22. Richard Hughes - 'A Night at a Cottage' (1926)

'There were none of the rags and tins and broken food about that you find in a place where many beggars are used to stay.'

(The Dragon's Head: Classic English Short Stories, Oxford University Press, 1988)

To begin the fourth week is from a collection of short stories bought at Tynemouth Book Fair, held in the evocative Victorian train station (still very much in use as part of the Tyne & Wear metro line). The fair was superb, and really required a whole day's perusal, with relief for lunch in the middle. I had to be back to play some football, so only really got around 50-60% of the main Book Fair in around two and a half hours; there were stalls from all around the North-East, and as far away as Selby and Huddersfield. The other half of the station was being used for the less specialist weekly market. A full day will be spent in the next one of these in late June, and indeed at a 'working class' book fair to be held in Sunderland at the Museum Vaults pub in mid-June (around the 25th anniversary of Orgreave), which has being extensively flyered.

All of this week's stories will be drawn from collections of shorts purchased today. The first is from the author Richard Hughes, most famous perhaps for A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), a novel in the RL Stevenson tradition of riproaring adventure and apparently an intrinsic sense of the terrain between child and adulthood. The volume is an Oxford University Press collection of Classic English Short Stories, originally published in 1939 as English Short Stories of Today - it also includes stories by Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, M.R. James, H.G. Wells, Dorothy L. Sayers and the Scottish socialist Naomi Mitchison.

'A Night at a Cottage' is almost a textbook example of how to craft a ghost story; very brief, chosen as I am struggling to get back on track with reading and writing about my 'one a day'. There is not a great deal of depth or ceremony about this story; Hughes simply gets on with delivering macabre chills in as few words as possible. The impression is of the narrator having to get the story out of him, placed under some constraints - as perhaps indicated in the way it ends. The extended clauses of the opening sentence establish exactly the sort of Gothic ground being trodden upon: 'On the evening that I am considering I passed by some ten or twenty cosy barns and sheds without finding one to my liking: for Worcestershire lanes are devious and muddy, and it was nearly dark when I found an empty cottage set back from the road in a little bedraggled garden.' (p.38) There has been heavy rain earlier in the day. It is also established that the narrator has recently left Worcester jail, now surfaced possibly as a fugitive - and certainly not wanting to return. (p.39) The ambiguity quite as to the 'various reasons' why our unnamed narrator does not want to return there, is typical of a story that revels in what it omits.

Unsurprisingly, I tend to intepret this Worcestershire as the mythologised Worcs. of Elgar and Rudkin; deepest England, if not entirely as associated with weird fiction as other counties might be. It seems apt to wonder whether the devious lanes include a sign for Pinvin at any stage. In its central motif of the drenched intruder, the story does attain a diabolic power akin to an M.R. James miniature, or a less ceremonious Dennis Wheatley (who I will concede I have never read). The fellow fugitive, the stranger who relates the story of the cottage owner's drowning of himself, turns out to be rather more than he might seem... He is also given a colloquial mode of speech - 'Gho-asts' 'fo-aks' 'hisself' 'childer' 'Drownded' (p.40) - that may have been fairly common in conemporary horror, if one is to go by the satirical horror classic, The Old Dark House (dir. James Whale, 1932), itself adapated from J.B. Priestley's novel Benighted (1927).

I enjoyed the brevity of this; Hughes conjures a limited but potent ghost story that does not waste a word. This is not really one to shake you to the core, but it delivers an agreeable measure of eerieness.

7/10

8. Michael Marshall Smith - 'This is Now' (2004)

'Forests have a way of making civilization seem less inevitable.'

(Stephen Jones, ed., The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Robinson, 2005)

'Where were you in '92?' Part 1




Marshall Smith's story sets up a week of shorts provided by Sunderland central library, after a fashion; all of the pieces to be written about this week were purchased from a sale two Saturdays ago at the Fawcett Street library. 26 books for £4 and all that, with a good number providing lifeblood for my short-story craving sensibility.

The first is from a bumper, indeed Mammoth Book of New Horror, containing stories from 2004. Perhaps appositely for the most recent entry so far in ASSAD, it is basically set in the future (2015), but the main focus is upon reflecting upon a dim-and-potentially-distant past (1992).

MMS is an anglo-American writer, born in Knutsford, Cheshire (1965) and who spent much of his childhood in South Africa, Australia and the US, only to return to the UK in the seventies (he is now a resident of North London). This story is set in a north-eastern corner of Washington state, in America, yet seems inflected with a British perspective in certain ways.

The central three protagonists have known each other at least since adolescence; the main framing sees them aged 38, returning to and then reflecting upon the scene of an episode that might be termed a teenage transgression: when they were fifteen they infilitrated an ambiguous military compound. They are also established in their present-day locale; a bar with omnipresent pool table activity, from which the memories arise - if internally.

MMS establishes a subtly uneasy juncture between the everyday and the unsettling, the odd; the current-day reflections and longueurs are juxtaposed with flashbacks to what happened fifteen years ago - the tense and rather primordial transgressions in 1992 contrasted with the languid and uneasily sedate rituals of 2015. The teenagers find a weak spot in the electrified fence and get over into a military installation - epically ambiguous, as MMS leaves it - that was established in 1985.

This is ultimately winning, perhaps, because it does not resort to 'horror' in any generic sense; it is gratifying to come across a story classed as one of 2004's finest horrors that simply does not need any shocks, undue violence or authorial sleight-of-hand to achieve its effect. Marshall Smith's prose is straightforward yet penetrating; revealing average 38-year-olds settling for life as usual, deciding, albeit tacitly, to put the fascination and curiosity awakened by their adventure at fifteen behind them - for better or for worse.

It is all bittersweet without any real sense of the sweet; there is the ebbing memory of their togetherness at fifteen, having got away with the transgression: 'boys who had come triumphantly out the other side. The forest felt like some huge football field, applauding its heroes with whispering leaves.' (p.259) Now, one is settled in a reasonable if hardly fulfilling marriage, one amicably separated, the other - the 'I' narrator, Dave, is seemingly at a loose end: 'I lit another cigarette and wondered why I still didn't really know how to deal with women. They've always seemed so different to me. So confident, so powerful, so in themselves. Kind of scary, even. Most teenage boys feel that way, I guess, but I had assumed age would help. That being older might make a difference. Apparently not. The opposite, if anything.' (p.253)

There is the melancholy in Dave's past reflections on a perceived missed opportunity with a girl called Lauren, who saw herself in Seattle in a few years: 'What I didn't know, that night in the forest, was that she would do this, and I would not, and that she would leave without us ever having kissed.' This along with the eerie, intangible memory of the transgressive night; seemingly abandoned, 'ruined houses' (p.256). This subterranean progress - albeit on the fringes of a town that is on the road to nowhere in particular - leads both everywhere and nowhere, as the final passages detail. The final point seems to be that it is important, sometimes, to leave old haunts behind, even if there is no obviously gleaming future in store.

8/10