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The Usurping Ghost: And Other Encounters And Experiences
Book by Dickinson, Susan
318 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
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January 26, 2021
Pulled this odd hardcover off the shelf (a retitling of The Restless Ghost, And Other Encounters And Experiences which, if Goodreads is to be trusted, was published the same year as this, but by another company). A short foreword from the editor makes it apparent that while the collection is intended for youthful readers (it has some nicely sketchy illustrations by Antony Maitland) the stories can be enjoyed by all ages. And it's the usual compilation of old reliables and distinctive, odd choices. I'd previously already read about half of it, but did some selective re-reading to fill in review gaps.
Let's get the weak ones out of the way first. I was excited to finally get a chance to read "Feet Foremost" by L.P. Hartley, as it's been on my to read list for a while (I believe I even watched a 1980s British TV adaptation a number of years ago). It's about the refurbishment of Low Threshold Hall, a stately British home (with original medieval tower and attached Queen Anne structure) that has been untenanted for 150 years. But the new tenants discover it has a legend attached, the curse of one Lady Elinor, whose ghost can only enter the house if she is carried across the threshold - which is then followed by the death of the carrier (with the ghost leaving by inhabiting their body). And, almost immediately following the gathering of the party - none of whom take the curse seriously - Antony commits the deed (the butler tells him there's a young women at the door when he awakes, who appears to have a broken leg, and the entranceway is flooded with rain, as the doorstep lacks a threshold...). But, as Antony slowly begins to sicken, his fiance Maggie (but no one else) becomes convinced that he has been cursed, and searches for ways to defuse the haunting. Okay, it's a "rules of the supernatural" story (which tend to be disappointing), but there are a lot of great things here - the story has a leisurely pace and so we take time for strange dreams, a few scenes amongst the servants, the deliberate killing of a pet (!), and a very striking moment of "coming upon the ghost" (who has been mistaken as a nurse). Too, the story seems to be moving towards a grim inevitability, as Maggie can't escape the only logical way to save her fiancee - but then, sadly, the plot ends with a glaring "deus ex-machina" (never has a British landholder's resolute unflappability been so summed up by an understated "We don't seem to be lucky here, just now..."). Which is a shame, because it's not a bad little thing until that point at all. M.R. James is a master, no doubt, but I've never been a big fan of "The Haunted Doll's House". Rereading it here, I enjoyed the authorial intrusions that satirize little aspects of ghost stories (and short fiction in general) in a knowing way, the passive/aggressive haggling dialogue that opens the piece and the brief description of the hideous haunter is effective (James is nothing if not an assured writer). But still, this story of a collector who buys a marvelous and enormous doll's house for a song, only to find that in the evening it becomes something like a miniature stage on which terrible historical deeds are replayed, still seems too much like a rehash of his own, superior "The Mezzotint" to me, and the passive aspect of the main characters makes it feel a little removed from the fear. Finally, in "His Own Number" by William Croft Dickinson, a man tells how a computer programmer who works for him has a strange, incorrect number turn up three times in his calculations, which seems to presage something fateful - and after the man's death, the narrator eventually puzzles his way to a solution to the enigmatic portent. Eh.
In the "Good but slightly flawed" category: Leon Garfield's "The Usurping Ghost" gives us a familiar set-up: two young boys have decided to scare the sexton at a ruined, seaside church by dressing up as the local legend - a ghostly drummer boy tied to stories of smugglers from a few decades back. But as the one, costumed and daubed with phosphorescent paint, marches into the foggy graveyard, he discovers he is being followed... by a ghostly, glowing boy with a drum. Now, despite that familiar set-up, this was interesting for a number of reasons - I like the writing style (crisp and clipped when it needs to be) and it takes time for atmospherics (the church grounds at night, enshrouded in blowing sea mists, is a great setting), but what was most interesting is that while stories with this set-up tend to go one way (an "after the fact" realization that what they saw, while playing ghost, was really a g-g-g-ghost!) this takes a different tack, as the ghost impersonator finds himself chased home by the ghost, who then takes the boy's place in his bedroom. So our fake ghost trudges back to the graveyard, convinced he must now take the ghost's place, only to come across the sexton, who was the target of the prank in the first place.... Can't say more, but it's slightly moralistic while still telling a good yarn. A young man arrives at a lonely train station, expecting to travel to his new prep school (which has sent a carriage and a rather sinister student to bring him there) in Manly Wade Wellman's "School For The Unspeakable" - but on arriving at the deserted campus (and meeting two more students) he begins to worry when his companions claim to be Satan worshipers... This was a reread - it has that straightforward readability that Wellman usually brings, along with a kind of story thinness that comes with some of his work. It's an atmospheric set-up and pay off, enjoyable in the moment (the three students are well-described) but just ends up being a fun, pulp time-waster.
"Ghost Riders Of The Sioux" was written special for this collection by Kenneth Ulyat. In 1889, two young men and their Native American boy guide are herding some horses back to their hometown in South Dakota when they see a frightening nighttime vision of Native warriors dancing and shrieking. Telling their parents leads to further historical events. While this is obviously a story for younger readers (told from the point of view of one of the boys), it is also NOT a supernatural story - but is interesting as something like a "youth Western" focusing on . Interesting but not really my thing. In "The White Cat Of Drumgunniol" by J. Sheridan Le Fanu a man retells his family's history of a curse, a death portent that takes the form of a white cat. It occurs to me that Le Fanu doesn't really get acknowledged for the work he put into varying the forms of the genre he worked in. In this piece (slightly underwhelming as a story) he obviously takes on the task of telling an "Irish folktale", including replicating the speaking style and approach to tale telling (and even includes an aside in which he compares the manifestation of the cat to the classic banshee). The image of "disembodied hands" is a staple of ghost and horror fiction - W.F. Harvey, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Guy de Maupassant and, IIRC, even Ambrose Bierce got in on the act. And Arthur Quiller-Couch gets *his* hands in with "A Pair Of Hands" as a women renting a cottage in Cornwall (complete with a mysteriously industrious maid) experiences a haunting that manifests in an unlikely manner. This wistful, charming little story is oddly heartwarming and not at all scary, but a good read nonetheless.
Of final note was Joan Aiken's "The Apple Of Trouble" in which two British schoolchildren, dealing with their domineering Uncle while their parents are away, find their trouble increased by the intrusion into their life of a mythologically/historically infamous piece of fruit, and the Greek Furies who arrive in pursuit of it. This is a piece of light fantasy - funny, frothy and well-written, but not really my kind of thing. What surprises me most is that it is one of a series of stories about "The Armitage Family" that Joan Aiken wrote through 1950s and 1960s (and which I've never heard of) but which feel like the blueprint, or tonal cousin to, the HARRY POTTER series (or at least my cultural perception of those books, never having read any). Much as I hope that fans of THE ADDAMS FAMILY are aware of Ray Bradbury's "Elliot Family" stories, I certainly hope POTTER fans know of The Armitages (all of Aiken's stories with them seem to have been collected in The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories in 2008).
There were quite a large number of Good stories in this collection. H.P. Lovecraft's "The Moon-Bog" may not be from the writer's first-tier work, but the story of a drained fen that unleashes an archaic, pagan terror is extremely atmospheric, with an eerie ending. "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells is a classic "overnight in the haunted chamber" story, and still holds up as a good read, as well as a lesson in fear and the human mind, with an enjoyable, philosophical ending. "Coincidence" by A.J. Alan has a man finding his sleep disturbed by repeated cars screeching to a halt on the street outside - and so he trundles out there to discover that recent roadwork has created an optical illusion of a dead man sprawled in the road, and so he sets the police to the matter of traffic warnings... but a number of months later... A cute, short little weird tale thing - breezily told. Not bad at all.
In "The Bus Conductor" by E.F. Benson, two men, after a failure at ghost hunting in the most perfect setting (with the exact needed atmosphere), discuss the supernatural. And one, more rational about it all, posits a theory that he supports with his anecdotal experience. This is a perennial that I hadn't had the opportunity to reread in quite a while - you may know it from being adapted in DEAD OF NIGHT, or a certain TWILIGHT ZONE episode, and I distinctly remember a version called "The Elevator Operator" from some Scholastic anthology bought from the bookmobile when I was a kid (it featured an illustration that frightened me greatly). I believe, in my readings, I have even run across an earlier version of the story by another author - although I can't put my finger on that at the moment. Two things really stand out from what can easily be summed up as a "prophetic dream/vision" story (which tend to be disappointing) (is there an echo in here?). First, the "theory of the supernatural" (which could be called "the pinhole theory") is nicely conceived and described, and was interesting after having recently read a bunch of H.R. Wakefield (who seems to come at the same idea from another angle). Second, for such a tersely told, rational story being related, it has quite a bit of atmosphere (during the vision), all heavy silence and sharpened detail. Nicely done. Somewhat similar is "Feel Free" by Alan Garner, where a student (pursuing a pottery class) studies a Grecian bowl in a museum and (after realizing how much artistry has gone into it) convinces the guard to let him handle it, upon which they make a personal discovery on the pottery's underside. And later, the student takes his best girl to the fun-fair... This is a very short little piece, told in a personable, breezy, "informal dialogue" style and - yes - I'm being vague in my synopsis because why give it away? An enjoyable variant (almost an inversion) of "August Heat" (which also appears here), I felt the scenes set at the automated, repetitious and plastic fun-fair were nicely sharp and echoed the concerns, decades after, of the Decadents.
In "The Bottle Imp" by Robert Louis Stevenson a Hawaiian man is offered the purchase of a small bottle which purportedly contains an imp from hell who will fulfill any wish (save staving off death). But the catch is that the purchaser (lest he die while retaining ownership and his soul be consigned to Hell) must sell the bottle to another for less than he paid. This was another reread for me and I was struck by how clear and direct Stevenson's writing style is - the piece just cracks along (it has something like a fable format, while being set in the real world). There's a wonderful, minor bit where (to prove the efficacy of the charm) the owner wishes that he and his potential purchaser can see the imp for a moment - and both are rattled to the core by what they glimpse (which is never elaborated on). While there are other things to like (implicitly, the story is about both looming damnation and man's inability to be happy with physical things as proof of his success) the story kind of bogs down near the end - seeming to take forever to get to the inevitable climax. Still, better than I remember (at least the start), and reading it made me chose to reread the older version ("The Bottle Imp" - "Das Galgenmännlein" - by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, from 77 years before Stevenson's - which I then reviewed in Fiends and Creatures)... while I also realized that there is something of a relation to Balzac's "The Wild Ass's Skin" ("La Peau de chagrin") as well. The second story here by William Croft Dickinson - "The Witch's Bone" - is better than the already noted - a local historian weighs a request by a museum to loan them a "witch's bone," a magical artifact he recently rescued from the hut of a deceased, purported witch. But he wonders whether that's a good idea, as he's just successfully (if somewhat unexpectedly) used it to murder an annoying social nemesis, so maybe it really IS dangerous? But as it turns out, the bone doesn't care how it's used, either way... Not bad - a bit of folk horror told at one (and then two) removes.
Finally, there are three truly excellent reads here, but they'll have to carry over into the first comment... (see you there)
Let's get the weak ones out of the way first. I was excited to finally get a chance to read "Feet Foremost" by L.P. Hartley, as it's been on my to read list for a while (I believe I even watched a 1980s British TV adaptation a number of years ago). It's about the refurbishment of Low Threshold Hall, a stately British home (with original medieval tower and attached Queen Anne structure) that has been untenanted for 150 years. But the new tenants discover it has a legend attached, the curse of one Lady Elinor, whose ghost can only enter the house if she is carried across the threshold - which is then followed by the death of the carrier (with the ghost leaving by inhabiting their body). And, almost immediately following the gathering of the party - none of whom take the curse seriously - Antony commits the deed (the butler tells him there's a young women at the door when he awakes, who appears to have a broken leg, and the entranceway is flooded with rain, as the doorstep lacks a threshold...). But, as Antony slowly begins to sicken, his fiance Maggie (but no one else) becomes convinced that he has been cursed, and searches for ways to defuse the haunting. Okay, it's a "rules of the supernatural" story (which tend to be disappointing), but there are a lot of great things here - the story has a leisurely pace and so we take time for strange dreams, a few scenes amongst the servants, the deliberate killing of a pet (!), and a very striking moment of "coming upon the ghost" (who has been mistaken as a nurse). Too, the story seems to be moving towards a grim inevitability, as Maggie can't escape the only logical way to save her fiancee - but then, sadly, the plot ends with a glaring "deus ex-machina" (never has a British landholder's resolute unflappability been so summed up by an understated "We don't seem to be lucky here, just now..."). Which is a shame, because it's not a bad little thing until that point at all. M.R. James is a master, no doubt, but I've never been a big fan of "The Haunted Doll's House". Rereading it here, I enjoyed the authorial intrusions that satirize little aspects of ghost stories (and short fiction in general) in a knowing way, the passive/aggressive haggling dialogue that opens the piece and the brief description of the hideous haunter is effective (James is nothing if not an assured writer). But still, this story of a collector who buys a marvelous and enormous doll's house for a song, only to find that in the evening it becomes something like a miniature stage on which terrible historical deeds are replayed, still seems too much like a rehash of his own, superior "The Mezzotint" to me, and the passive aspect of the main characters makes it feel a little removed from the fear. Finally, in "His Own Number" by William Croft Dickinson, a man tells how a computer programmer who works for him has a strange, incorrect number turn up three times in his calculations, which seems to presage something fateful - and after the man's death, the narrator eventually puzzles his way to a solution to the enigmatic portent. Eh.
In the "Good but slightly flawed" category: Leon Garfield's "The Usurping Ghost" gives us a familiar set-up: two young boys have decided to scare the sexton at a ruined, seaside church by dressing up as the local legend - a ghostly drummer boy tied to stories of smugglers from a few decades back. But as the one, costumed and daubed with phosphorescent paint, marches into the foggy graveyard, he discovers he is being followed... by a ghostly, glowing boy with a drum. Now, despite that familiar set-up, this was interesting for a number of reasons - I like the writing style (crisp and clipped when it needs to be) and it takes time for atmospherics (the church grounds at night, enshrouded in blowing sea mists, is a great setting), but what was most interesting is that while stories with this set-up tend to go one way (an "after the fact" realization that what they saw, while playing ghost, was really a g-g-g-ghost!) this takes a different tack, as the ghost impersonator finds himself chased home by the ghost, who then takes the boy's place in his bedroom. So our fake ghost trudges back to the graveyard, convinced he must now take the ghost's place, only to come across the sexton, who was the target of the prank in the first place.... Can't say more, but it's slightly moralistic while still telling a good yarn. A young man arrives at a lonely train station, expecting to travel to his new prep school (which has sent a carriage and a rather sinister student to bring him there) in Manly Wade Wellman's "School For The Unspeakable" - but on arriving at the deserted campus (and meeting two more students) he begins to worry when his companions claim to be Satan worshipers... This was a reread - it has that straightforward readability that Wellman usually brings, along with a kind of story thinness that comes with some of his work. It's an atmospheric set-up and pay off, enjoyable in the moment (the three students are well-described) but just ends up being a fun, pulp time-waster.
"Ghost Riders Of The Sioux" was written special for this collection by Kenneth Ulyat. In 1889, two young men and their Native American boy guide are herding some horses back to their hometown in South Dakota when they see a frightening nighttime vision of Native warriors dancing and shrieking. Telling their parents leads to further historical events. While this is obviously a story for younger readers (told from the point of view of one of the boys), it is also NOT a supernatural story - but is interesting as something like a "youth Western" focusing on . Interesting but not really my thing. In "The White Cat Of Drumgunniol" by J. Sheridan Le Fanu a man retells his family's history of a curse, a death portent that takes the form of a white cat. It occurs to me that Le Fanu doesn't really get acknowledged for the work he put into varying the forms of the genre he worked in. In this piece (slightly underwhelming as a story) he obviously takes on the task of telling an "Irish folktale", including replicating the speaking style and approach to tale telling (and even includes an aside in which he compares the manifestation of the cat to the classic banshee). The image of "disembodied hands" is a staple of ghost and horror fiction - W.F. Harvey, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Guy de Maupassant and, IIRC, even Ambrose Bierce got in on the act. And Arthur Quiller-Couch gets *his* hands in with "A Pair Of Hands" as a women renting a cottage in Cornwall (complete with a mysteriously industrious maid) experiences a haunting that manifests in an unlikely manner. This wistful, charming little story is oddly heartwarming and not at all scary, but a good read nonetheless.
Of final note was Joan Aiken's "The Apple Of Trouble" in which two British schoolchildren, dealing with their domineering Uncle while their parents are away, find their trouble increased by the intrusion into their life of a mythologically/historically infamous piece of fruit, and the Greek Furies who arrive in pursuit of it. This is a piece of light fantasy - funny, frothy and well-written, but not really my kind of thing. What surprises me most is that it is one of a series of stories about "The Armitage Family" that Joan Aiken wrote through 1950s and 1960s (and which I've never heard of) but which feel like the blueprint, or tonal cousin to, the HARRY POTTER series (or at least my cultural perception of those books, never having read any). Much as I hope that fans of THE ADDAMS FAMILY are aware of Ray Bradbury's "Elliot Family" stories, I certainly hope POTTER fans know of The Armitages (all of Aiken's stories with them seem to have been collected in The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories in 2008).
There were quite a large number of Good stories in this collection. H.P. Lovecraft's "The Moon-Bog" may not be from the writer's first-tier work, but the story of a drained fen that unleashes an archaic, pagan terror is extremely atmospheric, with an eerie ending. "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells is a classic "overnight in the haunted chamber" story, and still holds up as a good read, as well as a lesson in fear and the human mind, with an enjoyable, philosophical ending. "Coincidence" by A.J. Alan has a man finding his sleep disturbed by repeated cars screeching to a halt on the street outside - and so he trundles out there to discover that recent roadwork has created an optical illusion of a dead man sprawled in the road, and so he sets the police to the matter of traffic warnings... but a number of months later... A cute, short little weird tale thing - breezily told. Not bad at all.
In "The Bus Conductor" by E.F. Benson, two men, after a failure at ghost hunting in the most perfect setting (with the exact needed atmosphere), discuss the supernatural. And one, more rational about it all, posits a theory that he supports with his anecdotal experience. This is a perennial that I hadn't had the opportunity to reread in quite a while - you may know it from being adapted in DEAD OF NIGHT, or a certain TWILIGHT ZONE episode, and I distinctly remember a version called "The Elevator Operator" from some Scholastic anthology bought from the bookmobile when I was a kid (it featured an illustration that frightened me greatly). I believe, in my readings, I have even run across an earlier version of the story by another author - although I can't put my finger on that at the moment. Two things really stand out from what can easily be summed up as a "prophetic dream/vision" story (which tend to be disappointing) (is there an echo in here?). First, the "theory of the supernatural" (which could be called "the pinhole theory") is nicely conceived and described, and was interesting after having recently read a bunch of H.R. Wakefield (who seems to come at the same idea from another angle). Second, for such a tersely told, rational story being related, it has quite a bit of atmosphere (during the vision), all heavy silence and sharpened detail. Nicely done. Somewhat similar is "Feel Free" by Alan Garner, where a student (pursuing a pottery class) studies a Grecian bowl in a museum and (after realizing how much artistry has gone into it) convinces the guard to let him handle it, upon which they make a personal discovery on the pottery's underside. And later, the student takes his best girl to the fun-fair... This is a very short little piece, told in a personable, breezy, "informal dialogue" style and - yes - I'm being vague in my synopsis because why give it away? An enjoyable variant (almost an inversion) of "August Heat" (which also appears here), I felt the scenes set at the automated, repetitious and plastic fun-fair were nicely sharp and echoed the concerns, decades after, of the Decadents.
In "The Bottle Imp" by Robert Louis Stevenson a Hawaiian man is offered the purchase of a small bottle which purportedly contains an imp from hell who will fulfill any wish (save staving off death). But the catch is that the purchaser (lest he die while retaining ownership and his soul be consigned to Hell) must sell the bottle to another for less than he paid. This was another reread for me and I was struck by how clear and direct Stevenson's writing style is - the piece just cracks along (it has something like a fable format, while being set in the real world). There's a wonderful, minor bit where (to prove the efficacy of the charm) the owner wishes that he and his potential purchaser can see the imp for a moment - and both are rattled to the core by what they glimpse (which is never elaborated on). While there are other things to like (implicitly, the story is about both looming damnation and man's inability to be happy with physical things as proof of his success) the story kind of bogs down near the end - seeming to take forever to get to the inevitable climax. Still, better than I remember (at least the start), and reading it made me chose to reread the older version ("The Bottle Imp" - "Das Galgenmännlein" - by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, from 77 years before Stevenson's - which I then reviewed in Fiends and Creatures)... while I also realized that there is something of a relation to Balzac's "The Wild Ass's Skin" ("La Peau de chagrin") as well. The second story here by William Croft Dickinson - "The Witch's Bone" - is better than the already noted - a local historian weighs a request by a museum to loan them a "witch's bone," a magical artifact he recently rescued from the hut of a deceased, purported witch. But he wonders whether that's a good idea, as he's just successfully (if somewhat unexpectedly) used it to murder an annoying social nemesis, so maybe it really IS dangerous? But as it turns out, the bone doesn't care how it's used, either way... Not bad - a bit of folk horror told at one (and then two) removes.
Finally, there are three truly excellent reads here, but they'll have to carry over into the first comment... (see you there)
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