Fireside Gothic: three ghostly tales by Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor's "Fireside Gothic"

A review

The three stories in this collection were originally published as separate “Kindle Singles” but they complement each other very well. Despite their different settings, they share some overlapping themes. More importantly, they all express the atmosphere of old-fashioned eeriness evoked by the well-chosen title Fireside Gothic. This is not blood-and-gore horror, but the type of other-worldly terror which creeps under the reader’s skin.  I’ve read a blurb comparing these stories to Andrew Michael Hurley’s brand of folk horror, The Loney in particular.  Even this is widely off the mark. If anything, these works are more similar to the ghostly tales of the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries or the sort of pastiche (used in its most positive sense) which you would expect from contemporary authors such as Susan Hill.

A perfect example is the opener – Broken Voices.  Set in the years prior to the First World War, its protagonists are two teenage students at a Cathedral school who unexpectedly get to spend the Christmas holidays at their school, lodging with a retired teacher.   Inspired by ghostly tales about a long-dead composer haunting the cathedral, the boys set off on a nocturnal hunt for the lost score of an anthem, supposedly the composer’s masterpiece.  Unsurprisingly, this turns out to be a bad idea. 

The story’s ecclesiastical and scholarly setting is one which M.R. James or E.F. Benson would have found familiar, and reading it gave me the same sort of shivers up the spine which I get from these authors. It helped that I was reading Broken Voices on the first (cold)ish Saturday in my part of the world, and that on the same day I was due to take part in an early Christmas concert. I always savour these types of serendipities which complement the content of a story I’m reading and help me delve into its atmosphere.  (I remember the same type of feeling when I was reading Charles Palliser’s The Unburied in December a couple of years back).  Indeed, Broken Voices is my favourite in this collection, despite its anticlimactic ending.

The premise of The Leper House is markedly different but, despite its modern trappings (a broken-down car in a remote coastal area with no satnav or phone coverage), it also harks back to a classic trope in ghost stories: on a stormy night, the male narrator visits an old house and meets its intriguing (female) inhabitant but then cannot find the building when he returns to look for it in the sobering light of day.  (A similar narrative device is used in Oliver Onions’s The Cigarette Case, a ghost story whose details are strangely identical to a “real-life” incident recounted about an old house in Valletta, Malta. I wonder whether this is a case of art imitating life, or the other way round.  But I digress…)  I will not give away any further plot details, except to state that Taylor takes this premise to unexpected, genre-bending conclusions.       

M.R. James used to say that sex is distracting in a supernatural tale.  However, at the heart of The Scratch, is a torrid infatuation between Clare, a middle-aged mother who is more-or-less-happily married to Gerald, and Gerald’s orphaned nephew Jack, who has just returned from Afghanistan suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.  The story is narrated by Clare, and her guilty musings about this sudden passion for her disturbed lodger are as involving as the work’s supernatural elements.  Elements which, one must say, are vague and, possibly, just the result of the protagonists’ feverish imagination – a scratch on Jack’s arm that refuses to heal, Jack’s unnatural revulsion towards his relatives’ pet cat, and his obsession with a phantom big cat which seems to be roaming the nearby forest (although it’s never actually seen except by Jack himself).  This is possibly the most original and off-beat of the three stories but, for me, its effect was dampened by the vagueness of its ending – literally a page-load of questions raised – and left unanswered – by the narrator.

Despite these reservations, the collection was right up my street, and I heartily recommend it to fans of classic ghost stories.

Paperback, 256 pages

Published November 2nd 2017 by HarperCollins (first published 2016)