British Library Tales of the WeirdChurches, monasteries and convents have long been associated with sanctuary: sacred spaces should offer protection from evil in all its forms. This new anthology raises questions about the protection offered by faith, bringing together a collection of tales in which holy places are filled with horror; where stone effigies come to life and believers are tormented by terrifying apparitions. In a host of uncanny stories published between 1855 and 1935, Holy Ghosts uncovers sacrilegious spectres and the ecclesiastically eerie.
The British Library continues apace with it's collections of the strange and the supernatural with a collection of stories based around churches and those who inhabit them. These collections have on the whole been pretty solid and some indeed have been excellent - the Pan and the occult detective collections spring to mind - this one is somewhere in the middle.
Theme wise it seems strange that it's taken them this long to get around to a churchy collection and I'm glad they have as there were a couple of stories in here that I didn't know and enjoyed very much. Sheridan Le Fanu opens the book strongly with the temptations of 'The Sexton's Adventure' and John Wyndham's rather slight 'The Cathedral Crypt' is good pulpy fun to finish the book. In the intervening pages both Amelia B. Edwards' 'In The Confessional' and Robert Hichens' 'The Face of the Monk' provide engaging stories of redemption and I'm reminded that I need to further explore Hichens who was the author of one of the great strange tales, 'How Love Came to Professor Guildea'.
While we're on the subject of classics, there's a line in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's 'Good Omens' about how every cassette left long enough in a car will eventually turn into 'Best of Queen' well, I'm making a corresponding prophecy that into every unsuspecting supernatural anthology will eventually appear Edith Nesbit's 'Man-Size in Marble'. I'm pretty sure the number of copies of this story I have in my collection far exceeds the number of books I have. It's fabulous and deserves it's reputation but by god it's also ubiquitous and it is, of course, here.
Most of the other stories here are quite readable but perhaps not re-readable such as Edith Wharton's devious but obvious 'The Duchess at Prayer' and Mrs Henry Woods' equally obvious 'The Parson's Oath' but Elizabeth Gaskell's 'The Poor Clare' is far, far too long for it's scanty plot and Marguerite Merington's 'An Evicted Spirit' is sentimental claptrap rescued by an occasional enjoyably pithy phrase.
In summary a solid but stolid collection that I can't help but think would have been enlivened by replacing Gaskell's 70 pages with something a little more maverick like 'The Cicerones' by Robert Aickman or enigmatic like Arthur Machen's 'Opening the Door'.
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