More to come in May! I hope everyone is having a good night...I wish I could go out, but I'm dealing with a sinus infection, plus I'm broke, so instead I'm staying in...
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Happy Walpurgisnacht! Now we are 11!
More to come in May! I hope everyone is having a good night...I wish I could go out, but I'm dealing with a sinus infection, plus I'm broke, so instead I'm staying in...
Sunday, April 21, 2019
Whew...a few recent reads
Sorry to be dragging this month. I've been mentally and physically drained by various goings-on. I decided to skip the monthly musical interlude and go straight into some reviews...
This is an omnibus collection; the first part is by Louisa Baldwin, and the second by the lesser-known Lettice Galbraith. Neither had enough to warrant their own volumes, so they went with one.
Baldwin's The Shadow on the Blind has a few highlights; the title story has some eeriness and menace to it, but at the end people's reactions to the haunting seem overblown. "The Weird of the Walfords" was pretty interesting as the heir to a manor house is determined to not fall victim to an ancestral curse, and the measures he takes are a bit surprising considering the Victorian origin of the tale. And "The Real and the Counterfeit" is a memorable Christmas horror story.
But...the rest of it is rather unmemorable and predictable, and sometimes the sentimentality is laid on a bit thick. "How He Left the Hotel" and "The Empty Picture Frame" depend on revelations that experienced readers see coming a mile away. "The Uncanny Bairn," "Many Waters Cannot Quench Love," and "The Ticking of the Clock" are simply too sentimental. "Sir Nigel Otterburne's Case" has some interesting macabre elements, but in the long run is unremarkable in execution.
Little is known of Lettice Galbraith, aside from that she published two story collections and a novel in the mid-1890s and then nothing more was heard of her. The Trainer's Ghost is a very Victorian collection...but with a slightly harder edge. Sadly, much of it is unmemorable, but it has its moments. "The Case of Lady Lukestan" has a heartless woman getting her just deserts from a ghost, and "In the Seance Room" is delicately brutal in its depiction of a harsh man's confrontation with the shade of an abused wife. Others, like the title tale and "The Ghost in the Chair" and "The Missing Model" are unremarkable tales, save for their Victorian atmosphere.
This is a good collection for folks who like Victorian ghost stories, but it's a relatively unremarkable one, with no real ground broken and little to linger in the memory.
Birkin's Spawn of Satan suffers no Victorian delicacy. From 1970, this deals with modern horrors and surprisingly little of the supernatural. The title story may make you think of demonic terrors, but it's more a conte cruel about an idealistic mixed-race couple in a small conservative town and the buildup to acts of violence and revenge. "Wedding Presents" gives us a vicious murder and the murderer's attempts to cover the truth, in a story that would have been a perfect episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." And most of the stories are along that vein, tales of hatred and cruelty, and of their tendency to self-destruct, to the point that it becomes rather unpleasant reading. I had to put it down and walk away a few times. A little Birkin goes a long way.
Hope everyone's spring is going well, and you filed your taxes on time!
Baldwin's The Shadow on the Blind has a few highlights; the title story has some eeriness and menace to it, but at the end people's reactions to the haunting seem overblown. "The Weird of the Walfords" was pretty interesting as the heir to a manor house is determined to not fall victim to an ancestral curse, and the measures he takes are a bit surprising considering the Victorian origin of the tale. And "The Real and the Counterfeit" is a memorable Christmas horror story.
But...the rest of it is rather unmemorable and predictable, and sometimes the sentimentality is laid on a bit thick. "How He Left the Hotel" and "The Empty Picture Frame" depend on revelations that experienced readers see coming a mile away. "The Uncanny Bairn," "Many Waters Cannot Quench Love," and "The Ticking of the Clock" are simply too sentimental. "Sir Nigel Otterburne's Case" has some interesting macabre elements, but in the long run is unremarkable in execution.
Little is known of Lettice Galbraith, aside from that she published two story collections and a novel in the mid-1890s and then nothing more was heard of her. The Trainer's Ghost is a very Victorian collection...but with a slightly harder edge. Sadly, much of it is unmemorable, but it has its moments. "The Case of Lady Lukestan" has a heartless woman getting her just deserts from a ghost, and "In the Seance Room" is delicately brutal in its depiction of a harsh man's confrontation with the shade of an abused wife. Others, like the title tale and "The Ghost in the Chair" and "The Missing Model" are unremarkable tales, save for their Victorian atmosphere.
This is a good collection for folks who like Victorian ghost stories, but it's a relatively unremarkable one, with no real ground broken and little to linger in the memory.
Hope everyone's spring is going well, and you filed your taxes on time!
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