William Allison (June 8, 1999)[Has anyone seen Peter Straub's ghost?]Sorry. I couldn't help it.
Anyway, speaking of PS, alt.books.peter-straub is having a "group read" of IF YOU COULD SEE ME NOW if anyone might be interested. It just got underway yesterday; the schedule has been posted on a.b.p-s. IYCSMN, JULIA, and GHOST STORY are my favorite Straubs of long ago...
Speaking of group reads, the (semi)recent Le Fanu threads running here got me to thinking that a a.b.g-f analysis of some of "Mighty Joe's" stories might be just the thing to shake us out of our wingback-induced lethargy... The following online (as in available to everyone- now) stories are at our disposal:
J. Sheridan Le Fanu, An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier St:
http://www.mtroyal.ab.ca/programs/arts/english/gaslight/aungier.htmJ. Sheridan Le Fanu, Green Tea:
http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~nauerbac/tea.htmlJ. Sheridan Le Fanu, Mr. Justice Harbottle:
http://www.mtroyal.ab.ca/programs/arts/english/gaslight/justharb.htmJ. Sheridan Le Fanu, Schalken the Painter:
http://home.epix.net/~wallison/schalken.htmlGood idea? Bad idea? Hello?
Bill A. (waiting for rbadac to call for the brandy and cigars...)
--
alt.books.ghost-fiction FAQ
http://home.epix.net/~wallison/abgf_faq.htmloOo
Chris Bolton (June 8, 1999)
I vote for "Green Tea" -- always wanted to read it but never did. Now I have an excuse..... Managed to intercept this before it went out. <whew!> Glancing at "Green Tea" moments after typing the above, I find it's an entire novel, or perhaps novella. At any rate, it would be best for me (time-wise) to start with something a little smaller. You pick.
Chris A. Bolton
oOo
William Allison (June 9, 1999)
As per the other branch of the thread, we'll be doing "Schalken the Painter" first. This one is short, is the earliest of the four, and Bill B tells me he's got some questions about it... Happy reading!Bill A.
oOo
Robert Suggs (June 8, 1999)
William Allison wrote:
>JULIA, and GHOST STORY are my favorite Straubs of long ago...Dave Cousins was my favorite of the Strawbs, but gratuitous 70s British art rock obscurity aside, anyone hear about the new Straub coming out? I think it's entitled Mr. X. Sounds like Koonz to me, but they say Straub is back to the supernatural, kickin' butt and takin' names. I thought Hellfire Club (as a contemporary mystery/suspense) was fine.
>The following online (as in available to everyone- now)
>stories are at our disposal:
>
>Good idea? Bad idea? Hello?GOOD idea. Le Fanu is always a good idea. Those are all studies I've read a coupla times and fairly recently, but one can never get too much Schalken. I'd rather not monkey with Green Tea again.
Rob
In the Court of the Crimson . . . never mind.oOo
rbadac (June 9, 1999)
[Has anyone seen LeFanu's ghost?]I STILL like those King Crimson albums. Call me an old fart. Those were the days.
Schalken ! Harbottle ! Aungier ! Brandy ! Cigars ! Controversy !!!
We can always pick on 'Green Tea' later, by itself, if anybody's game.
rbadac, spinning in the grave of his memories
oOo
William Allison (June 9, 1999)
rbadac wrote:
>I STILL like those King Crimson albums. Call me an old fart. Those were the
>days.Old Fart at Play? "I Talk to the Wind" indeed...
>Schalken ! Harbottle ! Aungier ! Brandy ! Cigars ! Controversy !!!
Let's take 'em in that order. Well, you can bump the brandy ahead...
>We can always pick on 'Green Tea' later, by itself, if anybody's game.
If anybody's sane you mean...
>rbadac, spinning in the grave of his memories
At 33 1/3, 45, or 78?
Bill A.
oOo
Robert Suggs (June 9, 1999)
rbadac wrote:
>I STILL like those King Crimson albums. Call me an old fart. Those were the
>days.Well, I always call you an old fart anyway, but the four-disk Crimson retrospective is quite nice. Hadn't heard "Cat Food" in awhile. But Lark's Tongue in Aspic has to be the best. Great ghost story background music. I'm going to put some on now, and re-read Schalken.
R
oOo
rbadac (June 13, 1999)
[rbadac's essay on this story is online at violetbooks.com: The Weird Review]oOo
Robert Suggs (June 13, 1999)
rbadac wrote:. . . as always, an astute commentary of what just may be Le Fanu's best story; it would be difficult to find any concensus on that, because he wrote perhaps ten or more masterpieces, and all so different. Even his minor tales are well worth reading--but 'Schalken' is no minor tale. It stands with 'Carmilla' as not only a shocking mid-Victorian cards-on- the-table expostulation of kinky sexuality, but also a precursor to Dracula. What exactly IS the monstrous entity at the center of this story, anyway? He seems to live some kind of vampiric after-death night life. He joins death and sexuality, even more than Stoker's creation (Le Fanu and Stoker were passing acquaintances in the theatrical world, if I remember rightly); and the little blood-pool-in-the-coffin trick is extremely reminiscent of Dracula. It's hard for me to imagine that Bram didn't have a close eye on Le Fanu's work; we know, of course, that the little chapter prelude to his novel known as 'Dracula's Guest' was a nod to his precursor.
Getting back to the who-or-what-is-it question, we get to the factor I prize most in Le Fanu's writing. He didn't sit down at writing desk with his quill pen and say, "Well, what will it be tonight? Ah, a werewolf!" and pull out the Rules and Regulations Governing Werewolves from his shelf. His Things were unclassifiable. I hate ghostly rules or any methods that take a story in the direction of the concrete and predictable, and this may be one reason I think so highly of Aickman. I think it was Bill B (?) who was writing recently on 'The Haunted Baronet' and noted the surprising variety and creativity of the many apparitions. Long before Blackwood, Le Fanu populated the natural world with haunted dogs and birds (see 'Squire Toby's Will'). He took faerie legends and made them his own, and far less comforting. Sometimes the devil shows up, but never in the old wardrobes he had worn out by John Sheridan's time. In the story at hand, he plays on the uncomfortable feeling his contemporaries must have had about the odd carvings on gothic cathedrals. He certainly didn't improve matters for them! But he leaves just that little gray area for ambiguity that I believe is essential in these stories. He also consistently makes the character and subtle desires and failures of the human characters as interesting as the horrific qualities of his phantasms. Here we have the non-protective father and the ineffectual painter. I was not aware of the factual bases rbadac has pointed out, and I would dearly love to see that painting! One would think it would have appeared in a frontispiece by now.
It's often been said that Le Fanu drew on the dark inspiration of his own evening nightmares, and I can certainly believe it. There's a paradox in the fact that he was among the first to bring horrors to modern everyday environments and away from the old gothic trappings; this is so, yet he retained the gothic feel and brilliantly modernized it (as did Stoker at his best; Stoker is no match for Le Fanu in my opinion). Le Fanu seemed to understand how in the medieval mindset the devil was not someone who rode into town; he was present in the woods and the family trees and the dark corners of the barrooms. More than anything old Lucifer seemed to receive some kind of power from the sexual impulses always just beneath the surface. Medieval minds populated the earth with demons, and had no recourse but to build towering cathedrals to dominate their towns and point like gilded fingers to heaven; Le Fanu showed the prevailing presence of those many-faced demons, and--in this exceptional case--brought them right off the cathedral walls. The undead Thing in this tale is one of the most unforgettable and terrifying monsters ever created in a short story.
Rob
oOo
Paul Montelone (June 14, 1999)
Robert Suggs wrote:
> rbadac wrote:
>
> . . . as always, an astute commentary of what just may be Le Fanu's
> best story; it would be difficult to find any concensus on that,
> because he wrote perhaps ten or more masterpieces, and all so
> different.I must agree: "Schalken the Painter" is indeed Le Fanu's most accomplished tale. What has always struck me about it--and other tales of Le Fanu--is its unremitting atmosphere of supernatural doom. This, I think, explains the passivity of the human characters--including the father's, whose moral dubiousness is rightly pointed out by rbadac, but whose actions may perhaps be excused, considering the circumstances. And here too we get a glimpse of Le Fanu's aesthetic technique. By representing the human characters as passive and yielding to the supernatural Vanderhausen, Le Fanu gives us an effect whose cause we are forced to supply with a reality equal to it. And that is why I think Vanderhausen--as a horror--is so frightfully memorable.
Oh, and please, rbadac, scan that painting! A jpeg to download at The Haunted Bibliophile would be really neat!
Paul M.
oOo
rbadac (June 15, 1999)
Ach, I'm technologically-challenged ! Someone else will have to assume that task...It's really not scary in and of itself, just a gorgeous oil of a pretty young girl holding a candle and smiling.
Smiling.
You know, smiling.
Archly.
rbadac, who looked all over for a link to 'Girl With A Candle', but found that the Uffizi/Pitti gallery links in Florence were under construction...
oOo
Paul Montelone (June 15, 1999)
Not scary? Well, bewitching will certainly do.Paul M. (who is in love with all the female characters in Gautier)
ooOoo