Supernatural Tales

I enjoyed this little documentary, not least because of the sympathetic and intelligent tone taken by the presenter, Professor Ronald Hutton. Some genuinely interesting revelations, too, not least Churchill's late-blooming sympathy for Spiritualism that led to the repeal of the Witchcraft Act.

Due to various minor glitches the latest issue of ST will be a week or two late - it will definitely be out next month, though. And it's worth waiting for! Here's a sneakety-sneak preview of the cover pic, which is by Sam Dawson.

Over to the right - just along and down a bit from this - there's a Link List. This is a list of links. Oh yes. And I sometimes forget to point you over there so you can see what interesting things other people are doing on the intertrons. Among the newer editions is Walden East , the site of writer, reviewer, and all round good egg John Howard. Walden East consists of essays on authors and themes, plus some content. There's splendid stuff about Fritz Leiber, for instance, and even some poems of the fantastic in House of Moonlight. Oh, and there are lots of reviews. All in all, it's a feast for the mind, especially when John tackles some of the more esoteric ideas found in Machen's work. And I can't resist ending with this Machen quote: Yes, for me the answer comes with the one word, Ecstasy. If ecstasy be present, then I say there is fine literature; if it be absent, then, in spite of all the cleverness, all the talents, all the workmanship and observation and ...

A friend of mine who happened to be in London last weekend decided to go and see Conor McPherson's new play at the Donmar Warehouse. My friend then emailed myself and other like-minded folk that: this is a bit of a departure from McPherson’s norm. It’s a comedy with some very graphic violence. The violence drew a loud gasp from the audience as it was so unexpected and a couple of children were led out in some distress. I won’t spoil it for anyone who is going to see it, but there is a very small “spooky bit” but you have to concentrate on the text to spot it.  As a minor aside, I'm surprised that children were allowed in by the Donmar. There are more reviews, of course, and a good summary of the critical response here . As a McPherson fan I'd like to see 'The Night Alive', but since this one stars Ciaran Hinds and is directed by the author I suspect it will not go on tour. Ah well. Such is life in the provinces.

Cardinal Cox, indefatigable bard of the weird, has produced a pamphlet of poems that combines the style of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat with Lovecraftian lore. Here's the press release, which you can click to enlarge: As always, the Cardinal demonstrates a firm grasp of the poetic tradition he's adorning/subverting by putting a strange spin on it. This is a glimpse of the nicely-produced pamphlet itself.  Like the Rubaiyat, the poem tells a story replete with imagery, as the nameless protagonist ventures into a 'cursed empty quarter' and encounters strange creatures. Djinns and ghouls are well-represented, along with the less familiar shockers such as supposedly extinct 'lizard-people'. (Does David Icke know about this?) There are also fish-folk 'like men, yet scaled', who recall the Babylonian Oannes. Great fun and as erudite as ever, this is a fine addition to the Cox Canon. 

Tina Rath's stories about the small, amiable chimaera that is indeed found in a wardrobe started appearing in Supernatural Tales in 2002. Issue #4 saw the eponymous title story of the series, in which the chimaera tells an impoverished bit-part actress ('Supporting Artiste', or SA) a series of tall stories. But none, of course, are as unlikely as the storyteller himself. More stories duly appeared, the last in 2009's ST#16 ('Trouble with the Hob'), but not all of the chimaera's tales fitted the ST format - some were more science fiction than supernatural, for instance. But they're all very enjoyable and written with consummate elegance, and you can buy them all now as an eBook for Kindle . The thing that I admire most about Tina Rath's work is the way she combines a keen intelligence with understated wit. She easily weaves werewolves, vampires, ghosts and less likely creatures into her tales, while always keeping the reader's feet on the ground...

This is a guest post by James Everington. There are, appropriately enough, two different types of story about doubles, about doppelgangers. The first type is probably best exemplified by The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney. The doubles are the famous ‘pod-people’ – not actually people at all, their resemblance to those they copy only skin-deep. A scary and a brilliant metaphor for paranoia and the enemy-within, but largely an external threat. An example of the second is The Double by Jose Saramago. In this story, the central character (with the singular name, ha ha, of Tertuliano Maximo Afonso) sees an actor in a film who looks exactly like him... or exactly like he did five years ago, when the film was made. Further investigation of other films the actor has been in shows that throughout their lives the two men have always looked identical – the resemblance even including such things as both of them growing a moustache at the same time. The threat posed to Tertuliano by his dou...

On the way to the fayre I enjoy a good radio drama, and it so happens that Radio 4 Extra offers a veritable feast of classics, novelties, obscurities, and generally good stuff. There's always a dramatisation of a classic novel to be heard, and this week I've been immersed in The Mayor Casterbridge. This is of course one of those Thomas Hardy Wessex novels that pits a flawed man against fate and shows exactly how tragic an apparently ordinary life can be. The eponymous mayor, Michael Henchard. When he's young, drunk, and impecunious he sells his wife to sailor at a fayre. His wife, Susan, is willing to go because Henchard is a bad-tempered, self-pitying pain in the arse. She takes their infant daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, with her. Such wife-selling was not unheard of in Hardy's youth. When Henchard sobers up he is stricken by remorse and resolves never to touch drink for twenty-one years - his age at the time of his 'crime'. He journeys to Casterbridge (D...

Written by Daylight is the first collection of John Howard's stories published by Swan River Press. All eleven tales in WbD are republished from earlier collections or anthologies, but it so happens that all were new to me. As always with The Swan River Press, this is a beautifully produced volume. The cover art is striking and its imagery - an ordinary man's dreams presented as a fantastic vista - seems especially pertinent. If there is a unifying theme here it is the transience of existence, from the individual to the social and even the geographical. In 'Westenstrand' a man sets off for an island off Germany's North Sea coast during the last months of the Weimar Republic. The island is constantly being reshaped by tide and storm, so that no map can ever be wholly reliable. The protagonist journeys to Westenstrand to try and rekindle a relationship but comes to realise that 'we both understood that the map had changed'. Changing maps also inform '...

This is the day when we commemorate American Independence, and tens of millions of English speaking people conspire to pretend that the French didn't win a war. For obvious reasons.  Anyway, it's only natural (or indeed supernatural) to ponder American ghost stories. And there sure are a lot of 'em! Many of them ladies. A lot of Ph.D time has been put into the issue of why women wrote ghost stories in the 19th century, but it's fairly obvious that crafting supernatural fiction was seen as a ladylike pastime, rather like embroidery. Which is ironic, given that a lot of those stories, read against the grain, are rather subversive.  But, rather than subject you to my unoriginal thinking, here's a chance to bridge the Atlantic with a ghost story set in little ol' England, penned by an American woman, and produced as a British TV costume drama. Hope you're keeping up!

No, not that one. 'Happy Day' is the superficially cheery but in fact deeply weird greeting of the villagers in the Seventies kids' cult series children Children of the Stones. If you don't know it, think The Prisoner with a Gothic, time-travel twist and you're halfway there. It's about a community that no-one can leave, due to a strange (but quite well explained) connection between a 5,000 year-old stone circle and a distant black hole. It's brilliant stuff and I recommend it to anyone. There's a very good Radio 4 documentary on the series, Happy Days: The Children of the Stones, presented by comedian Stewart Lee. And here is a glimpse of the BBC iPlayer programme notes... Broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 1:30PM Sun, 9 Jun 2013 Available until 12:00AM Thu, 1 Jan 2099