Books

The Best-Kept Secret

29/03/2023

By

Being an easy pushover for a good UFO book (something I’ve not shaken since my childhood), I’ve just read Jacques Vallée’s and Paola Harris’ Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. It’s an account of a hitherto unknown UFO crash in San Antonio in 1945 very close to Ground Zero where the Manhattan Project had tested the first atomic bomb just days before. In reality, other than the testimony of old men who saw the crash as small children and a piece of aluminium, there’s not a great deal of physical evidence. Nevertheless Vallée and Harris link the first wave of UFO phenomena…

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The 5th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1969)

10/07/2021

By

Aickman’s fifth introduction is brief. He summarises his previous views: that ghost stories are separate from both horror and SF and that its “true affinity” is with poetry as it is “a projection and symbolisation of thoughts and feelings” that are excluded from usual written discourse. Ghost stories, he believes, began as tales of the dead returned but have widened to include Romantic notions involving the Imagination. Aickman asserts that “Ghost stories are exercises of the imagination.” Ghost stories are works of art and “the good ghost story offers the freedom of a lyric poem.” Aickman goes on to discuss…

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The 4th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1967)

03/06/2021

By

Aickman leads his fourth introduction to the Fontana Ghost Stories collection with a renewed attack on modern rationalism: “science will end the world,” he asserts. He goes on: “Even if there is no big bang, we shall destroy the world in no time, if we go on as we are. We shall crowd ourselves out; starve ourselves out; bore ourselves to bits; choke with protest against all the wrong things.” Such nihilism is offset for Aickman by his Romantic conception of the Imagination, where “Knowledge lies within us” in a manner that doesn’t respond to scientific enquiry. “Truth can be…

Some Thoughts About Caitlin R Kiernan’s Black Helicopters

15/04/2021

By

Professor Zeh sits in his office in Heidelberg. It’s 1969. Rain falls outside and Zeh’s office window is nothing but a dark grey rectangle. He’s smudged the ink in his notebook, jotting down a thought about Bohr’s interpretation of measurement he had while staring at his reflection in a mirror brushing his teeth this morning. Gemeinsamer Realität, Zeh writes over the faintly smudged word Mehrfachinterpretationen. Immediately, he crosses it out and writes dekohärent. Zeh frowns and feels irritated. His thinking this morning is messy. Inexact. In another room nearby he hears someone’s muffled shout followed by laughter. Here is the…

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The 3rd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1966)

13/03/2021

By

In this introduction to the third Fontana collection of Great Ghost Stories, Aickman engages with the nature of our desire to read supernatural fiction. He views it as “the need we all must feel for some degree of reconciliation with death”. Ghost stories themselves haunt modern society, allowing imaginary freedom from a modern mechanistic existence, a “compulsorily egalitarian society”. Once again, Aickman insists that ghost stories emerge from the “same strata of the unconscious” as poetry. A successful ghost story, he asserts, “must open a door, preferably where no one had previously noticed a door to exist; and, at the…

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The 2nd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1966)

06/03/2021

By

Little new ground is covered in Aickman’s second introduction to Fontana’s Book of Great Ghost Stories series (1966). He retreads his previous suggestions about the nature of ghost stories from the first volume and notes that the 1960s seem to favour Nineteenth Century arts (ghost stories, music), blaming the “new forms of society” for this preference of the past over the present. Aickman continues to express his dislike for modern society which he seems to view as falsely rationalising. Aickman argues that the ghost story is mainly a late Romantic form and asserts that “A world in which everything is…

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1964)

28/02/2021

By

Between 1964 and 1972, Robert Aickman sought to define the canon of supernatural stories and collected them in a series published by Fontana. The introduction to the first Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1964) has a bleak, nihilistic tone. Aickman sets the contemporary view of the ghost story in a post-rationalist world when humanity not only denies its spiritual being but also seeks to physically destroy itself. He mentions that behavioural psychology rejects the unconscious, culture is in a process of disintegration and commodification, religion’s attention is the corporeal and that love itself has become “rationalised and domesticated”. The…

Michael Moorcock’s “The Dreaming City” (1961)

27/12/2020

By

Moorcock’s The Dreaming City is the first short story featuring Elric, his silver-skinned Melnibonean hero. The story appeared in the wake of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (published between 1954 and 1955) as well as the renaissance of interest in Howard’s Conan tales (from 1932), Leiber’s Fahfrd & Grey Mouser series (from 1939) and Peake’s Gormenghast series (1950 – 1959). Moorcock insists that he was studying Freud, Jung and the gothic novel at the time and incorporated those elements into this tale. The setting of The Dreaming City is Melnibone, a once-great empire now in terrible decline. Its noble…

The Construction of Lost Hearts by M.R. James

17/12/2020

By

M.R. James’ Lost Hearts is a tautly-constructed short story with an impressive economy of narrative. It’s a macabre tale of an elderly occultist luring children to his home and murdering them in an attempt to magical powers and immortality. An unnamed narrator (James?) relates the tale. It seems to me that there are three movements in the story: events up to 24th March 1812, the evening of 24th March and “certain papers” from Abney’s desk explaining his motivations. There’s also a coda to the story is the delayed revelation that Abney has been killed with his heart exposed (this action…

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

03/10/2020

By

ENTRY FOR THE FIRST DAY OF THE TENTH MONTH IN THE SECOND YEAR AFTER THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS This evening I finished reading Piranesi, Susanna Clarke’s new novel. When I closed the book it was dark outside and I needed to turn the light on in the living room. Shadows formed in the corners of the room and I was certain I perceived vague pathways forming, brief glimpses of other places. Other worlds. Perhaps I imagined this. I found it difficult to bring my thoughts about the ending of the novel in some way that they converged…

Some Thoughts About Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Agents of Dreamland

06/09/2020

By

After the desert of ebony sand, there’s a great city of spiralling towers and crystal domes. Beyond the city is a vast methane ocean as still as glass. Furious storms travel the ocean. Benzene falls like snow. Ancient beings hunched over machines on this planet detect NASA’s New Horizons interplanetary probe as it passes Pluto. A mosaic is constructed. Pieces that hurt when you think about them too hard. It’s no coincidence that I bled from the back of my neck as I read, the blood congealing into thick, black powdery scabs . It just wouldn’t stop and my hands…

Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars

08/08/2020

By

I’m currently working my way through Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom series of pulp adventure novels. A Princess of Mars, the first of the series, was a surprisingly enjoyable romp reminding me of a mix of Gulliver’s Travels, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. While I’ve always been aware of John Carter, I’d not read any of the books in my youth. I’m not sure why as it would have been the sort of thing I’d have loved. Burroughs – who is possibly more famous for penning the Tarzan books – secured publication of A Princess of Mars (initially titled Under the…

“Learning” and “Path-following”

30/07/2019

By

I’m reading Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful The Old Ways. Early on he connects learning and path-following: The relationship between thinking and walking is also grained deep into language history, illuminated by perhaps the most wonderful etymology I know. The trail begins with our verb to learn, meaning ‘to acquire knowledge’. Moving backwards in language time, we reach the Old English leornian, lto get knowledge, to be cultivated’. From leornian the path leads further back, into the fricative thickets ofProto Germanic, and to the word liznojan, which has a base sense of ‘to follow or to find a track’ (from the Proto-Indo-European…