Arts
Chilling tales for these humid, lockdown nights
Being cooped up at home can get dispiriting and claustrophobic – till you find some vicarious means to usher in some excitement.
For centuries, tales of supernatural terror have been the companions of people in dark snowbound regions, when winter means being self-isolated for weeks or months.
Even here in the April heat, a little bit of the ghostly and the spine-chilling can be a welcome diversion for your familyevenings, or devoured perched anywhere, alone on the phone.
Here we suggest some of the old masters of the frisson- whose works can be read online free. Even if a tad old fashioned, you will find them atmospheric and chilling- timeless whether they were told at an old Paleolithic fire, or on a night when there’s nothing on the TV.
M.R. James
The sometime provost of Eton was a Cambridge scholar and antiquarian who created the classic English ghost story. He mingled his love for antiquarianism and academia- old manuscripts, old cathedrals and churches, lost crowns from Anglo-Saxon England even- with the supernatural.
James’s spooks are traditional, subtle and sinister. A divinity scholar who loved old manuscripts, he wrote stories to be told by a Christmas fire in the company of other Cambridge dons. Most stories feature antiquarians who tumble into all kinds of ‘terrors’- from a devil from King Solomon’s time haunting an old scrapbook with illuminated medieval leaves of paper, to an old witch haunting an ash tree- and all kinds of creatures flitting through an ancient English landscape.
Often the stories have old Latin texts or parts of historical documents which the antiquarian protagonists discover on their quests- pastiched like authentic documents by James who was a great mimic. He created a deliciously sinister atmosphere that deepens as the story progresses. It is this haunting evil against a gracious- often English- old world setting and antiquarian detail that makes the stories so satisfying. “Understatement and omission” are the names of his game. The ghosts terrify with their half-formed creeping vagueness.
The graphic, sensational age we live in- with a murder in every other chapter- is all the more reason to return to the monastic M. R. James- whose subtle shivers of haunted dolls’ houses to ‘wailing wells’ leave an afterglow like true stories with their historical detail- as if spirited from a real old antiquarian’s diary.
Read books and stories by M. R. James on Gutenberg.org and thin-ghost.org
Sheridan Le Fanu
This ‘Irish Walter Scott’ gave the bat wings to Bram Stoker and Dracula: Le Fanu’s own vampire novel, called Carmilla, was in fact written 26 years before Dracula.
To read Le Fanu is also to break the code of good old M. R. James- because the former seems to have taught the latter all about ‘tone and effect’ which James was to deploy so successfully.
Le Fanu avoided overt supernatural effects. In the best of his horror writing, “the supernatural is implied, but a natural explanation is also possible”. With this elegant ambiguity he was to influence later films as well.
Make a note to read In a Glass Darkly, which has a story about a ‘demon monkey’ stalking an English vicar, and a dwarf haunting a sea captain.
Le Fanu can be read on Gutenberg.org, manybooks.net and freeditorial.com
William Hope Hodgson
The father of all ghost seers and ghost finders was Carnacki. This svelte Edwardian investigated hauntings, using pentacles as well as scientific methods.
His creator Hodgson was a prolific writer, who predictably sounds an incurable romantic- having run away from boarding school to be a sailor aged 13!
The Carnacki stories bring out a delicious blend of the Gothic detective yarn with all the supernatural thrills of expelling ghosts and demons from grand houses.
Hodgson also wrote horror stories of a different ilk. If you like the macabre cosmic kind of horror (the darkest chocolate you can get) there is The Night Land and The House on the Borderland. Feel free to lose yourself in a nightmare.
Books by William Hodgson are available on globalgreyebooks.com, manybooks.net, and Gutenberg.org
Bram Stoker- paled by Dracula
The count from Transylvania had many obscure siblings: Bram Stoker created other horror novels influenced by folklore, just as the aristocratic vampire was based on a bloodthirsty feudal prince from medieval Romania.
Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm is a contemporary but classic adventure of a young heir coming to historic Mercia from Australia and having to battle many supernatural odds, including the ‘worm’ who is a giant snake living under the earth. These worms, said to be kin to dragons, were superstitiously dreaded in ancient Britain.
The Jewel of Seven Stars in contrast is a horror story set against digs in Egypt, where a young man gets pulled into an archaeologist’s plot to revive the mummy of Queen Tera.
Fantastic or classic as they seem, be warned that they ramble a bit- having been written on the cusp of the twentieth century, when the fast paced thriller was unknown, and would have been rather a dizzying thing indeed.
Visit gutenberg.org, globalgreyebooks.com, manybooks.net and freeditorial.com for Bram Stoker’s dark fantasies.