Remember The Dead
Black Shuck Books (undated)
Editor: J.A. Mains
Introduction: Mike Ashley
Previously unreprinted stories of yore: relating to Halloween and Christmas
My previous reviews of this writer-editor here and this publisher here
If I review this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
Around 500 pages
THE BLACK RING (1849) by Marie Rose Blaze de Bury
An engaging novelette-length tale told by one of its characters as a tale about he and other young men meeting by chance and travelling almost at random in the Pyrenees, heading homeward to Britain, caught up in a gypsy curse whereby they seemed trapped in a lethal tontine. Involving love of a young woman and survival of the fittest-by-fate. Fate and due time. Amid various interesting backstories, and social gatherings with seemingly sophisticated motives and adroit character-building by the author. And, oh yes, a larder in the forest! And chestnuts galore.
There are many striking passages, e.g.:
“it is a question of nothing further than a mere halt, a place wherein you may taste of a sort of a one-legged repose, and whence you are expected to hop off as soon as possible. Hang them! these devilish ‘posadas’ —“
“I now stepped in with an earnest entreaty that she should open the book of our future destinies before us.
‘There is nothing written in it for you,’ replied she haughtily — ‘the old story, page after page all blank.’”
“to the room where dancing was going on. I followed. He was already threading the crowd with something white on his arm, something very feminine and feathery, that fluttered, fanned, and flirted, as is the custom of the race. Into the whirl they went, and round and round they turned, she seemingly supported by nothing earthly than by his arm;”
anonymous
“When her son was about fifteen years old, some secret thought seemed suddenly to reanimate her altogether. She had always been an affectionate mother, but now she was seized with a passionate love for her son. She frequently caressed him with tears in her eyes…”
This novelette-length story is quite a find, I would suggest, and despite a few typos here and there, it genuinely chilled me. It only goes to show that a slow build up of detailed backstory imparted by one of the characters is required to really set any ghost alive! The Hall’s exterior with its healing more modern wall. The family who lived there even if with a mere glimpse of their implied peccadilloes. And the chamber in which the ghost haunts and the cabinet and its iron ring, certainly ring true, as the antiquarian narrator spends the night next to this chamber, despite being warned against it. The journey through secret stairways and oubliettes that he makes at night following the ghost, whether dream or reality, is superbly done, thus satisfying the backstories’ emotional and material promise. This work is of its pungent age, taking its time, with no thought for modern cynicism, although at the start of this nemonymous 1868 work, the narrator states that such modernity was already beginning to creep in… As an aside, the once sorrowful portrait of the lady (“in a lavender dress, very scanty”), the lady I quoted about above, ends this story with features that “are now lit up with a smile.”
anonymous
“…me sittin’ up late with her one night, three winters ago, a ‘eavy cold on her chest, as I thought would aye turned to jaunders, as ‘er eyes was yokes of eggs for yallerness, with a pain between the blade-bones like a carvin’ knife…”
I always find difficult to read stories that are told in a concocted dialect by elision, yet this one is so short and so utterly pungent with both horrific events retold and rich words used like “disembowelled sperrits” and humorous effects, that I deem it worthy of being THE archetypal example of such a work. As the words were elided, frissons of ghosts sure glided through my heart. Bound for the Dead Sea, hopefully!
by Mary Anne Barker
Despite the title, I saw little of Christmas here, other than a room for wine and walnuts for the men of the story — a story, otherwise, of Lady Gertrude Lawrence who marries a Mr Delaware and he takes this his new wife to one of his baronial homes up North, along with other wedding guests for them to expend cartridges at partridges. And she fancifully decides, as a useful breaking of such boring things, to act out, in the cold moonlit hallway of armour and portraits, the ghost of a previous pious spinster called Alice who once lived there and was deemed to have been a benign ‘fire-annihilator’. Two Alices and two ghosts, but do not let me spoil this socially characterful work about Gertrude Lawrence. But I do wonder if it is significant that the famous Gertrude Lawrence (1898-1952), born Gertrude Alice Klasen, was also an actress, and one with Alice as a second name! Also, the circumstances of her 1941 performance in ‘Lady in the Dark’ — when playing so powerfully a woman in need of psychoanalysis — are worth pointing out here.
by Dr. Maurice Davies
“The evening was delicious. To others it meant quadrilles and cards; to me it meant Fanny.”
At last, we have a Christmas Day story, a dinner party, full of good cheer, goodhearts and romance and spirits to drink. Yet, there is something striking about this ghost story about a young priest who is not there at the dinner but IS there, like Banquo, to the narrator, between the narrator’s two future sisters-in-law who spent the whole dinner, in their own mind, chatting to each other, with the priest between them! The priest himself sought out our narrator, it seems, to absolve him, as a priest, of someone else’s confessional shrivings or shrift that the priest had once written down, for the narrator thus to destroy such a shrift so that he, the priest, could rest easy without being a ghost. Yet I wonder whether that shrift was indeed a shift, as the narrator later sees the priest in his bedroom dressed in a “neglige”… A happy Christmassy ending, meanwhile, to this genuinely memorable tale! Spirituous as well as spiritual. A quirky rarity, with the ability to puzzle and chill.
“It seems scarcely suitable to connect a spectral visitation with a ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ Ghosts are really in season when the days are shortest, and the churchyards yawn the widest;”
…albeit it is the Simmons’ “Intruder” painting on our man’s wall over his harmonium upon which he later dreams a “negro with tunic and turban of white muslin was performing with much skill…” and amid other references to the nymph Egeria, the ‘Three Black Crows’ bearish reversal, an Indian Princess, a fan used as a strangling tourniquet, Bulwer’s Zanoni (of which I once owned a copy) and Queen Mab, this is a story of our man and his fiancée Olivia as they finagle finances to lease a haunted house, with various scenes of fear and motives that need a personal gestalt to encapsulate. Each reader will have a different gestalt. And I would not want to spoil yours by telling you mine. I would just mention Bulwer’s ‘The House And The Brain’ as a teaser. And it all happens on Christmas Eve. And Olivia’s surname was Snow.
“There was a lute, all its strings broken but one; and one stiff dress on a chair that looked to me so like a human being that I paused for at least a minute before I had the courage to go up to it…”
A genuine ghost story classic, both chilling and humorous, the first ever reprint of an unknown E. Nesbit work, one dealing with the dependance — upon a ghost to be seen and verified to be walking on Christmas Eve — for an engagement of marriage between the heroine and her beau, an engagement thus to be approved by the beau’s father.
A shame about the typos, one or two of them quite serious.
just for the record –
My E. Nesbit story typo finds –
more sure than —> more sure that
were fathered around the piano —> gathered
that light’s one’s life —> lights
her parents consent —> parents’
let down my fair —> hair
panel like the on —> one
Cary had warmed me —> warned
What should have liked —> What I should
“snap-dragon and a game of speculation”
Forfeits, too. A Christmas party is the setting for one of those archetypal stories where something – here a snowstorm – stops someone – here the Squire – leaving afterwards and he is put up in the only available room, one that happens to be haunted. And, as ever, the future potential subject of a ghost’s haunting dares relish the prospect. Nicely written. Yet I don’t believe the Squire when he tells everyone (who had been worried about his fate) about the reason why his room for the night was found empty earlier. I believed him about the visit of the eponymous ghost itself, though. A ghost with a “rustling of a soft silk gown.”
More from the “long-dead block-typesetting hands” – [made the I6th and 17th centuries —> made in the 16th; remaining this county —> remaining in this county; Winslow and Aylesbnry —> Aylesbury; he thought time be saw —> time he saw; but what’s to done —> be done; preparation the room —> of the room]
“The natural gas flickered and twinked in a way that drove me me wild, and once it nearly went out.”
A tale with a truly spooky incident concerning a dynastic curse of someone or something with (as in the previous story) “a silken swish beside me […] the slight, silky rustling” come to kiss the narrator under the mistletoe that he should not have hung. ‘Maybe’ the house knew something about it, too. A house with an enviable bah-humbug approach to Christmas! [theatres and do on—> so on; out want was —> our; ribbin —> ribbon; pretty. Petite self —> pretty petite self; voided the mistletoe —> avoided]
“It was Christmas Eve, a time when one’s thoughts wander back through the years to half forgotten places and people — little incidents of bygone days, to which time has given a new significance.”
A well-written tale of a man climbing mountains on Christmas Eve, beguiled by rocky pareidolia or seeing truth itself in a beckoning figure or a Lilliputian horse, and by dint of a falling accident he discovers a cave with bookshelves, drawings on the wall and an indecipherable message on a subsequently lost piece of paper. Do we believe him or is he mad?
[he bed climbed —> had; he had hand —> heard; in tins inner chamber —> this (and need to adjust the rest of the sentence); rum- bling —> rumbling]
“The white counterpane was stained with a large patch of red.”
I can just perceive this is potentially an effective ghost story, a gory one for once, as our narrator listens to what happened in an atmospheric country pub on Christmas Eve. I say ‘potentially’, because in this particular story the effect of the seeming typos is often difficult to penetrate and too numerous for me, as a mere paying reader, to list out, in the same way as I have not listed out the dash/hyphen and quote mark inconsistencies throughout these stories.
This reading experience has been a telling glimpse at a worthy labour of love, and I admire the exhumation of these enjoyable tales as a task bravely undertaken.
I SHALL READ THE OTHER HALF OF THIS BOOK IN OCTOBER 2020.