‘Ghosts’ lives!

Well, much excitement here at Allumination Central as my short story, ‘Ghosts’ has hit the streets in the latest issue of ‘Midnight Street’ - and it’s the cover story! Which I didn’t know about at all until my copy popped through the postbox, so a lovely surprise.

Anyway… the story’s about the problems of exploring haunted, abandoned weapon satellites on your own, and the cover catches its atmosphere very nicely indeed. And of course there are many other great stories in there - particularly looking forward to sitting down with the Joel Lane, Stephen Gallagher and Andrew Humphrey ones - and an interview with Neil Gaiman. Anyway, enough rambling - check it out (and order a copy for yourself) here.

Oh, and if you came here having read the story, welcome to the blog! Hope you enjoyed the story, and have fun rooting round here…

*plumps the virtual cushions, puts on welcoming music, opens a bottle or two of wine, sets out bowls of dry roast peanuts and Kettle Chips*

Truant heart

Following on from today’s earlier quick post, another quick post, about magnificent Dubstep artist Burial - the anonymous Fisher King of modern bass culture, bleeding out nostalgic futures from the South London suburb of Croydon.

I’ve been grooving to his wonderfully haunted album ‘Untrue’ since just before Christmas, but have reached a new level of admiration for him on reading a fascinating interview with him in Wire. Here it is in full.

What’s so interesting about it? First of all, there’s his mythologising of rave. I grew up while all that was going on, and went to some of the events that Burial dreams about having visited. My nostalgia is grounded in direct experience, and I’ve done very little with it; his is rooted in a dream of what could have been, and he’s used it to make magnificent music.

Secondly, there’s  his very engaged sense of craft, his absolute precision of creative ambition, and his inventiveness in using the tools to hand to create. Burial is very direct about the limitations he works under; that he transcends them so effectively is a very strong reminder that it’s not the tools you have to hand, but rather the inventiveness with which you use them, that really counts.

And finally, there’s his deep respect for M. R. James, rooted in an appreciation of his obsessiveness (’The techniques hit you between the eyes because they are so fucking focused, obsessed by the same devices’) and in his achievement (at his best, James can ‘burn a memory into you that isn’t yours’).

So - Burial - what’s not to like? Well, not very much… So go! Check him out! I suspect you’ll be blown away…

Prog horror

Normal service is officially on hold today. So, instead of the usual platitudes, here’s some groovy prog-comedy from the ever magnificent Matt Berry - some prog joy that sounds oddly like the gig I went to last night.

Horror followers will of course know MB as ‘Sanch’ from cult horror visionary Garth Marenghi’s deathless ‘Darkplace’ TV series - just as a reminder, I’ve dropped in the titles from that too. Who can forget the deathless tragi-horror of Skipper the Eye Child? Or the bleak curse of the Highlands? Or the searing romantic trauma of the broccoli from beyond time?

Enjoy, pilgrims…

The Archers and their target

‘A Matter of Life and Death’ shows us two broken utopias. The most obvious one is heaven; a perfect machine that cares for all who enter it. Stress and shock are balmed on entry. Enmities are forgotten. Grief seems not to exist. There’s even cricket on the radio.

But it’s a fragile utopia; it can be broken by something as predictable as fog over the channel. Lost in the weather, a collector of souls misses his target, allowing the film’s protagonist to stay alive beyond his time, and fall in love.

As ever, it’s only when the utopia is broken that the drama can begin. The restoration of utopia means the breaking of hearts. How can the two be reconciled? They can’t, and so utopia remains perfect by admitting the possibility of its own imperfection.

What’s interesting is the implicit cause of that break. It’s the first mistake in a thousand years or so. Fog, one assumes, wouldn’t normally have such a catastrophic impact on the collection of the dead.

But, as the film tells us, this is an unusual night; there has been a thousand bomber raid over Europe – and, for every bomber, thousands upon thousands of deaths.

And so the film begins as the machineries of Heaven – overloaded by the vast quantities of souls they presumably have to capture – creak and break apart. The film presents as a comedy, but buried beneath it is buried vast tragedy; the dead lost to world war.

Utopia hasn’t been broken by a mistake. It’s been broken by us, pushing and pushing at it until that mistake becomes inevitable.

Oh, and what’s the second broken utopia? It’s this world, broken by loss – an emotion and an action that the film absolutely and rigorously represses.

A mirror to shine in

Seeing a ghost is like experiencing a fragment of someone else’s memory; an insistent, present, repeated moment broken out of all context. Fiction takes such fragments and sets them in a reasoned and coherent narrative and emotional context.

For example, there’s Jack Torrance in Stephen King’s novel ‘The Shining’. He’s trapped in the Overlook Hotel, surrounded by ghosts. The book presents him as being possessed by the hotel – but in fact, the hotel is possessed by him.

Torrance gives the disparate iconography sets of the hotel – the topiary animals, the boiler in the basement, the various phantoms of 20s gangsters and their hangers-on, the lift, the Indian graveyard – a nexus, a narrative reason-to-be.

He’s a locus of meaning that both justifies their presence and defines how they should act. ‘The Shining’ is a great Gothic masterpiece, using the apparatus of the supernatural to amplify the impact of and comment on the nature of one man’s profoundly flawed and destructive emotional makeup.

In real life, ghosts don’t do that; but then again, in real life very little does that. Fiction creates entire, self-absorbed imitations of worlds; these worlds serve to very precisely focus the reader’s attention onto a very small set of characters, providing the imagery and event structures that support and intensify interpretation of their actions and intents.

If ‘Gothic’ describes stories where externalised and highly artificial events and locations respond to and are inspired by internal emotional turmoil, then - read on one level - all fiction can be said to be Gothic. None of it’s real; and it’s all driven by the author’s need to express and amplify what (s)he understands his or her characters to be, and what (s)he wants the reader to find out about them.

M. R. James the dramatist

And one more thing about M. R. James; he wrote his stories to be read out loud, and they still perform incredibly well. Come Halloween - or indeed any other cold, dark, spooky night - it’s well worth getting a few friends round, sitting down in front of the fire, and reading him to your (terrified) audience.

Quite apart from the spooky fun of it, it’s a fascinating insight into M. R. James the dramatist; his pacing, handling of tone, and character delineation and deployment are masterly.

Oh, and in a final chilling connection - while Provost at Eton, the aging MRJ taught the young Christopher Lee. The cold, bone white baton of spook was passed on to the next generation…

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! And a nice cup of tea…

Writing daily here’s been a very interesting exercise, if only because it’s made me ponder writers I’ve got a lot out of it and think about why I’ve found them so engaging. But I haven’t written about two of my great teenage obsessions – M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft.

MRJ’s ghost stories – and Edwardian ghost stories in general – fascinated me as a teenager. I think it was the combination of the profoundly comforting, secure world that most of them begin, and the subsequent destabilisation / revelation of the limits of that world.

I see MRJ as the great poet of threatened repression. Read from that point of view, so much of his imagery is so resonant – the menacing bedsheets in ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’, the terror implicit in people having fun together when you’re on your own in ‘Number 13’, and, perhaps most memorably, the mouth buried beneath a pillow in ‘Casting the Runes’ –

‘So he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being.’

Intimacy – or the prospect of intimacy – is deeply destructive to worldviews built on repression. The English are a famously repressed bunch; hence, I would suspect, the attractiveness and emotional power of MRJ’s haunted explorations of emotional frigidity at breaking point, as it’s exposed to the possibility of contact.

And what about HPL? My first reading of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ is one of the great book experiences of my life. I read it when I was about 14, on a skiing holiday – arctic wastes in prose, arctic wastes outside the window, mountains shadowing both.

HPL opened up whole worlds for me – worlds I found oddly attractive. Reading any one of the ‘real world’ stories (as opposed to the out and out fantasies), I was always falling for the locations – Boston, Arkham, Old New York, and so on. Notwithstanding the cosmic horror and sanity blasting reality of HPL’s world, these are places I’d love to live in.

Partially, that’s because HPL’s universe is such a beautiful place – the romantic sublime in all its awesome power made wildly successful pulp horror fiction. In HPL, terror often comes from enforced scale shifts, from a sudden, panicked realisation of the true place of humanity in the universe, and the consequent utter meaningless of our lives.

But once you’ve got over that, what mysteries and wonders to behold…! Even if, by implication, you have to lose your humanity to do so – becoming an ageless toad thing to swim to Unknown R’yleh, or a strange cone-like creature in a globe spanning prehistoric, pre-human civilisation, or a disembodied living brain in a glass jar carried between the planets by giant, cosmic insects.

And it’s worth remembering that humanity itself can be a source of the terror of difference for others – the implied experience of the resurrected alien characters in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ is fascinating, as is the protagonist’s changing response to them. He moves from terror to interest to respect to empathy, finally saluting the key characteristics that the profoundly alien and the profoundly human share.

‘Scientists to the last - what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!’

And of course to make the cosmic terrifying, it helps to have something cosy and homely to set it against. Hence also the appeal of Lovecraft’s earthbound locations – they need to be comforting and attractive, to make the rupture from them all the more upsetting. They’re nostalgia made stone; in literary terms, they function absolutely as idealised but artifical and eminently frangible Edens.

So that’s H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James; two writers that hypnotised me, both playing with innocence and experience and finding horror in the relationships and transitions between the two.

Seeing the world

At Arvon last week I was ranting – as you do – about John Burdett’s ‘Bangkok 8’, the only psychedelic transvestite Thai reincarnation police procedural you’ll ever need to read (apart, of course, from its sequel ‘Bangkok Tattoo’).

And, if that whets your appetite for Thai mythology, there’s much else out there – S.P. Somtow’s short stories and in particular his rather lovely coming of age novel ‘Jasmine Nights’ deal very directly with Thailand’s unreal realms, while Graham Joyce’s ‘Smoking Poppy’ is a much more oblique and restrained take on intersections between fantasy and reality. And that’s just for starters…

What’s interesting is how many of the characters in these novels perceive the fantastic. They take visions of past lives, strange ghosts, practising magicians, exotic curses, and so on, completely in their stride. Reading about such things may be a form of escape for us, but for them it’s the everyday world.

Ostensibly, that takes these books into the realms of fantasy, where Frodo is completely unsurprised by Gandalf’s existence and behaviour because he knows that wizards are real. But there are no hobbits in these books. They deal with authentic worldviews, rooted in direct experience, held by entirely non-fictional people who – if you step on a plane – you can go and meet and chat to.

Commonly, fantasy writing is seen as a form of escapism, but this kind of work points to an opposite function. It understands fantasy to include ‘things unexperienced’ as well as ‘things impossible’, reminding us again and again that there are many more ways of interpreting and engaging with this world than the overly reductive, rationalising modes we so easily fall back on.

Radio Lovecraft

Interesting looking Radio 3 documentary on H.P. Lovecraft here. Can be listened to until the 17th June, includes comments from Neil Gaiman, ST Joshi, Kelly Link, Peter Straub and China Mieville.