he chose his stories from. With the advancing of the public domain, many of these are now available through Archive.org and I can read them at last. No pulling the cherries out of the fruit cake here. You can actually read these collections as they were originally presented. Sometimes this means reading some lesser tales, or even non-supernatural ones as not all ghost story authors felt they needed to separate the ghosts from the grunions. (H. B. Marriot-Watson is one of these. But since he is an entertaining writer, his other pieces make good reading too. If you can’t cut it, you can always go back to the anthologists.)

So here are some books I can recommend as good conglomerations of single author stories:

Ghost Stories and Phantom Fancies (1858) by J. H. Friswell is an intriguing book for me. I had never heard of Friswell in all the anthologies (including Lamb). He’s not mentioned by Lovecraft or later critics. His collection is particularly nice if you want to get into the Christmas spirit since stories like “All Alone on Christmas Day” and “A Party With a Vengeance” are guaranteed to appeal.

A Strange Story; The Haunted and the Haunters (18-?) by Lord Bulwer-Lytton seems like an obvious one. “The Haunters and the Haunted” has been anthologized a lot but the truth is most people haven’t read Lytton. His name has become a by-word for “bad Victorian writing” which I personally don’t “countenance” (to use a good Mary Shelley word). I find Bulwer-Lytton quite readable and entertaining. I perfectly understand why he was a big deal in his own time. A Strange Story is a novel, slow-going by modern standards but a nice Victorian attempt to explain the unexplainable. “The Haunted and the Haunters” is much less restrained.

Weird Stories (1882) by Charlotte Riddell is my personal favorite right now. Riddell was a wonderful writer. The opening tale “Walnut-Tree House” is a standard haunted house tale but she opens it by imagining the house before the London suburbs encroached on it, then she slowly shows it changing over time. We get to explore the dilapidated house with the new owner, a rationalist, newly rich from the gold fields. “The Old House in Vauxhall Walk” is the chestnut usually taken from this collection. (I have to assume J. K. Rowling got the name Tom Riddle from Mrs. Riddell’s moniker. Yes?)

In a Steamer Chair, and Other Shipboard Tales (1892) by Robert Barr is one of those collection that isn’t all ghost stories, but if you like your ghosts at sea, this is the book. “Share and Share Alike” and “The Man Who Was Not on the Passenger List” are two of the ghost stories but I like the lead tale, “In a Steamer Chair”. Barr was a Scot who spent time in Canada before the literary life in London. He knew all about that cold north wind.

The Watcher and Other Stories (1894?) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu seems like another obvious choice. H. P. Lovecraft seems hardly aware of Le Fanu in his “Supernatural Horror in Literature” but if HPL was still with us I would argue with him that Le Fanu was more important than Poe in terms of ghost literature. Poe took the horror tale in a psychological direction (which non-genre critics prefer) but Le Fanu is the well-spring of all the best of Weird Tales and other magazines that came later. Ironically, even Lovecraft’s own Cthulhu Mythos. I recommend this collection because it cherry-picks some of his best (though the thoroughly psychological  “Green Tea” is missing.)

The King in Yellow (1895) by Robert W. Chambers is a good choice for those who really want a bit of Lovecraft in their ghost stories. This book was one of the seminal collections that inspire HPL. Not all the contents are ghost stories exactly. The latter portion is simply Parisian tales, but “The Mask”, “The Yellow Sign” and “The Demoiselle of d’Ys” form the core of the The King in Yellow as an evil play. This is the beginning of the whole Necronomicon deal.

Ghostly Tales (1896) by Wilhelmina FitzClarence is a good example of nobility writing books in their leisure. She was the Countess of Munster. Baroness D’Aulnoy and her fairy tales and Lady Wilde and her Witch Tales come to mind. She began her literary life at sixty. Ghostly Tales received strong reviews and readers thought many of the stories were real. They were actually “written in a manner similar to accounts of true hauntings” (Douglas A. Anderson). Lamb chose “The Tyburn Ghost” and “The Page-Boy’s Ghost” for his anthologies.

The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories (1905) by Gertrude Atherton gained a new reputation in the 1990s in part because of David G. Hartwell and his including “The Bell in the Fog” in Foundations of Fear (1994). Feminists reclaimed Atherton for their own (along with Charlotte Perkins Gilman) but horror fans also continue to love her work.

Hartwell wrote: Gertrude Atherton dedicated her first and best collection of ghost stories, The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories (1905), “To the Master, Henry James.” The title story of the collection is both an homage to James and an extraordinary critique. Ralph, the central character who becomes obsessed with a painting, is a portrait of the James whom Atherton knew, and the stamp of emulation is everywhere in the piece. But in the end, the portrayal is not entirely sympathetic… Whatever the case, “The Bell in the Fog” is an effective supernatural piece by a feminist writer who later became James’ literary enemy.

Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (1906) by Vernon Lee is another example of literary critics finding something good in the tales of things that go bump in the night. Violet Page published under the name Vernon Lee. Some of her work appeared in the infamous The Yellow Book, a magazine of fin de siecle literature. Lee, like Chambers, is consider to be an author of “The Yellow Nineties” though this collection appeared after that. The Edwardian period saw the rise of the “Soft Magazines” that would become the Pulps after World War I. The great age of the Victorian ghost story wasn’t over but it was winding down. (E. F. Benson, for instance, would go on producing Victorian ghost stories well into the 1920s. His Spook Stories was dated 1928. More Spook Stories was 1934.)

Well, there you go. December’s shivery hand is upon us but we don’t have to suffer. Curl up with a good blanket, a cup of hot chocolate or tea beside you and let that north wind do its worst. (If you have a fireplace, lighting that sucker is an obvious requirement.) Now the only cold chills running down your spine will come from these great books. Enjoy.