Remember The Dead

884FA7D0-86E9-4DD7-81E6-396C92440640
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

  1. I intend to ignore any typos in forthcoming reviews below of this book from last year, as I assume they will now have been corrected. I presume my copy is an uncorrected proof?

    WHY HALLOWEEN PARTIES?
    Published 28 October 1932

    Presumably anonymous.
    Loved the Halloween game with a lighted candle and an apple hung up, the apple-on-its-own version of this game harmless “if the chance of interchange of germs is ignored”!
    And nuts burning as fortune telling, two nuts being burnt meaning marriage!

  2. THE THREE DAMSELS: A TALE OF HALLOWEEN (1827) by David Lyndsay, Esq

    “It was her will, not his: and what woman ever failed in her determination over the mind of man.”

    And what elderly woman’s tale ever defeated or even upheld the woodland omens of her own story, tying the wisdom of her age with the spirits of three young sisters, a tutelary tale told to other young girls on Halloween of blessings received and foregone, in a tied knot of fate, a tale whose darksome florid prose the elder woman spoke of promised bridegrooms for the sisters’ tokens proffered, and the disruption of warriors as necessary glitches in such a seemingly inevitable pattern of gestalt. Quite a discovery this strange and impenetrable tale as a vehicle for an equally strange but penetrable tale, or vice versa.

  3. THE GHOST (1829) by J.K. Paulding

    “always in the dead of night”

    Another great ghost story find, assuming you block or at least mute the second half of the story from your mind. Good to know the second half was once there, though, like a ghost itself of rationalisation!
    The first half, meanwhile, is an inexplicable and truly haunting discrete work, with an obsessive spoon, a constant fear of Fridays, as a sailor called Morgan haunts a ship and its crew during its tour of the Mediterranean. They even needed to “quarantine” the ship at one point, as if a ghost were a virus! And there is the durable concept of “dwindling to a perfect shadow.” (And sailors, on leave, frolicking as “amphibious bipeds.”)
    [This author apparently invented Gotham as an aka of New York. Not that I usually read the author backgrounds provided by the editor, but this caught my mind’s eye. Now blocked.]

  4. THE FEMALE WRECKER AND THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY (October 29, 1850) by Erskine Neale

    “Wrong never comes right! Wrong never comes right!”

    An engaging couple of ghostly tales told by two male “elderlies” about their experiences in the past, as told by them darksomely in telling contrast to the sunshiny-happiness setting of where their such very telling tellings took place. Tellings of tales that were trying to compete with each elderly’s respective uncanny experience against the other elderly’s such experience
    — a chilling laugh, in the first tale, around the female wrecker’s deathbed, a woman who once spurned religion, and, in the second, visiting horsemen at night (from “Horsemonger Lane”?), visiting the eponymous house, but being visitors who were never there in the morning for breakfast (!) plus a huge thumping mallet sound on other days that always came from a room different from the one that one happened to be in (!) —
    as well as these being tellings of tales trying to prove to the third sceptical elderly man listening to them that such hauntings actually could happen.
    I know which of the doddery elderlies was me! (Remember us all when we’re dead.)
    A story worthy of Thomas Hardy, whose short fiction I already happen to be real-time reviewing HERE.

    “Be they whom they may they shall be disturbed.”

  5. “…he had dropt a clue of yam, and Mr. Mather, his host, finding him rummaging for it, assisted in the search, and, having got hold of it, persisted notwithstanding Andrew’s opposition, in unrolling the yam till he came to the kemeiy which, much to his surprise and amusement, he found to consist of about twenty guineas in gold.”
    Concerning Andrew Gemmels and Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary? Comments would be welcome about this, as the young lady in the intriguing short piece below throws ‘a clue of yam’ in a kiln.

    MACCULLOCH’S COURTSHIP (1869) by Hugh Miller

    “He had the knack of dreaming when broad awake;”

    …as we now all do today 150 years later. A highlander boy 14 now works in the lowlands and falls in love with a 19 year old girl, and explicitly at Halloween, there is an oblique ghostly scene between them in a “dark and lonely” kiln. (They later live happily ever after together.)

    “A belief in destiny often becomes a destiny of itself;”

  6. THE MAIDENS OF BRAEHEAD (1874) by Anonymous

    “Hallowe’en is above all other seasons of festive mirth the especial favourite of young lovers.”

    An engaging account of Hallowe’en celebrations at a highland farmer’s place and his four daughters, in more ways than one a retelling of the plot of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ but without the pride or the prejudice! Just due deserts by dint of fortune telling games. I particularly enjoyed account of the celebration itself with the aforementioned nut burning, and choosing the contents of three dishes, and digging into a potato stew for a silver sixpence, or button, or wedding ring…

  7. SEEING A GHOST (1877) by Anonymous

    “But it was a queer smile and a queer look, and her face was white as my apron.”

    When I was a small boy in the early 1950s, there was an expression for people seeming wan or waifful or generally pale – ‘you look as if you have just seen a ghost!’ This is one such occasion, and if you ignore the last three pages, it is a great ghost story, with more Halloween nut burning and being blindfolded above empty dishes as fortune-telling. Another love story with a parting of one of them to a distant place, and later seeing one’s lover as if a ghost. With much ‘flying of the wheels’ that young ladies spun with in those days. A tale told to other girls by an Aunt Biddy with ‘edicated larning’…

  8. A HALLOWE’EN ESCAPADE (1890) by Susan Mullen

    “There is eating of an apple at midnight before a mirror when your sweetheart will come and look over your shoulder.”

    From ‘slow fever’ to “brain fever” in this vignette of Hallowe’en methods of finding one’s future husband, including the ‘throwing down of a core of yarn in a lime kiln’, more burning of nuts, and the above quote that gave me a genuine frisson of ‘freet’. The trick that the lady of the house plays on her servant girl in such a process of love’s divination is both hilarious and very cruel. I was speechless. I should really not have found it hilarious at all. Not many stories give me such quandaries.

  9. THE SWEETEST SPELL OF ALL (1900) by Ralli West

    “We will burn nuts, comb our hair before a looking-glass, eating an apple all the time, then see if our true loves won’t peep over our shoulders; spin yarn, and — and all the rest of the magic spells.”

    More fun and pranks during Halloween, and later Christmas, and “unlimited flirtation”, Austen-like marriage seeking, among girls at Eccleston Court. Including a dark face or is it a dark wig, peeping over a girl’s shoulder…
    Some of these stories seem to help you remember the dead, — this one to forget them, at least for a nonce.

  10. HIS DARK DESIGN: A CARSE O’ GOWRIE HALLOWE’EN STORY (1905) by ‘Deborah’

    “‘Oh, mother, mother,’ at length cried pretty Jeanie petulantly, ‘where have you hidden the nuts? We want them now.’
    ‘Here they are, my doo!’ said the fond mother, producing them from a drawer in the dresser. In pairs the nuts went into the glowing fire…”

    Some nuts nestling down together cosily, others flying asunder with a crack and a whizz, presenting this book’s Halloween ritual of fortune telling of future spouses with the most perfect aplomb so far. Here, however, the results of this ritual does not play fair with the stolid farmer of the soil and what I presume to be his dark design at matching off his aging maiden sister-in-law to the local minister!
    Whatever the case, his ‘winsome’ daughter, 18 year old Jeanie, had a good time with her ‘bosom friends’, at the party, I infer.

  11. THE GRAVEYARD (1907) by Alphonse Courlander

    This is a genuine ghostly horror story classic, and I am surprised that this may be one of its rare outings into publication.
    It tells of a girl with bravado in front of her friends, at Halloween, going, as a sort of dare, to a graveyard on her own to fetch flowers from a certain grave… There is so much to mention about this story or to quote from it, that I am impossibly spoilt for choice. I shall just mention one perhaps trivial aside: that I had never realised before that ‘graver’ is a shortening of engraver upon gravestones. And, oh yes, you will never forget the description of some of the nameless graves…

  12. ALL SOULS’ NIGHT (1909) by Eleanor Fitzgerald

    “, for the Soggarth is always angry with the people for doing this,”

    A remarkably insidious story that resonates with all manner of mixed moral machinations amid the central Christian faith regarding those departing into death. Here a newly dead father returns as a white moth, and others’ various exterior motives of money-making, in hypocritically plying such faith, are to the cruel detriment of his widow and daughter. Needs to be read by others to triangulate, alongside me, the coordinates of quite how tantalisingly insidious this work really is!
    The apotheosis of this whole book’s title?

  13. THE SWORD (1917) by Rachel Swete Macnamara

    “She had her cousins’ word that they had played no trick but the sword remained as visible proof.”

    I somehow noticed word as sword there, and the obliquity of that accentuated the disarmingly inexplicable but equally meaningful devastation of the story’s ending,
    A deceptively and perhaps inadvertently great horror story about a variation on the Halloween game of finding a young lady’s future husband, here in a lonely part of the house – as encouraged by her cousins – where a dinner table is set for two and she must sit there and wait…

  14. ALL HALLOWS’ E’EN (1929) by ‘M.B.’

    “The place was like a vapour-bath and yet, I shivered,…”

    The blatant, all-out horror of a girl’s walking trip on Dartmoor with her dog, yet with a power transcending its own relentless writerly attrition, and it makes one wonder whether she really did get home in one piece after such visions of “cruelty and lust”…

  15. THUS SAID CALUM THE KEEPER (1862/1931) by Iain Frangan Caimbeul / Ian Colvin

    “, watching the nuts, those glowing lovers, burning in pairs.”

    …and that quote alone, amid much dialect in this particular work, is worthy of this book.

    I repeat –
    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.
    and now add to that : …accomplished with an eclectic genius.