Festive Horrors
Last Christmas, while George Michael wannabes were giving away their hearts (hopefully to someone special), I was nursing a bad cold, and self-medicating with Ibuprofen and a strong dose of spooky tales. Thanks to the festive downtime, I enjoyed two very different collections of horror stories, both of which were very effective in their own way.
I learnt of Ray Newman’s Municipal Gothic, from The Upstairs Window bookblog. I love Blair’s reviews, not only because they’re so well written, but also because they reflect tastes which are uncannily similar to my own. She waxed lyrical about Newman’s stories, and I immediately knew that this was a collection I had to read. I certainly wasn’t disappointed.
My feverish condition probably added to the allure of Newman’s offbeat tales. The subtitle – “Thirteen Ghost Stories” – is somewhat misleading insofar as it suggests a traditional collection of ghostly tales. There are some spectres which behave as one would expect them to – the story Protected by Occupation, for instance, which is also probably one of the scariest in the volume, relies on some fairly standard “haunted house” tropes. But Newman’s gritty, urban Gothic creations are generally much stranger and play around not just with narrative but also with form.
A case in point is Modern Buildings in Wessex, a fictitious monograph about modernist architecture, with a particular emphasis on buildings designed by one Hälmar Pölzig. At first there seems to be nothing wrong with this pastiche architectural study. However, the narrator’s comments become increasingly ominous, suggestive of a disturbing obsession. Similarly, An Oral History of the Greater London Exorcism Authority presents a creepy account of poltergeist activity clothed in the formal style of an official report.
What is particularly surprising is the streak of dark humour which runs through the collection, starting from the opener – The Curse Follows the Seed. This is not “horror for laughs” in the style of the Scream franchise. It’s genuine, atmospheric horror fiction which manages to contemporaneously elicit a smile and a shudder. And a nightmare or two.
In comparison, Adam Macqueen’s Haunted Tales seems like pretty standard fare. But that’s fine, since familiarity also has its own particular allure. I came across a beautiful hardback edition of this volume while browsing the shelves of Waterstones at Tottenham Court Road during a December weekend break in London. Having just read a glowing review, I thought it would be a great souvenir to take back home for Christmas. The stories in this collection were originally written as a “festive gift” for friends and relatives in lieu of Christmas cards – hence the subtitle “Ghostly Stories for the Darkest Nights”. The very concept of telling ghost stories at Christmas is a well-established tradition, and Macqueen has no qualms about admitting that he is heavily indebted to “tradition” in his ghost stories. In the book’s afterword he presents a whole list of authors who have influenced his work, and part of the fun in reading this volume is trying to guess Macqueen’s sources of inspiration – ranging from Shirley Jackson’s The-Lottery-style folk-horror (“The Old Folk”, “The Hawthorn Tree”) to fairy-tale fantasy (“The Elf-kin”) to ghostly historical fiction (“Come quick, danger”).
The stories are, perhaps, not terribly original nor do they purport to be. But they’re very well written and often manage to effectively transpose traditional tropes into the 21st Century (as in the case of the haunted Facebook messages in “The Wrong Teletubby”).
These two collections are testament to the
versatility of contemporary horror fiction, which has space both for a
traditional approach and more experimental fare. While reading them, I was (cold notwithstanding),
simply having a wonderful Christmastime.
Municipal Gothic
166 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 9, 2022
Haunted Tales
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