Before we get to the reviews, I just want to say that if I did my math right⊠Notebook readers collectively donated over $1500 to Hurricane Helene relief efforts! Thank you so much!! Thatâs a jump from even three days ago. <3 <3 <3
Secondly, I already have plans to reread a very upsetting book and write about it for Notebook so I donât think I have it in my to reread this one and write about it⊠but⊠if you want to read a really creepy, canât sleep They will eat me, collection of horror stories, check out Attila Veresâs The Black Maybe. And if you want to read a collection of ghost stories that will not interfere with your sleep, then M.R. James (below) is your man.
Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories (M.R. James, collected 2005)
Every October I enter âspooky movie watching seasonâ with two resolutions: first, that I will watch the infamously disgusting French âNew Extremityâ film Martyrs, and, second, that I will watch Night of the Demon, the movie used for the beginning of the music video of Kate Bushâs âHounds of Love.â Which is also an adaptation of M.R. Jamesâs short story âCasting the Runes.â Which is in this collection. Which is why I am telling you this. I ordered the Bluray of Night of the Demon so thatâs one step closer on that score. I imagine Iâll get to Martyrs⊠in, letâs see⊠2055? No, probably later.
After I finished the second story in this collection (âLost Heartsâ) I began thinking to myself that M.R. Jamesâs characters, much like H.P. Lovecraftâs, are people who delve a bit too deeply into things they shouldnât know )though, unlike Lovecraftâs, they generally get safely away from their forbidden knowledge unless they themselves are malicious). But H.P. Lovecraftâs tend to be autodidacts and also off-puttingly weird. M.R. Jamesâs are generally not only scholars1 but painfully boring people.2 Mr. Abney of âLost Heartsâ is described to in these terms:
The Professor of Greek at Cambridge had been heard to say that no one knew more of the religious beliefs of the later pagans than did the owner of Aswarby. Certainly his library contained all the then available books bearing on the Mysteries, the Orphic poems, the worship of Mithras, and the Neo-Platonists. In the marble-paved hall stood a fine group of Mithras slaying a bull, which had been imported from the Levant at great expense by the owner. He had contributed a description of it to the Gentlemanâs Magazine, and he had written a remarkable series of articles in the Critical Museum on the superstitions of the Romans of the Lower Empire. He was looked upon, in fine, as a man wrapped up in his books, and it was a matter of great surprise among his neighbours that he should even have heard of his orphan cousin, Stephen Elliott, much more that he should have volunteered to make him an inmate of Aswarby Hall.
Should it feel surprising, then, that somebody puttering about so much in the past is in fact⊠sacrificing children for some bizarre ritual of his own? Not really. I donât think M.R. James views scholarly unworldliness as some sort of morally dangerous situationâjust that people who choose detachment from every day reality do so for different reasons, and some of those reasons are less a certain angelic incompetence at normal life than a basic dislike of other human beings. (In other stories, such as âStalls of Barchester Cathedral,â itâs irritated competence that rather leads somebody down a bad path.)
In his introduction to this collection, S.T. Joshi quotes Lovecraft as saying that âthe average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairyâa sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and manâand usually touched before it is seen.â Joshi goes onto his own commentary about why he believes this to be the case, but I will now offer a bit of my own.
One has to do with doubt: our eyes do deceive us but our sense of touch generally doesnât. (Hence why visual distortion was such a favorite of a philosopher like Descartes.) We do often see things that arenât there, and even hear things that arenât there, but the start of touching something that was not supposed to be there is a totally different thing. And while some people have âtactileâ dreams, I would guess that itâs a lot like reading in dreams (which I often do)ânot unheard of, but uncommon.
So, from âCasting the Runes,â this related experience is very viscerally creepy in a way simply seeing something in the darkness with an inhuman shape would not be:
Either an economical suburban company had decided that their light would not be required in the small hours, and had stopped working, or else something was wrong with the meter; the effect was in any case that the electric light was off. The obvious course was to find a match, and also to consult his watch: he might as well know how many hours of discomfort awaited him. So he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and he declares, not the mouth of a human being. I do not think it is any use to guess what he said or did; but he was in a spare room with the door locked and his ear to it before he was clearly conscious again. And there he spent the rest of a most miserable night, looking every moment for some fumbling at the door: but nothing came.
The second partâfor meâis that these academics are so well-wadded with learning, so pleasantly adrift from the times in which they live, that the idea something can reach out and touch them is a more basic danger than seeing something odd or unpleasant. These are people used to looking at and interpreting strange things of the past, after all. Even touching them! But nobody expects to be⊠touched back.
And then also nasty tactile sensations have a way of lingeringâwhen, in ââOh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Ladââ weâre told the ghost feels like wet linen, itâs easy to imagine what an unpleasant surprise that wold be.âŠ
Fun fact: Canadian indie perfume brand Pulp has a series of M.R. James perfumes. Iâve never tried anything from Pulp and have no idea if theyâre good but they are infamously slow in shipping things out so do not order expecting them by Halloween. But then M.R. Jamesâs true season is Christmas.
Little Sisters and Other Stories (Vonda McIntyre, collected 2024)
Fireflood and Other Stories (Vonda McIntyre, 1979)
Technically Vonda McIntyre is sci-fi and not horror, but thereâs something nasty about these stories that made me feel they qualified. Many of these stories are really ambiguous snapshots of nightmare futures; like in âSpectra,â which is narrated to us by somebody who was taken by somebody (who?) and put to work at ambiguous pattern-matching, a process which involved the removal of her eyes:
The bands of light and dark fade. I stop. If I tried to keep working without information I would be punished again. It is time for exercise. They want to keep us healthy. The eyepieces withdraw from my dead sockets and the helmet lifts from my head. The world turns to gray, featureless, formless shapes.
Who is doing this to her? Why are they doing it to her? What is her âworkâ even accomplishing? She doesnât know and neither do we. She has no avenue out of this situation. She will die here, eventually, when she can longer perform her ambiguous purpose. In other stories, we meet people who have been genetically modified into mythological beings like centaurs for the amusement of others; in still more, different humans who have been genetically modified to perform certain roles in space exploration, except that exploration has now been abandoned, leaving them useless. In another story, people have been genetically modified again to be brilliant, but also to die at the age of thirty.
Even in a story where the adoption of a life no longer truly âhumanâ is voluntary and enthusiastic (âAztecs,â where some people have their hearts removed to become capable of conscious space travel), there is a price exacted that is incommunicable to those who wish to undergo the process, which can only be learned after the irrevocable step has been taken. But âAztecsâ is really the exception, as is the story âOf Mist, and Grass, and Snake,â where the healer has also voluntarily accepted a profession that sets her apart from everyday life.
In McIntyreâs stories, power is the boot that is constantly in your face. You are either crushed, creatively adapt, or, very rarely, you get a boot of your own. There are no other options. The stakes are always survival, though sometimes survival in a spiritual sense really means dying; in âThanatos,â somebody manages to kill herself rather than end up in a situation analogous to the one in âSpectra.â They are grim stories that left me feeling a little dirty after I read them; that is to say, theyâre good.
Though I think the Mr. Abney in âLost Heartsâ is something between an autodidact and a scholarâor rather he occupies some third space that doesnât really exist in America (and possibly no longer exists in England). Come to think of it, so does Karswell in âCasting the Runes,â right?
That the central characters of a James story are really meant to feel boring was driven home to me when reading âThe Mezzotint,â with its jokes about how awful golf is:
He lighted the candles, for it was now dark, made the tea, and supplied the friend with whom he had been playing golf (for I believe the authorities of the University I write of indulge in that pursuit by way of relaxation); and tea was taken to the accompaniment of a discussion which golfing persons can imagine for themselves, but which the conscientious writer has no right to inflict upon any non-golfing persons.
Great reading of M.R. James. Heâs the kind of guy I feel like works best when youâre reading him alone in a cozy room, which I suppose is where his protagonists usually make their first blunder. I like how the relationship is kind of mutual, how the scholars are poking their heads into where they donât belong and in response the ghosts etc poke their own heads into this realm. Thatâs a common thing in horror, but James does it really well. Respect the boundaries, fellas! Also, Night of the Demon rules.
Quick question: did you ever read any John Bellairs as a kid?
Nice to hear a bit more about McIntyre; she was an early student of Delanyâs and her work was praised, but then she got diverted into writing Star Trek novelizations. I think she gave Sulu his canonical first name?