GHOST STORIES
Christopher Hart
Sunless Solstice
Strange Christmas Tales for
the Longest Nights edited by
Lucy Evans and Tanya Kirk
British Library £8.99 pp288Sunless Solstice is the latest,
pleasurably unsettling
addition to the British
Library’s superb Tales of the
Weird series. Other stars
among its publications
include Weird Woods: Tales
from the Haunted Forests of
Britain, and Promethean
Horrors: Classic Tales of Mad
Science. The editors and
curators at the British^
Library have also excelled
at rediscovering forgotten —
wrongly forgotten — masters
of the ghostly and weird, such
as the remarkable R Murray
Gilchrist.
The research involved in
this latest title is hugely
impressive, scouring through
long defunct local newspapers
and little magazines, truffling
up such obscure writers as
one Frederick Manley, about
whom we know virtually
nothing, and who apparently
published only a single^
story in his lifetime, in the
South London Press: the
wonderfully haunting Irishry
of The Ghost at the Crossroads,
contrasting a cosy, high-
calorie fireside Christmas
celebration with a chilling
interruption from a visitant
seemingly not from around
these parts...
Another obscure
contributor is Lettice
Galbraith. “We don’t know
when she was born or died,
or even whether Lettice
Galbraith was her real name,”
note the editors. Yet her short
story The Blue Room, which
appeared in Macmillan’s
Magazine in October 1897,
fully deserves resurrection.
“There is a strange fascination
about everything connected
with the supernatural,” we^
are told early on, but today’s
reader will also enjoy the
spectacle of the spirited
late-Victorian Miss Erristoun,
undaunted by the Presence
that haunts the Blue Room.
Another dauntless female
— indeed downright terrifying
— is Hecate Quorn in H Russell
Wakefield’s tale of mountain
terror, The Third Shadow.
“Not far short of six feet andPeattie’s On the Northern Ice
superbly evokes the frozen
dread of a Canadian winter,
not just its immobile cold but
also its terrifying emptiness,
the Great Lakes near by and
the silent starry void above.
“In such a place it is difficult
to believe that the world is
actually peopled. It seems as if
it might be the dark of the day
after Cain killed Abel, and as
if all of humanity’s remainder
was huddled in affright away
from the awful spaciousness
of Creation.”
There are hauntings in the
very heart of London too, a
wintry, snowbound London
of a kind rare today, snow
“coming down like a white
fog”, and in the heart of St
James falling so heavily thatthe footprints of passers-by
are quickly erased.
In the hands of the skilful
ghost story writer — supremely
MR James — fear often derives
from uncertainty, from vague
dread, from things never quite
explained, and from the
narrator’s lingering, terrified
bewilderment about what
he actually experienced.
But it isn’t all fear, hatred
and vengeance. A delightful
exception is Hugh Walpole’s
tale of an irresistibly jolly
ghost, Mr Huffam. (Walpole,
the editors say, once wrote
that he feared he would one
day be no more than “a small
footnote to my period in
literary history”.)
The protagonist of the
story is actually one Tubby
Winsloe, who has just had his
marriage proposal to Diana
Lane-Fox rejected in fairly
frank terms: “I think you have
a kind heart. But marry you!
You’re useless, ignorant and
greedy. You’re disgracefully
fat, and your mother^
worships you.” The equally
well-proportioned Lady
Winsloe has “a bosom like a
small skating-rink” and
“moved as little as possible, she
said as little as possible, she
thought as little as possible”.
Yet into this unhappy and
hopeless clan, “rebelliously
determined not to live”, comes
the strange but exuberant
gentleman Mr Huffam, who
wears clothes of slightly
antique cut, loud waistcoats,
loves party games and thinks
Christmas is simply wonderful.
It’s a very enjoyable tale, even
in its knowing nod to the
reader that “good-humoured,
cheerful and perpetually
well-intentioned peoples are
among the most tiresome of
their race”.
The true masterpiece here
is the longest, Daphne du
Maurier’s brilliant and sad
The Apple Tree. But the most
purely moving contribution
is perhaps the last, James
Turner’s A Fall of Snow from
1974, an account of first
love and first loss in the
desolate snowbound
landscape of Suffolk.
The editors have done a
marvellous job of excavating
and restoring to published
life some of these more
obscure stories, and it makes
for a superb wintry collection,
full of melancholy and death,
but also comical moments
and some truly memorable
characters. A delight. ctipped the beam at one
hundred and sixty-eight
pounds, mostly muscle...
Terribly, viciously ‘County’.”
And there’s the enjoyably
deranged The Leaf-Sweeper
by a very young Muriel Spark,
although the editors note that
the story’s “surrealist edge”
may have been caused by the
grande dame “overdosing on
amphetamine-based slimming
pills” and subsequently
suffering hallucinations.
One can cope with the most
unnerving ghost stories, of
course, as long as one is sitting
comfortably in one’s own
well-heated home, and many
of the tales here deliberately
evoke a contrastingly frigid
world of frost and snow and
blizzard. Elia WilkinsonTales to give you
a winter chill
This British Library collection of weird tales is a perfect
Christmas read, full of haunting visitors and party-loving spirits
DAnielA AlFieRiBOOKS
It isn’t all fear,
hatred and
vengeance
34 19 December 2021