The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories: Eight Ghosts

English Heritage is a registered charity that cares for over 400 historic monuments, buildings and places in England. The idea behind this book was to invite eight writers to be allowed after hours access at their chosen English Heritage site, in order to write a ghost story about that site.  Proceeds from the book will go so support conservation of English Heritage sites. So far, so good.

In practice the resulting stories are of mixed quality. "The Bunker" by Mark Haddon seems more like the set-up for a time-slip novel. It grabs your interest, but simply ends too soon. "As Strong as Death" by Jeanette Winterson bring a modern style to a ghost story at a same-sex wedding.  The opening story, "They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me See"by Sarah Perry, is about a haunting attached to an intricately carved wooden screen in a large hall. "Mr. Lanyard's Last Case" by Andrew Michael Hurley is the story of a mid-eighteenth century prosecutor's last case. Stuart Evers's "Never Departed More" is a diffuse tale of an actress scouting out the locale of planned film; she becomes too involved with the ghosts. Kate Clanchy's "The Wall" tries some structural trickery which makes her story less satisfying, while Kamila Shamsie's "Foreboding" is groanworthy as it has a Middle-eastern or East Asian man in England experiencing a bad pun telepathically via his sister as she dies thousands of miles away. Max Porter's "Mrs. Charbury at Eltham" is the best story in the book, skillfully juxtaposing two parallel narratives, one from the 1930s and the other from modern times, into one connected haunting.  Andrew Martin adds an afterword, "Within These Walls," a rumination on the development of the ghost story, and there is an anonymous 39-page closing essay,  "A Gazetteer of English Heritage Hauntings," presumably by Rowan Routh, who is credited with editing this volume.

Whispers in the Dark

Whispers in the Dark (1992) is the second of Jonathan Aycliffe's supernatural thrillers.  It is basically a memoir of the girlhood of Charlotte Metcalf, written in her old age, and telling of the awful events of her childhood, including the supernatural curse on her family based around the hall of her cousins, Antonia and Anthony Ayrton. It is very smoothly written, engaging and readable, even if one wishes for something more substantial. Yet it remains at best only a well-done commercial thriller. 

The Falling Woman

The Falling Woman (1986) by Pat Murphy is another one of the Nebula Award winners that I didn't read when it first came out.  It's an odd choice for a supposed "best science fiction" novel, for it is basically a mystical fantasy. (And later editions of the book add a subtitle that wasn't there initially, "A Fantasy.") But leaving all that aside, the book is basically the story of two women, Elizabeth Butler, an archeologist at a site in the Yucatan, and her estranged daughter Diane who seeks out her mother after a fifteen year absence following some upheavals in her own life, including the death of the father who raised her.  Elizabeth, who has a history of mental issues, sees ghosts from the past, and in the field of archeology, this appears as a bonus for her understanding of her work.  Diane decides to stay with the dig, and she too experiences these ghosts, including the ghost of a survivor of human sacrifice, the only survivor of the live offerings cast into a deep pool.  The characters are finely drawn, and their interplay passes for plot in most of the book. It is well-done, and engaging in a relative way, but I remain surprised that this novel is the winner of a major award. 

The Kin of Ata ...

In 1971, The Comforter: A Mystical Tale was published by its author, D.M. Bryant. It tells the story of an arrogant and  unlikeable man who chokes his girlfriend to death and flees in a car, afterwards having a serious automobile accident.  The man wakes up in an island world rather like an idyllic California commune, with a self-sufficient but small batch of dreamers who seem to do almost nothing, which of course irritates the man.  So when wanting sex, he rapes one woman who had befriended him, and over the course of the rest of the book he learns their language and their ways, spending decades with this kin of Ata. The woman he raped becomes his lover and comforter, until she leaves (by metaphysical recourse) to come to this world to help make it better.  This desertion crushes the man, and eventually he decides to follow her back to this world, and he returns to find himself in a hospital, shortly after his automobile accident, and he is soon charged with the murder of his girlfriend. Thus the decades with the Ata were a dream vision. Or perhaps not.  The man realizes that he must plead guilty to the murder, because it is the right thing to do.  He writes the book The Comforter in order to explain himself, before he is executed and thereby can return to Ata.

This book is far better-known under the later title The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, which was used when it was first reprinted in 1976. The author was then signed "Dorothy Bryant."  One wonders whether the gender neutral initials it was first published under were to  mask the author as a female.  Yet the book itself is decidedly feminine in approach and attitudes, if once considers it a product of its era, that being California in the late 1960s.  As a novel it is mildly interesting, but nothing more. I don't understand why is has earned the status of cult classic.

Endymion Spring

Endymion Spring (2006) is a curious first novel by Matthew Skelton. It operates on two related time-lines, one of a young boy Endymion Spring who is apprenticed to Johann Gutenberg in Mainz in the fifteenth century, as Gutenberg was developing moveable type. The other follows a young modern American boy Blake Winters, who is at Oxford with his younger sister and mother, who is a scholar studying at the Bodleian and other libraries. What connects the stories is a old book, blank to everyone but Blake, who sees various riddles and statements on its pages. What sounds like a promising start of an oddball biblio-mystery gets lost in its own development. This old book is evidently both powerful and magical, and it is purported to be able to lead its bearer to a Last Book, which contains all the wisdom of the world. Of course the various Oxford bibliophiles and scholars Blake encounters all know of this, and want the book for their own purposes. But this set-up is unconvincing and contrived, for the book itself is aware enough to guide Blake, and its pages conveniently glow with light when the plot needs it to. And this contrived nature makes the book much less interesting than it might have been. Still, it is readable, if not particularly well-written, and it is different enough from the popular  run-of-the-mill fantasies that it keeps one's interest. Overall, though, one can't help thinking that it should have been better.