Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts

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books, ghost stories, horror fiction, Joe Hill, reading, short stories

I found this in the “Customers Also Bought” section while buying an ebook version of Stephen King’s Different Seasons — another great collection. Hill is King’s son, and also writes horror, as well as mainstream fiction. 20th Century Ghosts is mostly a mix of horror and fantastic realism, with a few mainstream fictions thrown in.

It’s interesting to see the themes that repeat in multiple stories: Sons’ relationships with their fathers, or with their brothers — sometimes positive, sometimes not. Boyhood school friendships. Autism and other developmental disabilities. Missing children. Child abuse. Fratricide. Patricide. There’s a certain ambiguity in how mothers are represented, leaning towards the negative.

Some of the tales could be classified as supernatural horror, but the horror element isn’t from the supernatural, but from the prosaic: a child predator, or from some latent sociopathic tendencies in one of the characters. The supernatural instead often serves a positive function in the story. For instance, in one story, the ghosts of previous abduction victims find a way to help the current kidnapped child.

My two favorite stories aren’t horror; one isn’t even fantastic. “Better than Home” is a sweet story of an autistic boy’s relationship with his father, the coach of a losing baseball team. “Pop Art” is about a “tough kid” and his friendship with the class bully-bait, a boy named Arthur with a hereditary condition: he was born inflatable. It’s also a story about death, and loss, and letting go. I read it on a plane, and I’m sure the flight attendant wondered why I was crying. Hill writes boys’ relationships — with parents, with siblings, but especially with other boys — really well.

When your best friend is ugly — I mean bad ugly, deformed — you don’t kid them about shattering mirrors. In a friendship, especially in a friendship between two young boys, you are allowed to inflict a certain amount of pain. This is even expected. But you must cause no serious injury; you must never, under any circumstances, leave wounds that will result in permanent scars.

– From “Pop Art”

“Dead-Wood” reminded me of Jack Cady, though it was too short to be a satisfying story. More of a sketch, really. “My Father’s Mask” felt a bit like Thomas Ligotti, at least I think it did. It’s been a long time since I’ve read Ligotti (he’s not my favorite author). “Best New Horror” was the weakest story, in my opinion. It went exactly where you knew it would, although Christopher Golden, in the collection’s Introduction, argues that this is as it should be, for that piece.

Overall, a beautiful collection of tales, especially if you like a dose of the fantastic. Recommended.

Truth like Fiction

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ghost stories, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, reading, Sir Walter Scott, superstitions

Just a quick post today. I finished the Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, and I still want to write something about the witch-trials that Scott describes, when I have more time. Today, I’ll just share a story with you from Letter 10.

This letter is about allegedly true ghost stories that are demonstrably non-ghost stories. I like this story because it takes an ordinary and “plausible” ghost story (plausible, if one admits the existence of ghosts, I mean), and gives it an utterly contrived sounding explanation.

“The Spectre Skeleton” by George Cruikshank. Illustration for The Letters

 

This is directly from Letter 10, slightly re-formatted.

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A club of persons connected with science and literature was formed at [Plymouth]. During the summer months the society met in a cave by the seashore; during those of autumn and winter they convened within the premises of a tavern, but, for the sake of privacy, had their meeting in a summer-house situated in the garden, at a distance from the main building. Some of the members to whom the position of their own dwellings rendered this convenient, had a pass-key to the garden-door, by which they could enter the garden and reach the summer-house without the publicity or trouble of passing through the open tavern.

It was the rule of this club that its members presided alternately. On one occasion, in the winter, the president of the evening chanced to be very ill; indeed, was reported to be on his death-bed. The club met as usual, and, from a sentiment of respect, left vacant the chair which ought to have been occupied by him if in his usual health; for the same reason, the conversation turned upon the absent gentleman’s talents, and the loss expected to the society by his death.

While they were upon this melancholy theme, the door suddenly opened, and the appearance of the president entered the room. He wore a white wrapper, a nightcap round his brow, the appearance of which was that of death itself. He stalked into the room with unusual gravity, took the vacant place of ceremony, lifted the empty glass which stood before him, bowed around, and put it to his lips; then replaced it on the table, and stalked out of the room as silent as he had entered it.

The company remained deeply appalled; at length, after many observations on the strangeness of what they had seen, they resolved to dispatch two of their number as ambassadors, to see how it fared with the president, who had thus strangely appeared among them. They went, and returned with the frightful intelligence that the friend after whom they had enquired was that evening deceased.

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The Haunting at Frodis-Water

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Eyrbyggja Saga, folklore, ghost stories, Iceland, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, reading, Sir Walter Scott

Iceland on the Carta Marina by Olaus Magnus, 16th Century. Wikipedia

Sir Walter Scott tells a shortened version of this story in Letter 3 of Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft; it is from The Eyrbyggja Saga (The Saga of the Ere-Dwellers) from Iceland. My retelling here is based on the 1892 English translation by William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson. The story encompasses Chapters 50 – 55 of the saga.

From Letter 3: River Gods and Revenant Warriors

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books, folklore, ghost stories, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, Nordic folklore, reading, revenants, Sir Walter Scott

Franklin, Massachusetts. I just spent two straight days lecturing all day (ten lessons!) on statistics and machine learning. Exhausting. Now I’m curled up in my hotel wishing I had some hot cocoa to go with the snow, and the artificial gas fireplace in my room. Oh well.

As promised (or threatened?):Letter 3 of Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. Here, Scott traces how early belief systems of the Celts, Germans and Nordic peoples contributed to the demonology of the subsquent Christian-dominated culture in Scotland and other parts of Great Britain. This is much like the inversion theory we’ve talked about before, with respect to aswang (manananggal) or penanggalan.

Illustration of the Devil in the Codex Gigas, 13th Century. Image: Wikipedia

Scott lists a number of examples. I’ll mention one: “Nixas, or Nicksa, a river or ocean god, worshipped on the shores of the Baltic”. I think the Nixas that Scott mentions is the same as Nikkar, or Nichus, the Scandinavian ocean god. Nikkar is apparently the incarnation of the destructive aspects of Odin (see Harland, below, as well as the “Note by Karl Haupt” beneath this Polish folktale about Nixes). According to John Harland, in Lancashire Folklore (1867), Nikkar metamorphized by the Middle Ages into St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors. From Nikkar probably also came “Old Nick”, by way of the water monsters known as Necks. And “Old Nick”, of course, is slang for the devil.

But I really want to talk about something else: two of the Nordic folktales that Scott mentions. Not because they fit in the inversion thesis, but just because they’re cool. I’ll do one today, and one (hopefully) tomorrow.

 …it was a favourite fancy of [the Norsemen] that, in many instances, the change from life to death altered the temper of the human spirit from benignant to malevolent; or perhaps, that when the soul left the body, its departure was occasionally supplied by a wicked demon, who took the opportunity to enter and occupy its late habitation.

This leads us to the story of Asmund and Assueit, two Norse chieftains and brothers-in-arms. The two were so devoted to each other that they took a vow that when one of them died, the survivor would go down into the sepulchre, or burial mound, and be buried alive with his friend. How very Egyptian of them. In fact, the burial mound also  contained (by tradition I assume) the dead man’s arms, swords, and war trophies.

Image via Wikipedia

Assueit died first, killed in battle. Asmund kept his promise. Their soldiers buried them both, along with their war horses. And that was the end of it, for about a century, until a Swedish rover and his men wandered through the region. The locals told him the story of Asmund and Assueit (including the part about the arms and trophies). The rover decided to liberate the buried treasure, and ordered his men to open the sepulchre.

But when they did, they heard the sounds of battle coming from inside: yelling, the clang of swords hitting swords, swords crashing against armor. They lowered one of their men down into the tomb by a rope to investigate. When they pulled the rope back up, rather than their man, they recovered — Asmund, battered and scratched and mangled.

Asmund fell on his knees before the Swedes and recited —  in verse, apparently — his life for the past one hundred years. No sooner did their soldiers close up the tomb when Assuiet rose up, reanimated by some ghoul or demon. A hungry one, it seems, because the first thin Assueit did was devour both the war horses. Then he tried to eat Asmund. Asmund picked up a sword to defend himself, and the struggle lasted the entire century — I guess until just after the Swedes opened the tomb. Finally Asmund subdued the demon and drove a stake through the body, destroying him.

After finishing his story, Asmund fell down dead at their feet. The Swedes recovered Assueit’s body, burned it, and scattered the ashes. Then they reburied Asmund in the tomb.

I assume they took all the arms and trophies before they left.

Hiding in Plain Sight

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aarne thompson, books, folktale, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, reading, Sir Walter Scott

Things have been quite hectic lately, and I’m on another business trip next week. I’m still working my way through Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, and I plan to post some folktales and folklore from Letters 3, 4, and 5 when I get a chance. I also want to post about some of the witchcraft trials that Scott discusses in Letter 5. I may stop after that; the rest of the letters are still interesting, but not necessarily on the theme of this blog. We’ll see.

Just to keep things from going completely quiescent, here’s a little folktale straight from Letter 3 (I’ve reformatted it a bit). The motif of hiding someone (usually a lover or a son, I think) by turning them into an ordinary household object is a common one. I have vague memories of a Baba Yaga story where the heroine uses this trick, but my Russian Folktales book is in a box right now, so I can’t look it up. I could try to find the Aarne-Thompson tale type for you — but alas, I feel lazy today. So just enjoy the story, instead.

The Spinner (1873)
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Image: Wikipedia

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There is a remarkable story in the Eyrbiggia Saga (“Historia Eyranorum”), giving the result of such a controversy between two of these gifted women, one of whom was determined on discovering and putting to death the son of the other, named Katla, who in a brawl had cut off the hand of the daughter-in-law of Geirada.

A party detached to avenge this wrong, by putting Oddo to death, returned deceived by the skill of his mother. They had found only Katla, they said, spinning flax from a large distaff.

“Fools,” said Geirada, “that distaff was the man you sought.”

They returned, seized the distaff, and burned it. But this second time, the witch disguised her son under the appearance of a tame kid. A third time he was a hog, which grovelled among the ashes.

The party returned yet again; augmented as one of Katla’s maidens, who kept watch, informed her mistress, by one in a blue mantle.

“Alas!” said Katla, “it is the sorceress Geirada, against whom spells avail not.”

Accordingly, the hostile party, entering for the fourth time, seized on the object of their animosity, and put him to death. This species of witchcraft is well known in Scotland as the glamour, or deceptio visus, and was supposed to be a special attribute of the race of Gipsies.

Letter 2: Witchcraft in the Bible

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books, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, reading, Sir Walter Scott, superstitions, witch-trials, witchcraft

Saul and the Witch of Endor
Frontispiece to Saducismus Triumphatus, by Joseph Glanvill
archive.org

On to Letter 2 from Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, by Sir Walter Scott.

One of the motivations for writing The Letters was the success of a series of publications called Criminal Trials of Scotland, by Robert Pitcairn. The text covers a selection of criminal proceedings from 1487 to 1624, a period that included many witchcraft trials. Pitcairn actually sent Scott transcripts of trials that were still unpublished, as Scott was writing The Letters; unfortunately, none of them appear in Letter 2, though I’m hoping they might appear in a later letter.

Instead, Letter 2 addresses the Scriptural treatment of witchcraft. Scott’s primary point is that what the Bible calls “witchcraft” and the contemporary understanding of “witchcraft” are two different things. The justification for the execution of witches in Scotland, and in Massachusetts, and elsewhere, was Exodus 22:18 — “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Many learned men have affirmed that in this remarkable passage the Hebrew word CHASAPH means nothing more than poisoner, although, like the word veneficus, by which it is rendered in the Latin version of the Septuagint, other learned men contend that it hath the meaning of a witch also, and may be understood as denoting a person who pretended to hurt his or her neighbours in life, limb, or goods, either by noxious potions, by charms, or similar mystical means. In this particular the witches of Scripture had probably some resemblance to those of ancient Europe, who, although their skill and power might be safely despised, as long as they confined themselves to their charms and spells, were very apt to eke out their capacity of mischief by the use of actual poison, so that the epithet of sorceress and poisoner were almost synonymous.

He goes on to say (with the appropriate citations) that the Old Testament deems witchcraft a capital crime because it is idolatry — worshipping or asking counsel of false deities — not because witches practice magic, per se.

To understand the texts otherwise seems to confound the modern system of witchcraft, with all its unnatural and improbable outrages on common sense, with the crime of the person who, in classical days, consulted the oracle of Apollo — a capital offence in a Jew, but surely a venial sin in an ignorant and deluded pagan.

The emphasis is mine. Clearly, Sir Walter didn’t put much credence in the accounts of witchy behavior that he read in the trial transcripts. He refers to the accusations later as “disgustingly improbable.” And he was very much against applying the biblical law “against a different class of persons, accused of a very different species of crime.”

Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft: 1

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books, ghost stories, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, Project Gutenberg, reading, Sir Walter Scott, superstitions

Painting on the wall of Rila Monastery, Bulgaria
Photo: Nenko Lazarov, adjusted by Martha Forsyth. Wikipedia

The more numerous part of mankind cannot form in their mind the idea of the spirit of the deceased existing, without possessing or having the power to assume the appearance which their acquaintance bore during his life, and do not push their researches beyond this point.

– Sir Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, Letter 1

I started Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft the other day. The book was originally published in 1830, as one of the volumes in a series called “Murray’s Family Library”. It’s in the form of letters to Sir Walter’s son-in-law, J.G. Lockhart, who convinced his father-in-law to write a piece on witchcraft for the Family Library. Sir Walter was recovering from a stroke at the time, and his son-in-law wanted to distract him from work that was too strenuous. Also, apparently, Sir Walter needed the money.

The first letter takes a skeptical tone towards supernatural phenomena. Sir Walter lists off a number of naturalistic explanations for ghostly appearances, omens, and the like. He backs up his list of phenomena and explanations for them with anecdotes and stories that he’s heard from friends and colleagues. It’s a bit like reading a nineteenth century Snopes.

It may be remarked also, that Dr. Johnson retained a deep impression that, while he was opening the door of his college chambers, he heard the voice of his mother, then at many miles’ distance, call him by his name; and it appears he was rather disappointed that no event of consequence followed a summons sounding so decidedly supernatural.

Reprints from Galaxy

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books, ebooks, Galaxy, genre, reading, Rosetta Books, science fiction

Let me admit right off that this post is a shameless crib from a recent post on Acid Free Pulp. I’ve been browsing the website for Rosetta Books, and I came across their Galaxy Series: selected reprints from the venerable GALAXY magazine.

I’m not a huge science fiction reader, but even I was intrigued: Bradbury, Vonnegut, Frederik Pohl… I think I’m going to pick up Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons, just to see if it’s as prescient as everyone claims.

Their Crimescape true crime series might interest some of you, too.

Happy Browsing!

Cranky Thoughts about Language

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books, browsing my bookshelf, Elizabeth Bear, genre, Jane Rice, reading, Sylvia Plath, weird tales, writing

Photo: Paul Zumel

Poger Rock: a “forgotten, moribund collection of buildings tucked into the base of wooded valley” in rural Washington State.

Next to a dumpster, a pair of mongrel dogs were locked in coitus, patiently facing opposite directions, Dr. Doolittle’s Pushmi-pullyu for the twenty-first century.

And about a paragraph later, the protagonist limps into a bar — excuse me, a tavern — where a stuffed black wolf “snarled atop a dias near the entrance.”

Hmmm, I think as I read this. The author is trying a bit too hard, isn’t he? Because this is a horror story, light reading. But I kept reading anyway, because certainly, I am often guilty of trying too hard, myself. I’ve learned the hard way that I have to throw away the first thing I write after having read Nabokov, because I fall so in love with his language — so beautiful, so luminous — that I try to emulate it. It doesn’t work, mostly because I’m not Nabokov, but also because, honestly, the subjects I tend to write about don’t lend themselves to his style. That’s how I felt about the use of language in this piece.

I read far enough to learn that the protagonist was fleeing from her abusive husband, to a remote hunting cabin where she was staying with her lover. I suffered through said lover discovering an old fur cloak in a hunting blind in the woods. Oh, and by the way, did you know the man who built this cabin was driven out of Scandinavia because of rumors that he was responsible for the gory unexplained murders in his village? And that Scandinavian legend says that to wear the skin of the beast is to become the beast? All this information was given to me in a fire hose of exposition, the kind that makes for awkward narrative and really clumsy dialog. I stopped reading and went to the next story.

Last, the bullet blooms agains steel. Still almost pristine until that moment, now its conical head flattens. Its copper jacket splinters into shrapnel needles, wire-fine, scattering. The core splashes, the force of impact so great that cold metal splatters like syrup, droplets blossoming in an elegant chrysanthemum. The butt of the casing flattens against the engine block for a split second before it peels away and falls.

But it’s already exited the girl, and the girl is falling.

That’s the opening of “The Romance”, by Elizabeth Bear. I had to read those lines a few times, because I was still in a bad mood from the last story, and my brain refused to work at parsing the “fancy language”. But in the end it was worth it. The narrative cuts back and forth between the slow-motion shooting above, and a middle-aged children’s librarian who is attending a fiftieth-birthday party that features a haunted carousel. Naturally, I was hyper-vigilant for clumsy exposition, but Ms. Bear managed to inform me of the carousel’s history, and the protagonist’s history, without irritating me. She even used the phrase “the ineffable,” and I didn’t hurl the book across the room. It’s all about having a light touch.

Visayan Sorcery, 2012

Tags

BBC, filipino folklore, folk medicine, folklore, mananambal, Philippines, superstitions, Visayan

Salagdoong Beach — Maria, Siquijor
Photo: Peter V. Sanchez, Wikipedia

Once something is on your mind, you see it everywhere. I came across a feature story in BBC News Magazine today, called “Healing rituals and bad spirits on a Philippine island”. The reporter visited the island of Siquijor, to investigate what she calls “witches”, and the island’s tourism department calls “traditional healers”.

In Visayan, they are called mananambal. If you’ve been following my blog, then you’ll remember that I’ve written a bit about witchcraft and sorcery beliefs in the Central Visayas before, specifically as described in Richard Lieban’s 1965 book, Cebuano Sorcery. Lieban didn’t visit Siquijor, but he did mention it a few times. Apparently, the island is infamous for its witchcraft.

The BBC reporter, Kate McGeown, visited three mananambal, including a woman who is the last living practitioner of bulo-bulo on the island. Here’s Lieban’s description of bulo-bulo:

…the practitioner blows through a bamboo tube into a glass of water held over the patient; if the illness is supernatural, vegetable, animal, or mineral matter appears in the water, “extracted” from the patient.

You can see a video of the mananambal doing bulo-bulo on Ms. McGeown at the BBC link. It took three rounds of the ritual before her water came clear — apparently Ms. McGeown had some bad mojo going on.

Much of what she describes from her visit is familiar to me, from having read Lieban’s book. The mananambal she met with are devout Catholics, and they see no contradiction between their traditional rituals and their official religion. One of the mananambal dowses for spirits. Another one is an herbalist, who makes potions from herbs and roots that she gathers every year, between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

And this was familiar, too: Ms. McGeown asked the healers she visited why their services were still in demand. Because bad witches still exist, and put curses on people, they answered.

Or perhaps it is the more practical reason suggested by Francisco – that because the island did not have its own hospital until recently, traditional beliefs about illness and disease have stood the test of time.

Lieban said that, too — back in 1965. Back then, even in Cebu City, where modern medicine was readily available, people still visited mananambal, so lack of modern resources isn’t the only reason that folk medicine endures. Still, it’s a bit depressing that almost fifty years later, there are still places where people visit folk practitioners primarily because they have no other choice.

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More Reading

“Healing rituals and bad spirits on a Philippine island”: The BBC Article

Siquijor Island: Tourist site about Siquijor. It looks like a beautiful place. I may have to grab my snorkeling gear and head out there for some, um, ethnographic research. Yeah, that’s it.