SHADOW PUBLISHING 2017
Edited by Dave Brzeski
When I read some of these stories, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
(My previous reviews of older or classic fiction: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/ )
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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
I reviewed earlier one of the Walter stories in the context of Robert Aickman’s 5th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, as follows…
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…to a young people’s party in an era when they spent time “always necking” with each other… this story having been first published in 1967, if not 1612!…
A QUESTION OF TIME by Elizabeth Walter
“So he was put to the question, to use the contemporary euphemistic phrase.”
The euphemism for ‘torture’, here used about Farther Furnivall in hiding who had been betrayed to those who were then persecuting Catholics, betrayed by a painter who now happens to be reincarnated as one of these wide boys at the 1960s party, and this story, if with some elegant prose, has indeed a slightly torturous plot, if not also a tritely tortuous one, but then the ending with its finely rendered hands redeemed it…
Yesterday, I saw for the first time a portrait of my favourite writer Elizabeth Bowen (as shown below), depicted. with the most finely rendered hands I’ve ever seen in a painting, indeed a combined gesture of fingers and eyes that speaks some message to me across time. Perhaps true of naive Emily who was at the story’s party, too? Or of another Elizabeth who wrote this story?
DUAL CONTROL
‘There’s nothing there when you go up to her. Only a coldness in the air.’
A dialogue in two acts between a quarrelling married couple, to and from a party, full of recrimination about her boozing and his philandering, and on the way to a party their car hits a woman called Gisela (guess, how do they eventually know her name?) and they do not stop so it is a hit and run, I infer.
Who was driving and who runs or floats after them into an eternity of running on empty? There are uncanny moments arising from the spoken words, genuinely haunting moments quite disarmingly lingering and keeping the reading tank more than empty. The title, I guess, makes my question above about the driver’s identity more apposite than I assumed at the time I asked it!
I happen to be concurrently reviewing all the stories of Walter de la Mare which may have some bearing on the synchronicity of this Walter…
“I’m thinking that Lindau will be pretty much elbow-to-elbow…” — from Tripadvisor today
A MONSTROUS TALE
‘It was a very angry arm.’
Honeymooners growing quarrelsome and forgiving, by turns, in the Lake Constance area, but much to her chagrin, there it is forebodingly named Bodensee in German. An inland sea almost, one with sudden storms, and legend of monster, one resembling our Lochness monster, I guess.. Almost a monstrous tale in itself by telegraphing ahead about future terrors, with literally countless references to an ‘arm’. Arms in person and also coming out of the water, a recurrent arm that some mistake for a fish, others for a the monster. And a model of that monster placed, out of sight, out of mind, on top of a wardrobe…. Lindau’s outflow pipe poisoning the lake and preventing monster feeding on other monsters…. and a maiden cruise upon the good ship ‘Lindavia’, her husband in the accompanying Rheingold boat, she left behind, and then a storm of arms monstrously comes at me…the husband being not the only one who loses his mind, I guess.
“She felt a hysterical laugh rising in her, which was cut short by a grip on her arm.”
“Caroline scarcely noticed as she ran into his arms.”
‘Darling, you remember that arm I saw?’
‘I remember that arm you thought you saw,’
“…where Caroline sat with her arm about her husband.”
SNOWFALL
“The room seemed to be cluttered with such a variety of objects that Brian felt as though he had wandered into a museum, where the staff had gone on strike leaving everything unlabelled.”
This is the story of Brian, an estate agent, travelling over the Brecon Beacons in his downbeat Triumph Herald without a mobile phone, of course, as mobiles had not been invented and the main phone lines were down because of the white-out. Genuinely suspenseful in plainspoken style, the first part represents the best passages about a car being lost in snowfall, wonderfully evoked as increasingly heavy precipitation, and its driver, against the odds, eventually finding unexpected and spooky shelter.
Shelter in an unexpected byway, here a house and an apparently mad anthropologist with heart ague who had dabbled in the black magic traditions of both Africa and the Caribbean. A unique evil synergy of two hot climes effectively now factored into the utter cold here. Yet the story degenerates into much over-extended horror business with various props.
A ghost or what? And who was the ghost? I even felt like giving up the ghost myself!
DAVY JONES’ TALE
“‘Whosoever looketh upon a woman to lust after her, that same hath committed adultery with her in his heart.’ How often had I heard it thundered forth on Sunday. In Porthfynnon, despite all you see on the television; we took the Ten Commandments seriously.”
A tale of the Abbot and his Monks, ship-dangerous rocks; the latter, close to the visible Abbot, are hidden beneath the waves. The Narrator and his adopted brother, and the latter’s wife Agnes, entangled in a historic shipwreck off the coast where the two men are lifeboaters. Rivals and friends, and Agnes who chose which of them loved her best.
An adept narrative of revenge and ghosts, those who feel let down by a precursor lifeboat, in the distant past, and this ghost ship and its ghost captain are now netting those lifeboaters as a ship of rotten wood. A ship as its own ghost of itself in its current state? Do ghosts as people and their berths age and decay as if they are still alive? One of them Agnes herself? A remarkable concept about the nature of ghosts and objects, But who is Margaret Freeling? A hundred years too late.
“All I could do was to give myself as utterly as I had once done to Agnes, as I had done a thousand times to this element, as—at the end when there is no more hope in him —a man may give himself to death.”
COME AND GET ME
“The two privates were already kneeling with field glasses clamped to their eyes, resting their elbows on the balustrade as they surveyed the road along the lake’s farther side. It was as well, since they might otherwise have dropped the glasses when the silence was shattered by a laugh, a terrible, shrill ha-ha-ha that was human but maniac, and seemed to come from everywhere at once.”
…being what I call an elbow-trigger supreme, one that ignites the plot of this unsettling story. A house, once magnificent, now gone to rack and ruin in the Welsh Hills. Its nearby village now sunk under the lake. A mixture of Punch and Judy, explicitly mentioned, and a mimicking African grey parrot, with a plot of desertion in the war …. but who really deserted and who was locked up here, when, years later, some soldiers playing Army games as training manoeuvres come here and act as catalysts for the playing out of ghostly destinies stemming from a ghastly past. A house named after a bird, here beset by bird-silent woods and a vicious crow who need not wait for its carrion. A prehensile house in itself that seemed to move towards you, and the vast locks and bars at the house’s heart, as an inner protection against the house itself?
‘You’re nuts!’ I hear relentlessly repeated parrot-fashion inside my head!
“Mr. Thomas did not hesitate, merely pausing to serve ice-cream to two small girls and some corn-plasters to a woman with bunions the size of eggs.”
THE ISLAND OF REGRETS
I was genuinely chilled to the bone by this story, despite its ludicrousness and horror telegraphed ahead. The prelude of the engaged couple relationship is fair enough, with Dora foolhardy to challenge superstition then too scared by wishing belief of superstition upon herself, and her Ag. and Fish. civil servant fiancé named after a Turn of the Screw character who becomes the madman himself that the Breton Island’s house ever needed ha! ha! ha! Laughing like the house’s madman in the previous story above, or was it his mirror image parrot? A series of tenant caretakers who replace each other leaving shells behind. This story needs such a reader to caretake it. Or this whole book does! I am trapped, having now broken its taboo like the island’s taboo, but the bit of me left writing this about it will never return, I insanely vow! Oh, yes, I must not forget this story’s FACES. On the bus journey in particular. Probably one of the most horrific scenes I have ever read. Seriously. Aickman eat your mört out, I say. Like the Ag. and Fish. man, his “sole is cooked”, as it says somewhere in the soon-to-be-fading memory of this story… Just a few memorabilia that I shall foolhardily commit to writing below…
“We Bretons say it is a magic island. It grants the first wish you make when you first set foot there, but grants it in such a way that you will wish it had not been granted. This is why it is called the Island of Regrets.”
“Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are different days.”
“Then Peter Quint began to laugh. His mirror image joined him in insane peals of grim amusement. ‘The new tenant, ha-ha-ha!’”
“We know that the English are mad. But, sacre nom! why can’t you go mad on your side of the Channel? Don’t you know that’s what the English Channel’s for?”
The Island of Regrets, indeed.