The Secret Lives of Authors

How I Write: The Secret Lives of Writers (2007), edited by Dan Crowe, is a kind of coffee table book about writers and their writing spaces—their desks, their surroundings, their rituals, and their favored desk-top tchotkes.  Basically, the editor wrote to sixty-some-odd writers about their daily work as writers. There are some well-known authors included, but a lot of the names are of less-known, and all of them are decidedly pretentious in a literary way (i.e., genre authors were evidently not asked).

As an exercise, I though the book sounded interesting, but the end-result is considerably less engaging.  One goes from such insights as Lionel Shriver's note that "having the nerve to write yet another book in a world already drowning in blather requires bravery, arrogance, and willful naiveté" to Tim Carvell's "the only way to write is to first spend a considerable amount of time not writing." Well, both statements are true, but it's rather sad that they represent the best this book has to offer.

Wisdom for All Ages

Ursula K. Le Guin turned 88 a few weeks before her latest book was published. Her new book is No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters.  It is basically a collection of some of her blog posts since she started blogging in 2010. That makes the book sound less interesting than it actually is. Le Guin has accumulated much wisdom in her nearly nine decades on the planet.  And her viewpoint is always worth reading and reflecting upon. (Well, almost.  When authors write about their own pets the result is often dire.  With Le Guin, it's cats. And there are seven entries on her cat. I'm sure some people will find them charming.  I didn't.) 

Much of Le Guin's thoughts on fantasy, escapism, imagination, fundamentalism should be read by everyone (especially those people who don't sympathize with these subjects).  Her views on Darwin and belief are quite clearly thought out and reasonable. She writes: "I don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution.  I accept it.  It isn't a matter of faith, but of evidence. The whole undertaking of science us to deal, as well as it can, with reality. The reality of actual things and events in time is subject to doubt, to hypothesis,  to proof and disproof, to acceptance and rejection—not to belief or disbelief."  Amen to that.

Le Guin is a national treasure.  May she ruminate and continue to write for years to come.  (But hold back on too many cat posts.) 

YA Tales of Unnatural Death

John Gordon's short collection, The Burning Baby and Other Ghosts (1992), contains five tales of various ghosts and unnatural deaths. The title story is the best in the book, about a glowing baby that appears in the bonfire that secretly hold the corpse of a murdered pregnant girl. The second story, "Under the Ice," is about a dead body sometimes seen under the ice where some young boys go skating. The remaining three tales get silly—"The Eels" about a haunting be eels after an old woman's grand-daughter is killed.  "The Key" and "Death Wish" are overly complicated and not very rewarding. The vibrancy of the first tale sets a standard unrivaled by any other tale in the book. 

Silly Ghost Stories

The Travelling Bag and Other Ghostly Stories (2016) is the latest collection of ghost stories by Susan Hill, known for her novella The Woman in Black (1983) which has been filmed twice. The new volumes contains only four stories, all of them silly in some way.  In the title story, the prank of filling a travelling bag with moths ends up with a man dead. In "Alice Baker" an office worker always has bad smells around her and she doesn't make friends with her co-workers.  Eventually, the narrator figures out she was a ghost. In "The Front Room" a Christian family, feeling charitable, move the husband's unpleasant elderly step-mother into their front room, with predictable awfulness.  "Boy Number 21" concerns a very lonely schoolboy whose one friend goes missing, yet apparently he reappears from time to time. All four stories feel unpolished--with incongruous ideas tossed off to keep the plot moving without regard to the story structure itself. A sad, disappointing little volume.

Dinosaur Tales

Dinosaur Tales (1983) by Ray Bradbury is a slim collection of four short stories, and two poems, overly illustrated by various talented artists with the shackles of black-and-white-only put upon their imaginations. There is a short foreword by Ray Harryhausen, and gung-ho introduction by Bradbury himself, but the end-result is really a fourth-rate product.  Only one of the stories is really good (the class "A Sound of Thunder" from 1951, which has been filmed a couple of times), the rest of the book is the kind of stuff one expects from a book packager who thinks:  "Ray Bradbury wrote a great dinosaur tale and a few other crappy ones, and one that isn't really a dinosaur tale but we can call it one. Let's bring them together with some black-and-white illustrations, and a color cover, that we can get for cheap and make a book of it."  And that's exactly what Byron Preiss Visual Publications Inc. did. The end-result only diminishes the reputations of everyone involved.  

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.