CRYSTAL GAZING

May Sinclair. The Flaw in the Crystal and Other Uncanny Tales. Edited by Mike Ashley. British Library 2023.

May Sinclair (1863 – 1946) was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair. She wrote two dozen novels, short stories, philosophy and poetry. Her supernatural fiction is a small but impressive body of work. Sinclair was influenced by the writings of Freud and psycho-analysis in general. She was a supporter of the Medico Psychological Clinic in London. 

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BUT IS IT HORROR?

Colin Fleming, Scrooge. Liverpool University Press (Devil's Advocates) 2021.

Anyone expecting a dispassionate review of the 1951 film Scrooge directed by Brian Desmond Hurst and of course starring Alastair Sim as Scrooge and Michael Hordern as Jacob Marley will find the opposite. Fleming's review is a personal homage to the film but also it is very much more than that. It is a personal confession of the importance the film has played in his life. 

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FEAR IN THE FACE OF NATURE

Algernon Blackwood, The Unknown: Weird Writings, 1900-1937, edited by Henry Bartholomew. Handheld Press, 2023.

The Unknown is an Algernon Blackwood anthology in four sections. (1) Canada, (2) Mountain, (3) Reincarnation, and (4) Imagination. Nine short stories and four essays. Henry Bartholomew provides an excellent introduction and his selection cannot be faulted for it conveys well Blackwood’s exhilarating and disturbing awe in the face of nature. 

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MAGIC AND THE MURDER QUEENS

Jem Bloomfield. Witchcraft and Paganism in Midcentury Women’s Detective Fiction. Cambridge Elements, Magic. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

At last! Finally, the rarefied world of academe has deigned to turn its august attention to magic, as in this series of Cambridge Elements short books. The full scope and ambition of this series is summed up on the back cover of this contribution: ‘Elements in Magic aims to restore the study of magic, broadly defined, to a central place within culture.

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DANGEROUS DIGGINGS

Amara Thornton and Katy Soar (Editors) Strange Relics; Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural, 1895-1954. Handheld Press, 2022.

To gather together a collection of short stories linking archaeology and the supernatural might appear blindingly obvious to fans of horror and ghost stories, as it has must have been done before. However I couldn’t find previous evidence of such a literary project. So, Strange Relics is a very welcome book: the intersection of the past and present, with ancient relics, being the catalyst for a disaster or profound shock, is a compelling idea.

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COURTING THE UNCANNY

Nina Antonia. Dancing with Salomé: Courting the Uncanny with Oscar Wilde & Friends. Trapart Books, 2021

The late nineteenth century in Western Europe and the USA was bristling with concepts that ran against the material aspect of bourgeois society. Religion was faced with Nonconformism, Spiritualism, mediumship, eastern-based philosophies and occult ritual societies such as the Golden Dawn. Socialism and Communism were spoken of more and more as both viable and desirable alternatives to Capitalism. 

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THE MONSTERS THAT MADE US

Tim Flight. Basilisks and Beowulf : Monsters in the Anglo Saxon World. Reaktion Books, 2021.

This is a well-researched and thought-provoking book, which shines a light on some of the cultural origins of our instinctive human fears. Fear of wolves, of snakes and serpents, of dense forests and deep seas, fear of isolation, fear of chaos and disorder. It tells us much about monsters and Anglo Saxons, but also quite a bit about ourselves.

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DEBATABLE DEATH

Sharon Rushton. The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein. Bodleian Library Publishing, 2021.

There have been any number of books, some reviewed in Magonia, which have examined the story of Frankenstein’s ‘creature’ from various perspectives: as an aspect of folklore and popular belief, as a literary theme, as a popular cultural icon. This book looks at Mary Shelley’s masterpiece as a presentation of the medical and scientific controversies of the era in which it was written.

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THE GAP IN THE PLOT

John Buchan. The Gap in the Curtain. Handheld Press, 2021. 

John Buchan is chiefly remembered for his spy novels featuring the adventurer hero Richard Hannay: the most famous being The Thirty Nine Steps. Yet he also wrote a considerable amount of supernatural and weird fiction – four collections were published from 1902 to1928. In 1932 came the novel The Gap in the Curtain exploring the idea of precognition. 

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THE RETURN OF PAN

Paul Robichaud. Pan, the Great God’s Modern Return. Reaktion Books, 2021.

‘The Greek god Pan...cosmic god of All; symbol of bestial lust; demon; protector of forests; cipher for Stuart monarchs; symbol of the latent powers in nature; terrifying god of the abyss; source of occult knowledge; symbol of gay love; guardian of wild animals; Horned God of the witches; ruler of nature spirits; archetype of the unconscious; and many more.’

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THE MACHINERY OF MYTH

Philip Ball. The Modern Myths. Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination. University of Chicago Press, 2021.

‘Myths are not choosy about where they inhabit, and I am not going to be choosy about where to find them...They erect a rough-hewn framework on which to hang our anxieties, fears and dreams.... Myths are promiscuous; they were post-modern before the concept existed, infiltrating and being shaped by popular culture.’

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EXPLORING THE GOTHIC MIND

Clive Bloom (Editor) The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

The foundations of the gothic novel were laid in the eighteenth century with The Castle of Otranto (1764), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1790) and The Monk (1796). This is a dark dungeon and secret passageway territory that I read as a teenager but have been unable to comfortably revisit. 

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SEX, DRUGS AND DOWN A HOLE

Angela Youngman. The Dark Side of Alice in Wonderland. Pen and Sword, 2021.

There has always been a rather dark cloud hovering over Alice in Wonderland. Starting with the nature of the relationship between Charles Dodgson – Lewis Carroll – and Alice Liddell, the original ‘Alice’. The story was made up, on the hoof as it were, one summer day in 1862, to amuse the ten-year-old Alice and her two sisters, daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, on a boat trip along the Isis in Oxford.

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PRE-HAUNTED AND RE-HAUNTED

Merlin Coverley. Hauntology, Ghosts of Future Pasts, Oldcastle Books, 2020.

Hauntology, Ghosts of Future Pasts is a book about hauntings, or more precisely the idea of haunting, and why, since the publication in 1848 of Marx and Engel’s The Communist Manifesto, we, meaning modern English society, have been pre-occupied with the supernatural. The term hauntology was first used by the philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1983 and describes, according to Merlin Coverley, “the ways in which the past returns to haunt the present.”

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VEILS AND DREAMS

James Machin (editor), Faunas: The Decorative Imagination of Arthur Machen. Strange Attractor Press, 2020.

We’re powerfully aware of Arthur Machen (1863-1947) as the author of some of the finest horror fiction of the 1890’s: weird, wonderful and decadent works both lyrical and mystical. The Great God Pan, The Novel of the Black Seal, The Novel of the White Powder, The Inmost Light, The Hill of Dreams and Machen’s masterpiece, The White People – a long story that ranks, for me, with the finest in English literature; its partly stream of consciousness narrative being remarkably effective, though very different from James Joyce or Virginia Woolf.

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MOONDARK

David Tibet (selected) The Moons at Your Door. Strange Attractor Press, 2016.

I realise that I’ve written this piece in the wrong order. The Moons at Your Door is the earlier David Tibet anthology of thirty 'hallucinatory tales' coming straight after my review of David’s latest book There is a Graveyard that Dwells in Man (2020). But I think he and Strange Attractor Press would appreciate this as both books subvert the norm and reverse the order of things and reality.

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WORDS FROM A GRAVEYARD

David Tibet (editor) There Is A Graveyard That Dwells In Man. Strange Attractor Press, 2020.

Before I discuss the pleasures to be found in David Tibet’s anthology of strange fiction I’d like to highlight this book as a desirable artefact. Of course the production values of Strange Attractor Press are high – they consistently produce beautiful looking books. In the case of There is a Graveyard that Dwells in Man we find a striking collaboration between the husband and wife team of David Tibet and Ania Goszczynska.

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NAVIGATING NOWHERE

Emma Gee, Mapping the Afterlife: From Homer to Dante, Oxford University Press, 2020

This isn’t a book about the reality or otherwise of the afterlife, or beliefs about life after death in general. It’s a study of how the afterlife is presented in a selection of classical (and one medieval) works, chosen to ‘represent particular stations in the period from Homer to Dante’. Which is fine as far as it goes – but how far is that?

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MARKS OF THE BEAST

Jack Fennell. Rough Beasts: the Monstrous in Irish Fiction, 1800-2000. Liverpool University Press, 2019.

"In Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea, the protagonist Roquentin descends into an existential crisis when he starts to perceive the viscosity of the world around him – that is, its malleability and lack of consistency – which Mary Warnock explains via a comparison to treacle, a substance that is nether solid nor liquid, lacking a defined shape and boundaries."

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EXPLORING FENLAND

Matthew Harle and James Machin (editors). Of Mud and Flame: The Penda’s Fen Sourcebook. Strange Attractor Press 2019.

There are very few TV plays that have received the kind of critical essay treatment of Penda’s Fen (1973.) And Of Mud and Flame is grandly even more – a source book drawing upon English social history, mythology and philosophy. Does it warrant this kind of attention? After giving Penda’s Fen three viewings I can honesty say yes.

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