Only Sleeping
“Full-faced, however, her beauty was seriously flawed by an odd asymmetry of features.”
…describing a Russian woman as another form of iconostasis… but I am leaping ahead of myself: this is a spooky tale, sometimes self-consciously so or even satirically so, like ‘Lamia’, with all the trappings of a ghost story that would please MRJ fans (and the boy who is haunted in an Isle of Man guesthouse by the long corridor leading alongside his non-ensuite room surely deserves being spooked by reading MRJ stories just before going to sleep!) – but, artfully transcending that feeling of mine, the story is genuinely scary. And the ambiance of Douglas, the Russian woman’s ‘Don’t Look Now’-type bereavement, the decor of the guest house, with shreds of Robert Aickman or Elizabeth Bowen… Mentions of the River Mersey, of beams in the rafters as well as beams from a lighthouse, of a “screen” of sycamore and privet, all lend to the symmetry/asymmetry of this book, enhanced by Lowe’s excellent drawings, one with what I saw as a confessional screen like a barred cell or railings around gravestones (here “caged-in tombs“) ….and the dreaded “unconsecrated ground” ie unscreened by God? And the millennium ball toing and froing upon these tides of fiction. This book, I recommend to any reader wanting to be scared. No facelift can relieve that threat, I suggest, from the twisted visage within you or represented by the mask you hide under the normal face, a mask that upstages any talisman of self even if only by dint of ‘superstitious awe’. I wonder if this book is the prime example of what I call ‘ghorror’ (a word I coined recently as a result of a typo, pronounced ‘gore-or’) where ghost story trappings are accompanied by gory upstagings of one’s very soul. But that is just me idly rambling from the other side of the page. Or foolhardily rambling like Bell’s protagonists … to seek some oxymoron of destiny. A fate that is only sleeping. Or slanting from the vandalised past toward you with some mixed hope and despair for the future. (26 Jun 12: 12.05 pm bst)
A Certain Slant of Light
The reviewer in Ely Cathedral:
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