5 NOVEMBER 1983, Page 27

Spine chillers

Patrick -Skene Catling

Ghost Stories selected by Susan Hill (Hamish Hamilton £7.95) The Woman in Black Susan Hill (Hamish Hamilton £7.95) A Gallery of Horror edited by Charles L. Grant (Robson £7.95) It Raymond Hawkey (New English Library £7.95)

most inhabitants of this planet hold it in such low esteem that they imagine the worst punishment for the disembodied spirits of malefactors is to be sent back here. Some of them evidently return volun- tarily, seeking redress for mortal wrongs that were done to them. In any event, nobody ever seems to encounter a happy ghost. Nobody gives a ghost a big hello. Posthumous life on earth must be pretty

dreary, from the ghosts' point of view, especially in foul winter weather, when the living, having pulled the curtains and surfeited themselves with food and drink, sit by the fire, telling slanderous anti-ghost stories.

Ghosts should be forgivingly welcomed as salutary, admonitory exemplars of blunders in the flesh and as witnesses to personal survival after death (sometimes doubted), and then gently assisted to find their way to a peaceful final abode. Surely, they could be coaxed out of any spiteful, vengeful impulses. They, most of all, must want bygones to be bygones.

Alas, ghosts' public relations have always been atrociously, one might say vindictive- ly, mismanaged. As a result, ghosts are generally regarded as dangerous and disgusting or merely ludicrous. They have declined over the centuries from druidical myths to Gothic novels to Hammer Films to Saturday-morning comic cartoons on children's television. It is little wonder that ghosts, whenever they are noticed, are usually so cross and behave so badly.

Susan Hill, while not going so far as to offer ghosts any sympathy or hope of rehabilitation, has exerted herself to restore to them a certain awful dignity. In the in- troduction to her respectfully conservative collection of Ghost Stories, she says: ' ... the time would now seem ripe for a revival of the classic ghost story, in a world where an overkill of horror has begun to

provoke a reaction of mere hilarity and boredom'.

In compiling this excellent anthology of irreproachable ghostly orthodoxy, she decided first what a ghost story was not in short, a story without a ghost. She ex- cluded 'anything to do with werewolves, witches, vampires and monsters; anything science-fictional or about fantasy other- worlds inhabited by alien beings, however wraith-like their mere appearance might be; anything involving frightening occurrences which were bizarre, odd, inexplicable, in any ordinary, human terms, and yet which did not, apparently, involve "ghosts" or, at least, ghostly phenomena'.

She has assembled a powerful team of Victorian masters of the genre and 20th- century writers with 19th-century formal literary manners. Connoisseurs will nod their heads in approval and comfortable an- ticipation as they recognise the great names: Dickens, Gaskell, James (Henry and M.R.), Kipling, H. G. Wells .

My favourite two stories of the 13 (a good un-round number) are Elizabeth Bowen's 'The Demon Lover', about a reproachful dead fiance, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Green Tea', in which the follow- ing sentence appears, justifying the whole volume: But as food is taken in softly at the lips, and then brought under the teeth, as the tip of the little finger caught in a mill crank will draw in the hand, and the arm, and the whole body, so the miserable mortal who has been once caught firmly by the end of the finest fibre of his nerve is drawn in and in, by the enormous machinery of hell, until he is as I am.

This collection has one obvious fault. The anthologist has observed her own strict classical rules so conscientiously that there are no surprises, except for neophytes, whom Ghost Stories will serve as an ideal introduction to years of uneasy pleasure.

Susan Hill's own new short novel, The Woman in Black, is a very nicely written traditional ghost story of originality and sensitivity which persuasively supports her contention that understatement of the supernatural, rooted in commonplace reali- ty, still has the 'power to chill and alarm'. The novel is graced with a fine jacket and black-and-white illustrations by John Lawrence, which reminded me of Edward Ardizzone in a sombre mood.

Roald Dahl writes that he read 749 ghost stories in 1958 when he was choosing 24 of them for a television series. The series was not made but he was hooked and he con- tinued to read all the ghost stories he could get his hands on. He has collected the 14 he likes best in Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories. Susan Hill's and his collections have only two authors in common, Le Fanu and Edith Wharton, and they are represented in the two books by different stories.

As one might have expected, Dahl's choices are idiosyncratically off-beat, subt- ly macabre and of high literary merit. In his introduction he reports that the first 50 or so stories he read in 1958 were `so bad it was difficult to finish them. They were trivial, poorly written and not in the least spooky. Spookiness is, after all, the real purpose of the ghost story. It should give you the creeps and disturb your thoughts'.

Dahl apparently reads as fastidiously as he writes. Although none of the stories he presents here are as wonderfully im- aginative, ingenious and well written as his own, some of them are spooky, creepy and disturbing. I commend particularly 'On the Brighton Road', by Richard Middleton, a neat metaphor for damnation, and 'Ring- ing the Changes', by Robert Aikman, which describes one of the worst ways a couple could spend their honeymoon.

Charles L. Grant, according to the blurb of A Gallery of Horror, is 'the world's foremost anthologist of horror fiction today'. This is a collection of many of the sorts of stories that Susan Hill prudently eschewed, a hodge-podge of idiot nasties.

In a facetious introduction, the an- thologist traces his pathological predilec- tion for artificially induced nightmares to the Saturday movie matinees in Kearny, New Jersey, where he first encountered 'the werewolf, the vampire, the ghost, the ban- shee, the thing in the cellar, the thing in the attic'. Since then his taste in entertainment has deteriorated.

Mr Grant persists in his delusion that horror fiction is fun. His book is fun only if you get your kicks from stories about aber- rations such as homicidal mania ('The Rub- ber Room', by Robert Bloch), sexual bestiality (`Nona', by Stephen King), and vampirism in a Nazi concentration camp ('Down among the Dead Men', by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann). The only relief is a story about lycanthropy in 'Carrion City', Colorado, ('Gravid Babies', by Michael Bishop), and another, quite a good one (`The Typewriter', by David Morrell), about an antique typewriter with a demented will of its own, which automatically writes best-selling second- rate novels until it reverts to infantilism. Many of the contributors to this anthology must have been betrayed by similar machines.

It, a novel by Raymond Hawkey, which is ballyhooed as 'the first truly modern ghost story', is an even more convincing testimonial to the superiority of the truly old-fashioned ghost story. It is short for It- zhevnikov, a Soviet senior military defector who hates both super-powers and is mistakenly killed in the course of his escape to the West. The story is about a British woman parapsychologist who is so eager to migrate to the United States that she co- operates, against her professional better judgment, with the US Department of Defence, the CIA, and the loony (fictional) President to raise the Russian's ghost so that it can be debriefed of its military secrets. The ghost is really nasty. It has a way of possessing people and making them do nas- ty things. It possesseslthe' heroine f if she can be called that) and compels her to rape herself in a most unpleasant way. Then the ghost possesses the President and makes him do something nasty that he doesn't really want to do.

At first, I thought It was going to be the funniest black satire on the American military establishment and Presidency since Terry Southern wrote Dr Strangelove. But It isn't. Padded almost beyond endurance with medical, military and dirty-tricks jargon, it is an execrable bore.