The Ghost Slayers – Mike Ashley, Editor
The ongoing Tales of the Weird collection of the British Library now numbering over thirty volumes, it is inevitable that not only will certain authors and themes recur but also that certain characters already familiar to those readers who have followed the sequence will resurface, as is the case in the “thrilling tales of occult detection” gathered by editor Mike Ashley as The Ghost Slayers, with nine selections from between 1898 and 1963 drawn from the archives.
The earliest story a contribution by the mother and son writers Kate and Hesketh Prichard, they offer The Story of the Moor Road as witnessed by Flaxman Low, a gentleman who proceeds from the knowledge that the supernatural exists, perhaps with validity as his character had been established in previous works by the duo, but while he duly investigates and explains – after the fact – the case of the coughing tramp who comes and goes unseen he does not at any point stage what could be considered a useful intervention.
An eccentric philanthropist and freelance doctor ministering to the needy, John Silence is asked to assist a haunted writer, undertaking an interview first with the concerned wife then the afflicted husband before the extended and repetitive encounter with the entity which resides in the house, the ultimate triumph brought about by the literary equivalent of a special effects extravaganza which hopes to distract from the fact that the actual substance of A Psychical Invasion is thin in Algernon Blackwood’s overlong tale of 1908.
Sharper and more evocative, William Hope Hodgson introducing additional characters as his story progresses who serve as more than sounding boards for his ego, The Searcher of the End House is Thomas Carnacki, residing with his mother in a holiday rental cottage beset by nocturnal disturbances, a tale from 1910 which simultaneously debunks parts of the apparent haunting even as it puts credence in deeper mysteries to explain other phenomena.
The Fear of Claude and Alice Askew from 1914 suffers from the chronological arrangement which places it beside Hodgson’s story in that they also reveal many of their events to have simple earthly motivations while others are assigned fully to the supernatural, but most interesting from a historical perspective is that the broad shape of their premise and the history of their setting of Camplin Castle greatly resembles Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House, published thirty-five years later.
The solution to the mystery of precious stones and unidentified human remains requiring Mesmer Milann to visit The Valley of the Veils of Death so slight it barely justifies the trip, Bertram Atkey’s overwrought voyage overseas of 1914 is casually racist and misogynist in its dismissive attitude towards any characters who are not the smugly conceited medium, marring what would otherwise have been a passable supernatural thriller.
Stalked by a fearsome beast, The Death Hound, a man reports his case to Doctor Taverner which pits the master of the supernatural against his opposite number dedicated to evil in Dion Fortune’s economically told story of 1922, while night terrors of a more abstract nature underlie The Case of the Fortunate Youth investigated by Cosmo Thor who deduces there must be an underlying cause associated with the recently inherited house in Moray Dalton’s 1927 adventure, well-written with more pace and atmosphere than many in the collection.
A contribution from the author Gordon Hillman, Forgotten Harbour brings a great change of style, immediately leaping to action and travelling to the lighthouse known locally as Dead Man’s Light for its tragic history and unexpectedly operated by men so terrified of the unseen that they border on hysterical, “the greatest American authority on poltergeists” Cranshawe seeming to solve the 1931 case with intuition rather than investigation and also a superfluity of exclamation marks, one page alone boasting ten of them.
Set in another mansion of unsavoury history of which there are apparently many, this time in New England, Lucius Leffing is summoned to investigate the sense of dread which wakes the residents in the night, Joseph Payne Brennan’s 1963 story In Death As In Life focused on the more physical aspects of the disturbance and introducing, albeit briefly, an atypical exorcist but ultimately concluding The Ghost Slayers with a story which again reinforces rather than challenges the firmly established template of the collection.
The Ghost Slayers is available now from the British Library
