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I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales of R. Murray Gilchrist

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Through vampiric trysts, heady visions of ghostly processions, and metaphorical tales of murdering one’s own psyche, the portrait of a truly unique writer of the strange tale emerges.

R. Murray Gilchrist was lauded for his imagination and florid, illustrative style during the fin-de-siecle period, and this new collection showcases the very best of his short fiction. Despite being admired by H. G. Wells and described by Arnold Bennett as "almost the peak of perfection in that difficult genre [of short fiction]," Gilchrist and his works are now largely forgotten. Packed with thrilling encounters and unforgettable descriptions from the weirdest ebb of the writer’s mind, this anthology aims to introduce a new readership to Gilchrist’s entrancing and influential oeuvre.

317 pages, Paperback

First published August 19, 2021

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About the author

R. Murray Gilchrist

45 books8 followers
Robert Murray Gilchrist was born in Sheffield, England in 1867. He never married and throughout his life lived mostly in remote places, including the North Derbyshire village of Holmesfield and a remote part of the Peak District.

He began his writing career in 1890 with a novel, Passion the Plaything, and would go on to publish a total of 22 novels, six story collections, four regional interest books, and a play. His stories appeared in many popular periodicals of that era, including The Temple Bar and the decadent journal The Yellow Book. Not much is known about Gilchrist’s personal life, but he is known to have lived for a time with a male companion, and given that Gilchrist never married and sometimes featured homoerotic themes in his work, as in the story ‘My Friend’, it is possible he was homosexual.

Though well known today to connoisseurs of weird and Decadent fiction, Gilchrist’s story collection The Stone Dragon and Other Tragic Romances was generally poorly received by critics on its initial appearance in 1894, and following the book’s failure, Gilchrist chose to write in other genres. It was not until Hugh Lamb began anthologizing some of Gilchrist’s work in the 1970s that he began to be rediscovered. Now he is ranked by many alongside other fin de siècle practitioners of weird fiction, including Vernon Lee, Arthur Machen, and Eric Stenbock and The Stone Dragon is a volume highly sought-after by collectors.

During World War I, Gilchrist was noted for his charitable assistance to Belgian refugees, many of whom attended his funeral after his death in 1917.

-Valancourt Books

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5 stars
15 (24%)
4 stars
18 (29%)
3 stars
21 (33%)
2 stars
6 (9%)
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2 (3%)
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
186 reviews9 followers
January 23, 2022
I really enjoyed this volume. I've been a Gilchrist fan for a while now and I was really excited to see a new volume of his tales with hitherto unseen stories. The editing is really effective. The way the stories have been collected really aids with new connections and capturing patterns of representation. the section on 'Passion and Death' was a little emotionally overwhelming at times. There's a really good selection of stories, going from weird tales, to tragic stories of love, to tales of murder and crime, and, in the 'Weird Peak' section, humourous quasi-supernatural regional tales. Gilchrist's language is rich and baroque. It can be a bit overwhelming in large doses so I do recommend spacing out your reading and really giving yourself time to get into, absorb and appreciate the richness of the imagery, the playfulness of the language, the truly striking descriptions. He innovates with his word usage and combinations in ways which startle as well as bringing to the fore archaic words and phrases (helpfully explained by the editor Pietersen in the endnotes).

All in all, an excellent read for fun. Also, a fantastic collection for scholars interested in the weird, the fin-de-siecle Gothic, queer literature (the story 'The Friend' particularly stands out here) and late 19th/early 20th century short fiction.

Hands down my favourite story was 'The Friend' but there were plenty that I would happily read over and over again! Not every tale was of equal quality or interest and do watch out for some racist depictions of side characters (particularly in 'Francis Shackerley' and 'The Noble Courtesan')
Profile Image for Frederick Heimbach.
Author 12 books21 followers
December 16, 2024
The first story in this collection got me excited for more. "More," however, turned out to be "exactly the same," as Gilchist troweled on the sticky, gooey stucco of his particular brand of weird, decadent, humid, moldy atmospherics. So my rating dropped from five starts to sub-three ... but then some variety came in, and I altered my expectations, and some of the later stories were quite good.

So, four stars. Fans of etiolated rich people pining over doomed love affairs and/or flirting with devil-men amidst the mossy ruins of an abandoned "pleasaunce" (aka pleasance, aka a formal garden--even Gilchrist's vocabulary is moldy) may give this collection a fifth star.
Profile Image for N. M. D..
181 reviews7 followers
June 28, 2022
Picked this one up because I was completely unfamiliar with the author. You've got all the Victorian trappings here. Doomed romances, scorned lover suicides, bewitching women, useless men, forbidden trysts.

I was really hoping for the sort of tortured, repressed homoerotic subtext being a secretly gay Victorian should bring about, but only one story delivered on that. The rest are about men and women obsessed with one another to almost comical levels of melodrama. Many stories feature men discarding the love of a virtuous lady for the lure of a another, usually some supernatural monster woman. They either get the happy ending, where they learn from their mistakes, or they get the bad ending. And they are the most consistently ineffectual fictional men I've ever seen.

The writing is archaic, even for its time, reading more like the 18th century than the 19th. I think these tales, being so repetitive, would work better not being read all at once. This is one to pick up and read a story or two here and there.

So, aside from the stories, there's the matter of this particular edition. First I want to say that I deeply appreciate British Librtay putting these volumes out and I will continue to buy them. There are writers amongst these sets I've either only read one story from in an anthology or have never heard of. The more dark Victorian and early weird tales that see new light, the better. That being said, the holier-than-thou content warning at the beginning is actually more offensive to me than anything found in this book, which is very quaint and mild with its old-fashioned-ness. Something is really wrong if people have become so entrenched in their modern ideas that they don't realize or can't easily cope with the fact that things used to be different. Second, there are a ton of missing commas. The more I write, critique, and read, the more I've noticed punctuation and grammar problems in books. It's horribly distracting. 

These errors were a surprise hiccup in an otherwise well-constructed collection. I'd love to see BL release a Russell Wakefield collection. Hanns Heinz Ewers would be awesome too.
Profile Image for Anna Orridge.
Author 6 books2 followers
November 23, 2021
This is a very rich read, with dense and textured prose, but it's definitely worth persisting with. Gilchrist's flair for description and the mournful psychological depth ensures the stories have an unsettling, lasting power. They are organised into sections according to theme, with illuminating introductions by the editor, Daniel Pietersen.

Reading a Gilchrist story is often a bit of a deep plunge, because the reader is expected to absorb a lot of information in the first few pages, and it often takes a while to orientate yourself.

As a collection, it's probably best to sip rather than glug - as you would do with a very rich and oaky red wine. A definite Must for all fans of classic Gothic texts.
Profile Image for Leah.
1,732 reviews289 followers
November 30, 2021
For the most part these aren't really horror stories. They are doomed romances, full of exalted language and melodrama. They are well enough written, and I enjoyed two or three of them, but eventually they all began to feel like repetitions on a theme. Not my kind of thing, unfortunately - sub-Poe without the wild imagination that makes ploughing through the excesses in language worthwhile. At around two-thirds of the way through, I realised I couldn't take any more of it. My rating is entirely subjective - other people may find his style considerably more appealing than I did.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, the British Library.
Profile Image for Muaz Jalil.
357 reviews9 followers
October 31, 2023
Not my cup of tea. Did not enjoy them at all. Too convoluted for my taste
Profile Image for p..
976 reviews62 followers
February 2, 2022
i must admit - the language, the older english, impeded my fully enjoying this. regardless, it is still pretty clear gilchrist was a talented author - and there are some ideas, some imagery that i thoroughly enjoyed! i just wish i had been able to connect with the stories better.

that being said, some of my favourite were "the crimson weaver", "the lover's ordeal", "a night on the moor", "the basilick", "the grotto at ravensdale", "dryas and lady greenleaf", "the stone dragon", "the noble courtesan", "the holocaust", "my friend", "sir toby's wife" and "a strolling player".
Profile Image for Mads ✨is balls deep in the Animorphs reread✨.
308 reviews36 followers
September 13, 2023
A disappointment. I picked this up because the "gothic" and "Peak District" put together made me go absolutely ham in the book shop. It's therefore frustrating that only three Peak Weird tales are collected here, because they are striking in comparison to the ponderous melodramas that bloat the rest of the collection.

I read this in large chunks rather than dipping in and out, which is definitely not the way to go with densely written and thematically repetetive short stories. Nonetheless, I was expecting some genuine weirdness (given the title) and even horror (given the cover), but most of these are simply badly paced gothic romances. And after the first dozen overwrought of maidens with limpid eyes and swan necks and flaming hair I was starting to get a bit frustrated, and annoyed by the deliberately antiquated language.

On the plus side, although their physical descriptions give off major "women written by [Victorian] men" vibes, Gilchrest's heroines are an active, fiesty bunch who normally serve as the driving agents in the story (for good and ill), in comparison to a lot of passive male narrators. However, the disconnect between these milquetoast men, and their fervid enganglements with overblown women just increased the sense of overall detachment and absurdity for me: it feels like Gilchrest is going through the motions of what a gothic love story *should* look like, rather than depicting these romantic dynamics because they feel real to *him*.

This disconnect really hit home when we get to "My Friend". This is not just the only story with a queer theme, it's also one of the few depictions of love and longing that feels REAL. It's gentle, contemplative and genuinely moving.

"Gabriel," I said, "I have been dreaming of you again...I am out of tune with all the world but you."

In one scene the narrator quietly watches Gabriel sleep by the fire. He carefully lists every feature of Gabriel's face, before finishing with the tender, simple admission that:

Here was nothing fascinating, save the fact that it was the face of my only friend.

To me, My Friend is a thousand times more convincing as a romance than any of the storms of passion that came before it. Who knows if Gilchrest would have written more brilliant stories like this, if he didn't live back in a time when being gay got you sent to prison. What a tragic waste.

Gilchrest's primary strength is his fantastic eye for imagery the natural landscape, and this adds richness and depth to his stories - although this becomes window dressing when the plot itself is lacking. Nonetheless there are other stories worth reading here; The Grotto At Ravensdale; The Basilisk; Sir Toby's Wife and The Crimson Weaver stick out in my memory. And like I said the Peak Weird tales are great, once we finally get to them. They are grounded in Gilchrest's own time, and are populated by believable people, rather than a heightened, overstuffed version of the past. At the very end of the collection, the melancholy and bittersweet A Strolling Player actually made me cry.

⭐️ Overall thoughts: My Friend and A Strolling Player are wonderful, but this collection would be far stronger if 5 - 10 of the less inventive romances had been culled by the editor. Despite the title, there's very little that's truly weird here. Unfortunately, beneath all the florid trappings of archaic language and overstuffed heroines, even the Peak itself is often muffled out.

🦆 Duck rating: Ponds abound in the grounds of various gothic mansions, so in one or two of the stories there are DUCKS!!!

📚 Will I read others: I definitely will want to look for some more of his Peak Weird stories. Anything involving Derbyshire and folklore, I'm there. That's a guaranteed sale for me. I'll just be steering clear of everything else...
Profile Image for Onorio Catenacci.
45 reviews
October 16, 2023
This book is a collection of reprinted short stories of the mostly forgotten author R. Murray Gilchrist. Mr. Gilchrist wrote in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.

It's hard to characterize Mr. Gilchrist's writings. He intentionally embraces the use of archaic language which makes his stories a bit difficult to follow. On the other hand I've added a few interesting words to expand my vocabulary--e. g. cheeseparing. A really cool new word (at least to me) to say "extremely stingy with money".

He also seems to revel in obscuring details with a level of obfuscation that would do H. P. Lovecraft proud. While Lovecraft seemed to never have met an adjective he didn't like, Gilchrist seems to have never met a plot point that he couldn't make hard to decipher.

I might be able to tolerate those authorial quirks but the last section of the book "Peak Weird" has three stories written with a dialect seemingly local to some region of the UK which is fairly difficult to read.

Unlike most of the other books I've read so far in the British Library Tales of the Weird series (indeed I've also read most of the Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories series) this book was really a chore to read. The stories seemed to ramble without much point and the denouement of most of the stories only seemed to add to the confusion.

Others may find this book entertaining but as for me, I only finished this book due to a determination to reduce my habit of failing to finish what I start.
Profile Image for Lynsey Walker.
325 reviews13 followers
December 21, 2023
A high 3 star, would have pushed the dizzying heights of 4 stars but had to skip the whole last section as it was written in dialect, and I CANNOT bear that as I cannot understand it.

So it appears my bad run of books has come to an end. Cuthulu be praised.

I wholly admit to never having heard of Mr Gillchrist in my life, which is unforgivable as he appears to be an early pioneer of weird fiction. And what weird fiction he writes, it is gothic, Elizabethan and overarching it all it is weird. We have overblown gothic romances that suddenly and abruptly end in devil worship/murder/madness/ghosts or all of the above. I have never read the likes. Nor shall I ever again.

This is not your normal weird fiction, there are no tentacles for a start, it is creepily and subtly weird, slightly Poesque, but not even quite that. It is all EXTREMELY gothic, the settings, the costumes, the overly dramatic lovers sighing. And yet it is both.

It is all ethereal and dreamlike and I was whisked up and taken along for this beautiful ride.
Profile Image for Al Wright.
157 reviews
November 19, 2024
A deceptively varied collection of nowadays overlooked gothic tales.
Gilchrist's writing is easy to dismiss as B-grade purple prose of its era, in favour of the more time tested likes of Lovecraft or Poe. Yet, despite their near self defeating consistency, the subtle differences in theme explored in each story make for engaging experiments in sub genre.

Take 'The Return', 'The Basilisk' and 'The Stone Dragon' for example: they each seemingly take the same template of a tragic love story, yet when compared the stark differences become clear alongside Gilchrist's ability to conceal finer details in plain sight. All are stories of jealous love: though one is tragic in a Shakespearean sense, another using a monster metaphor for emotional stagnation and regret and finally one as grotesque.

Gilchrist's archaic style of prose, even for the time, lends to the historical settings and, in a more contemporary sense, highlights him as a crucial Proto-Modernist of horror literature. He went backwards so the genre could move forwards.
Profile Image for Sohxpie .
350 reviews
October 30, 2023
A very interesting collection of short stories from a somewhat unknown author. I am extremely glad that I discovered this British Library Tales of the Weird collection because it is introducing me to so many great writers and fantastic stories. Gilchrist definitely shines in his descriptions of things, his writing is absolutely stunning. When he talks about nature and the landscapes, he creates such a vivid scene that is easy to picture in your head. I really enjoyed reading these stories. I loved how the collection was separated into different themes, it really showcased the range of stories. I absolutely loved 'A Witch in the Peak', I thought it was a very fun little story. 'A Night on the Moor' and 'Midsummer Madness' were stand-out stories for me as well.
Profile Image for Frank Lopes.
5 reviews1 follower
November 11, 2021
A wonderful collection!

This selection of Gilchrist’s stories is both well edited and made very comprehensive to the modern reader via an extensive glossary. They make a crucial part of the history of weird fiction, and are genuinely interesting and good by themselves! If you might have any interest in gothic tales and weird fiction, this is a great collection, of an author you’ve likely not encountered before, and is unlikely to encounter again!!!
Profile Image for caro_cactus.
909 reviews14 followers
February 5, 2022
Gothic, weird and gorgeous. The writing is visceral in the images, there is humor and tragic irony and a nuance and complexity of the female characters is impressive. Very glad I was "forced" to read it for book group, definitely food for thought and the imagination! It's also very well edited.
Profile Image for Helen McClory.
Author 12 books208 followers
Read
March 10, 2022
Ripe with purple prose and scenarios. A wee thick cherry slice of the gothic
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews

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