Firstly, mostly to get them out of the way, two boring anecdotes.

Semi-irrelevant anecdote #1:
Once when I was working in Waterstones in Oxford, I sold lovely David Mitchell a book of M R James’ ghost stories. The end.

Semi-irrelevant anecdote #2:
I went to a supposedly haunted school. The school was in the Thames Valley, reasonably old although not much predating the 20th Century, at a guess (I’m sure I could find out but my interest is limited) and situated in some rolling countryside that I am sure I would have found impressive had I not been brought up as a yokel and thus seeing a massive field of oil seed rape as a massive field of oil seed rape, rather than a burning golden sea, etc. The school itself was in old farm buildings, the former barn and stables made a sort of three-quarters-enclosed courtyard, with an ancient, crippled weeping willow tree in the centre and this was where the junior school basked sunnily, the buildings whitewashed and their insides at least semi-efficiently converted to schooling purposes.

The senior school occupied the old farmhouse, which was at once more conveniently school-enabled and also completely ridiculous; the library was only accessible through the English classroom and the corridors were sharply-twisting, crowded things. Originally, the entire school had been in this building and the attic had been used as dormitories but had long since been abandoned, its accessibility being even more limited than the rest of the place, as a dumping ground for old play costumes and props. In certain conditions, light would shine through the attic windows and from the playground, you could make out a dress or a mannequin’s head and everyone would run round describing the fact they’d seen the ghost of the girl who’d killed herself out of the attic window. This girl had various different names, as far as I can recall but there actually had been someone who’d died (I think of TB) there and so there was a semi-taboo over the whole thing from the teachers, who considered it half-bad taste and half-hysteria, not incorrectly.

The attics themselves were fabulously creepy; I went up there possibly four or five times, usually to retrieve play costumes. There was no electric lighting up there, so we had to go in the afternoon when the light would be suitably angled as to illuminate the racks of mouldering furs and tea dresses and consequently, the rooms would be heated specifically according to the sunbeams, making some areas baking and stinking of dust and mothballs and others freezing and full of dank, a disorientating sensation to experience as you crossed a stooped, poorly-lit room and trailing rags brushed against your head and shoulders. This was fairly par for the course, however and since my own room in my parents’ house was similar it didn’t freak me out enough to overwhelm my curiosity about the costumes and the jewellery and the boxes of photographs up there.

What freaked me out utterly and completely and turned absolutely everyone into a screaming idiot, teachers included, was the rooms the other side of the hall. These were never lit up at the same time, due to the sun-angling lighting and so were in a sepia-darkness that made them seem timeslipped; old iron bed frames rested against the walls, never removed and they cast odd, long shadows, decaying leather straps that had once supported mattresses hung like torture-restraints and the paint was peeling off the ceiling in curlicues but there was no evidence of it hitting the floor, which was utterly black in a layer about an inch-and-a-half thick of dead or half-dead bluebottles. Thinking about those rooms now, well over a decade after I must have last seen them, I can feel the hair on the back of my neck standing up and hear the noise of these dying flies buzzing a steady, low drone that rose and fell. I never saw one airborne in there and I suppose that there must have been insecticides used by the caretaker to kill them but there were so many of them and in such drowsy, fitfully mortal states that it was like some overwhelmingly surreal, morbid scene from …well, I want to say a Hitchcock movie but I don’t watch films and don’t really know, so I’ll have to say one of those lasting images from M.R. James.

These rooms filled me with incapable, sick fear and seemed portentous but without reason; why were the flies there, why were they dying in such numbers and why were they always carpeting the room thus? Rather like the more terrifying bits of James, there wasn’t any explanation offered, merely the fact of their existence.

A School Story is one of my favourite of his stories, for this reason. I enjoy matter-of-fact ghost story telling, as James does it; there is little or no effort made to rationalise the events with supporting background stories, such as the vengeful ghosts you tend to get in supernatural mystery stories (although I like them, too, for B-Movie reasons) and there’s rarely a potential get-out for the victims of the tale. I particularly like that in this one, the narrator knows no way to make any sensible link between the events and so any and all conjecture about how things come to unfold is entirely our own. Like the rooms full of flies seemed to me, the narrator knows that the events are in some way portentous or significant and certainly frightening but without any ability to define why, each being seemingly innocent in isolation.*

The first ghostly or apparently significant incident occurs during the description of Sampson, a favoured tutor who had travelled the world and seems to have been a bit of a rogueish figure, in a disciplinarian manner, who had on his watch-chain a charm fashioned from a Byzantine coin. The narrator, possibly with retrospect, describes the tutor as having “rather barbarously” carved his initials and a date across the coin. This is pretty much a red herring, of course but James’ drawing the reader’s attention to it and indeed, the rare occasion of him describing something in detail (a paragraph ago he has dismissed bothering to describe one of the protagonists except to say that he was entirely unexceptional and Scottish) means that instantly this appears to be a hinge-point in the tale.

It is slightly offputting, then, that “the first odd thing” then happens a paragraph later in Latin class. Again, the Latin is a red herring; although, as it’s been noted before in this series, anyone who is anyone in an M R James story can speak Latin there’s no more significance than that to the setting, I suspect, although it works well with the Byzantine coin to throw suspicions off-kilter as the reader looks for a pieceable mystery.

McLeod, the unexceptional Scot, is delayed in delivering his Latin sentence using the verb “memini.” I have never learnt Latin and can’t read it in the slightest, so whatever memino librum meum means goes right over my head but is no doubt a hilarious error but apparently, this is “the sort of rot” that some of the boys will have come out with as they wait to pass in their sentences to Sampson. McLeod, seemingly in a dream-state, doesn’t fill his in until, berated by the rest of the class, he finally scribbles down a sentence he doesn’t understand but which seemingly Sampson very much does; “memento putei inter quattor taxos.”

Apparently inspired by a vision that popped into his head before he wrote it, McLeod says to the narrator that it means “remember the well among the four yews,” with a small discussion of which tree he is referring to placed prominently enough that the reader is led to dwell on the trees. And yews are sinister and conjure visions of churchyards, which coupled with Sampson’s spooking seems obvious that there is something unwholesome occurring and that this is a warning shot of some kind. It is not a particularly scary one, however, being too specific to be a common fear and too disjointed to be obviously leading and the boys seem to largely forget the incident as McLeod is taken to his bed for a month with illness and the nameless narrator only retrospectively sees it as suspicious.

The next event is also set in the dull surroundings of the Latin classroom, embedded amongst notes on grammar and a complaint against conditional sentences (which I won’t pretend to know the specifics of) and again an incident where Sampson is alarmed by a contribution to the boys’ testing. This time, our narrator steps in as a Boy Investigator and, after the teacher runs from the room, discovers the slip of paper which has alarmed him. The sentence, belonging to no one in the room according to their dying oaths and some weak CSI handwriting analysis, is innocuous enough that our narrator steals the piece, the paper itself obviously offering no sense of foreboding despite the decidedly sinister message of “If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you,” which is the sort of fantastically stalkerish thing that would unnerve anyone.

The disappearing ink is a weak way to make the paper seem unnatural; the fact of it existing is creepier and it annoys me to some extent that James uses that fact to confirm its supernatural origin. A paper that has appeared, written by no hand in the class, by no ink in the class and by an apparently extra person in the room, unnoticed, is much more alarming for its physicality and continued existence than otherwise and so the message disappearing after the narrator steals it is frustrating, especially given the next events seem to suggest something far more corporeal, if no less unnatural, going on.

The description of the thing which McLeod (although notably, not the narrator) sees at Sampson’s window is one of my favourite passages in any of the ghost stories; like a lot of the rest of the story, it is the mundane turned sinister by some creeping suspicion that, whilst unconfirmed, is bad enough in its suggestion. Originally describing the situation to the narrator as there being a burglar at the teacher’s window, visible from their dormitory, McLeod makes the bizarre excuse for not raising an alarm of not knowing who it is, as though burglars are generally known to the victim and something about this phrasing is obviously off-kilter enough to support the creep the narrator feels when, looking out to an empty courtyard and realising somehow that there is indeed something wrong afoot.

These suspicions are confirmed, when the boys begin speaking again, with McLeod’s description-

“I didn’t hear anything at all,” he said, “but about five minutes before I woke you, I found myself looking out of this window here, and there was a man sitting or kneeling on Sampson’s window-sill, and he looking in and I thought he was beckoning.” “What sort of man?” McLeod wriggled. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I can tell you one thing – he was beastly thin: and he looked as if he was wet all over: and,” he said, looking round and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself, “I’m not at all sure that he was alive.”

Insofar as a burglary is mundane, this is the inverse to most accounts of supernatural events in that McLeod at first claims to have seen a break-in, then post-rationalises it to be an incident involving the undead. Normally, we would expect him to start with the notion that he’d seen a zombie and then suggest raising the alarm in case of a break-in, whereas here terror actually seems to grow with distance and why not? The image is a disturbing enough one that even someone who saw it probably wouldn’t think of all they’d seen until a few moments later. Initially, you see a man breaking in, then you think perhaps he’s beckoning, then you think about how thin he was and his wetness and a dread that perhaps you have seen something more awful than you really want to think about sinks in.

The idea of faces at windows terrifies me. No, wait, right. There’s a bit in Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters, which was a staple of scaring the pants off me as a very small child, where Father Christmas wakes to find goblins have once more invaded his house. The actual description-

“One night, just about Christopher’s birthday**, I woke up suddenly. There was squeaking and spluttering in the room and a nasty smell – in my own best green and purple room that I had just done up most beautifully. I caught sight of a wicked little face at the window. Then I really was upset, for my window is high up above the cliff, and that meant there were bat-riding goblins about – which we haven’t seen since the goblin-war in 1453, that I told you about.”

which isn’t as earth-shatteringly terrifying as I remember it because a) I am now nineteen years older and b) at some point during those nineteen years I think I concocted an entirely different passage, which I believed I’d learnt pretty much verbatim from the book, enraptured by terror although after a quick investigation by Mark and I, I’ve realised is probably from a dream (there was a supposed accompanying illustration but I think I’d invented that as well, since it doesn’t follow Tolkien’s bright inks style) and which went as follows;

“One night I awoke to silence; there was heavy snowfall and it seemed the fire had gone out, making the room freezing and dark and at first I thought it was this that woke me. Crossly getting up to stoke the embers, if possible and cursing the Polar Bear for his choosing wet logs I smelt something wrong. There are plenty of smells here; soot from the fires and wood in the workshops and spilt ink and soap and the Polar Bear’s coat smells something awful when he hasn’t dried it properly but this was none of them and I began to be afraid that something dreadful had occurred. There was a soft noise at the window, settling snow dripping off the roof I thought and something made me turn to move the curtain where, pressed nearly against mine I saw a pointed little face and knew they were back.”

Which demonstrates an overactive imagination but is also one of the things that to this day utterly and totally terrifies me, despite being almost entirely of my own elaboration. The idea of the creature at Sampson’s window frightened me completely when I first read the story (aged about eleven, I think) in the same way the tapping of tree-things at a window in another ghost story I read around the same time (mostly forgotten and of infinitely lower quality than James’ but I was largely constricted by the school library) and the way the goblin at Father Christmas’ window had when I was four. My room, which occupied a peaked bit of the former attic of my parents’ house, had a window just behind where I slept, which I couldn’t see through from my bed but which, if something had been pressed against it, I could have noticed. I lived in the country and the bloodcurdling screams of mating muntjacks (which are genuinely awful noises, choking and howling like they’re dying) don’t wake me up, equally the busy cross-county main road that ran through the village ensured that there was a heavy enough stream of HGVs etc. to ensure the thing that really freaked me out was when I woke up to dead silence, presumably where the invented Father Christmas passage comes from.

Which is all a massive digression from M.R. James but one I think is necessary. The narrative of the A School Story begins with two men in a smoking room; I imagine them wearing particularly fine red smoking jackets, drinking port and looking like old MPs, which is to say fat and rendered red-nosed and tough-faced by years of pompous outrage. One begins by recounting (without the prompt for this anecdote being included) that at his school they had a ghost’s footprint. Whether this is in response to those ridiculous, soft-touch non-ghost-imprinted schools these days or not is never specified, however he does say that there was never any story behind it, merely that it existed as a quite unremarkable feature except that it was on a stone staircase. It’s discarded fast enough that whether it was an actual indent or merely a mark is never even specified.

The man continues by describing ghost stories told at schools, which is a standard enough thing; anyone who’s ever been in any educational establishment will have at least half a dozen fairly generic tales to recount that supposedly definitely really happened in some specific but varied spot not far from the school.

It’s a nice touch that the two men first rubbish these stories as ridiculous and almost certainly removed from literature; one suggests to the other that he write about it- “There’s a subject for you, by the way – “The Folklore of Private Schools” but the first speaker demurs on the basis of the scantiness of material on which to draw, “I imagine if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly-compressed versions of stories out of books.” M.R. James: early Lars Ulrich of the Intellectual Property world.

“Nowadays, the Strand and Pearson’s, and so on, would be extensively drawn upon,” -kids these days, eh? They’ll rip off any old sh1t. This is something I quite like about James, though; in discussing ghost stories within his ghost stories (and this is far from the only time it happens, often the characters pause to discuss the supernatural or are engaged in researching the very thing that comes to haunt them) he justifies his prose style, which is not on the face of it something to chill the blood. The way he recounts the stories, almost always through second-or-third party narrators, is (and excuse me whilst I stab myself in the face for my own pretension here but) Herodotian in its gossipy, editorial style. The oft-discarded characters (“and I shan’t bore you with a description,” ie: I can’t be bothered to write one, repeatedly features in one form or another) and the fact that we are hearing stories twice or thrice edited by their characters and then by James’ own, fictional researcher-author character means that the sparse style, retaining only the juicy bits or those that have been considered important adds to the apparent disparity of events’ significance. Which is possibly lazy writing but I take quite a lot of pleasure in authors who make their writing a character and so I find it quite charming.

It’s this editing that makes the creepy bits really creepy to me, too. The actual conclusion to A School Story is necessary but unfrightening. A third party in the smoking room discovers, by identifying Sampson’s Byzantine charm, that he was found dead in a well amidst a yew thicket in Ireland, with the body that presumably attacked him and dragged him back there “arms tight round” him. This is unnerving to the person who found the bodies but our distance from Sampson and the lack of any explanation of how events came to be this way means it strikes me as merely archaeological. Or possibly I’ve just watched too much CSI but nonetheless, the story at that point has taken on the same meaning as the stories rejected in the smoking room at the start; “a man was found dead in bed with a horseshow mark on his forehead, and the floor under the bed was covered with marks of horseshoes also; I don’t know why.” And neither does the reader really know why two bodies were found in a well in Ireland; Sampson had obviously feared it but no explanation for his knowledge is offered and the fact that he died is not especially frightening, given we know him by little more than the few token identifiers that allow the body to be named his.

Allowing my own fears to perhaps bias me though, the thing that frightens me about A School Story is the false clues, the strange feelings of dread and the lack of understanding. Nothing about the two incidents in Latin class suggests that a corpse will turn up at Sampson’s window, late at night (although Sampson himself presumably fears it) and although there is a little hint perhaps of something unspecified, when McLeod mentions that Sampson questions him about his origins it’s obvious that the coin and the old language are misleading. The thing in the well presumably has no classical significance or if so, is unlikely to be Byzantine in origin (although I suppose coins are flung into wells traditionally and Sampson’s tale about Constantinople could be a bizarre lie but I prefer the lack of explanation) and its link to its victim is inexplicable on the evidence we have.

And that’s what’s really terrifying and what, readers, has led to me having to recruit Mark to sit in the same room as me to finish writing this because the fireplace is making rustling noises and the window opposite is darkened and empty. The seemingly mundane turning terrifying is a common tool in horror; a glamourous young lady wakes in the middle of the night to a strange noise in the kitchen, potters down the stairs in her nightie to investigate if it’s the cat again, decides she must have imagined it and the next thing we see, she’s mostly dismembered behind a police line. I have no delusions that I will be killed in a glamourous nightie, being mostly found in flannel pyjama trousers and a Pantera t-shirt but the fear of Things At The Window makes my blood run cold still.

The significant events that lead up to Sampson’s disappearance are frightening for being apparently explicable, to at least some extent; boy daydreams in Latin class, writes something weird, annoys teacher; extra slip of paper is stuffed into pile by hilarious prankster (which is why the ink disappearing annoys me I suppose) and again, annoys teacher into having a migraine. Sampson’s fear up until that point is alien to me but in the conclusion as recounted by McLeod the idea that a thing he knew was likely coming, which had sent him warning shots, appears in the dark of night, silently. When he woke he must have felt terror, then perhaps a sense of brief reassurance that there was nothing immediately there until he looked to the window and the terror was all the worse for the moment of respite as the possibly-not-alive thing beckons to him.

In a brief “I have freaked myself out too much to continue writing” crisp break in the kitchen, Mark said that the thing that’s frightening there is the fact that this time, we haven’t seen any of this but imagine if the supernatural comes calling and we have to be the retelling witnesses to such. We’ve all had moments of suspicion about events that presumably turn out to be entirely mundane; there’s a rustling in the fireplace, it’s probably a spider and of course the window across the road is out, the occupants are probably down the pub like any sensible person at this time on a Sunday.

At my old school, the attic door was once open when I got in. I wanted to close it because I could hear the buzzing of the dying flies (or thought I could) and because at that time I arrived at school a good hour before most other people, it scared me to be the only one with this noise leading me, seductively fearful, to this place that scared me. I thought the caretaker might be up there though and didn’t want to lock him up there, so I steeled myself and got about seven steps up the stairs before I thought I saw something move (probably dust disturbed by my feet) ran back and slammed the door shut because the idea of seeing what made the dead flies pile up there, although it’s probably nothing more sensational than a can of Raid, was too sickening. The confirmations of our paranoia, irrationally displayed, are just too horrible; in A School Story there’s no sense of conclusion beyond the fact Sampson dies and there’s no assurance for the narrator or poor indescribable McLeod that what they witnessed was one thing or another.

The temptation, in a lot of horror movies or stories today, is to provide a motive or a cause (and James does that often enough; it’s apparent why, say, the bedcloth creature appears in O Whistle) and to rationalise it into a solvable thing, in order to give it some kind of narrative but James’ casenotes style in the ghost stories doesn’t demand anything more explanatory than a simple recount of events as they are known, the evidence not necessarily leading to anything more satisfying than an apparent occurrence and for a reader rationalising noises they can hear from where they sit or lie with the story, that’s much more a dread likely to make you unable to get up and turn the light off than any clarity could. James’ talent lies in giving just enough to activate one’s imagination but not enough to reassure you.

*Unlike a room full of dead flies, which is just fvcking creepy whichever way you look at it. But bear with me here.
**Sidenote: whilst looking for this passage, Sukrat and I also gleefully discovered a letter which ends:
P.S. (Chris has no need to be frightened of me -PAGING THE UNRESOLVED ISSUES POLICE.

But the Japanese comic market is completely different, and there I have found a few good comics aimed squarely at girls – and one masterpiece, actually aimed at young women rather than girls, which is what has prompted me to add to my series a year and a half later.

Ai Yazawa’s Nana is perhaps my favourite comic ever now, and I thank my friend Cis for pointing me at it. It’s about two young women who move to Tokyo for a new life, both called Nana. Nana K is sweet and rather naive – the punky Nana O calls her, in an exasperated temper, “puppy-dog-like”, and Nana K gets the happiest expression ever. Nana O is a singer, and it’s her band and that of her ex that provide most of the other characters, and the two bands are central to the developing story, which so far runs to 19 translated volumes of around 200 pages each.

I love everything about it: I could happily read another 10,000 pages about any of the major characters, and I feel for them very deeply, their joys and pains. This is partly because she creates them so superbly, with depth and multiple facets and unmistakeable feelings, capturing their speech beautifully, sometimes capturing them breathtakingly precisely with one line. She also develops their stories carefully, giving them good and bad times mostly from what they do rather than anything external happening to them, and including unusual techniques such as increasing use of flashforward sequences. I have particularly strong feelings about the relationship between the Nanas: it breaks my heart when Yazawa keeps them apart for long (sometimes she separates them for hundreds of pages), and I feel as if I could happily watch them together in their flat, at the table in the bay window, forever.

Besides the intelligence, sensitivity, maturity and honesty of the story, what turns this from a superbly written comic into an all-round masterpiece is her art. She switches styles from one panel to another: one might be gorgeously stylish, which comes partly from her fashion illustration background, and sometimes looks like Jaime Hernandez’s work with a touch of Guido Crepax; then the next might be broadly cartoony, somewhere between Osamu Tezuka and Charles Schulz. In nearly 4,000 pages, I don’t recall once thinking that she chose the wrong mode for a panel. I also don’t think any two pages have the same layout of panels: in this, she makes even Crepax look predictable. Every page seems as if it has been designed without preconceptions, to fit the needs of the story at that moment, and she never seems to put a foot wrong.

I can’t think of another comic I have ever read that is so strong in every area: character, story, dialogue, drawing, layout. It’s formally original and masterful, and a joy to read, very funny and immensely moving. I don’t think comic books get any better than this. I’ll also note that it is a huge hit in Japan: the latest book collection broke records by selling almost 800,000 copies in its first week there.

I’ll also mention the other series of hers available in English: Paradise Kiss is a 5-book story of a schoolgirl getting involved with some fashion students. It has a lot of the same qualities, though you do feel you are reading a single story rather than a serial starring some characters, and I think she has got much better in the later Nana.

In M R James’s universe everyone who matters is fluent in Latin. It’s not so for the modern reader – or at least this modern reader – and there’s an interesting gap left between the Latin that he so liberally scatters throughout his stories, and the translations we read.

The Treasure of Abbot Thomas begins with some big chunks of Latin, which our antiquarian protagonist – Mr Somerton – gets straight down to translating. What he ends up with isn’t immediately clear to him, either, but he follows up the clues within and is lured into a hunt for buried treasure, departing to parts foreign, and for now out of our sight.

Some interpretation – if not translation – is also needed for the missive that opens part two of the story; Mr Somerton, away on the continent, has gotten himself into a pickle, and his manservant writes to the rector for help. The grammar, spelling and punctuation of this letter are very much at odds with the careful and precise language elsewhere in the story; it jars. (I think there’s plenty of scope for looking at how servants’ speech stands out like a sore thumb in these stories, but that’s for another time.) The rector makes quick sense of the letter, hops on the next boat out, and arrives to find his antiquarian friend enfeebled and in fear of some yet nameless horror. Recounting the events that have so rattled him are beyond him, and he begs the rector to first carry out a task – kept hidden from the reader. That accomplished, he settles down to tell his tale.

What a romp of buried treasure it is! Coded messages in stained glass windows, and ciphers to be puzzled out, lead us at last to treasure buried down a well. Mr Somerton’s curiosity, and maybe a touch of avarice, ensnares him. He cannot resist it – who could? – and follows the trail to its moonlight conclusion, where at last we’re introduced to the villain and the monster of this tale. The treasure is guarded by a some supernatural creature. It slips its tentacled arms around the neck of our poor antiquarian, just as he’s reaching for his haul, driving him nearly insane with the cthulhuesque horror of it all.

The rector and the servant are dispatched to replace the treasure in the well. It’s back where it was, hidden behind a slab of stone and covered over with mud. The demon can cease to hound Mr Somerton.  All is well.

Or is it? The very ending of the story is in Latin, and leaves us straddling one of those little gaps of comprehension. The rector mentions – just mentions – that Somerton must have missed an inscription above the treasure-hole.

It was a horrid, grotesque shape — perhaps more like a toad than anything else, and there was a label by it inscribed with the two words, “Depositum custodi.”

And here it ends. The footnote, upon which my ignorant self depends for on-the-fly interpretations, translates Depositum custodi as Keep that which is committed to thee. How ambigious is that! What’s committed? To whom? Is the treasure committed to the tentacled, slithery guardian, and will it sleep easy now they’re walled up again? Or is that creature now committed to our unfortunate Mr Somerton. It – or something – has already been rattling the doors at night, and causing unpleasant dreams. Will there be easier sleep after the story concludes, or does the haunting continue after the book’s been closed?

The placing of this phrase at the end of the tale seems incredibly open-ended to me. I’m a dweller in the world of sequels, and of hydra-like monsters who rise again for one last attack just as the heroes have relaxed and turned their backs (walking away to wipe up the blood, patch themselves up). No twenty first century demon would let itself be walled up without a confrontation. But I think I’m reading too much into such a woolly translation of just two words. I do a quick trawl of a handful of online Latin dictionaries – and quiz a friend on what they remember of their long-ago GCSE Latin – and it seems to be that a clearer translation would be ‘Guard this thing I’ve left in your keeping’. That’s far less ambiguous. The demon’s the guardian of the treasure, and the treasure’s sealed up whwere it should be. The demon can kick back, relax, and get back to doing whatever it is demons like to do in dark dank holes.

Here monsters stay dispatched or dismissed, and if you’re alive at the end of the story – not everyone is – you’ve probably lived to tell the tale (from a roaring fireside, with a comforting glass of brandy to hand, on a dark and stormy winters’ night, no doubt). Mr Somerton might prefer to leave the stained glass windows for a while, and focus on pews, or baptismal fonts, or some other aspect of ecclesiastical architecture . I doubt he’ll sleep all too well for the next few months, but it won’t be supernatural scratchings that keep him awake. This tale ends here. There’s just the slightest whisper of sequel potential. The antique books and stained glass windows still exist, and the demon is back with the treasure, ready to wind its hideous tentacles around the neck of the next hapless treasure hunter.

His rant can’t have done any favours for the nerves of last night’s auditionees. (Yes, they all read Chortle.) (It is a weird business.) Yet it was the strongest group we’d seen yet.

Each of these hopefuls got just 5 minutes with which to make the judges remember them. And even if their act worked in the tiny upstairs of Hampstead’s Magdala (known as “The Alpine Club”), would it work in a 1000+ seat theatre? Compere Ross Ashcroft – who is very good at what he does – settled us in and we began.

• Chum Bucket (sketch) – negotiations w/Michelangelo over Sistine Chapel ceiling
• Liam Speirs – lame R&B clubs, dung beetles, pigeons eating a chip
• Val Lee – 60s-ish, dead lesbians in fleeces, unironic bathmats
• Hatty Ashdown – ashamed about going to Morrison’s, old mum
• Jody Kamali – Iranian, from Bristol, rugby fan banter
• Ariadne, the Greek WAG – Brits abroad, men are like taxis darlings
• Max Dowler – impressions, Alan Sugar, Christian Slater
• Richard Dellow – mushrooms, festivals, he shit in a Pringles can

INTERVAL

• Abandoman (sketch) – crowd-sourced freestyle rap
• Claire Stroud – “i’m a body double for Lorraine Kelly”, Primark dresses, farts on the Tube
• Dave Gibson – mustache, polyester suit, “getting mugged isn’t actually funny”
• Sonya Kelly – mom on Facebook, “i’m putting on a mixed load”
• Ryan McDonnell – fast talker, old people and public toilets
• Sir Harold Hackney (Alternative Mayor of London) – 78 y.o., sang Mares Eat Oats
• Simon Fielder – dating, “making love happen is like fighting terror”

I was astonished by Abandoman, who asked questions of two audience members and then sang a pop-rap love song about them, right on the spot, using all the details they were provided. And the rapping was actually good – twisted, complex and dense. When improv is done this well it feels like a magic trick – there must be something more at work here. But no, human brains really are capable of this.

Dave Gibson played an exaggerated version of a standup – bad suit, bad mustache, boundless self-regard. His material wasn’t memorable, but the persona and brio with which he invested it was.

Ariadne the Greek WAG wasn’t a particularly original invention but Alyssa Kyria did it very well; her hair in long black ringlets, her skin slathered with tanner, her contempt for Brits wrapped in a million fake smiles. “London men are like taxis, ladies. Oh yes. Most of them are dodgy, they usually have no idea where they’re going, and it’s usually best to get a big black one! And if you’re lucky he can take six of you at once.”

But my favourite was Val Lee. An older woman, she arrived on stage and with her quiet, strong voice simply commanded the room. Her entire act was based off the sweater she was wearing. It had belonged to her ex-lover. On whom she began to unload. “I hate your burgundy anorak. And I hate your blue bathmat in the shape of a foot. It was never ironic.” Suddenly we were somewhere else, we were with her in the very smallest, most private spaces of her life. She described going out to a lesbian discotheque after they had broken up. “You wouldn’t call it that here in London, but this was Eastbourne, so it was definitely a lesbian discotheque. Straight people can’t go to discotheques past a certain age, but lesbians can go until… well, until they die, really. You can usually tell the dead ones. They’re slumped over the table with their fleeces still on.” The specificity was killing us. We were helpless, in her power completely.

Lee’s act made me rethink Muldoon’s (and my own) narrow definition of political comedy. Wasn’t the 80s alternative comedy movement largely about imploding and reversing prior arrangements of public (political) and private (apolitical)? If we’ve gone back to thinking that Gordon Brown and the BNP are what counts as political, and penises and ATM paranoia are not, we’ve gone back to a pre-80s mindset, to a kind of ruined shell of a Habermasian public sphere. We all know it’s the very people who claim to “not be political” at all that have the most deeply embedded opinions. And somehow, an act that was all about the most specific images of a failed personal relationship felt the riskiest, the most liberating, and the most revelatory about life.

There was no roundup for Audition #5 because I couldn’t make it, and I can’t make the last one either so this is it, I’m afraid. I know you’re shattered. If you’d like to attend the final audition it’s next Wednesday at 8pm in Walthamstow, at The Plough, opposite Wood St. Station.

The actual finals themselves are at the Hackney Empire on Jan. 30, 2010. It’s the last big event there before the Empire goes dark for an indefinite period to give the Arts Council time to figure out how to complete their management takeover. It will be the last chance to see the refurbished Empire for some time.

Full images under the cut…

Roland Muldoon, the guy who occupied the Hackney Empire in 1985 when it had been abandoned by Mecca Bingo and left for dead by the borough council, picked it up, dusted it off, made it a base for his political theatre group C.A.S.T., and then transformed it into a base for popular low-brow theatre and “new variety”. Muldoon and his wife Claire remain the impresarios of New Act of the Year. He says comedians are “scared” of politics these days.

“There’s no Left any more,” he says. That may be, but surely this means politics is even riper than ever as the stuff of comedy? And not just the stuff done by politicians, but the stuff that prompts private seething resentment. Or rallies. Or a sense of betrayal. If us and them are no longer so clearly defined in traditional terms wouldn’t that be a good thing for comedy? Or does this particular comedic variant – standup – lean so heavily on established tribal assumptions that “post-ideology” really is a net loss for it? On the evidence of the last few days it looks like the latter.

Here then, were the decidedly apolitical acts of the evening:

• Luke Benson – “Today’s special.. yes it is”, Geordie, playing Medal of Honor with granddad
• Jo Selby – Vladivostok, “now I will tell you another joke”, hand puppet, Mr Twinkles
• Paul F Taylor – infantile, dog stroking, “this is the first time I’ve spoken today”
• Helen Arney – ukelele, osteopath sex
• Adam Tempest – tall, flatmates, South African accents aren’t sexy
• Norman Cho – Peckham, bald, suit, Chinese
• Mark Simmons – Funny hair, Folkestone, Chunnel humour
• Barnaby Slater – calm, Ikea like going on pull, Maddie humour

INTERVAL

• Richard Fox – synthesizer, “Meet the Fritzls”, “why is my beard ginger”
• Catie Wilkins – crap ghost rides, dirty talk, R. Madeley’s autobiography
• Martin Hall – neice wants to marry him
• Rob Coleman – big hair, puns, tasteless one-liners
• Andrew Ryan – Cork, Irish Dragon’s Den, lightswitch for handbag
• Lindsay Sharman – pathetic mom gossip, plummy, frantic
• Nish Kumar – Croydon, fast talker, sneaky knights, crap racists
• Angelica O’Reilly – anal bleach

This collection of comedians produced a surprising amount of pedophilia jokes. It’s essentially a capricious phenomenon – like putting a random piece of music on a random piece of film, moments of bizarre synchronicity will emerge. Last night it was pedophilia. (Not even my favourite act of the night, Martin Hall, could resist, but he was so guileless about it, and his five minutes were structured so well, that you almost even forgot that the heart of his material was the fact that his underage neice had decided she wanted to marry him.)

The other standout for me was Jo Selby, who is probably not Russian but convinced me otherwise for the first minute or two. “Bad” joke telling by cod-foreigners is pretty much the opposite of groundbreaking but she was so good at it that she won the room over completely. No movement was wasted – the whole act was put together like clockwork.

Muldoon says that although none of the audition acts have been political, no one does racist material on stage any more, and that’s a political achievement in itself. For my part, I think we will always laugh at people who are different from us, and ethnicity is one such marker. But when we can do that with affection, as in Selby’s Russian bit, it does feel like an achievement.

* Actually several of them are back around for their second or third try; some even using the same material…

If you see enough standup you’ll become a connoisseur of the quotidian observation. Where the casual observer might see a hopped-up loudmouth in an ill-fitting suit, you can distinguish the fine gradations of it all and appreciate the tangy bouquet of self-loathing overlaid on a peaty observation about Oyster Cards. This is not a good thing.

Here then are my notes on last night’s hopefuls at The Funny Side in Covent Garden. They were given five minutes each in which to imprint some humorous memory of themselves.

• Marc Burrows – moon-faced, fake urban legends
• Timmy Manners – high fiving a midget
• Paul McCaffrey – “brand new pizza”, ATMs, RAF ads
• Ben Van der Velde – Jewish Geordie, bungee humour
• Daniel Simonsen – Norwegian, shyness, why doesn’t Rocky protect his face?
• No Son of Mine (double act) – “father and son” team, gay Taliban, “magic hand trick”
• Darren Maskell – props, “the promise of a Parker pen”, horse kidnaping
• Sal Stevens – “the coil”, girlfriend jealousy
• Helm and Taylor (double act) – hairy lads, hectoring, “bad” one-liners

INTERVAL

• The Beta Males’ Picnic (sketch) – “take your tablets”, cravats, Shakespeare as irritating robot
• Gareth Kane – Kilburn, his estate, got dumped
• The Dog-Eared Collective (quadruple act) – “The Night Line” advice line, social misfits, Yorkshire
• Chris Dangerfield – new suit, crazy hair, sex with no-handed lady
• Rob Beckett – fast talker, cereals

A common thread has begun to show itself and that is that Russell Brand has a lot to answer for. More than half the acts here aped – knowingly or not – his breathless, pseudo-stream-of-consciousness speedfreak delivery. Some pushed it to the limit, basically assaulting the audience with lung power and speed, while others were content to maintain a low-level frenetic hum.

I suppose the idea is that “energy” on stage is a worthy goal in and of itself, that it will carry the act along if the material sags. But I just found it exhausting after awhile. The quiet, calm ones wound up standing out. That meant Paul McCaffrey – whose timing was tremendous, just letting jokes hang in the air while he paused stock still and let us roll it around in our heads – and Daniel Simonsen, the Norwegian, whose innocent complaints about the perils of shyness beguiled me.

Special mention should be given also to No Son of Mine, a putative father-son combo whose past spills out uncomfortably on stage. It wasn’t as smooth as it could have been, but it was a pleasure seeing a sketch actually acted – and affectingly – rather than simply shouted.

Tomorrow: Audition #4.

By the way, this was just so I’d remember who they were. I mean it’s brutal. They get 5 minutes each (8 minutes for double acts) and the judges have to decide on that basis, in a room of perhaps 30 people, whether they should do their act for a sold-out 2000-seat theatre. Which actually makes the decision quite simple. They have to competely knock it out of the park to stand a chance.

• Johnny Cochrane – big hair
• Alexandra Clarke – ukelele, X-Factor
• Jez Scharf – Tie, guitar, depressed, ex-girlfriend
• TOBY (double act) – “wib wobs”, treacle, Rohypnol
• Timothy Lock – Harry Hill, American
• Joe Roundtree – music genres, midget in suitcase
• Will Marsh – Wood Green, fireworks, headlines

INTERVAL

• Frisky and Mannish – glitter, piano, “question”, eternal flame stalker
• WitTank (sketch group) – posh, loud, “rim me, Hardy!”
• Darshan Sanghrajka – his neighborhood, Kipling rap
• Joe Lycett – middle class, Amazon reviews, X-Factor voice
• Claire Parker – transsexual
• Naz Osmanoglu – Bear Grylls, towel business
• Nathaniel Metcalfe – “he’s gonna make it”, barefoot executive
• James Mason – hipster saddo

The Freaky Trigger favorite might have been Frisky and Mannish, who performed a medley of songs that ask questions (punctuated with “question!” from “Independent Women”) and a brilliant version of “Eternal Flame” that brought the song’s stalker tendencies to the fore:

I believe -
It’s meant to be, darlin’..
I watch you when you are sleeping.. ;)
You belong with me!! :D
Do you feel the same??
Or am I only dreaming?????????????
Is this burnin’ an eternal flame????

Say my name!!!!!
(Sun shines through the rain)
Of all life SO LONELY…
And come and ease the PAIN!!!!!
I don’t wanna lose this feeling..

call my name
call my name
call my name
call my name
CALL MY NAME

SAY MY NAME

But as good as they were, and as imaginative as TOBY were, and as much as I liked what were in general very good-natured and generous performances, there was only one that really stood out. That was Nathaniel Metcalfe, an unassuming dude who had just one joke which he stretched out to five minutes, about the theme song to a movie called The Barefoot Executive, starring Kurt Russell and a monkey. It was a doozy. I hope he makes it.

Next week: Audition #3. (#1 is missing because I got the dates mixed up.)

AH-OO AH-OO AH-OO

We’ve even got a trailer this year:

As a special treat, Freaky Trigger viewers can get 2 for 1 at any show by using the sekrit password: TRICERATOPS

he’s been banned as a troll from crooked timber (tho i suspect he’s posting once more, under yet another name): on his own blog he’s furious, frustrated, isolated, relentlessly suspicious, oddly and unexpectedly generous… and consistently fascinating, because of rather than despite the cryptic incompleteness of his posted thoughts, on politics and art, reason and imagination and the self-absorbed rent-seeking intellectual classes:

“One of the many mistakes of the 2oth century was to imagine it might be possible to know without doubt which of our creations would avoid obsolescence. An art or society of ideas, a dream of scientific socialism or of the morality of technological progress, all are predicated on the same assumption, that modernity could mean infallibility, as if a cursory reading of Freud could render one immune to the effects of the unconscious. Such confidence doesn’t work now any more than it did 80 years ago. It doesn’t work for Donald Rumsfeld, or Steve Jobs, any more than it did for Lenin or Le Corbusier.”

However the vectors of the spread of a disease are nothing over the spread of jokes, memes and neologisms. So here are a couple of case studies for you to keep your eye out for.

A) WINE FLU: This would be an example of a joke disease which will burn out very quickly once everyone has heard it, but if Have I Got News For You or The News Quiz get it quick enough will get an OK laugh. The basic formulation is as follows:
“I woke up this morning with nausea and splitting headache. I think it might be Wine Flu”
Do you see? Its a play on words mistaking Swine Flu (actual disease) with Wine Flu, a made up term referring to a hangover.

THREAT LEVEL: High. Its a pretty simple joke after all. Luckily it should burn out by this time next week.

B) BADVOCACY: I came across this term on a website and wondered about the difficulties of the neologism coiner. It comes from Tom’s neck of the woods, looking at web and social media’s ability to spread negative perceptions around. For example #amazonfail is a perfect example of Badvocacy in action. Its clearly a clever mixture of BAD and ADVOCACY, and yet feels clunky.

You can check out The Ladybird Book Of Badvocacy, from Weber Shandwick, who are SHOCK, an advocacy firm. So you can see why they are keen on the term. But it seems a bit too glib to really succeed in the rough and tumble word of web neologisms. Nevertheless if you see it elsewhere, in particular in a headline, let us know.

THREAT LEVEL: Low.

Also let us know if you want us to monitor the pandemic levels of threat of other words – we have tendrils everywhere.

A couple of people were excluded for not fitting any reasonable definition of intellectual, and a couple more were excluded for being dead (also, if I’d put Ayn Rand in it would have been a one-horse race). Otherwise what you see is everyone nominated. So: VOTE! (For up to three people)

His most famous novel is Solaris, made into a great film (the Tarkovsky version is my favourite science fiction movie) and later a decent one. It concerns a first contact with aliens: the distinct idea behind most of Lem’s several approaches to this standard SF trope is that Lem believed communication with an alien mind, or comprehension of it, would be all but impossible. (I imagine Tarkovsky felt the same, as he also adapted the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic as Stalker, and that expressed a similar position.)

Lem was also, extraordinarily in this genre, something of a luddite: he regarded many scientific advances, real ones and those portrayed in his fiction, as a bad thing, as a move away from and enemy of the better human traits. He wrote little SF later in his life, instead pronouncing on technology and the future – he was very against the internet, for example.

This all makes him sound grim and po-faced, and some of these works are indeed among the most demanding SF ever written. However, he also wrote some extremely funny stories, generally about a robot civilization. The Cyberiad is hugely imaginative and varied, and often hilarious. There’s a brilliant story about a poetry machine that must have been one of the hardest things ever to translate, this side of Georges Perec.

There is other work worth reading too: collections of reviews of or introductions to nonexistent books, for instance. His essays on SF and science are very astute too – he was writing about the human implications of things like virtual reality and nanotechnology over 50 years ago.

He’s well worth trying, but you might want to choose carefully, as I suspect different works will appeal to different readers.

Actually it doesn’t have to be the Nazis. It could be Stalin, or the US military. The basic formula is the same:

“How many of the millions who use [x] every day of their lives realise that its story began in a secret research program in Nazi Germany…”

I spotted this pattern when I saw it three times in a couple of days. Stephen Fry’s series on rock and roll technology starts with Nazi efforts in amplification. James Harkin’s book Cyburbia traces the invention of social networks to – you’ve guessed it – military theories about cybernetics. And Adam Curtis’* excellent documentary series love nothing more than rooting around and digging up a Nazi or two.

Generally the Nazis in these stories aren’t doing a great deal of historical work. World War II was probably the most concentrated period of R&D spend in human history, and if it wasn’t the Cold War was. The military tends to have a really massive development budget. So it’s enormously unsurprising that many if not most technologies can be traced back to some sort of military roots. It’s interesting but not significant – the historical equivalent of going “aaaah but did you know that Perfect Day is really ABOUT DRUGS?”.

*Curtis is an interesting case because he dodges around the problem – for one thing he rarely starts with the Nazis, for another his Nazis are subject to the same laws of unintended consequences as anything else in his documentaries: they’re mere links in the chain of forces that haunt a Curtisian view of history.

You may have seen one or two films of his work: The Grifters was a fine adaptation of one of his last really strong works (his great years run from the start of the ’50s to the mid-’60s), whereas both versions of The Getaway graft on a lame happy ending. The actual ending is the most scary and depressing piece of writing I’ve ever read, creating a caged existence of constant terror.

I think he was the first crime writer to regularly use unreliable narrators. The sheriff in the brilliant The Killer Inside Me gradually reveals himself as an extraordinary character completely at odds to his presentation and a reader’s early impression. In other books, he reflects characters’ growing madness in the writing, for example splitting the book into chapters based on the narrator’s fantasy, again utterly different from the reality we are seeing.

He’s worth reading for the pulpy thrill-power of the stories, his terrifying grasp and representation of psychopaths and other monsters, and the daring in his approach to writing. The work isn’t often easily found, and like most writers for markets where speed and schedule was valued more than excellence, the quality is uneven. Frankly, given how hard the best stuff can be to find, the chances of coming across the sloppier works is remote. I particularly recommend The Killer Inside Me and The Getaway, but almost all of them need a strong stomach.

A good example of the early SF might be Babel-17 (1966), a novel where the threat from alien invaders is not in any sense physical: it’s their language. It changes the minds of anyone that it touches. We get spacecrafts and their crews, but these are not at all military or heroic in style – the characters are outsiders and poets and the like. The effect of the language embodies the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistics, that language affects our perception and interpretation of the world, and a reaction against Chomsky’s ideas (much the more favoured at this time) that language is functional and natural. This approach to SF was new.

Some years later (1975) he wrote a book called Dhalgren, which has long been my favourite novel. It is sort of SF: a guy with memory loss wanders into a city that has been largely abandoned since some undefined ecological disaster left it blanketed in fog. He wanders around a bit and hangs out with people and stuff. It’s almost 900 pages, and parts are highly experimental, fragmented and unsequenced. I’ve read quite a few books twice, one three times, and this seven times.

His most interesting SF or fantasy, more or less, since then is the four Neveryon books, containing eleven stories of widely varying length. These are set in some fictional past word undergoing many transitions at once: the coming of writing, money instead of barter, rural to town living. It’s about language and narrative – the first story, over 70 pages long, is repeated as the last story, and of course by that point it reads very differently and carries new meanings.

Since then he has written some extreme hardcore literary porn: avoid most of this unless you have an extraordinarily strong stomach, though the early Tides of Lust, sort of a porn response to Ulysses, is far less unpalatable. I am not joking about avoiding these. Unless you want to read about disabled children being raped and lots of eating shit, these are not sexy.

I do recommend everything else (if you want straightish SF, as well as Babel-17 I recommend The Einstein Intersection and Nova, and any of the SF story collections), and his first book of autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water, is wonderful. As well as his polymath brilliance, his experience of being a black man who has at times ‘passed’ as white, and a mostly-gay man who has lived as straight (he was married for a while) give him a rare perspective on prejudice.

Matthew Scudder (16 novels) is a private eye in NYC, whose best friend is a hardened criminal. The novels vary in tone and story, some tough to the point of brutality, but morality is always complex, and Scudder being a recovering alcoholic plays a big part. These are worth reading in order, mostly, because the character does develop (including getting married, eventually).

Bernie Rhodenbarr (10 novels) is a professional burglar who also runs a bookshop. There is a formula here: Bernie commits a burglary in his usual skilled and careful manner, but finds himself prime suspect in a murder. The rest of the novel sees him evading the police while trying to solve the crime, ending with a traditional “I expect you’re wondering why I’ve called you here today” scene. The pattern means I wouldn’t recommend reading a bunch close together, but they are always highly entertaining.

Evan Tanner (8 novels) is an outrageous character, a kind of freelance international spy and adventurer. He never sleeps (shrapnel in the brain from Korea) and uses his time to write doctoral theses on any subject commissioned, and to support any and every bonkers lost-cause society. An interesting twist was when Block revived Tanner (from suspended animation!) 20 years later, to find that many of the apparently hopeless European independence movements had finally won through. These books are wildly over the top in what Tanner achieves, and may not be to everyone’s tastes.

Chip Harrison (4 novels): these start as coming-of-age novels, then Chip becomes the assistant of an eccentric but brilliant detective who never leaves his home (an homage to Nero Wolfe). These are the only ones that absolutely need to be read in order, as a tetralogy.

Keller (4 books): these are less novels than collections of episodes in the life of this professional hitman, often given complicated jobs, more often complicating them himself by identifying with his targets and their lives.

There are others: I particularly like Martin Ehrengraf (a bunch of short stories), a lawyer with a perfect record of getting off those accused of murder. It’s never stated outright, but it’s unmistakeable that his main technique is committing more murders with an identical M.O. or to frame someone else – the most casually immoral protagonist I’ve ever seen in a series.

There are of course also non-series books and stories. I’ve never read a poor Block (I’ve read over 50), perhaps because he is a consummate craftsman, whether being hardboiled or funny. He’s written I believe four books on writing. I recommend him very highly – I’d suggest starting with a Scudder, unless one of those other descriptions especially appeal.

“See that space between the panels? That’s what comics aficionados have named “The Gutter!” And despite its unceremonious title, the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics! Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea.”

– Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

A ghost story about a picture that comes to life might or might not be frightening. “The Mezzotint” isn’t one. It’s a ghost story about a picture that turns into a comic strip, and as McCloud says, it draws its fear from what’s happening – or what might be happening – from one frame to the next. Comics artists refer to this skill – the manipulation of the time and space in a story via jumps between frame – as ‘storytelling’, and the protagonist in “The Mezzotint” finds himself in the uncomfortable situation of being told a story involuntarily.

Except it’s not being told just to him. The story – expressly framed as a companion to “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” (which IS about a picture coming to life, kind of) – establishes its rules and sticks to them: once the mezzotint sequence is initiated*, it changes whenever anyone looks at it – doesn’t have to be the same person.

So the story derives a lot of its effects from who is seeing the picture, and who is describing what they see when. Some gutters turn out to be a lot nastier than others. Let’s go through, frame by frame:

Frame 1: Seen by Williams, described in the narration. This is the Mezzotint’s initial state, where it appears an ordinary and indifferent piece. Nobody else sees this.

Frame 2: Seen by Bings and Williams, described by Bings and in the narration. A hint of a figure appears at the edge of the picture, and moonlight is discernable (we learn later this was not the case in F1). At this point the reader is likely to work out what’s going on.

Frame 3: Seen only by Garwood, described by Garwood at the time and then in more detail after F5 has appeared. The figure is crawling towards the house.

Frame 4: Seen by Williams, described in the narration. The figure is still crawling towards the house – it is apparent it has a cross on its back.

Frame 5: Seen by Nisbet, described by Nisbet. No figure, moon on the wane (it has taken it a while to cross the lawn), open window.

At this point the story starts to revolve around Williams and company’s attempts to work out the rules of the picture and document it. They do this with admirable presence of mind, considering (at no point do they seem to feel that they are in danger from the picture). But here is where something interesting happens. The next frame that Williams sees and describes has the figure scuttling across the lawn with a small bundle. But this is not the sixth frame.

Frame 6: Seen by Filcher, described by Filcher, but not in detail. We know only that he looks at the picture with entranced, “undisguised horror”, and that he sees a “skelinton” carrying a baby.

Frame 7: Seen by Williams and company. The figure is towards the edge of the picture, only its head and legs are visible, and the bundle it carries can be “dimly…identified” as a child.

How can I be sure that Frames 6 and 7 are different? All through the story, James is careful to document who is looking at the picture and where they are. None of Williams’ friends can see what Filcher sees, and Filcher himself leaves before they take a look. This suggests to me that the picture has reset again, and Filcher got a much clearer view of the creature than Williams ever did.

Frame 8 is the house, inert once more, and that’s the end of the strip.

The Mezzotint is a meta-story. Williams and friends are being told a ghost story – in comic strip fashion – by the creator of the Mezzotint (who died immediately after its completion – one of the nasty and quite unresolved mysteries in the tale**). So they’re aware they’re in a ghost story, and as such make efforts to game it, by photographing and monitoring events. But the story gets the better of them – its most horrid revelation remains unseen by them, and by us: the typically Jamesian comical servant acts as a smokescreen for it, and the worst of the story remains where it’s most powerful, in the gutters.

*the whys of this are extremely cryptic – the motives of the antiquarian who sells it on to Mr Williams are unclear: we can’t be sure, though we might suspect, that he knows something’s up (he denies it).

**another is how many Mezzotints there are: “impressions of which are of considerable rarity”. A mezzotint is a print, and a very physically arduous print to produce at that. Do all impressions of this one have its jack-in-the-box properties?

Next week: The Ash-Tree

There are two points to make about this. Firstly, unlike almost any other writer before the New wave, Sturgeon’s interest is in mind, in how we think, rather than in futuristic tech and aliens and so on – this is what made him a key figure to the New Wave, why we get a blurb on the back cover by Samuel Delany saying his work “is the single most important body of science fiction by an American to date”.

But beyond that, his approach is different. Chapters tracking the angry bum first infected by the alien consciousness, his moves towards conquering the world, are interleaved with chapters that seem like little vignettes centring on a wide variety of humans – these are a little like reading some kind of anthology of modern short stories, perhaps Carver-influenced Dirty Realism, even. The characters in these play their part in the climax, when the entity succeeds in “re”uniting the human mind, but they stand alone as small character pieces, and many have only the tiniest role beyond this.

One of my early and surviving favourite novels within SF was his More Than Human, which has a fair amount in common with The Cosmic Rape: in MTH, a bunch of humans come together to form what is a kind of gestalt consciousness. I really felt that it opened up new conceptual vistas in my teenage understanding of the mind, science fictional as the story is, and I am still moved by his compassion and breadth of thought. This is also on show in many of his superb short stories, addressing sometimes difficult issues in smart and open-minded ways. ‘If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?’ talks about incest, while the inspired ‘Mr Costello, Hero’, is a brilliant attack on McCarthyism.

I respect some writers more than I love them – someone like Cormac McCarthy is a great and powerful novelist, but too aggressively demanding to really be fond of. I wouldn’t wish to imply that Sturgeon doesn’t deserve plenty of respect for his originality, craft and willingness to think beyond easy answers for a lot of fascinating and important questions, but really he has a special place in my heart for the heart he shows, the passionate interest in a diverse humanity, in a genre dominated by lovers of machinery.

Particularly recommended: More Than Human, The Dreaming Jewels and any short story collection.

He’s best known for his 87th Precinct stories, 57 books spanning almost 50 years, though Detective Steve Carella and his fellow detectives in an analogue of NYC don’t age at that pace. These defined the police procedural, and are the model for most modern police TV shows, to one degree or another. They are short on heroics and car chases and genius detectives, long on professional cops doing their jobs, interviewing and following up leads. They are elevated well above the routine by his superb use of and descriptions of weather, and crackling and convincing dialogue, vital in the long interviews. He also reproduces documentation regularly.

His other lengthy series centres on Florida lawyer Matthew Hope: there are thirteen of these. To be honest, they are pretty much private eye novels, as there is very little in the way of courtroom action and legal manoeuvring. I like these a little less, though I have still read, I think, all of them.

His Evan Hunter books are often more mainline fiction – The Blackboard Jungle is the most famous. Since they generally aren’t crime books, they are rather outside this. I recommend the McBains, and I’d say start with an early 87th Precinct or two – the later ones, from the ’80s or so, get longer, and there isn’t always the extra content to justify that; he also starts including more sex, and I don’t care for how he handles that. It seems sort of sleazy and unpleasant. The early novels are very easy reading and consistently entertaining, and I think most readers develop a quick attachment to them and the characters.

The taste for unbridled luxury culminated in the court fetes….Nothing could be more insipid or ugly than the ‘entremets’, consisting of gigantic pies enclosing complete orchestras, full-rigged vessels, castles, monkeys and whales, giants and dwarfs, and all the boring absurdities of allegory. We find it difficult to regard these entertainments as something more than exhibitions of almost incredible bad taste.

Speak for yrself mate! Further discussion of these remarkable pies, and the events surrounding them, will feature in Saturday’s Lollards of Pop show.

An elderly man takes in his orphaned young cousin. It is surprising, given that the man is known as something of a recluse, a retiring academic type – specialist in the later pagans and their mystical beliefs – seemingly more comfortable with books than persons. Or maybe it is not surprising for a man to take an interest in the welfare of a young relative, if interest of a distant kind. He asks the boy’s age, and such, and sends him off to be looked after by the housekeeper; and the housekeeper tells him, one day, of her master’s kindness, that he has taken in children before, a little gipsyish girl and a little foreign boy, although being gipsyish the little girl ran off after a few weeks, and being a foreign ragamuffin and naturally unruly so too did the boy.

Strange dreams this young cousin has, of a thin thin body lying moaning, hands pressed to its heart; and he sleepwalks at night at times; and there are rats in the house too, huge ones they must be, for there are scorings on the young boy’s door and even scratches on his nightgown, all down the left side of his chest, after he has spent another night in a dream he cannot quite remember; and it might be rats or the wind in the cellars at night but the butler will not go down to fetch the wine once dark has fallen, for in that dark such scuttlings and sighings have a sound uncommonly like speech.

And, now the boy is eleven and a half, something dreadfully exciting is to happen: for his uncle has asked him to sit up until quite eleven o’clock, and to come and visit in his study.

***

M.R. James’ first collection is called Ghost Stories of an Antiquary: they are the ghost stories of someone who collects antiquities, and also ghost stories about the collector of antiquities, the various forms that the antiquary takes. Most of James’ antiquaries arrive at houses, or villages, or hotels, and there their curiosity brings some historical horror to light. “Lost Hearts” focuses on one such antiquary: but his research has not brought some horror to light so much as made himself the horror.

In “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook”, the antiquary Denistoun discovers the scrapbook of a past antiquary – an unprincipled one, he decides, who must have plundered his library in order to make his scrapbook. Alberic’s moral failure to respect the intact books of his library creates an object of curiosity and desire for the future Denistoun; Alberic’s failure to control his rapaciousness creates the “night monster” that terrorises him to his death, and lives on after in the book he created.

It was asked: Shall I find it?
Answer: Thou shalt.
Shall I become rich?
Thou wilt.
Shall I live an object of envy?
Thou wilt.
Shall I die in my bed?
Thou wilt.

Denistoun mistakes this for a “treasure-hunter’s record”: wrapped up in an antiquary’s concerns, it is hard to tell intellectual curiosity from a Faustian bargain.

Mr Abney, the antiquary of “Lost Hearts”, lives retired from society, “a man wrapped up in his books”, with a library full of works on the mysticism of the Late Classical period. He is a writer of articles, recognised by academics for his learning. And within him the pursuit of knowledge has warped into something terrible. Immersed in the world of the mystics, he has lost his moral sense– or at least put it aside. What is this thing he plans to do? He writes of “enacting certain processes”, “absorbing the personalities”, “removal”. Oh, it may seem barbaric to the modern mind, but he, a man of philosophic temperament, is merely engaging in experiment, testing the truth of an old receipt of Hermes Trismegistus’: that one may attain the powers known to Simon Magus by a simple method, “by the absorption of the hearts of not less than three human beings below the age of twenty-one years.” The best method is to cut out the living heart, reduce it to ashes, and drink it down in some port; the psychic portion of the souls thus absorbed may be an annoyance for a while, but can be disregarded.

Of course the ghosts get him.

The bit about the antiquary forgetting his ethics in his pursuit of knowledge isn’t exactly spooky, though there’s a delicious richness to the passage from Mr Abney’s papers where (of course!) he lays out his plans, his reasons and his self-justification. That passage comes right at the end, and the story’s short enough that you can nip back to the beginning and start again, with new knowledge of the details. Abney isn’t brought down by any exterior moral force. It’s his arrogance that gets him, his assumption that he is psychically strong enough to ignore the ghosts of the children he kills. But those ghosts aren’t all that scary – the girl some kind of sad proto-pre-raphaelite figure, lying in the bath with her hands pressed to the place where her heart should be; the boy a conventional figure of vengeance, a rat in the cellar all “hunger and longing” and long long fingernails*, who first tries to steal the heart from Abney’s nephew and then moves on to Abney himself. So what is spooky, here? The housekeeper, that’s who: the one person who might have noticed something, a monster of absolute contentment, who knows the ins and outs of the district and yet cannot see the evil in her own house.

Next week: The Mezzotint.

* bonus spooooky fact: after you die, your fingertips shrink, making your fingernails look longer. this is the root of the superstition that demons’ fingernails keep growing after death: whichever reasonably un-decomposed corpse you dig up, their fingernails will appear to have grown horrifically.

It’ll work in a kind of “book club” style – we all read the next story, one of us blogs about it (along whatever lines they see fit) and we all pile in in the comments box. You do too, since even if you’ve never read James before most of his stories are available online. (Or you could pick up the Wordsworth Books edition for a couple of quid.)

What do we hope to achieve? Diversion and entertainment, as usual, but also I expect we’ll think about ghosts, history, academia, dialect, what makes stories frightening, what makes them funny… we will approach the stories like Jamesian antiquaries ourselves, pottering around and following our noses – hopefully not awakening any restless spirits, but I guess there’s always a risk.

Join us next week to read Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook.