Good Horror*
I can’t decide whether I’m glad that a literary tentacle has slithered away from the slimy, bulgy-eyed, axe-wielding main body of horror back in my cringing, hiding-under-the-bed direction—or not. As someone who pretty well grew up rereading DRACULA and HP Lovecraft and DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE and Edgar Allan Poe and SOME OF YOUR BLOOD and Shirley Jackson** clearly I must like being creeped out of my skin. Possibly I’ve fallen out of the habit—or got old, of course.*** I’ve said many times that getting-on-for-ten-years-ago when I wrote SUNSHINE, while I wrote it because it wanted me to write it, I was also aware of writing it for people like me: who grew up reading DRACULA but were merely grossed out by the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE style of horror, which seemed to have taken over there for a while. But as I was being kept awake by the following two books it did cross my mind once or twice to wonder if I was really having such a good time. Or not.† The fact that I was choosing to be kept awake through the (remains of the) dark hours due to certain airborne wildlife in my immediate vicinity†† may have something to do with my fragile state of mind however.
LONG LANKIN is Lindsey Barraclough’s first novel.††† Cora and her little sister Mimi have been sent down from London to stay with their great-aunt who lives alone in a large, ramshackle—and haunted—house beyond the outskirts of a little village.‡ It’s the 1950s, and post-war austerity hung on a long time in Britain; electricity is patchy, not everyone has a telephone, and there’s a lot of make do and mend. Cora and Mimi’s great-aunt is spectacularly not pleased to see them, and orders them to go straight back to London, but they can’t. They were dumped unceremoniously by the man who brought them, resentfully doing a favour for their father; and their feckless father has dumped them on his wife’s aunt because his wife has left him and he has no idea what to do with his daughters. Cora is a tough London girl and determined to be ready for and equal to anything—and to protect her little sister. But she’s out of her depth. She wishes they could go back to London—especially when she starts hearing ghostly voices and unravelling the story of Long Lankin, and comes to understand that the reason their aunt is so unwelcoming is because she’s afraid something awful will happen to Mimi—the same awful thing that has happened to many other little children over the centuries, including members of their own family.
The best haunts are embedded in recognisable reality, and much of the pleasure of this book is in the background; Barraclough is extremely good about the reality of children.‡‡ Mimi wets the bed she shares with Cora because she’s afraid of the dark in her aunt’s house, and she has a disgusting toy named Sid, which Cora describes as ‘her knitted thing’. Cora makes friends with Roger, a boy from the village, who is curious about Cora’s aunt and her haunted house—and the church that belongs to the old house, which is even more haunted, and which every child in the village has been forbidden to go anywhere near—and which has ‘cave bestiam’ cut into the wooden arch of its lychgate. Roger is one of five children, and his offhand tales of home life are funny and distressingly vivid: ‘Our house is specially noisy on Mondays because Mum does the washing. The whole place smells of Baby Pamela’s nappies boiling in the big pan on the gas stove. . . . The other annoying thing about going home is that Pete and I have had a row because I trod on one of his soldiers and broke its leg off, and he’ll be hopping mad because I’ve sneaked off and left him to do the wringer on his own.’ It’s out of this kind of ordinary reality that the confrontation with the ancient evil that is Long Lankin gruesomely emerges—let me suggest that you plan to read the last hundred pages all in one go.
CHIME by Franny Billingsley came out last March. Someone sent me the ARC months ago and I put it on the pile. And then one day I took it off the pile and read the first page:
‘I’ve confessed to everything and I’d like to be hanged.
‘Now, if you please.
‘I don’t mean to be difficult, but I can’t bear to tell my story. I can’t relive those memories—the touch of the Dead Hand, the smell of eel, the gulp and swallow of the swamp.
‘How can you possibly think me innocent? Don’t let my face fool you; it tells the worst lies. A girl can have the face of an angel but have a horrid sort of heart.
‘I know you believe you’re giving me a chance—or, rather, it’s the Chime Child giving me the chance. She’s desperate, of course, not to hang an innocent girl again. . . .’
Eeeep. I’m afraid I put CHIME down again. I finally braced myself to give it a proper try and . . . it’s lovely. Creepy, but lovely. It’s really good. And that line ‘the gulp and swallow of the swamp’? Billingsley is another very, very stylish writer, although of an entirely different sort than Barraclough; it’s not the ordinary reality that draws you into CHIME but the extraordinary reality: ‘The earth tilted beneath my feet. . . . The second sight was coming upon me. Not the ordinary sort of second sight, the sort that links me to the Old Ones. . . .
‘The sort that, only three days ago, linked me to the skull of Death.
‘The world shook herself like a dog. She tried to fling me off, but I clung to the nearest gravestone. This sort of second sight is never roses and moonbeams, but death and blood and the smell of fear.
‘From the grave beneath came a little voice. “’Twere the Boggy Mun what sent the cough what took me.”. . . .
‘“The Boggy Mun,” said a second child from the next-door grave. . . .
‘The earth tried to scratch me off, like a flea. “Took me, and the baby too,” said a third. . . .
‘“And now we be asking you for help, girl what can hear ghosts. . . .”
This is the first Billingsley I’ve read, but it won’t be the last. I’d heard of her WELL-WISHED, heard that it was excellent but . . . well, hadn’t got round to it yet. I will now. ‡‡‡
* * *
* And permit me to remind you that Tessa Gratton’s excellent BLOOD MAGIC came out in April. http://robinmckinleysblog.com/index.php?s=Tessa+Gratton
** I never loved FRANKENSTEIN for some reason, and I didn’t discover (the sublime, the supreme) M R James till I was almost a grown-up.
*** One of the advantages of getting old—and you take your advantages where you can find ’em, say I—is being able to blame it for stuff. I’ve always been cranky, but nobody expects me to outgrow it any more. Mwa hahahaha.
† I had exactly the same reaction to the denouement of BLOOD MAGIC. I am a snivelling wet. I’m sorry, I can’t help it.
†† You’re supposed to be outdoors eating bugs. Go away.
††† The ‘about the author’ says she was a music teacher. I’m looking forward to whatever she’s going to do next anyway, but I’m especially looking forward to it if she’s going to blow up another scary old ballad like Long Lankin.
‡ I think it’s Essex, but geography has never been my strong suit. It’s out the Thames estuary, at any rate, and there are marshes. Marshes are made to be haunted, especially English marshes.
‡‡ ‘About the author’ also says she has five of her own. She has good reason to know kids.
‡‡‡ And CHIME just won an Honor in the Boston Globe-Horn Book 2011 Awards list: http://readroger.hbook.com/2011/06/2011-boston-globe-horn-book-awards.html Congratulations!
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