IN GHOSTLY COMPANY by Amyas Northcote

Amyas Northcote (1864-1923) is an author about whom little is known despite the usual biographical details. Born in England, emigrated to the US in 20s where he was a businessman in Chicago, then returned to England in 1900, eventually becoming a justice of the peace in Buckinghamshire. This, his sole volume of stories and the only writing he seems to have ever done, came out in 1921, and he died 18 months later. No other writings seem to have been found after his death. Not much is really known of his life, or what he did for a living, or what his thoughts and passions were, or why he decided to write ghost stories. But that being said, his stories are pretty darned good.

First in this edition is the oft-anthologized "Brickett Bottom," a famously unsettling tale of a house that isn't there and disappearances. You'll find it in a lot of "best-ever" or "haunted-house" anthologies, and I've heard it dramatized for radio. It's a remarkably dark, bleak story, and relentlessly macabre. In other words, you HAVE to read it.

Others follow some more of the standard fare. "Mr. Kershaw and Mr. Wilcox" is of a psychic dream. "The Late Earl of D." follows a ghostly re-enactment of a murder. "Mr. Mortimer's Diary" tells of a man hounded by the spirit of someone he deeply wronged. "The House in the Wood" is a very, very standard tale of a child's ghost warning a parent of danger. "The Young Lady in Black" is also very, very standard, of a ghost that returns to fulfill a promise. "The Governess' Story" recounts an auditory haunting that replays a despondent teen's suicide.

However, there are some others that stand out, at least for me.

"In the Woods" is a dark, unsettling tale of a lonely teenage girl who explores the forests on her own, only to find herself under the spell of the resident nature spirits. It's rather Machenesque, and blends Victorian whimsy with dark menace. There's no real plot; it's almost a lengthy vignette, with no real resolution. But it's darn good and worthy of more attention.

"The Steps" concerns itself with a wealthy society girl who turns down a soldier's marriage proposal, twice. He swears to have her, and then is called into action and dies. His steps haunt her and hound her. It's standard stuff, except for its nastiness. The soldier is never depicted as being all that evil or forceful; he's a lonely man, deeply infatuated, and thwarted in love. The girl is never depicted as terribly nasty either, just a normal girl of her class. So her ghostly persecution is not that of a deserved revenge on a heartless person, or even of a psychotic stalker and innocent victim. It has more the feel of a random bit of spectral evil that just happens to happen...and thus is very chilling.

Two stories, "The Downs" and "The Late Mrs. Fowke," are very folkloric. "The Downs" has a man walking across a stretch of land on a night when the spirits of those who died there walk...and it's strange and hallucinatory. "The Late Mrs. Fowke" concerns a clergyman who discovers his wife has dealings with Old Nick. Both have a strong rural atmosphere and are quite fun.

Northcote's stories are generally set in England or America, but "The Picture" is set in Hungary. It's not a great tale, but it is full of menace, where a girl does one of those silly rituals to see the face of her future husband, and later finds that face on a decades-old portrait hanging in a local castle. It has a macabre end, to be sure, but it's never clearly explained WHY it happens, which makes it all the more unsettling.

The last story is also a bit different. "Mr. Oliver Carmichael" is not really a ghost story, but a tale of occultism. A man has a chance meeting with a woman who seems to recognize him, and who takes a malicious interest in him. It turns out she's the reincarnation of a soul that was knit to his, and while his rose to light and goodness, hers sank to evil and darkness. It's actually not a very good story; very little happens. It's quite a bit of buildup and no payoff. But it's interesting because it's got that didactic tone that you normally find in stories written by True Believers, and it makes me wonder if perhaps Northcote had been fascinated by that sort of thing, and if that had something to do with his decision to write ghost stories. Unfortunately I can only conjecture.

This is a handsome, slim paperback from Wordsworth, and with a nice introduction by David Stuart Davies. It's worth picking up if you come across it.

A facsimile of the original dust jacket.

AYLMER VANCE: GHOST-SEER by Alice and Claude Askew

Wordsworth Editions has started a marvelous series of horror and mystery reprints, and I snapped a handful or two when I could, and am finally getting around to reading them now that I've getting settled in at the new place and adapting to a new normal.

Alice and Claude Askew were prolific writers of pulp fiction in the early part of the 20th century. A husband-and-wife team, they wrote a slew of works, and even had a few adapted for the stage and the silent screen. They were involved in support and relief for Serbians during WWI, operating in Serbia and Corfu. (For some reason I find Corfu impossibly exotic and enticing. I'll say it again. Corfu.) They died together in 1917 when a ship they were traveling on was sunk by a German torpedo.

This slender volume of short stories (only 127 pages) is a very nice example of the early 20th century occult detective genre.Some are built around supernatural menaces, and a few are more mystical in their outlook. The first tale, "The Invader," is a tale of possession, but the next, "The Stranger," tells a story of a woman who is apparently beloved of a pagan god and eventually rejects an earthly suitor to join her true love. (In that respect it's reminiscent of the preachy Dr. Tavener stories by Dion Fortune, only less preachy.)

"Lady Green-Sleeves" is an occultist love story with no real detection. "The Fire Unquenchable" tells of a series of mysterious fires and poltergeist activity ties into a deceased poet's unfinished work. "The Vampire" is a fun variation, mixing vampirism with possession. "The Boy of Blackstock" revolves around a haunting and an unhappy marriage. "The Indissoluble Bond" is more mystical in exploring a girl's bond to a man who may be her destruction. "The Fear" is a more straightforward tale of a destructive haunting.

The stories do follow a progression; the narrator, Dexter, moves from being an acquaintance hearing some stories, to Vance's partner in detection. And there's a thread in these stories that distresses me...a few times, the solution to a haunting is the complete razing and destruction of an old manor or castle, something that would have M. R. James screaming in horror. It made me blanch, that's for sure.

This entertaining collection can be purchased by itself in paperback by the aforementioned Wordsworth Editions, but you can also get an electronic edition from Ash-Tree Press that contains two other collection of occult detection, Rose Champion de Crespigny's Norton Vyse stories, and Kate & Hesketh Prichard's Flaxman Low stories. Take your pick with these.

THE HOUND OF DEATH by Agatha Christie

"Oh jeez, is he going to start reviewing Christie? Is this turning into another Poirot-worship blog?" I hear you screaming.

Well, I like Poirot, but there's enough about him on the 'net to let other people pick up the slack. I'm not wild for Miss Marple. However, there's some less-known Christie that I'll tackle from time to time.

The Hound of Death is very atypical Christie. It's a short story collection, and while some of it is the usual Christie mystery plotting, mostly it's a departure as it deals with ghosts and psychic phenomena. This is Christie taking a stab at horror writing!

The title story is a very interesting tale of a man's encounter with a traumatized nun from Belgium, a refugee from WWI under the care of a psychologist. The nun has strange memories and appears to have psychic powers. She is telepathic and has visions of a remote "city of circles" which far too many critics maintain is supposed to be a city in the far future, but is very, very, very obviously supposed to be Atlantis. The psychologist wants to tap her hidden power, an ability to call down immense destruction, which she apparently used on a German battalion that attacked her convent; the battalion was destroyed, but so was the convent, leaving her the only survivor...and the wreckage is in the odd shape of a hound...

"The Hound of Death" is odd, somewhat unsatisfying, but at the same time very bloody intriguing.

"The Red Signal" is a tale of twisted emotions and semipsychic warnings. "The Fourth Man" tells of possession...or is it madness? Is a young girl the victim of multiple personalities, or has she been possessed? "The Gipsy" is a very standard tale of love denied and true lovers being united in death.

"The Lamp" is also a rather standard ghost story, but with an added element of a person's deliberate self-sacrifice to bring aid to a lost soul. "Wireless" is a nasty twist tale of a murder plot that ends up going hideously awry, and I found rather reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith or Ruth Rendell. "The Witness for the Prosecution" is obviously the basis of the famous play and movie, and little needs to be said about it other than the ending is a bit different. "The Mystery of the Blue Jar" starts off as a rather eerie ghost story...but ends up something else entirely. "The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael" is more supernatural hijinx with hints of witchcraft, as a man suddenly seems to develop the personality of a cat.

"The Call of Wings" isn't mystery or supernatural, just a tale of spiritual awakening and self-sacrifice. "The Last Seance" is a harrowing tale of spiritualism, in which a desperate women confronts a medium...whose powers may be real, and may be someone's undoing. The final story, "SOS," is a cute little mystery with overtones of the eerie but all rather mundane at the core.

How is it overall? As with any anthology, it has ups and downs. Some stories left me cold, like "SOS" and "The Call of Wings." Nobody can argue that "The Witness for the Prosecution" is a classic; it is. "The Hound of Death" is an intriguing tale with elements I may incorporate into a role-playing game, perhaps. (Yes, I said it.) And I truly loved "The Mystery of the Blue Jar" and "The Last Seance."

Christie was a great technician when it came to plots, but she wasn't always a great stylist. (Exception: The Hollow. Look for it.) She wasn't always great at creating atmosphere, at least in her earlier work. Sometimes in her later years she was good at it. (The stories were written mostly in the '20s, and the collection published in 1933. I found a reference claiming that "The Call of Wings" was one of the first things Christie ever wrote.)

It's actually a little difficult to get this in a physical edition; most of the stories here were republished in other anthologies, but a straight reprint with the stories in original order is hard to find. But it is available electronically; I got the ebook edition from Amazon and it's probably not horribly long until it's in public domain as some of Christie's early work already is.

Worth reading for Christie fans; general fans of supernatural and gothicism might be interested.

THE DEVIL'S MISTRESS by J. W. Brodie-Innes

What a lurid title!  What a lurid cover!  And yet, underneath it all, it's actually quite a good historical supernatural novel, based on what's known of a real case of witchcraft in 17th-century Scotland.

Isobel Goudie (sic) is the intelligent, passionate daughter of an attorney, used to an exciting life with her prosperous father.  However, due to various machinations, she ends up in an unhappy arranged marriage with a cloddish poor farmer.  She was raised Catholic, but he's a devout Protestant, and demands she renounce her Catholic baptism.  She's generally miserable, and an attempt to spark up her loveless marriage is useless.  But soon she meets a handsome stranger and is drawn to him, and through him is initiated into a coven of witches.  Soon her life is a whirl of spells and enchantments, and she sees beneath the facade of local respectability.  She even visits the Fair Folk for a while.  But in the end, her conscience and devotion to her friends has her breaking from her love and her coven, and putting her own life in jeopardy.

Isobel Gowdie (the more common spelling) was a real person who was tried for witchcraft in 1662.  Apparently she confessed voluntarily; there are no indications that she was tortured or interrogated in any way; she seemingly just walked up to the authorities one day and said, "Oh by the way, did you know I'm a witch?"  Her confessions are very lengthy and detailed...and also out of sync with other known "facts" about witchcraft at the time.  In fact, she established a few cliches that were unknown before her confessions were made public.  It's debated if she was truly involved in some sort of coven or cult, or if she was mentally ill and her confessions were the work of a bizarre inner fantasy life.  There is no record of her being executed; was she done to death, or did they decide she was crazy and put her away?  (I once saw her name used by a Wiccan as an example of one of the "millions" who were "tortured and executed" for witchcraft...but as far as is known, Gowdie was never tortured or executed, and the best estimates place the number of people executed for witchcraft, based on available documentation, is below 100,000.)

Naturally, Brodie-Innes takes the view that she was a real witch, at least for the purposes of this novel.  But she's not simply a cackling caricature.  Isobel is a fully-realized human being, of whom another character says that she "would either be a great sinner or a great saint."  She genuinely tries to make her marriage work before giving in to her otherworldly lover.  She truly cares for her friends and stands by them when they need her.  She wonders if her lover truly is Satan himself or just a roaming charlatan who knows some conjuring tricks.  And yet she gleefully partakes in the coven's hunts, and puts her enemies under dire enchantments.  And she often wonders if her supernatural adventures were just dreams.

That's one thing I truly liked about THE DEVIL'S MISTRESS; her spells and bizarre adventures with her coven are treated in a hallucinatory, dreamlike way.  She'll often be in another part of Scotland as part of her working an enchantment, but then get tired, fall asleep, and wake up in her own bed.  Sometimes I was tempted to think they truly were dreams, or drug trips, but another thought is that Brodie-Innes was thinking of them as astral projections, although that is never made explicit.  Her workings of magic are given quite a bit of attention and detail, but are never tedious or repetitive.  They're just more elements of the world the author creates.  And he knew his stuff.

John William Brodie-Innes was a Scottish lawyer and bibliophile, but was most notably a prominent member of the Golden Dawn, and a significant figure in Victorian and Edwardian occultism and mysticism.  He was a close associate of MacGregor Mathers, and reportedly gave Dion Fortune her training in the occult, and was the inspiration for her occult detective character in THE SECRETS OF DR. TAVENER.

I've read supernatural and horror fiction by occultists before, and Brodie-Innes is head and shoulders over all of them.  All too often, an occultist's passions and beliefs translate into tiresome preachiness and didacticism, and good storytelling, plotting, and characterization take a back seat.  Fortune's Tavener stories exist mainly to teach her views on occultism and psychic phenomena; another set of supernatural tales by Madame Blavatsky has its moments ("The Ensouled Violin" is flawed, but haunting) but overall is spoiled by her intention of communicating her worldview to the reader.

But Brodie-Innes simply creates a world and some fully-realized characters to populate it.  Isobel is sympathetic and strong, especially when she realizes she has to part ways with her lover when she realizes she must be true to herself and the people she cares for.  He never preaches or condemns, never tries to explain why the spells work or the nature of her experiences; they simply are. 

I read an old copy, a 1974 printing by Sphere that is Vol. 11 in "The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult" that from what I've seen ranges from some genuine classics to some total crap.  But it's back in print (courtesy of Ramble House) and it's worth a read.  Gowdie has appeared in other novels, like ISOBEL by Jane Parkhurst, and NIGHT PLAGUE by Graham Masterson.  Gowdie's "spells" have made their way into poetry anthologies, and she's also inspired songs by artists like Creeping Myrtle and Alex Harvey.  Both Maddy Prior and Inkubus Sukkubus have used Gowdie's words in song.  And modern composer James MacMillan composed a 1990 orchestral piece, "The Confession of Isobel Gowdie," which has met with critical and audience acclaim.

So look for Isobel; she's well worth it.