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When I first began reading Famous Modern Ghost Stories I mentioned how much fun Dorothy Scarborough’s introduction was. Turns out, the stories themselves are fun too.

There are fifteen stories in this collection. Some of them, like Poe’s “Ligeia,” I have read before. Some it really felt like I had read before but I couldn’t recall when or where, like “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood (I just love the name Algernon, it’s so, I’m not sure what, but it tickles my fancy so it is probably good I don’t have kids because I’d be tempted to call a boy Algernon and then you know he’d go by “Algie” for short and all the kids at school would make fun of him). Others were plain silly like “At the Gate” by Myla Jo Closser in which a recently deceased dog takes up his vigil outside the gates of Heaven with the other dogs waiting for their owners to arrive.

My favorite story in the collection was “Lazarus” by Leonid Andreyev. It is the story of Lazarus after he was raised from the dead. Did you ever see the Buffy the Vampire Slayer show where they bring Buffy back from the dead? She kind of wasn’t the same afterwards, or at least for a while. Well, Lazarus wasn’t the same either and while everyone was really glad to have him back, the haunting look in his eyes kind of freaked people out so no one wanted to be around him. Maybe if Lazarus had had a Scooby gang he would have eventually recovered.

Coming in second as my favorite story based only on the complete absurdity of it all, was “The Beast with Five Fingers” by W.F. Harvey. Bachelor uncle is ill and Eustace, while visiting, notices that uncle is unconsciously doing automatic writing. Eustace goofs around with this a bit until uncle dies. And then, in spite of uncle’s wishes to be cremated, he is not. Last minute instructions turn up and Eustace is bequeathed uncle’s well-preserved hand, the hand with which he did the automatic writing! The hand, of course, is alive but it isn’t uncle inhabiting it. At one point Eustace locks the hand in a desk drawer and the hand writes a note and slips it out through a crack in the desk. A servant finds a note bidding him to open the desk drawer and when the servant does so, the hand escapes! It is never clear why Eustace is being haunted by this hand or what the hand’s intent is, but the story comes very close to being a farce, right up to and including the hand eventually strangling Eustace and then the two of them ultimately perishing in a fire.

After reading so many ghost stories together it seems there is almost a requirement that at least one person experiencing the ghost or other phenomena has to be utterly and completely unbelieving. He, because it is usually a he in these stories, is then required to make up all sorts of logical explanations for what is happening. These explanations often approach the ridiculous. In the end, however, the unbeliever is convinced by the haunting and is either just in time to save himself or too late and dies. A few do believe right away and these have two responses. The smart ones figure out what the ghost wants. The not so smart ones go into battle. The smart ones generally come through unscathed and even satisfied about having helped a spirit move on. The not smart ones usually end up dead or psychologically traumatized for the rest of their lives.

These stories, even the bad ones, are all amusing in their own way. Of course I’m not supposed to be amused, I am supposed to get chills. But it seems that much of what haunts us is related to the times in which we live. Not that we can’t still feel a tingle down the spine when reading Poe, but it isn’t going to keep us up at night. Which makes me wonder whether in 100 years readers will think Stephen King is scary or will readers of the distant future read him and giggle and wonder why the twin girls in The Shining scare us so badly and make their way into other places like this IKEA commercial:

As a RIP Challenge read, Famous Modern Ghost Stories was quite fun. If you are looking for some older stories that don’t tend to show up in the anthologies, this would be a good choice.

What I learned from She by H(enry) Rider Haggard: There is nothing more horrible than a woman of great beauty unless it is a woman who is old and ugly. Actually there is, but I’ll get to that later.

Ah those crazy Victorians and their adventure stories filled with misogyny, racism and classism and all kinds of other isms. All in all, it comes down to being a really silly adventure story in which two British gentlemen like to shoot animals and marvel at the backwardness of the natives who, because they are not British and wear animal skins for clothes and use mummies as torches, are obviously savages. But, I get ahead of myself.

Haven’t read She? Let’s see if I can summarize it for you. Newly minted Cambridge professor Horace Holly is visited late one night by his friend and colleague Vincey. Vincey is ill and tells Holly he will die soon. He makes Holly promise that he will take on the guardianship of Vincey’s five-year-old son, Leo. He then spins a tale about how ancient his ancestry is and leaves Holly a locked iron box he is not to open until Leo turns 25.

Holly raises Leo as promised. Leo turns out to be smart and tall and very blond and so beautiful that people refer to him as a Greek god. Every woman who sees him falls madly in love, which Leo finds mildly amusing. The day of his 25th birthday arrives and Holly brings out the iron box. Inside are all kinds of goodies that include writing in uncial Greek and also Latin, which our narrator Holly is kind enough to reproduce and then translate each one into English for us. The main prize is the Sherd of Amenartas. It tells the tale of the beautiful Amenartas running away from Egypt with the equally as beautiful Kallikrates. They end up in the clutches of Ayesha who falls in love with Kallikrates, demanding he abandon Amenartas and stay with her. But Kallikrates refuses and Ayesha in her rage kills him. Amenartas escapes. It turns out she is pregnant, bears a son, and then passes down from son to son the story of Kallikrates and the injunction to one day take revenge upon Ayesha, who, while not immortal, has a lifespan of thousands or years.

Can Holly and Leo believe such a fantastic story? Holly doubts it but Leo, bold and brave like a lion, is eager to find out. So they set off with their trusty servant, Job, to the wild lands of Africa. After their ship sinks and they get lost in the swamps, they are rescued by savages sent by She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. These savages are the Amahagger who pretty much worship She and do her bidding. These savages do savage things like allow their women to be in charge. Almost immediately, Leo is claimed by Ustane. Young Leo is tickled by the whole idea of women being in charge — what a lark! —and goes along especially since Ustane is attractive and uh — shall we say attentive to his manly needs? Holly is too old and ugly to be of interest but servant Job is approached and offends the woman and the whole tribe with his proper British manners.

The savages are also cannibals and decide that they are going to take a bit of revenge on their guests by eating Mahomed, the ship captain who survived with them. The Amahagger don’t end up killing Mahomed, but Holly does. Aiming at the female agressor who holding him while a man is about to put a burning hot pot on top of Mahomed’s head, Holly somehow shoots the woman and Mahomed. Oops! is pretty much as grief stricken as Holly gets about that.

Anyway, Leo turns out to be the spitting image of the dead-for-two-thousand-years Kallikrates. She believes in reincarnation, she has been waiting around all those years for Kallikrates to return to her. Holly at first had a hard time figuring this out. He could not believe that She was immortal or even close to it because

The person who found it [near immortality] could no doubt rule the world. He could accumulate all the wealth in the world, and all the power, and all the wisdom that is power. He might give a lifetime to the study of each art or science. Well, if that were so, and this She were practically immortal, which I did not for one moment believe, how was it that, with all these things at her feet, she preferred to remain in a cave amongst a society of cannibals? This surely settled the question. The whole story was monstrous, and only worthy of the superstitious days in which it was written.

If you were nearly immortal your goal would be to rule the world, right?

Holly’s lack of imagination weaves its way all through this book where he repeatedly excuses himself from describing things because, well he simply cannot. For instance, when She removes her veil and he sees her face:

I gazed above them at her face, and—I do not exaggerate—shrank back blinded and amazed. I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil—at least, at the time, it struck me as evil. How am I to describe it? I cannot—simply I cannot! The man does not live whose pen could convey a sense of what I saw.

Holly is really good at long moralizing passages though. Here’s a short snip:

Soon I gave up thinking about it, for the mind wearies easily when it strives to grapple with the Infinite, and to trace the footsteps of the Almighty as he strides from sphere to sphere, or deduce His purpose from His works. Such things are not for us to know. Knowledge is to the strong, and we are weak.

Of course, both Holly and Leo fall under the spell of She’s beauty. They lose their will, they can’t help themselves. Only when She steps back into the flame that gave her long life to discover that standing in it a second time takes it away and she shrinks into a hideous shriveled thing the size of monkey and then dies, are the two men released from her spell. Then Holly quickly tosses a robe over her horrible ugliness before the stunned Leo can see what happened.

Even with She dead, the two men have the chance to become nearly immortal themselves. The moralizing Holly of course refuses. Leo also refuses because he does not have the patience to wait two thousand years for She to return. And men call women fickle and inconstant!

This is a ridiculously terrible book. I have no idea why it caught the popular imagination and has been so influential. There is even a sequel called Ayesha, the return of She. But now I’ve read it and I don’t know if I am glad or wish I could wash it off my eyeballs. There is the real horror right there. It’s not She or the cannibals but the book itself that is horrible, which of course makes it more than appropriate for the RIP Challenge.

I was surprised to come to the end of the book I was reading on my Kindle today. It’s a Project Gutenberg file of She and I always forget that those often end somewhere around the 95% to 98% mark. So when I finished I had a little panic because I hadn’t downloaded the gothic novels I had planned to read for RIP yet. I started paging through to see what I did have and discovered Famous Modern Ghost Stories.

Published in 1921, this is collection of ghost stories features the likes of Anatole France, Ambrose Bierce, Guy de Maupassant, and Edgar Allan Poe. The collection is assembled by Dorothy Scarborough, Ph.D., lecturer in English at Columbia University. This book has a companion volume she also compiled, Humorous Ghost Stories.

I am in the midst of the first story, “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood. Blackwood is so far not impressing me. The narrator of the story is canoeing down the Danube with a friend. They have reached a swampy area and found a dry island to camp on for the night. Problem is, he has gone on at great length for pages about the history of the Danube and the sites he and his friend have seen so far on their trip. I so wanted to shout numerous times, Get on with it! But since I was in public I kept my mouth closed and firmly projected my impatience at the story. Which makes me wonder now if somehow my firm mental projections at books I have read on my now dead Kindle had anything to do with its demise? Hmmm.

The Blackwood story is not what I was keen to tell you about. It’s the introduction to the book by Dorothy Scarborough, Ph.D. (that’s how she has her name on the book!). She is a hoot! Her introduction had me laughing throughout, not sure whether she was serious or pulling my leg. First she mentions how there has been a huge increase in the population of the spirit world and then she says:

Life is so inconveniently complex nowadays, what with income taxes and other visitations of government, that it is hard for us to have the added risk of wraiths, but there’s no escaping.

Then she goes on to try to explain why there might be more ghosts now than formerly and why they might be so much more vigorous than they used to be:

Perhaps the war, or possibly an increase in class consciousness, or unionization of spirits, or whatever, has greatly energized the ghost in our day and given him both ambition and strength to do more things than ever. Maybe ‘pep tablets’ have been discovered on the other side as well!

Next, she explains how modern ghosts are different from those old-timey ghosts:

Modern ghosts are less simple and primitive than their ancestors, and are developing complexes of various kinds. They are more democratic than of old, and have more of a diversity of interests, so that mortals have scarcely the ghost of a chance with them. They employ all the agencies and mechanisms known to mortals, and have in addition their own methods of transit and communication. Whereas in the past a ghost had to stalk or glide to his haunts, now he limousines or airplanes, so that naturally he can get in more work than before. He uses the wireless to send his messages, and is expert in all manner of scientific lines.

And ends up sounding like a motivational speaker for ghosts:

Whatever a modern ghost wishes to do or to be, he is or does, with confidence and success.

Finally she gets around to talking a bit about the stories in the collection. One of the stories has a man being haunted by a severed arm. Scarborough writes:

Fiction shows us various ghosts with half faces, and at least one notable spook that comes in half. Such ability, it will be granted, must necessarily increase the haunting power, for if a ghost may send a foot or an arm or a leg to harry one person, he can dispatch his back-bone or his liver or his heart to upset other human beings simultaneously in a sectional haunting at once economically efficient and terrifying.

Are you laughing? I hope you are laughing.

The story I am most interested in reading falls second in the collection, “The Shadows on the Wall” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Scarborough says that “one prominent librarian considers [it] the best ghost story ever written.” I shall soon find out and let you know!

Turning the calendar page to September can only mean one thing when it comes to reading: time for the RIP Challenge! It’s been nine years —nine! — that Carl has been hosting what has surely become a highly anticipated fall event. I know I always look forward to it and actually started thinking about what I would read a few months ago, plenty of time to write and rewrite and rewrite again the list of books. And now here we are and I need to figure out what, exactly, I am going to read. Of course I can always change my mind. For some reason I don’t feel like I have much time to read many books for RIP, not sure why I’m feeling that way, maybe the big pile of books on my reading table has something to do with it. But I will still manage to get in a few, so here’s what I’m thinking of:

• House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. I’ve been meaning to read this one for years and I think it is finally time I got to it. It is a sort of haunted house story in which the house, much like the TARDIS, is bigger on the inside. Only I don’t think the Doctor will be showing up to sort things out and save the day.
• She by H. Rider Haggard. A little adventure, a chance at immortality, and a whole lot of Victorian prejudice, what more could a girl want? I actually started reading this at lunch today on my Kindle. Such proper gentlemen about to be terrified by a strong woman and Africa. Horrors!
• What’s a RIP Challenge without some old fashioned gothic romance? The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve. Published in 1777, Reeve described it as “the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto.” It is filled with revelations, horrors, betrayals, and a final battle between good and evil. I presume there might also be a beautiful maiden in there somewhere too.
• If I survive The Old English Baron and find myself prepared to face more terror, I just might give Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb a go. Lamb was Lord Byron’s mistress, one of them anyway, and the title character is reportedly a very unflattering depiction of him. It was Lamb’s first novel and a big success. Ah, revenge is sweet.

If the “classics” get to be too much I might substitute something more recent, but that will be a last minute decision. Stay tuned!

A large portion of the beginning of The Mysteries of Udolpho is taken up with Emily and her father traveling through the Pyrenees of France. It seems on nearly every page there are comments on the “sublime charms of nature” with long descriptions on the craggy mountains, the deep valleys, rushing torrents, and the quality of the light. In fact, there is so much of this I began to think Radcliffe was up to something. So it wasn’t long before I found myself borrowing a copy of Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. And now this early sentence in the book makes so much more sense:

This landscape with the surrounding alps did, indeed, present a perfect picture of the lovely and the sublime, of ‘beauty sleeping in the lap of horror.’

I have vague recollections of reading Burke back in college as part of a class in literary theory but my memory has been wiped out to save myself from the trauma that was Hegel, Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva. Poor Burke never had a chance. Since he is associated in my mind with that class I assumed he was going to be hard going and I’d be scratching my head. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Burke is so very concerned with everyone understanding him that large portions of the essay are given over to explaining his words. I appreciated his precision to a point, after that point I found myself muttering, okay okay, can we just move on? All that to say that if you ever feel inspired to read Burke, you don’t need to worry about not “getting him” because if this essay were a math problem, he’d be getting full credit for showing his work so his readers can follow along with his arguments and not be left in doubt.

If you are like me you equate sublime with beautiful, maybe not every day beautiful but startlingly beautiful, the kind of beauty that moves you to tears. But no, beauty and the sublime have nothing to do with each other. Beauty, you see, inspires pleasure and love in the beholder. It is sunshine and rainbows.

The sublime? It is composed of delight derived from terror, pain, distress and danger. It is a feeling far more intense and elevated than mere beauty. The sublime, according to Burke, is the “strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling.” This is because pain, the root of the sublime, is more powerful than pleasure.

Now the pain Burke refers to is not necessarily physical pain caused from tumbling over a cliff while hiking in the mountains in search of the sublime. It is a physical pain but more of one caused by extreme emotion than a broken leg. It’s a hurts so good kind of pain caused by an “unnatural tension of the nerves.”

What elements go into producing the sublime? Burke is kind enough to explain each one in great detail but I will spare you and just list out a few for you:

• Obscurity. This is because you can’t see something clearly and so you are thrown into a state of fear and uncertainty. Obscurity can be caused by darkness or fog, or lots of trees.
• Power. Anything powerful is dangerous and potentially destructive and terrifying. Like a king or a bull or flash flood or God.
• Vastness. As in size. This can be a tall mountain or a deep valley or great plain, lake or ocean. Infinity is also a source of the sublime. Think of the size of the universe and your mind will likely be filled with a sort of delightful horror as you try and fail find the edges.
• Magnificence. As in a great profusion of things as in the stars in the night sky or millions of buffalo on the Great Plains before settlers killed them all.
• Color. Pink is not the color of the sublime. The sublime is not cheerful. The color of the sublime is dark and gloomy, a cloudy sky not a clear blue one, dark brown jagged rocks not a gentle verdant slope.

Can you kind of see a little how Emily and her father’s travels through the mountains was so sublime? And why Radcliffe might want all that in a gothic novel? Because the whole point of a gothic novel is horror (and romance) and since the source of the sublime is terror, perfect combination, right? Radcliffe didn’t write a book based in the supernatural so she pulls much of her gothic horror in early on by using the sublime. We don’t feel it like the readers in 1794 would have, but no doubt much of the scenic descriptions would have been terrifying.

Also of note is that Radcliffe uses the sublime to clue us in to who the good and bad characters are. The good ones all experience the sublime at one time or other while out in nature. The bad characters, not one has a sublime experience. They are too small-minded and petty and the sublime scene that moves Emily so produces nothing but boredom to those who are not good.

That is a bit of what Radcliffe is about with so much mention of what is sublime. While it gets a bit repetitive for a modern reader, she wasn’t just rambling on and on to add padding to the story. Instead, the sublime is an integral part of her approach to the gothic, at least in this novel. I’ve not read any of her others so I can’t say whether it holds true for them. Perhaps next RIP Challenge I will read Romance of the Forest and find out.

What a fun book Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe turned out to be! Sure it’s a long book, and sure there is lots of wandering and admiring the sublime scenery, but oh, when I got down to the end and all the secrets and mysteries began to be revealed, what fun! All the revelations at the end could have been handled better. Instead of making them part of the narrative, they end up feeling like Radcliffe knew she had to end the book and disclose all the secrets and she wasn’t sure how so she just tells us in one long rush. She does manage to tie up everything which was good because I was starting to wonder if she was going to remember to say what was behind the black veil at Udolpho. Now I know why there is so much wondering about this very thing by Catherine in Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

The Mysteries of Udolpho was published in 1794 in four volumes. It is a Gothic Romance with love, bad men, castles, hidden passages, ghosts, bandits, murder, coincidences, and secrets galore. But Radcliffe did not write a supernatural gothic novel, for her there is an explanation for everything. And to make extra sure we know we are not to believe in the supernatural, she makes fun of the people in the novel who do.

The story follows Emily St. Aubert who becomes an orphan at the tender age of seventeen. Because she is not yet of age, she is given to the care of her father’s sister, Madame Cheron, a vain, ambitious woman with a mean streak. Not long after Emily goes to live with her aunt, Madame Cheron agrees to marry Count Montoni, a handsome, passionate and agreeable Italian. Almost immediately they set out for Venice. Montoni turns out to be other than he represented himself and his sins, to the horror of the good and pure Emily, begin to mount up fast as soon as they arrive in Venice. After a few months in Venice where Montoni tries to trick Emily into marrying Count Morano, Montoni suddenly packs up his household and hurries his servants and women off to Udolpho, his crumbling and remote castle in the Pyrenees. The only thing that sustains Emily’s spirits throughout her trials at Venice and Udolpho is her love for the Chevalier Valancourt who loves her in return.

Poor Emily’s road is never smooth but in spite of the river of tears she cries, the horrors she must face, the many moments of fainting and insensibility, she remains true and kind and good so is therefore rewarded in the end.

There are many things the book is about but I think the one that stands first in line is, in the words of Emily’s father:

‘A well-informed mind,’ he would say, ‘is the best security against the contagion of folly and of vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within. Thought, and cultivation, are necessary equally to the happiness of a country and a city life; in the first they prevent the uneasy sensations of indolence, and afford a sublime pleasure in the taste they create for the beautiful, and the grand; in the latter, they make dissipation less an object of necessity, and consequently of interest.’

Of course Emily has a well-informed mind and it is from all this her goodness and many virtues flow. It is also because of this that she is the only one in the book who, while suffering more than anyone, comes through it all unblemished. We are subtly and not so subtly reminded of this throughout the book.

We are also to learn what it means to have good taste as well as gain an appreciation of the sublime. In fact, there is so much sublime this sublime that in the book I was prompted, by the suggestion of Tom, to read Burke’s Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Which I did, mostly, and about which I will write tomorrow and attempt to relate it to Udolpho without boring you too much.

The completion of this book also concludes my RIP Challenge reading. It has been great fun, as usual, and I even managed to read one more book than I had planned. Yay!

What a good story The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf turned out to be. What’s not to like about a story with the Devil himself and spiders in it? It was even a little creepy at times.

The story begins with a christening. After much eating, the celebrants push themselves away from the table for a little walk to make room for more food. One of them notices an old black post in the window frame of this lovely new house and asks Grandfather about it. And boy, does Grandfather have a tale to tell!

Long ago a powerful knight named Hans von Stoffeln took possession of the land and the peasants of the area. He decided he needed a new castle, bigger and better than the old one, and forced the peasants to build it for him on top of a barren hill. After long and hard labor during which the peasants were forced to neglect their own fields and families and come near to starvation, the castle was finished. But the knights made fun of von Stoffeln and his castle on the barren hill, so von Stoffeln decided he needed an avenue of one hundred trees. He ordered the peasants to uproot trees from miles away and bring them to the castle and plant them in an avenue. This work had to be done within a month’s time. The peasants were beside themselves, worn out and hungry their carts and tools and animals on the verge of falling apart and collapse, what were they to do?

Suddenly in their midst appears a hunter dressed in green with a “beard so red it seemed to crackle and sparkle like fir twigs on the fire.” He offers to help but the peasants, unable to see how a huntsman could help them, refuse. The green man chides them, tells them he can make their work fast and easy for only a small payment: an unbaptized child. Horrified, the peasants refuse again.

The next day they begin their work and it quickly becomes clear that they will not be able to complete the task in the allotted time. But Christine, a “frightfully clever and daring woman” decides that they can beat the Devil at his own game and convinces the men to agree to the offer of help. The Devil seals it with a kiss on Christine’s cheek. Suddenly the work becomes easier and the peasants complete their task so quickly that they have time to start work in their own fields.

But soon the time for the first baby to be born draws near. Christine, who is the midwife, plans on having the priest present at the birth so the baby can be immediately baptized and saved from the Devil’s clutches. The plan works. But then Christine’s cheek where the Devil had kissed her starts burning. A small black mark appears on it. As the time for the birth of the next baby arrives the black mark has grown bigger. As the woman gives birth inside the house with the Priest present, Christine is outside in the midst of her own labor except instead of birthing a baby, she gives birth to one large spider and thousands of tiny ones from the black mark on her face. It is a gruesome scene:

And now Christine felt as if her face was bursting open and glowing coals were being birthed from it, quickening into life and swarming across her face and all her limbs, and everything within her face had sprung to life, a fiery swarming all across her body. In the lightning’s pallid glow she saw, long-legged and venomous, innumerable black spiderlings scurrying down her limbs and out into the night, and as they vanished they were followed, long-legged and venomous, by innumerable others.

These spiders first killed all the peasants’ livestock. And the peasants, placing all the blame on Christine, now start to plan on how to get their hands on the next baby before the priest can baptize it.

Isn’t this a delicious story? You will have to read it yourself to find out what happens and what it has to do with the black post at the beginning of the story. It is safe to say that the Godly win. And, of course, as long as the people in the valley remain Godly they have nothing to fear from the spider. We are reminded that inborn purity, like family honor,

must be upheld day after day, for a single unguarded moment can besmirch it for generations with stains as indelible as bloodstains, which are impervious to whitewash.

Of course it is the clever woman, Christine, who persuades the men to allow evil into the community. And generations later when the spider strikes again it is also women who are at the root of its reappearance. But you know Eve set the precedent in the Garden so the fault is always with the women because men just can’t say no to their persuasive powers. Given that the story was originally written in 1842 the sexism can be noted but tolerated and the story enjoyed for its delicious horrors.

I can chalk this one up as another RIP Challenge read as well as mark it down as my NYRB subscription October read. Woo! Two birds, one stone and all that. The Mysteries of Udolpho is almost done too. Next week for sure. I’d say I am doing really well with my October reading plan but I don’t want to jinx myself. Oops, I think I just did.

For a person like me who has a tendency to get nightmares from supernatural and gory slasher type horror, psychological horror along the lines of Shirley Jackson is more than sufficiently creepy and delicious. So when I learned about Thomas Tryon’s The Other and saw it noted as a worthy descendent of Jackson I suspected I was in for a treat. Boy, was I! In fact, I put it in the top five best books I’ve read for the RIP Challenge ever.

The book begins with an unnamed narrator who is clearly in some sort of institution. It isn’t long before we figure out it is a mental institution. But who is this person? He is forty-eight-years old and has one of those smooth and slippery voices that ask you to trust him but you can’t quite because there is something not right that you just can’t put your finger on. Very soon he addresses us directly as he begins to tell the story of the Perry family. And not long after that we know this is one of the Perry twins, but is it Niles or Holland?

Then we move back in time to when Niles and Holland were twelve and thirteen, living on the family farm in the small Connecticut town of Pequot Landing. Their father was killed in the fall of the previous year in a tragic accident. When he was carrying a bushel of apples down into the apple cellar, the heavy trapdoor in the floor of the barn smashed down on his head, sending him to his death on the concrete floor below. Now the boys’ mother is in such deep grief she hardly leaves her room. The boys are looked after by their grandmother, their aunt and uncle who also have a boy a few years older than Niles and Holland, and the housekeeper. The twins’ pregnant older sister and her husband are also living at the farm.

While the perspective shifts around, much of the story is told from the viewpoint of Niles. He is the younger twin, born on the other side of midnight. He is also the angelic good twin while Holland has a mean streak. Just how mean? Right away we are treated to the story of Holland hanging his grandmother’s cat in the well. And not long after that story we see him kill his cousin’s pet rat by feeding it poison. Good twin, bad twin.

Yet Niles idealizes Holland. Holland inherited the family ring with the peregrine falcon on it from his father but he gave it to Niles who carries it around in an old tobacco tin because no one is supposed to know he has it. Also in the tin is The Thing, wrapped in blue tissue paper.

And then people start dropping like flies, all of them meeting their end in a freak accident of one kind or another. Niles suspects Holland is behind everything but Niles will keep his brother’s secrets.

The story keeps unfurling with things getting worse and worse and now and then we return to the present with the twin in the asylum but still don’t know which twin. It must be Holland, right? But no, maybe not. And the dead pile up and something is not right, something about what we are being told in the story isn’t meshing, but what is it?

And then, about two-thirds of the way through the book you find out and it’s a surprise but not a surprise because, like the adults in the story, you knew but you just couldn’t believe it because the truth is too horrible. But after the revelation you can’t ignore the truth any longer. And the rest of the book carries you along unrelentingly in this horrible thing right to the very end. I found myself muttering as I read, “oh no, oh no, oh no.” And once in awhile I noticed my hands shaking and my heart beating just a little faster. When I read the last page my “oh no” changed to “oh wow” and the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. It’s that kind of book.

I went back to the Wikipedia article on gothic fiction today and Daniel Radcliffe is no longer Ann Radcliffe’s brother. It was fun while it lasted!

I’m reading Mysteries of Udolpho on my kindle and am about 20% of the way through. Our heroine Emily is about to be whisked away to Italy with her aunt. Of the first 20% of the book I’d say three quarters of it is spent on Emily and her father traveling through the Pyrenees, making the acquaintance of Valancourt, and wandering some more always admiring the sublime scenery. There is so much scenery that I had to wonder what the heck is going on?

Well, it turns out that the book was published just about the time Romantic ideals were starting to percolate. Ah, sublime nature! If one can be moved by it then one is brought closer to the Creator. So Emily, her father and Valancourt are being shown as good people who understand and appreciate the important spiritual, intellectual and authentic life. They are what we should aspire to be.

Then Emily is cast out from this little paradise by the death of her father. She is forced to go live with her aunt in Toulouse. Madame Cheron, soon to be Montoni, presents a tidy contrast. Her life and those with whom she associates is all about money, ostentatious displays of wealth, and artifice. And it is about to become very dangerous for our poor heroine.

Will Emily’s authentic self survive? Oh but this is a gothic novel. She will pass through perils, shed so many more tears that the river she has already created with them will flood, but no doubt she will survive and have a happy ending. I just have a lot of pages before Emily will get there. But it is fun in spite of the river of Emily’s tears, all the sublime scenery, and not much else happening. Though it is beginning to get interesting because of the jealous cruelty of Madame Cheron/Montoni and hints of secrets. It is even starting to feel a bit Wilkie Collins-y.

So it appears that Mysteries of Udolpho has wormed its way into being my wild card RIP book. I am going to save The Others for October. I want it to be cool and gloomy and the leaves off the trees. I want some goosebumps. Until then Udolpho should keep me tripping along.

This has ben a day of I-couldn’t-make-that-up-if-I-tried. The star of awesome from work today went something like this.

A young woman walked up to the circulation desk and asked, “Is this a library?”

I looked at her a moment before answering because I thought she might be joking but she was completely serious. “Yes,” I replied.

“A law library?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“So, um you like have law books and stuff here?”

“Yes,” I managed with a straight face, “is there something in particular you are looking for?”

The poor woman was completely clueless about what she needed and I wanted to help her but we crashed and burned spectacularly. I asked a research librarian if she could help out and she had as much trouble as I did and we sent the woman away with information that may or may not have been useful for her. When I told the librarian how the interaction had begun she gawped at me, “You’re making that up!” Nope, couldn’t have made that up.

Now, this evening is the at home version and capstone event. I was doing some preliminary searching on the Mysteries of Udolpho because nature plays such a huge role in the novel I wanted to see if I could find anything on the role of nature in gothic novels. I looked at Wikipedia’s Gothic Fiction page for clues, not expecting any but sometimes I am surprised. And I was surprised but not by nature and gothic fiction but by this (click on image if you need it bigger):

See, I had to take a screen shot because some Wikipedia editor is going to come along and fix it eventually and I needed proof that I did not make it up! I know someone is just screwing around, but oh, did it give me an extra good giggle because it is that kind of day. A wicked side of me hopes some undiscriminating student writing a paper comes along and adds that bit into her essay.

Now I can’t follow any of that up with even a half serious chat about how I am getting on in Mysteries of Udolpho so I will just have to leave it at that today and maybe try again tomorrow.

Back in 2010 I read John Connolly’s YA novel The Gates. Alas, in spite of it being about Satan trying to create a portal from Hell to Earth in order to take over the world, I didn’t read it for RIP. But now I have the sequel, The Infernals, that I have been meaning to read since it came out in 2011 and finally managed to get to it this year for RIP.

This time our intrepid boy, Samuel Johnson and his beloved dog Boswell, are being stalked by Mrs. Abernathy, the demon who had used the power of the Large Hadron Collider to open a portal between Hell and Earth and whom Samuel and the hapless demon Nurd foiled. Mrs. Abernathy is not quite the same after the experience. Once the right hand demon of the Great Malevolence, she has fallen out of favor due to her failure. But, she has discovered that she can now open a portal on her own, she just can’t open a very big one. She does, however, manage to open one big enough to pull Samuel, Boswell, a police car with two police officers in it, an ice cream truck with Dan Dan the Ice Cream Man in it, and four rather rude and cantankerous dwarfs into Hell. Unfortunately her accuracy is off and she must find Samuel before her enemies can.

And so we have Samuel and Boswell wandering through Hell in a not very Dante-like way. Still they manage to get into some close calls and even facilitate the redemption of one inhabitant. Of course Mrs. Abernathy eventually catches Samuel and Hell is on the verge of a great world-rending battle as demon squares off against demon.

The Gates was a wonderful book, clever, laugh-out-loud funny, full of literary references and jokes that adults would get but yet still a good entertaining YA story. It is one of those YA books that could really have been written for adults but somehow got shuffled into the young adult section because the protagonist is only 13. I had high expectations for The Infernals and it started off with a bang and a good laugh. Sadly it was just downhill from there. There was too much wandering around in Hell with nothing happening, too much time jumping around between points of view — Samuel, the dwarfs, Nurd, Mrs. Abernathy, Duke Abigor, and random other inhabitants of Hell. Plus, there was the escape from Hell which left me boggled, that’s it? All the lead up and it was that easy?

Whereas The Gates read like it was for adults, The Infernals really does read like it is for young adults, and pretty young ones at that. Sure there are a few jokes that the kiddies are likely to wonder about, but for the most part it lacked complexity and comes of overly simple and bland. The vital spark that The Gates had was missing from The Infernals. While I was greatly disappointed, it wasn’t all that bad. I did finish it after all. There will soon be a third book, The Creeps. Not sure whether I will read it or not. Maybe I will let Bookman read it first and then depending on his reaction decide if it will make its way onto my RIP list for next year.

This has got to be the funniest opening to all of Austen’s novels:

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings—and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on—lived to have six children more—to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any.

That’s the beginning of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and why this doesn’t get more attention, I don’t know. After I read that marvelous beginning I had to stop and read it again and then spend some time giggling before I could go on.

Even though Northanger Abbey wasn’t published until December 1817, six months after Austen died, it is the first book she completed for publication. Written around 1788-99, Austen revised it in 1803 and sold it for £10 to a London bookseller who then decided not to publish it after all. Austen revised it again in 1816 intending to try publishing it again. It was during this revision she changed the name of the main character from Susan to Catherine and changed the title from Memorandum, Susan to Catherine. The title we have was very likely invented by Austen’s brother who had arranged for the book’s publication. I love Jane dearly but I think her brother came up with a better title!

Probably just about everyone knows the story. Our plain heroine Catherine is seventeen and like most ladies her age loves reading gothic novels. She has the pleasure of being invited to Bath by her rich neighbors, the Allens, to be Mrs. Allen’s companion. One day Mrs. Allen runs into an old school friend now the widow Mrs. Thorpe. She is in Bath with her daughter Isabella and her son John. Both children are pretty much fishing for rich spouses and because of Catherine’s association with the Allens, they assume she is wealthy too. John has designs on Catherine and Isabella on Catherine’s brother who happens to know John at Oxford. Much conniving and underhandedness ensues and the innocent Catherine has no idea what is going on because she is too busy falling in love with Henry Tilney.

Catherine becomes friends with Henry’s sister, Eleanor, and gets invited to stay at their home, Northanger Abbey. Catherine imagines all sorts of gothic mystery that leads to much embarrassment on her part when her overactive imagination is discovered and proved wrong.

Of course the gentle satire of gothic novels is great fun and what this book is most known for. Catherine is reading The Mysteries of Udolpho while in Bath and talks about it with whoever will listen. But this book is so much more than that. It is also a sort of coming-of-age novel as Catherine goes from sheltered innocence to a more worldly understanding and grows from a girl with a romantic imagination into one of good mannered practicality.

And then there is the commentary from Austen about the reading and writing of novels:

leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.

To be asked what one is reading and to reply “only a novel” is the norm but within that novel one finds on display the “the greatest powers of the mind” revealing the “most thorough knowledge of human nature” and doing it with wit and humor. I could hear Austen tsking, “only a novel! Humph!”

This being a Jane Austen novel our plain heroine gets her fella in spite of herself and the no-good machinations of the good-for-nothing selfish money grubbers. I first read this book so long ago that I had quite forgotten most of it. I seem to recall not being all that impressed by it back then when I was twenty-something. I didn’t know much about real gothic novels, certainly hadn’t read any, and so much of the humor was lost on me. Now, thanks to the RIP Challenge, for which I chose to reread Norhtanger Abbey, I have read quite a few gothic novels and this time around thoroughly enjoyed the humor. And with so much mention of Mysteries of Udolpho in the book, I immediately began reading it when I finished Austen. What fun!

It’s time for the annual Readers Imbibing Peril or RIP for short, Carl’s seasonal reading event encouraging all and sundry to enjoy some atmospheric creepy (or scary) gothic horror supernatural goodness. This is year number seven. The event runs from September 1st through one of my favorite holidays, Halloween.

I will be attempting Peril the First which involves reading four books. Last year I went for Victorian gothic goodness. This year I am mixing it up with something old and several new. Here is what I plan on reading in no particular order:

• Dark Matter by Michelle Paver. It hasn’t been published in the US and while I can get used copies online I want new and so will be making my first order from Book Depository. I have so far managed to avoid buying from them feeling like it will be a slippery slope. We’ll see if I start sliding or not. Anyway, the book, which several bloggers have already read and enjoyed, is a ghost story set in the far north.
• The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen. First published as a story in 1890, Machen turned it into a book in 1894. It was declared degenerate and horrific at the time but has since become classic horror. Insanity, sex, the god Pan, a sinister and beautiful woman. What more could anyone want?
• This New & Poisonous Air : Stories by Adam McOmber is a book of short stories that blend historical fiction, fantasy and the macabre. It came to my attention not long ago via Danielle. It seems like it should be fun.
• Finally, Affinity by Sarah Waters. I thought about doing a group read of The Little Stranger with other RIPpers, but decided that I was more in the mood for spiritualism and seances.

So there are my four. I am looking forward to all of them and seeing what others joining in the event that is RIP are reading. A good time is sure to be had by all. Will you be participating?

The Helmet of Horror by Victor Pelevin isn’t especially horrific in the usual RIP kind of way as in giant helmets falling from the sky and killing the Prince on his wedding day in Castle Otranto. Or, rather, I suppose it is but the horror is of the existential sort rather than the something weird and creepy is out there and going to get me sort. Except there is something creepy out there in the form of a Minotaur and two dwarves. But are they really there?

The Helmet of Horror is part of the Canongate Myths series and retells the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. The story spools out in a private online chat room. Each of the characters wakes up in a room with a bed and a desk and a computer. They have no idea how they got there. They don’t get to choose their screen names and they quickly discover that their conversation is being monitored and censored – all the swearing is xxx out as is anything they say about their real names or professions. They can talk freely about their situation and what they discover outside their doors, and what they think the meaning of it all is. Theseus is the crux of it all and finally, in the end when he arrives, the game is up.

What that game is, well, it involves the Helmet of Horror. It also involves questioning what is real and what isn’t and whether it matters in the end. Is reality created by someone or something else? Do we create our own reality? What constitutes real anyway? The fact that the conversation takes place in virtual reality adds an entire other layer.

I enjoyed the book even though I had to read the last ten pages twice to figure out what happened. I wasn’t wowed by the book though, which could have something to do with reading it on the train. The book reads fast and I think it would benefit most from reading in it in one or two long chunks. I have never read Pelevin before and I do want to read something else by him. I found Helmet of Horror to be well written and creatively conceived, just not quite the right time or place for me to read it. These things happen.

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole was originally published in 1764 and is commonly considered to be the first gothic novel. The first edition title was The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto. Quite the mouthful! The novel was presented as a translation of a manuscript printed in Naples in 1529 but the manuscript’s story is claimed to have come from a still older story dating back to the Crusades. Critics of the time took it for a medieval romance and some really believed it was a translation.

The novel was so successful, however, that Walpole acknowledged his authorship in later editions. In the introduction he explains the novel is an attempt to blend ancient and modern romance — pre-novel prose of the fantastic with the modern novel of the supposedly real (real people, real places, real situations).

The Castle of Otranto has many of the elements that become standard gothic tropes: virginal maiden (Matilda, Isabella), foolish older woman (Hippolita), Hero (Theodore), tyrant (Manfred), servants as comic relief/ stupid or gossipy servants, clergy (Father Jerome), setting (castle/church/secret tunnels), a prophecy, omens, a hermit, the supernatural.

And melodrama. Can’t forget the melodrama. This book hits the ground running and doesn’t let up for a second. Manfred’s son is killed on his wedding day by a giant helmet that appears from nowhere. Manfred has no more male heirs and is therefore in danger of losing his rights to the castle and surrounding lands. He therefore proposes to Princess Isabella, the woman his son was going to marry. Manfred will divorce his wife and Isabella will give him an heir. Isabella flees the castle through secret tunnels, one of which connects the castle to the church.

There are signs and portents that Manfred is committing grave deeds and his days as Prince are numbered. The feathers on the top of the helmet in the castle courtyard wave ominously on occasion and a mysterious knight appears with a large retinue and a giant sword, companion to the giant helmet. There is also a possible ghost spied by Manfred and others at various times as well as a giant foot.

But Manfred is nothing if not single-minded in his pursuit of Isabella. We are assured early in the novel that Manfred is not a bad man and then he proceeds to prove that, while he may have once been a good man, he is no longer:

Manfred, though persuaded, like his wife, that the vision had been no work of fancy, recovered a little from the tempest of mind into which so many strange events had thrown him. Ashamed, too, of his inhuman treatment of a Princess who returned every injury with new marks of tenderness and duty, he felt returning love forcing itself into his eyes; but not less ashamed of feeling remorse towards one against whom he was inwardly meditating a yet more bitter outrage, he curbed the yearnings of his heart, and did not dare to lean even towards pity. The next transition of his soul was to exquisite villainy.

I love that last line, “The next transition of his soul was to exquisite villainy.” Most excellent!

No more about the plot. You have to read it to believe it. And reading it is great fun. I expected it to be completely silly, and it was, but it was also engaging and kept me turning those e-book pages. I can imagine it must have been frightening and shocking to readers back in the day when there was no gothic tradition and cliche for it to fall into. Readers today might roll their eyes a bit and giggle now and then, but it is still well worth the read, especially as a

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu was first published in 1872. Carmilla is a vampire story and predates Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years. I expected a story that would be outrageous and colored with the supernatural, melodramatic and worthy of an eye roll or two. What I got was something else entirely.

In case you don’t know it, the plot centers around Laura, a girl of 18. She lives with her widowed father in a remote castle in Styria in the middle of a forest. The closest neighbors are a few miles away. Laura’s only real company are her two governesses. One evening while the three of them and Laura’s father were out looking at a particularly bright moon, a carriage comes careening around the bend and flips over. Everyone inside is more or less fine, except Carmilla, a girl of Laura’s age, who is shaken and a bit in shock. The girl’s mother is in a panic as she is in a hurry to get somewhere and can’t waste time waiting for her daughter to recover. Laura’s father insists that they leave the girl with them even though the mother says she will not be able to return for her for three months. But after more insisting, Carmilla is left in the care of complete strangers. The mother mentions that the girl has a delicate constitution and has just recovered from a long illness and is forbidden to talk about who she is and where her family is from.

Carmilla recovers soon enough and she and Laura become close friends. It also turns out that when they were each six, they had had a dream in which the other one had appeared as her older self. When Laura had her dream as a child she awoke screaming because she had been bitten on the chest but no marks were found and no one thought anything of it.

Carmilla is pale and tends to sleep late. She doesn’t leave her room until after 1 in the afternoon. Soon reports of girls mysteriously dying in the area filter in to the castle. And when paintings that had been sent out for restoration are delivered, one of them painted in 1698 of Mircalla, Countess of Karnstein looks exactly like Carmilla. Carmilla manages to pass off the resemblance by admitting that she is a descendent of the Countess. Right.

The book is really well written and compelling even though there were a few moments I wondered how Laura and her father could be so blind to what was going on. What surprised me most though was the sex. Where Dracula is a somewhat sexy novel, it doesn’t hold a candle to Carmilla:

blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.”

Steamy! And there are plenty of other passages like that one.

Carmilla’s victims are always girls while Stoker makes Dracula clearly heterosexual and sets him up as a danger to the proper containment of female sexuality. Le Fanu does not condemn either Carmilla or Laura’s sexuality. Instead, sex is a way to lull Laura’s anxiety and lure her to accepting death. I must say though that as often as Laura finds herself attracted to Carmilla, she feels as though she is in a trance and is sometimes disgusted with herself and hates Carmilla. I’m sure there is lots of psycho-sexual analysis that can be done with this story, but I’ll leave it there. A tease.

If you have read Dracula but not Carmilla you really

Friday evening Bookman and I settled in with a bowl of popcorn to watch some “scary.” The “scary” was Shades of Darkness, Disc 1, a television show that appeared in the 1980s. On the disc was three “episodes,” The Lady’s Maid’s Bell, Afterwards, and The Maze.

Having recently read Wharton’s story “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” this is the one I was most interested in. Bookman has not read the story so I was curious to see what he thought. The dramatization definitely pushed the story in a particular direction but also left some things unanswered, like what was the ghost of Emma Saxon, the former lady’s maid, after. When it was over, Bookman felt it left him wondering too much. He wanted closure. Since I knew what to expect, I was more bothered that there was less open endedness to the film than there was in the story. Overall we thought the film was fair but lacking in scary.

“Afterwards” is also from an Edith Wharton story. I didn’t know anything about this one. A newly rich American couple buy themselves an English country manor house. They jokingly ask the agent if the house came with a ghost too. The agent said, reluctantly, that yes, it did but an odd one. It seems this particular ghost is not recognized as a ghost until afterwards. This one did give me a little chill because I spent a good part of it trying to figure out who was the ghost. When the ghost does appear and the reason it appears as well as the aftermath, it’s good in a not good ghostly way.

The third episode, “The Maze” is also based on a story this one by C.H.B. Kitchin, an author I have not heard of. In this one a youngish couple moves into the house the woman/wife grew up in. There is a maze in the garden and she forbids her daughter, Daisy, to play in it. But of course Daisy disobeys and she meets a man there. We gradually learn from the mother that she knows who this man is and that he is a ghost, that in life he had met with some accident. But the story was moving so slowly and a little confusedly that we didn’t finish watching it. Perhaps this one would be better on paper.

The evening was not a resounding success. Moderately enjoyable. I suppose this is what you get when the really scary stuff gives you nightmares. I wanted to be scared but not really scared, just creeped out a little but in this case only “Afterwards” came close with its little chill.

I sat down today and thought I had nothing to write about but then I remembered that I had several M.R. James stories read and unblogged. Saved! Whew!

“Count Magus.” Mr. Wraxall is touring Sweden with the intent of writing a travel book that includes the histories of some Swedish families. His researches take him to the old manor house of Count Magnus. The family gives him access to whatever he wants. This story was pretty good. There is a tale from a guest at the inn Where Mr. Wraxall is staying about three men who decided to hunt on the Count’s lands soon after his death and met with a bad end. One of the men had his face sucked off. Pretty gruesome for a James story. Then there is the coffin of the Count that has three metal locks on it and as Mr. Wraxall studies the inscriptions the locks gradually drop off and… You’ll have to read the story to find out!

” ‘Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.’ ” This I think is my favorite James story so far. it was especially fun reading this one since a year or so ago the Slaves of Golconda read Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black which is based on this short story. I can’t say Hill’s novel wowed me, but I loved the James story.

Professor Parkins goes on holiday to the town of Burnstow to play some golf. He wanted a large room and the only one the inn had available had an extra bed in it. Not ideal, but good enough. One of Parkin’s colleagues asked him to check out some ruins in the area for him to determine if they would be worthy of excavation. Parkins obliges. While at the ruins having a look around he discovered what looked like the base of an altar. Curiosity gets the best of him and he starts digging around and discovers a small cavity, reaches in his hand — no don’t do it! — and pulls out a dirty metal tube. Back at the inn that night he cleans it up and discovers it is a whistle. He puts it to his lips –No don’t do it! Haven’t you seen the movies where people who do stupid stuff like this never end well? — he puts the whistle to his lips and blows. No sound comes out so he blows again. Silly Parkins. You’ll have to read the story to find out what happens, only let’s just say that the other bed in the room doesn’t remain empty.

“The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.” This story was like the Da Vinci Code only better written. I shouldn’t say that since I have never read Brown’s book. In this story we have the old Abbey Church of Steinfeld and an antiquary doing some research there. A particular window with three saints on it turns out to be a message regarding the location of a treasure hidden away by a long ago Abbot. The clues are decoded and the treasure located, but the treasure has a protector. Cue evil laugh.

“A School Story.” This one was not memorable. In fact, so unmemorable I don’t even remember what it was about.

“The Rose Garden.” This one has a haunted garden which was a lot of fun. It wasn’t always a garden. Once long ago there was scaffold there where some men were hung. The posts were left there for reasons you will have to read the story to find out about. But the posts get incorporated into a little garden room in later years. When the now lady of the house decides she wants to turn that part of the garden into a rose garden and wants the posts and seats from the now dilapidated garden room removed…things happen.

Sorry I have to be so vague, but I don’t want to ruin any of the stories for you. Except for the school one, these M.R. James stories have been great fun. Not high literature by any means, but enjoyable with some nice shivers along the spine now and then.

All of these stories I have read in

The Lady’s Maid’s Bell by Edith Wharton is one of those ghost stories that works by being so ambiguous the reader is forced to fill in the blanks with whatever frightens them most. It would be interesting to take a survey from people who have read this story asking for their interpretation of events.

The outline of the story goes like this. A lady’s maid named Hartley, who is also our narrator, is between jobs because she was ill with typhoid. Now recovered, her friend Mrs. Railton gets her a position as the lady’s maid to Mrs. Brympton, a youngish lady, something of an invalid, who lives year-round at her country house because town is too fatiguing for her. The place is old and gloomy and solitary. Mrs. Brympton’s two children died and her husband is often away. The former maid, Emma Saxon, died the previous spring after twenty years of devoted service and since then none of the attempted replacements have stayed for longer than a few weeks. But Hartley doesn’t find that out until later.

Once installed as Mrs. Brymtpon’s maid, she makes friends with the servants who refuse to talk about the room across from Hartley’s that is to always remain locked. Nor will anyone tell her why Mrs. Brympton won’t ring for her but instead always sends the housemaid Agnes to fetch her.

The house is indeed lonely. The only ones there are the servants and Mrs. Brympton. The only regular visitor is Mr. Ranford, a gentleman who lives in the neighborhood. Mr. Brympton finally puts in an appearance and gives Hartley a good look up and down. But Hartley

was not the kind of morsel he was after. The typhoid had served me well enough in one way: it kept that kind of gentleman at arm’s-length.

None of the servants like Mr. Brympton and he and his wife are not on the best of terms. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief when he leaves.

Time goes by. Hartley is a bit bothered by the locked room. Sometimes at night she imagines she hears noises behind its door.

One night when Mr. Brympton is at home, Hartley is startled awake by the ringing of her bell. Before she can collect herself and put on clothes she hears the locked door open and someone hurry down the hall. Do you see where this is going? I won’t say anything further.

There are important things that happen going forward but that are never answered or not answered satisfactorily. So when we reach the conclusion there are any number of explanations for what happens but no definite proof that any of them are correct. Suicide, murder, infidelities, bad health, overactive imagination? Something else?

At first the refusal of the story to reveal its secrets bothered me. It made me grumpy and I wanted to write about how stupid it all is. But the more I let it sit the better the story becomes. It’s one that needs time to seep in and work on your brain and imagination and at this point it is starting to be kind of creepy for me. If I think about it much more I’ll probably dream about it and that won’t do. Except now I can’t stop thinking about it. That evil Edith Wharton!

In case you want to read the story for yourself it is available for free from many places on the web. The story was originally published in the collection The Descent of Man which can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg or Amazon if you have a Kindle. I also read this story for the R.I.P. Challenge. I love this time of year!

Today’s post is a collaborative ghost story being written by several bloggers. Visit Smithereens first for the beginning of the story.

As I looked up, my smile froze and my heart skipped a beat…

The man was tall and thin. His face pale, his cheeks hollow and his eyes sunken. He stared straight ahead. “Working late too?” I asked.

He acted like I wasn’t there.

“We need to get out in the daylight more often, these fluorescent lights aren’t doing much for the ol’ complexion.”

Still no response. I shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.

“What slave-driver do you work for? I bet you’re in the legal department, right?”

The man didn’t move a muscle.

I stared at the numbers above the elevator door. None of them were lit. It didn’t even feel like we were moving.

“This elevator sure is slow tonight,” I said. I reached over and pushed the ground floor button again. I pushed it again. And then I kept pushing it, fast.

“This elevator doesn’t stop at that floor,” said the man. I don’t know what unsettled me more, that the man finally spoke or the deep, dusty sound of his voice.

I laughed nervously and pushed the button again.

“This elevator only stops when it gets to the bottom,” said the man.

“You know, that’s not very funny,” I said. My voice came out in a higher pitch than I would have liked. I sounded scared, not the thing you want to sound stuck in an elevator with a crazy man. I backed away from him as far as I could get which admittedly wasn’t very far. I reached into my bag searching for the mace I kept there. But if I had to use it in an elevator I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t be incapacitated too. I had to take my chances. My hand closed on it and found the trigger, if he made a move I was ready.

But he didn’t move. He just stood there staring straight ahead.

After what seemed like a very long time, the elevator bell dinged. I relaxed a little, finally I could get out of here. The elevator doors slid open…

(To be continued…)

The next chapter will be at Incurable Logophilia. Be sure to check out the list of participants and the order. You don’t want to miss what happens next!

Sorry if you’re tired of Dracula, but there is a passage I wanted to share that didn’t really fit into any of the other posts.

Jonathan Harker is at Castle Dracula in Transylvania, a lonely in the middle of nowhere kind of place. Dracula, it turns out, has quite a library and speaks impeccable English though slightly stilted and oddly accented at times. Harker is in the library looking at all the books when Dracula enters:

‘I am glad you found your way her [to the library], for I am sure there is much that will interest you. These friends’–and he laid his hand on some of the books–’have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is. But alas! as yet I only know your tongue through books. To you, my friend, I look that I know it to speak.’

Ah the veiled message of Dracula’s hope for London, his desire to “share its life, its change, its death” is kind of creepy. But what I like best about this passage is that Dracula is a reader. I would love to see what books he has in his library. What does Dracula read? And does he kick back in his coffin with a fresh glass of blood to enjoy his book? Does he dare read past dawn? And I wonder how he acquired all his books? I mean, it’s not like he can pop over to Barnes and Noble or Waterstones for a coffee drink and a browse or have Amazon deliver to his door. There is a band of Gypsies that regularly visit the castle and do things for him so maybe they bring him books? Or maybe he has raided the libraries of all the bookish folk in the surrounding area? Be careful, that tapping at the window might not be a tree branch in the wind, it could be Dracula coming for a snack and your books!

Yesterday I tried to provide a little context for Dracula. Today let’s talk about sex. There are only five female characters in the book. Three of them are Dracula’s vampire women at his castle. They only make a couple brief appearances, most notably when Jonathan Harker disobeys Dracula and falls asleep in a room other than his own. Harker wakes up to the three vampire women discussing who gets a piece of him first. They are pretty and voluptuous and oh so desirable. Harker wants them and fears them at the same time. Lucky for him Dracula shows up and saves him.

They make another appearance towards the end of the book when Van Helsing enters the castle with the express purpose of killing them. It is still daylight outside and so they are sleeping in their coffins. He gazes on their sleeping forms, noting how beautiful they are, and is momentarily transfixed with longing for them. But Van Helsing being the manly man he is, he shakes it off and stakes them each through the heart and then cuts off their heads.

The women we are most interested in are Lucy and Mina. Lucy and Mina are friends but where Lucy is an upper class lady, Mina must work for a living. Lucy is the pure and proper Victorian lady. She is beautiful and blond, is lively but in a proper way. In one day she is proposed to by three different men, Quincey, an American from Texas, Dr. Seward, a gentleman who runs the mental institution, and Arthur who before the book is over becomes Lord Godalming. Arthur is, of course, the best match and happens to be the one who Lucy is in love with and rightly accepts him. Unfortunately for the pair, Dracula gets between them.

Lucy of course becomes a vampire. It is a long and drawn out process of changing not like in the movies. Her fiance, her two rejectees, and Van Helsing who arrives to help Dr. Seward with the vampire problem, all love her and do their best to save her. It begins with a blood transfusion from her fiance. But Arthur’s blood, the best and purest, not only because he is her fiance but also because of his aristocratic standing, is rightfully the first donor. But it is not enough. Dracula keeps finding a way to get to Lucy and she ends up receiving transfusions from all the other men as well. But Van Helsing doesn’t want Arthur to know so he won’t be jealous about the exchange of bodily fluids.

When Lucy becomes a vampire her sexuality is unleashed. Her blond hair turns dark, her lips are bright red, and she is suddenly voluptuous. She feeds off babies and small children and horrifies the men when they come to confront her by throwing the toddler she was holding in her arms at the time down onto the ground. Vampire Lucy is now unclean, carnal and unspiritual. Dr. Seward who loved her so now hates and loathes her and longs to kill her. But the kill is Arthur’s right. They return to Lucy’s tomb when it is still daylight and she is in her coffin. Arthur is to stake her through the heart. When he drives in the stake Lucy’s body “shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions” but Arthur kept on:

He looked like a figure of Thor as his trembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake

All this while the other men watch and urge him on. When the work is done Lucy returns to her pure, blond self. Arthur has redeemed her from the taint of Dracula. But Lucy is never blamed for her infidelity. She sleepwalks and Dracula claimed her while she was sleeping, therefore she did not willing give herself to him and she can be forgiven.

Mina with her man’s brain and woman’s heart, who makes sly remarks disparaging the “New Woman,” making sure that we all know despite her knowledge of shorthand and her typing skills she learned them all to help her husband Jonathan the lawyer. Mina is the one who puts together Dracula’s story from the various letters

This is my first time reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That I am no longer a Dracula virgin is oh so appropriate to a novel rife with sex and fear of “the other.” But I get ahead of myself.

The story of Dracula is one that has captured the cultural imagination and his story has been told in countless movies (none of which accurately recreate the novel). Dracula was not the first popular vampire story, however. Stoker was greatly influenced by Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, even going so far as to locate Dracula’s castle in Styria before moving it later in a rewrite to Transylvania which had more resonance and fear for Stoker’s time due to the issue of the “Eastern Question,” a racial fear that is an undercurrent throughout the novel.

Dracula was first published in 1897 and has never been out of print. So as to provide a little context, H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau was published the year before. 1897 also saw Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Kipling’s poem “The Vampire,” H.G. Well’s The Invisible Man, and Freud coining the term “psychoanalysis.” A year later, in 1898, Marie Curie discovered radium. And in 1899, Dracula was finally published in America.

Whereas Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau caused a big uproar and controversy, not a single reviewer at the time made a comment about the sexuality, race, or blood contamination in Dracula somehow managing to not even make any connections with the syphilis epidemic that was raging in London at the time (Stoker died of syphilis in 1912).

Instead, reviews stuck to the safety of Dracula being a tale of fantastic horror. A Daily Mail review in 1897 suggests

Persons of small courage and weak nerves should confine their reading of these gruesome pages strictly to the hours between dawn and sunset.

A review in the Bookman focuses on the good v. evil aspect of the book, the triumph of “human skill and courage pitted against inhuman wrong and superhuman strength.” It’s curious that they didn’t at least remark about the sexual nature of the book. But then perhaps that is wrapped up in the good v. evil point of view, sex is evil and chastity is good or something like that.

For me the horror of the book was the sexuality and how so very misogynistic it all is. On a gender side note, I found it interesting how often the men in the book broke down and cried and how frequently they told each other what manly men they were while the women hardly cried at all, remaining steady pillars of emotional strength for the most part.

I want to talk about the way Lucy and Mina are portrayed and their relationship with Dracula and the men but that is too long for one post and I will save it for tomorrow.