This is a running review of the book Spirits of the Dead. Find out more here.
"So many, I had not thought that Dreamtours Holiday Company had undone so many."
This third story from the latest (and last?) collection of Ron Weighell's stories is a hallucinatory tour de force. A man only described as the Tour Guide struggles with a major drink problem while conducting a group of sightseers around historic Sicily.
The beauty and strangeness of the various temples is well evoked. You get the feeling the author didn't just do a package tour but immersed himself in all things classical. There are a few acerbic comments about Brits abroad, but most of the tale involves the unpeeling of arcane truths about the Guide. He has, it seems, a background in esoteric research, but ventured too far into certain areas of scholarship and has paid the price.
The Tour Guide sees the world around him as a kind of hellscape, inhabited by ghosts, demons, and less definable entities. His drinking, combined with the horrors he experiences, means that he experiences the world as an unholy chaos. He survives, barely, until a mysterious American tourist, Dollarton, turns up and offers to play a series of games. For all his down-home amiability, Dollarton's agenda is a sinister one that our nameless protagonist can't escape.
Not an easy read, this story, but the intense prose suits the premise and it lives up to its remarkable title.
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