a gallimaufry

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

When it comes to creepy fiction, my needs are quite specific. I am incredibly weedy, I once had nightmares after watching an episode of Midsomer Murders which is about as feeble as you can get without actually turning into a flower, so my tolerance of ick and gore is non-existent. Edgar Allan Poe really is my limit. Yet I do enjoy a good ghost story, a sinister old house on a hill, shadows lengthening by the fireside. Scary but not too scary because, as well as hating ick, I am quickly repelled by anything too cruel or too evil, even E. Nesbit can go too far for my tastes, I need a happy ending.

Recently, I have bravely read Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings which I enjoyed but in a tense sort of way. Robert Aickmann’s Dark Secrets was also very good and although the first story was truly horrifying, the rest of the collection was unsettling in a delightfully spooky but not upsetting way. Emboldened, when I saw a new copy of Mexican Gothic in the English-language section of my local library, I borrowed it. The reviews on its front pages compared it to Jane Eyre, Rebecca, Dracula and The Mysteries of Udolpho, which appealed. (Though I may say here I thought the reference to Jane Eyre rather a stretch.) I initially also thought of House of Mist by María-Luísa Bombal, but although there is a lonely house wreathed in mist, a young wife, strangeness and atmosphere, they are not really alike at all.

Noemí Taboada is a light-hearted, slightly spoilt debutante, enjoying the social whirl of Mexico City in 1950. Her beloved cousin Catalina has married, somewhat against the family’s wishes, an impoverished Englishman who lives in an isolated old house deep in the mountains, and now sends a wild and desperate letter to Noemí’s father. Should she be receiving proper psychiatric care rather than being nursed by the Doyle family in the middle of nowhere? Noemí’s father sends her to find out. But of course, it is all much worse than she could have imagined!

Silvia Moreno-Garcia has taken lots of Gothic tropes and had a great deal of fun with them. There is a rotting mansion, wreathed in mists and beside an old graveyard. There is a nasty aristocratic family, haunted by the murders of their relatives some thirty years ago and obsessed with ideas of racial superiority (naturally theirs is the superior race, non-whites the inferior ones). There are strange dreams that may be true, a mysterious sickness, disused silver mines and a lot of fungus. There is creeping about the house at night. To these she adds a twist of feminism as Noemí proves herself, despite her high heels and taffeta skirts, to have the right blend of courage, rebelliousness, intelligence and love to expose the house’s horrible secrets.

In the end it is horrifying and I hope that I can sleep well tonight… What I like about it though is that the horror is used to tell us something about racism, class systems and yes, the patriarchy. And the novel is beautifully structured and paced, the characters well drawn, the atmosphere properly creepy. But I shan’t tell you any more because I don’t want to spoil it...

(The only remaining mystery to me is why the paperback edition that I read has a very bland outer cover that reflects very little of the novel and then a brilliant inner cover, which is the one at the beginning of this post.)

What are your feelings about creepy fiction? And what is the most frightening novel you have read?

 

The Pendragon Legend, by Antal Szerb; translated by Len Rix

For weeks Belgium has lain under a thick grey cloud, our lives occasionally enlivened by a few hours of rain, no sunshine, no snow, just greyness. At such a time, what could be better than The Pendragon Legend, the first novel of the Hungarian writer Antal Szerb, published in 1934. It is gothic, comic, romantic, mysterious and utterly charming. It would be satirical, if satire was too strong a word for its affectionate, gentle mockery: it loves what it laughs at. It includes a ghost, ancient books, the Rosicrucians, north Wales, a ruined castle, a disputed inheritance and sinister goings-on. I love it and re-reading it has cheered me up no end.

Perhaps you too recognise the feeling that is described here? It is the moment when our narrator, János Bátky, first claps eyes on the precious Pendragon library:

I was filled with the tenderness I always feel – and which nothing can match – when I encounter so many books together. At moments like these I long to wallow, to bathe in them, to savour their wonderful, dusty, old-book odours, to inhale them through my very pores.

János Bátky is a Hungarian scholar with an interest in the esoteric. At a party he falls into conversation with the Earl of Gwynedd, a recluse who shares his enthusiasm for Robert Fludd, and is invited to stay with him at Llanvygan Castle and examine his library of priceless manuscripts. Reading up about the Pendragon family (who are the earls of Gwynedd), Bátky befriends an Irish adventurer and fantasist named Maloney who, coincidentally, is also bound for Llanvygan in the company of Osborne Pendragon, the Earl’s nephew. But before they leave, a mysterious telephone caller warns Bátky to stay away.

At Llanvygan Bátky accidentally offends the Earl and so does not see much of him. Most of the Earl’s time is devoted to experiments with some gigantic axolotls he has bred and through whom he hopes to find the secret of the resurrection of the body and eternal life. Bátky enjoys his days in the library, especially when accompanied by the beautiful Cynthia, Osborne’s sister, but his nights are considerably less enjoyable, interrupted by a midnight rider with a flaming torch charging around the castle. Someone is trying to murder the Earl, there is a crazed prophet in the village, and the ruins of Pendragon Castle on the hill above hold a secret that may shed light on the mysteries, if only Bátky, Osborne and Maloney can find it.

So, melodrama, mystery and eccentrics a-plenty, all spiced with lashings of humour. It’s a book that doesn’t take itself seriously, like its narrator. As the quote about his feelings for libraries suggests, Bátky is sensual as well as scholarly, easily distracted by a beautiful woman. He is clever and curious but weedy, given to experiencing life through books and ill-equipped to face the more physical dangers the situation in Llanvygan foments. The telephone call almost puts him off even starting for Wales, and it is only academic vanity that spurs him on. He struggles to climb a cliff during a nocturnal escapade with Maloney and Osborne, and at a crucial point gets lost on a Welsh mountain because he cannot tell the difference between beech, birch and oak trees. He is a frightful snob and romantic and it is these qualities that support him and drive him on rather than any nobler attributes. He is somewhat in love with the idea of the British aristocracy, to put it mildly.

Here he is, experiencing that mainstay of gothic fiction, an eerie noise at night in a castle:

Anyway, I switched the light on. The room was now at least two hundred years more historic than when I had gone to bed. I had seen rooms like it in London museums and French chateaux, but then there had been guides and written inscriptions to direct one as to what to imagine [..] But none of the elaborately carved wardrobes in this room carried any such source of enlightenment. Nothing tied the imagination to what was merely informative and comforting. For all I knew, some ancestor might have died in here, repenting his unspeakable crimes amid horrific visions ... And all the while, there came this unceasing sound: tap, tree-ee, and the terrible sigh. [...]
Of course, I realised it must be a window, or something of that kind, producing the noise. On many a windy night the same battle had been waged between an unsecured window and my fevered imagination.
I knew that, whether I wanted to or not, I would have to go and investigate. I knew my habits of mind: until I did that, I would have no rest.
I got out of bed, donned my dressing gown and quietly drew back the door.

There is a clever balance here between self-deprecating humour and true creepiness, no mean feat to achieve. For underneath the jolly japes, the endearing eccentrics and the madcap pace, we glimpse a darkness: besides the horror of banal, lucre-worshipping criminality there arises the horror of an evil less easy to comprehend, and one which speaks to ancient terrors. Where does legitimate pursuit of truth end, and obsession and madness begin? At what point does the past grip the present too tightly? Dreams, prophesies, stories, lies, all have their own truths. The novel plays delicately too on bodily and literary immortality; it concludes with a sense that there are indeed mysteries that can never fully be understood.

The Pushkin Press edition which I read was translated by Len Rix so beautifully that not only does it flow as easily as if it had been written in 1930s English, it also captures Bátky’s personality and dry wit perfectly. The whole book is an absolute joy.

(Portrait of Antal Szerb, from the Pushkin Press website; Szerb was a Hungarian Jew and so his literary career was destroyed and he was murdered in a forced labour camp in 1945)

 

'The School Friend', by Robert Aickman

What better way to welcome in the new year than with creepy stories of ghosts and doom?

Robert Aickman’s is a name I’ve often come across as a writer of the uncanny but his stories were scattered across anthologies and I had no real picture of him. In 2014, the centenary of his birth, Faber republished many of his story collections and his novel, and after only a seven-year wait I finally persuaded Father Christmas to give me his first solo book, Dark Entries. ‘The School Friend’ is the first story in that collection and it is very, very strange and horrible.

The epigraph to the story is a quote: ‘To be taken advantage of is every woman’s secret wish’, attributed to Princess Elizabeth Bibesco, née Asquith, a writer and coiner of aphorisms who married a much older man and died young. (She seems a fascinating person and I’d like to read her work!) This epigraph acquires resonance as the story progresses; it implies rape fantasy, submission, perhaps consenting to becoming a victim in order to gain what you want.

The central figure in the story is Sally Tessler, whom the narrator Mel first meets at school. Sally is precociously clever and her mathematical ability is ‘almost magical’; she dresses in a distinctive way and is beautiful. The narrator is reminded of Tessa in The Constant Nymph – a novel, play and film in which the child Tessa falls in love with an older man and dies as a teenager, unrequited. Virginity and purity are associated with Sally by the narrator. Yet Sally gives Mel a strangely illustrated copy of Petronius’s Satyricon, a Roman novel packed with sexual adventures, and surprises her by being very knowledgeable about all the activities depicted in it.

Sally lives alone with her father, Dr Tessler, ‘the victim of some serious injustice’ and very mysterious. He never leaves the house, but brings Sally up very strictly according to a ‘threefold’ regimen: ‘reading, domestic drudgery, and obedience’.  There is no mother. At the very least, this seems a very unhealthy atmosphere for a child to grow up in.

Sally gives Mel another book: an elderly copy of Faust in German. It turns out later to be a first edition. Faust memorably sells his soul to the devil for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasure. Sally wins a university scholarship, moves away and becomes a scholar in the Classics.

The death of Dr Tessler and his weirdly old-fashioned funeral (of what did he die?) brings Sally back to her old home town, to which Mel has also moved back, under a cloud. Sally moves into her father’s house and sends Mel a postcard, inviting her to tea. The postcard shows a photograph of Mitylene, the capital of the island of Lesbos, home of Sappho. Sally does not receive her own post at home but goes to collect it every day.

The tea and the house are dismal and Sally is changing; she is dirty and badly dressed; later, when she meets Mel at the supermarket, she aggressively rejects her. After Sally is seriously injured in an accident, Mel has to visit the house to ‘keep an eye on it’ at the (odd?) insistence of the ward matron. Of course she explores the house...

The house itself is weirdly suggestive of Sally’s body and Mel feels like an invader. It is unkempt and slatternly, as Sally has become, stained and hostile. It contains – what does it contain? Mutilated toys, a prison-like refuge stuffed with occult books, signs of bestial violence. Sally seems to have been trying to protect herself from something. Mel sees a horribly white-faced man in a black frock-coat who instantly vanishes: ‘I thought at first that dead or alive, it was Dr Tessler; but immediately afterwards I thought not.’

The matron tells Mel that Sally is pregnant and in a terrifying scene back at the house the two women confront each other, while upstairs Sally’s ‘baby’ grunts and snuffles like a pig. ‘Let me tell you, Mel, [...] that it’s possible for a child to be born in a manner you’d never dream of.’

‘Will you be godmother? Come and see your godchild, Mel.’
The noise was coming from the library. Distraught as I was, I now realised that the scrabbling noise was connected with the tearing to pieces of Dr Tessler’s books. But it was the wheezing, throaty cry of the creature which most turned my heart and sinews to water.

And at the end of the story, Sally and Mel meet as if nothing has happened. Sally’s appearance is as it has always been, ‘with that strange imperishable untended prettiness of hers, and her sweet absent smile. She wore a white dress.’ She has sold the house and is moving to the Cyclades; she invites Mel to join her since Mel is not happy.

Mel gives away little information about herself. A writer, she has returned to her parents’ house after an unnamed ‘catastrophe’ which she refuses ever to enumerate. She has a distant relationship with her own father, and she says that she went ‘swiftly to the bad’ but in what way we do not know. She is knowing, almost certainly not telling us everything, and what she does tell us seems both portentous and banal.

The story coalesces around the two women’s sexuality and allies it with knowledge and creativity. It is hard not to see Dr Tessler as oppressive and incestuous. Perhaps he has made a Faust-like pact; perhaps Sally has. Returning to the house as an adult, Sally does not clean it as she did as a child but instead becomes like it, dresses herself in it. She seems to be terrorised by some supernatural creature which may even be raping her, but does not flee. Is it that same creature she calls her child? Does she have to undergo an appalling test of her courage to expurgate a traumatic past?

The working of the story is subtle. It is told slantwise and partially, so that we have the sense of a meaning but not the meaning itself, and nothing is ever explained. The surface events are unsettling but they become very much more disturbing when you try to piece them together. And because we can’t explain it, we cannot close the book feeling that we are safe from it.

Happy New Year!

(The illustrations are by Charles Keeping: for an edition of Beowulf translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland, picture found here; and for The Wedding Ghost by Leon Garfield, found here)

Flyaway, by Kathleen Jennings

Kathleen Jennings is an Australian illustrator with an interesting blog. I can’t remember where I first saw her work, but I do remember seeing a warm recommendation of Flyaway, her first novel, from Terri Windling. Without bothering to find out anything about it, I spent my Christmas book token on a copy and settled down to read it by the stove, one icy evening.

Our narrator is Bettina Scott, aged nineteen, living with her mother Nerida in the prettiest and tidiest house in Runagate, a small Australian town in a district ‘somewhere between the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean but on the way to nowhere’. Despite Nerida’s careful homemaking and tender pruning of Bettina into a model of 1950s girlhood decades too late, all is not quite perfect in the Scott household since Bettina’s ‘mocking father and unloving brothers’ vanished three years previously. Bettina is busy ‘scrubbing out a little more, too, of that old childish self – the restless temper, the loose-limbed insolence’, almost but not entirely successfully. Sometimes a lie escapes. Sometimes she has a nip of the cooking brandy.

Beyond the lattice of roads, paddocks and houses, the land around Runagate has ‘a fragile beauty’ which gets ‘into your bones, into your veins’. It is a land of ‘hills and scrub’, ‘purple shadows’ and tough trees: ‘Bottle and box, paper and iron, thorned and blossomed under the unutterable light [...] Trees like lanterns, like candles, ghosts and bones’. It is a haunted landscape: ‘Memory seeped and frayed there’. It is beautiful but dangerous. People vanish into the landscape, just disappear. Bettina’s family are not the only ones.

Two strangers are seen in town and someone paints the word ‘monsters’ on the Scotts’ fence. Believing that the strangers are her brothers, returned, Bettina and two of her former schoolfriends, Gary and Trish, follows them, a small quest with a Tupperware box of sandwiches. (Trish’s mother vanished too, years ago. And so did Gary’s uncle.)

It’s a short book, complex, thorny and tangled as the lantern bush that engulfs the village school at Woodwild. I read in a state of constant fear, yet enjoying the rich and evocative prose. Bettina’s repressed and partial narrative is interwoven with stories about other disappearances and explain them in terms of magic and monstrosity, borrowing motifs from folk lore and fairy tale. The further into the bush the three companions go, the more threatening the landscape becomes. The stories are chilling: a shape-shifting megarrity which will take your place at the dinner table, a wolfish Pied Piper, a bone horse. What do these stories mean? What kernel do they transform? Fantasy and reality become so deeply entwined there is no separating them any more (perhaps just a bit too confusing, ultimately?).

Far too creepy to read on your own at night, you will enjoy this in daylight if you like the work of Kelly Link, Zoe Gilbert or Angela Carter. But really, it is unlike anything I have ever read: an eerie song to the power of land and story.

(Kathleen Jennings, Into the Woods, silhouette; from her portfolio here)