The Quickening by Mari Biella. Review by Bill Kirton

Susan Hill is quoted as the most accomplished of our contemporary writers of ghost stories. She’s certainly an excellent writer but, for me, her work isn’t remotely scary or disturbing. The Woman in Black is touted as a masterpiece of the genre and yet I found it predictable and devoid of the chills everyone seems to ascribe to it. This no doubt says more about me than about Ms Hill, and her fans will probably not even have bothered reading this far in my review. And, even if they have, they’ll consider me unqualified to comment on anything in the genre.

But it’s the fact that others have compared Mari Biella’s The Quickening with Ms Hill’s works that provokes my remarks because to me there seems to be a significant difference between the approach of the two writers and the impact of their stories. Ms Biella makes no assumptions about the reader’s susceptibilities. All aspects of her story, the rational and the immanent, are given equal weight. Her characters and their relationships are beautifully, carefully drawn and delineated. She knows them so well and follows their shifts of mood and their changing perceptions with the lightest and yet surest of touches. Her writing is measured, thoughtful. She chooses the words she puts into her first person narrator’s mouth with care and skilfully reproduces the tone and rhythms of the late Victorian era in which the events take place. Most of all, her book’s uniqueness stems from the fact that she manages to close the gap between the rational and the supernatural which sceptics like myself find so difficult to negotiate.

The vast, impossible distance between the quick and the dead is, if not overcome, at least brought into question. The rational-minded Lawrence Fairweather despairs at his wife’s persistent refusal to accept the loss of their younger daughter. His wish is to move on from the tragedy but the child’s continued ‘presence’ for his wife and their other daughter closes all avenues. It sits at the centre of the narrative, determining its pathways, insinuating itself into everything, challenging him.

His account of the events begins in apprehension. Its slow burn intensifies as the story builds and, as he relates details of changes in his wife, we become aware of subtle psychological changes in himself. Simultaneously, in the broader context, the opposing forces of the real and the imagined begin, barely perceptibly, to overlap as seemingly irreconcilable elements gradually merge and fuse.

The result is a shiver which is qualitatively distinct from that produced by more conventional hauntings. Here, the external trappings of the story – its historical period, geographical location, oppressive mood and surroundings – follow those conventions, but the hauntings are internal, of the mind. They occupy the same space as reason. And, even to a sceptic like myself, they seem to be equally valid.

This is an excellent work, a pleasure to read. Ms Biella makes the ghostly accessible, possible, legitimate.

Hauntings: Nine Eerie Stories by Susan Price

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of ghost stories, especially well-written, evocative, psychologically astute ones. Susan Price’s collection Hauntings ticks all three boxes, and more besides.

The ghost story, at least if it’s to be done well, isn’t an easy form to master. (Having written a few myself, some of which were more successful than others, I can speak from experience.) The ghost story is often categorised as a sub-genre of horror, yet usually contains few of the over-the-top theatrics that characterise a much more showy kind of horror. The ghost story, instead, relies on the slow, careful evocation of place and mood and a mounting sense of dread or uncertainty, followed by the careful, controlled release of tension. A good ghost story, it’s fair to say, is a great deal easier to read than to write.

Price, however, knows exactly what she’s doing, and the stories in this collection are an unqualified success. These are tales set on the curious, queasy border between this world and another, a border which may or may not exist only in the mind (this uncertainty is partly what lends the ghost story it’s curious power, perhaps). Most of them are set, very recognisably, in more-or-less contemporary Britain, and yet they allow us to experience another world and time. An old farm, slowly being swallowed up by urban sprawl, seems to coexist with another dimension, which is also perhaps in danger of disappearing. A young woman lives another life through her dreams. A terrorised victim of school bullies finds that she can have her revenge – at a price. A fraudulent medium experiences something truly unearthly. The tensions and power play of an ordinary marriage attract, or create, a supernatural force.

What anchors these stories and makes them so believable and powerful is that they are set in a realistic, tangible world. It’s a world of suburbs and pubs, farms and industrial estates. The characters too are real people: they speak in local dialect, behave as everyday people do, and often seem to be way too down-to-earth to be afflicted by supernatural happenings. So when the supernatural arrives it seems all the more urgent and real, and all the more unsettling.

Though these stories will almost certainly send a shiver up your spine, they are not primarily horrifying. They are rooted in folk tales, folk history, and legend. Like many ghost stories, they are often also curiously comforting – that death might not be the end has always been a seductive idea, which is perhaps why ghost stories were dreamed up in the first place. In one particularly memorable moment in one of the stories, a witness cannot bear to look: not, as you might think, because he’s scared, but because he can’t bear the thought that there might be nothing there after all.

These are ghost stories just the way I like them: stories that suggest that, just beyond the realm of ordinary perception, there is another world; and that, sometimes and in some places, the veil can be lifted, and that world can be glimpsed or experienced. This may or may not be true, but it’s a powerful idea; and that power is channelled carefully in Hauntings, and crafted to create these marvellously-realised tales. If you like ghost stories, you’ll love this.

To buy Hauntings, go to Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

Haunting Hounds by Karen Bush

When I was very young – but probably old enough to know better – I used to be an avid reader of ghost stories (I still am, and now I’m definitely old enough to know better.) I loved nothing more than curling up under the covers and scaring myself silly with tales of headless horsemen, phantom nuns, and grey ladies. Of course, one of the good things about being a ghost-mad kid in Britain is that Blighty’s a notoriously haunted country, in which just about every village and country lane boasts its fair share of ghosts. And not all of those ghosts, as Karen Bush proves in this lovely collection, come in human form.

If men can return from the dead – and, according to folklore throughout the centuries, they can – then I suppose it follows that man’s best and most loyal friend might also do the same. The spectral dogs in this collection are every bit as diverse as human ghosts. Some are horrible, and some are helpful. Some are gloomy, and others are playful. Some come back to haunt the living because of unfinished business, and others do so for no apparent reason whatsoever.

There are plenty of famous spectral hounds here, from the hounds that ride with the Wild Hunt to the mysterious black dogs that haunt lonely roads, either helping or harming the humans they encounter. There are literary dogs, like the inspiration for Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles and the Isle of Man’s Moddey Dhoo, which features in Sir Walter Scott’s work. There are vicious dogs and placid dogs, guard dogs and guide dogs, witch dogs and even fairy dogs. And as well as the well-known spectral dogs, there are plenty of more obscure local legends; a huge amount of research must have gone into this book.

Whether you believe in ghosts or not (‘All argument is against it; but all belief is for it,’ according to the opening quote by Samuel Johnson), they’re undoubtedly an intrinsic and fascinating part of folklore, and rather revealing on a psychological level. Ghost stories are often as reassuring as they are frightening, and the same applies to ghost dogs: it’s comforting to think that our canine companions might survive death. And this fascinating, affectionate tribute to our four-legged friends is, ultimately, comforting – not least because of Claire Colvin, whose beautiful and humorous illustrations really make this book a treasure. Highly recommended to anyone who loves ghosts, or dogs, or both.

Haunting Hounds can be purchased at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

The Quickening: A Ghost Story by Mari Biella. Reviewed by Catherine Czerkawska

It’s no secret that I love a good ghost story – and this is a very good ghost story indeed. The Quickening is an elegant, intelligent, entertaining and very scary piece of writing: somewhere between a traditional country house haunting and a psychological thriller, with elements of both. You can trace its roots to the stories of both Montague and Henry James and a few other Victorian paranormal writers. There are echoes of the later ghost stories of Susan Hill. But essentially, this novel stands alone as a brilliant portrayal of what I came to think of as a sort of restrained foreboding. 

 ‘Mine is a story of mystery and of misunderstandings, and of good intentions that went miserably astray. It is a story of death, too, and whatever might follow bodily death: and that, perhaps, is the greatest and most troubling mystery of all.’

The novel – which begins in the late summer of 1897 - is narrated by Lawrence Fairweather, a youngish married man, a botanist who has a private income and therefore, like so many young men of his time, has no real need to work. He has little to absorb his mind. He claims to be a rationalist and of course he is: an intelligent and down-to-earth man with no time for religion. But his rational beliefs are ill suited to his present situation. And that is one of the most intriguing themes in this thoroughly intriguing novel.

Almost immediately, we are aware that something traumatic has befallen Lawrence and his wife, Julia. The couple have been travelling abroad for several months and are now returning to their house in England.

‘Back then, I thought that houses were but stone and wood, and had no power other than that which we chose to bestow on them,’ says Lawrence, adding ominously, ‘I was utterly wrong; and had I known that, I would never have set foot in that godforsaken place ever again.’

The country house to which they are returning is in the Fens – evocatively described, the very monotony of this bleak landscape, as autumn and then winter approaches, somehow adding to the atmosphere of slowly encroaching threat. Halfway House it is not a particularly old house. It is shockingly ordinary: a ‘plain and unaffected building’ much as Lawrence would claim to be a plain and unaffected young man, a man of science. There is no age-old ghostliness or ghastliness here to explain the story. No. This is a much more subtle and therefore much more threatening tale.

We soon become aware that the couple have a young daughter, Hazel, who has stopped speaking. Doctors have been consulted. There is no physiological reason for this so we must again assume some intense psychological trauma. And there is a housekeeper, Mrs Jessop, a pleasant and concerned servant who has been minding the house while the little family has been travelling. But not sleeping there. She will not sleep there. And as Lawrence observes, ‘She looked weary and worn... Great dark shadows ringed her eyes, and her skin seemed as dry and creased as parchment paper.’

This is where and how it all begins. The family returns – as why should they not come home? - the housekeeper welcomes them, and then, ‘here, amongst these quiet rooms and empty hallways, something had quickened and come to life.’

Soon the reason behind the disquiet emerges. I won’t spoil it by naming it here, since that too is very carefully and deliberately handled. Among so much else, I found myself admiring the consistency of the voice of the narrator. Mari Biella has most certainly crept inside his head and taken us, her readers, with her – and this is no mean feat. The haunting, when it comes, is low key, subtle, carefully managed by an author in command of her material and in command of her own prose. It is none the less frightening. There is a suffocating, profoundly disturbing quality to the whole novel – relentless but relentlessly fascinating too. I couldn’t help but read on and was sometimes genuinely haunted by the kind of nameless and indistinct fears experienced by the characters – and by the uneasy sense that the narrator himself may not be entirely reliable.

Which makes this into a genuinely frightening proposition. A tour de force of the imagination. Read it by night and be afraid. Be very afraid.

The Quickening: A Ghost Story is available on Amazon's Kindle store.

Here in the UK

Here in the USA

Out of the Deep by Dennis Hamley reviewed by Julia Jones & Valerie Laws

With the dark nights closing in and Halloween rattling its bones (or its Trick or Treat collecting tins!) devotees of ghostly and supernatural stories are spoiled for choice. The stories included in Dennis Hamley's Out of the Deep, however, demonstrate that the supernatural is always just a frisson away --  whatever the location or time of year. They are set on a summer holiday, at the opening of a railway line, at a football match as well as the more obviously eerie settings such as a lonely crossroads or a medieval mound. If I had to select just one of all these stories to ponder on a desert island I think it would have to be The Shirt off a Hangedman's Back for its sombre reflections on the injustice life and the cruelty of crowds. 
Dennis Hamley understands the supernatural as a means of imaging "some of the deepest and most enigmatic processes of the human heart and will". After each of the dozen stories in this collection he adds a commentary explaining how the story came to be written and what particular aspect interested him as he wrote. The explanations are clear and unpretentious and have Hamley's professionalism and wealth of writing experience behind them. If one is trying to understand (or teach) the genre they are invaluable -- similarly if one if trying to improve one's own writing. 
I was left with a question, however. 
The first time I read this book I followed the suggested pattern: story + explanation, story + explanation and it was ideal for what I needed at that moment. I'm not a writer who finds the supernatural easy and I wanted a greater understanding of the process so I could discuss it with students. Dennis Hamley as a lifetime of teaching experience and Out of the Deep delivered exactly what I needed. 
Such is the perverseness of folk, nevertheless, that I began to bite the hand that fed me. A discussion in quite a different arena (the Arthur Ransome page) had made me ask myself the question, can there be too much explanation? Does it help or hinder involvement if readers are able to identify every location of a story, every detail that could have contributed to the writing process? This is a troubling question for a literary biographer ... 
When I read the stories in Out of the Deep for the second time I read without the explanations --and found them noticeably more powerful and evocative. I wondered, then, whether Dennis Hamley might consider tweaking the layout and adding more links to the ebook format so that electronic readers could choose their preferred mode? (He could even knock out those few wicked little typos that have crept into his text like imps of Satan!) 



JJ - A few days after I'd posted my Amazon review I discovered that Valerie Laws (aka Lydia Bennett or 'superswimmer') shared my high opinion of them. Here's what she had to say - and a little more.

Out of the Deep presents ghost stories with a very wide variety of settings, each with some fascinating lore about the story's own little world, football, bare knuckle boxing, family life at different times... these spooky tales introduce us to a range of revenants, ghosts with unfinished business, seeking justice, seeking to warn the living, and in this ebook edition, each one is followed by a short piece from the author telling how it came to be written, the inspiration and evolution of the tale.  

   In 'The Overbalancing Man' Hamley manages a delicate balancing act, to keep us teetering on the edge, as the disaster, whatever it is, comes hurtling towards us. In a story about railways and trainspotting geeks and the engines of the past, he has a ghost story unfolding before the eyes of a young girl. The re-enactment of tragedy she keeps seeing haunts her life - but is it really a ghost from the past, or a ghost from the future? As events unfold, the complications of past/future dimensions, and the question of whether something destined can be changed, the nature of the tragedy becomes clear. Hamley doesn't always end with a resolution, sometimes it's the discovery of the mystery or ghost which is the end, and sometimes it ends badly, for someone, as happens in life.

   Though the stories are short, the characters in them, living and otherwise, are beautifully drawn, and they are much more than just spooky, they are also moving, sad, and disturbing. Dennis Hamley is an author with many many books behind him and his craft has been honed to sleek perfection. Read them, and leave the light on!

Review of 'Overheard In A Graveyard' by Susan Price

'Overheard in a Graveyard' by Susan Price - 

Reviewed by Rosalie Warren

I love scary stories - not full-blooded horror and nothing too vampirical (is that a word?) - but ghost stories that reach down into the psyche: ones that unearth deep, unspoken, unacknowledged fears.

So how have I managed to live for more than fifty years without encountering the work of Susan Price? I don't know, but that state of affairs is now being remedied. Since reading Overheard in a Graveyard  I've downloaded - is it three or four of her other books? I'm an addict, anyway...

Overheard in a Graveyard is a collection of short stories, beginning with one of that name. The opening tale is a conversation between a night-time visitor to the graveyard and an inhabitant of one of the graves. It's creepy, to the extent that the words crawl like cold fingers down your back. I missed its power the first time I read it, as I hadn't got used to the form. When I'd read the other stories I went back and read it again. This time, it made me shudder. Shades of Heathcliff and and Cathy in Wuthering Heights (still gives me nightmares, that book), but with a compelling voice and atmosphere that is all Price's own.

The second story, 'Bus Aid', is a very different kind of beastie. There's social comment - social satire - here. There's claustrophobia; people trapped and desperately needing help. It's funny, too. And it leaves you wondering... who was doing the haunting in this tale?

Another favourite of mine is 'The Footsteps on the Stairs'. Young children left alone, and a father interrupting his evening at the pub to come home and check that they're OK. Or does he?

I'm trying to work out why these stories have such power. I think it's because of the realism - the poverty in which many of the characters live. The cosy, grimy, small-town life that surrounds them. And the shock of the supernatural, in among all that.

In Price's stories it feels sometimes as though the ghosts inhabit the true world - the one that makes more sense. Some of their transparency is coloured in by the reality of mid-twentieth century Black Country life. Almost as though it's our messy world that's doing the haunting and disturbing the cool, elegant realm we call the supernatural.

There's ambiguity, too - many more questions than answers. Was that really a ghost, or just a dream, or a frightened child's imagination run amok? And there's the delightful recognition that ghosts and spirits may sometimes be benign.

'Mow Top' is heartbreakingly sad. The picture of the toy car rusting away on its little stone on the empty moors will stay with me. This is how it works in real life. Children see ghosts and tell us. We reassure them, and ourselves, that there are no such things...

'The Familiar' is all about the cost of power, and cuts deep.

The final story, 'Overheard in a Museum', is a thing of beauty, like the ship itself. You can feel the swell of the sea beneath you as you read. It speaks of a distant era and reminds us that objects so often outlast people by a long, long time. Except that the ship is not a object - it's the spirit of an age.

You don't need to believe in ghosts to enjoy these wonderful stories, but be warned. You may dive in as a sceptic and find yourself an agnostic, or even a believer, by the end... perhaps not so much in ghosts as in another world, very close to and overlapping with our own.


Details:
Title: Overheard in a Graveyard and Other Stories
Author: Susan Price
Kindle Edition Publication Date: September 2011
Kindle Edition price £1.54
ASIN: B005NHG5XG
Click to view on Amazon.co.uk
Click to view on Amazon.com

Happy Reading,
Rosalie

Rosalie Warren
Author of Coping with Chloe and Charity's Child
See more of my reviews on my blog, Rosalie Reviews