Muckross Abbey and Other Stories by Sabina Murray

 

Muckross Abbey and Other Stories

by Sabina Murray

Muckross Abbey and Other Stories is a collection of ten ghostly tales by Massachussets-based PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author Sabina Murray, hailed by The Washington Post as a pioneer of “ironic Gothic”. 

In this volume, the influence of the classic English ghost story comes to the fore.  “Harm”, one of the longer pieces here, speaks of the ghost of an American playwright who returns to haunt an Irish artist retreat house where she died. In its final paragraphs, which serve as an epilogue of sorts, the story turns all “meta”, with one of the minor characters ruminating on the nature of ghosts and their tales:

“But in the end, it doesn’t really matter, does it? In another twenty years, we’ll all have forgotten who she was. She’ll just be that lady buried in the wrong place, another ghost wandering about, desperate for someone to supply the narrative"

 

“I say it had to be love,” said Jennifer... and it was moving, this impossible love of a dead woman, a dead love, a tale of few concrete details, except for its irrepressible woe.

It is an interpretation of “the ghost” which would have been familiar to the classic writers mentioned in the book’s blurb – “Wharton and James, Stoker and Shelley”.  In fact, the spectres that haunt Murray’s collection are largely unquiet spirits, whether jealous ghosts returning to seek revenge or simply bodies “buried in the wrong place” coming back to complete unfinished business or simply to bother the living.  They also behave in just the way we would expect them to: walking through walls, appearing as vague mists in doorways and mirrors, re-enacting their final moments.  It is perhaps to reinforce this “familiarity” that, with a few exceptions, Murray places her stories in the “Old World”:  the settings include desolate, foggy Dartmoor (“The Long Story”), rural Oxfordshire (“The Third Boy”) and Ireland (“Muckross Abbey” and the above-mentioned “Harm”).    

So what does Murray bring to these stories which goes beyond “pastiche”? First of all, the narratives largely take place in the “here and now”, and feature contemporary individuals with contemporary concerns, who take selfies on their smartphones and watch Netflix on their tvs.  This creates an intriguing contrast between a subject-matter based on “tradition”, and the modern-day settings.  Secondly, there is, in many of the pieces, a sense of playing around with history of the genre, and “knowing” (ironic?) references to the tropes of the Gothic.  For instance, “Remote Control” starts with a honeymooning couple debating whether a movie quote about Monte Carlo is taken from To Catch a Thief or from Rebecca. It is, indeed, from Rebecca and the rest of the story is, actually, a riff on Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel.  “Apartment 4D” takes place in a modern-day drab apartment building, but is framed as a tale told around the fire – surprise, surprise – one Christmas Eve. 

But, ultimately, the best reason for reading this collection is that the stories are all deliciously creepy, with some of them being genuinely unsettling. My favourites include “Apartment 4D”, which has some shocking twists, and the two related stories, both featuring the same nuns’ school, “The Dead Children” (what an ending!) and “The Flowers, the Birds, the Trees”.   Highly recommended.

ebook

Expected publication: March 21st 2023 by Grove Press