The Wine-Dark Sea, by Robert Aickman

First published in 2014, this is a collection of eight longish short stories — each comprising more than 50 pages. It’s the first Aickman I’ve read, after lots of recommendations. And days after finishing this collection, I’m still trying to make sense of what I might think of it all.

In titular story “The Wine-Dark Sea”, an Englishman called Grigg is on holiday in Greece, where he becomes intrigued by a small island that the locals say is off limits. Grigg steals a boat to see the place for himself, and there falls under the spell of three women, a modern take on sirens.

I’d been expecting something in the vein of MR James, and there’s a similar slowly dawning disquiet. But Aickman’s protagonists are ordinary, relatable people rather than James’ bookish academics. There’s also a strong sexual element, very unlike James. In “The Wine-Dark Sea”, Grigg has sex with these sirens; in other stories here, the sexuality is less certain — we’re not always sure if characters are being predatory, or if actions speak of deep-felt desire. But part of the effect is that we’re put on our guard.

That’s a big element of “The Trains”, in which two young woman, Margaret and Mimi, are out rambling and get caught in a storm. They seek shelter in a strange old house overlooking a railway line, and find it a museum to the construction of that same railway. Mimi is enchanted by the owner of the house, Wendley Roper, but Margaret is more sceptical. And yet Mimi is scandalised and Margaret more matter of fact when Roper’s “tall, muscular” servant, a gothic figure called Beech, walks in them while they’re getting changed and Margaret is “absurdly naked”. Was it an accident? As the story progresses, there’s an every growing sense of threat.

In “Your Tiny Hand is Frozen”, lonely Edmund St Jude (landline) phone keeps ringing. Initially, he hears, odd ghostly voices or gets people trying to reach a particular business. And then he strikes up a friendship with a woman who seems keen to reach him in person… This reminded me a lot of Nigel Kneale’s 1952 radio play “You Must Listen”, which I saw a live performance of last year. Both are supernatural stories about technology that was then cutting edge and which people all had in their homes; an encroachment of the strange into the very familiar and everyday.

The best of the bunch here, I think, is “Growing Boys”, about a mild-mannered middle-class woman, Millie, whose sons are fast becoming something monstrous, though their school won’t spell out exactly why they’re being expelled. It’s a comedy of manners and yet brilliantly disturbing.

At one point, Millie tries (again) to talk to her husband Phineas, but he’s too caught up in his own aspirations to stand as a Liberal. Besides, he’s also teetotal.

“If only one could give him a proper drink before one attempted to talk seriously with him; that is, to talk about oneself.

‘It’s the boys, Phineas. You don’t know what it’s like being at home with them all day.’

‘The holidays won’t last for ever.’

‘After only a week, I’m almost insane.’ She tried to rivet his attention. ‘I mean it, Phineas.’

Millie knew extremely well that she herself would be far more eloquent and convincing if Phineas’s absence had not years ago deprived her too, though with never the hint of an express prohibition, but rather the contrary. When she was reading, she had learned of the Saxons never taking action unless the matter had been considered by the council, first when sober and then when drunk. It was the approach that was needed now.

‘What’s the matter with the boys this time?’ asked Phineas.

Millie twitched. ‘They’re far too tall and big. How long is it since you looked at them, Phineas?’

‘Being tall’s hardly their fault. I’m tall myself and I’m their father.’

‘You’re tall in a different way. You’re willowy. They’re like two great red bulls in the house.’

‘I’m afraid we have to look at your family for that aspect of it. Consider your Uncle Nero, if I may venture to mention him.’” (pp. 153-154) 

We get here Millie’s despair, hints of the monstrosity of her sons which we then conjure for ourselves, and the way Phineas undermines her — and puts the blame on her, too. Later, when Millie moves in with her Uncle Stephen, he carries her to bed and then, later, welcomes her into his own bed where he can “look after” and “protect” her (p. 192). The sense is of something more brooding and sexual going on, another monstrous something in the family. What’s more, when Millie consults a psychic, she spots other women she knows seeking their own advice — as if the whole community is beset with unsettling strangeness.

In “The Fetch” a man is haunted by a ghostly spectre who carries off his loved ones. Again, the story is as much about the man’s strange marriage to a friend’s ex-wife, and her relationship with her maid, with hints of something sapphic. 

“The Inner Room” is about a doll’s house that turns out to have a peculiar real-life counterpart. “Never Visit Venice” sees a traveller give himself up to the spectres of the city. And then there’s “Into the Wood”, about an English woman whose husband is employed to work on road construction in Sweden. While he is busy in this boring line of work, she checks herself into a beguiling hotel, which turns out to be a sanatorium for people who cannot sleep. At first, she seems unaffected… But the title is not about what happens to Margaret Sawyer, but what she will have to do next, beyond the end of the story as told. 

Some stories here end decisively, revealing exactly what’s been going on. Others end more opaquely, leaving us to puzzle out their prospective meanings. They’re all very odd, the main thread of plot peppered with other strangeness in passing. And yet they’re also grounded in real details. Aickman is clearly well-read, the stories full of specific detail.

“[‘Orm’ meaning ‘serpent’] was one of the few Swedish words Margaret felt more or less able to manage. The high tessitura in which the language is spoken, the combination of breath and altitude in the vowel sounds, were quite beyond her.” (pp. 375-376)

Or there’s Margaret Sawyers ’s reference to her own Manchester home in the “Cheshire subtopia” (p. 378). That last word is the coinage of Ian Nairn, railing against the nightmare of post-war British architecture, where all urban space looked the same so you could might never know where you were. I think that’s what makes these stories so effective. Aickman isn’t so much adding new strangeness into the recognisable, everyday world; he’s teasing out and showing us what’s already there. 

See also: me on Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson

The Haunted Tea Set and Other Stories, by Sarah Jackson

I've dashed through this short, 112-page book of 20 strange, unsettling and enthralling tales published two months ago. The collection takes its name from a short story that you can read in full for free on the Bone Parade and which I massively recommend. It so completely got me that I immediately read it to the Dr, while we were away on a trip to mark our 20th wedding anniversary last week. A number of Jackson's other stories are also available via the links on her website. 

Most of the stories in this collection are very short, some just a paragraph, most just two or three pages, and yet they're packed with vivid, evocative strangeness. There are eerie hauntings, there are ordinary witches going about their lives, and more than one story involves someone returning to the community where they grew up where all is not quite right. The strangeness is grounded in well observed, concisely depicted reality, so tangible and effective.

Opening story "Greenkeeper" felt like traditional horror of the sort I'd seen many times before until, after just two-and-a-half pages, it offered a killer last line. "The Haunted Tea Set" follows, and by then I was hooked. That story, and "Subsidence" later on, offer something extraordinary - not just a sense of the ordinary horrors we live with, but the promise of hope and healing.

Sarah Jackson also edits the quarterly short story zine Inner Worlds.

The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien

Atomic Theory is at work in a rural parish of Ireland. This, says Sergeant Pluck of the local police station, explains a spate of missing bicycles - and why one particular bicycle is locked up in a cell. The sergeant spells it out for us thus:

"Everything is composed of small particles of itself and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other geometrical figures too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again, all the time on the go. These diminutive gentlemen are called atoms. Do you follow me intelligently?" (p. 86)

Since the narrator of The Third Policeman follows this, the sergeant proceeds with devastating logic:

"'Consecutively and consequentially, ' he continued, 'you can safely infer that you are made of atoms yourself and so is your fob pocket and the tail of your shirt and the instrument you use for taking the leavings out of the crook of your hollow tooth. Do you happen to know what takes place when you strike a bar of iron with a good coal hammer or with a blunt instrument?'"

The answer, he says, is that,

"When the wallop falls, the atoms are bashed away down to the bottom of the bar and compressed and crowded there like eggs under a good clucker. After a while in the course of time they swim around and get back at last to where they were. But if you keep hitting the bar long enough and hard enough they do not get a chance to do this and what happens then?" (p. 87)

Pluck explains that atoms from the iron bar duly end up in the hammer, while atoms from the hammer end up in the iron bar. What's more, the same applies in the matter of bicycles.

"The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles." (p. 88)

He proceeds to supply percentages for various named individuals. 

This is one, compelling example of the daftness contained in The Third Policeman, a novel written in 1940 but not published until 1967. I've had this recommended by various people over the years but have only just got to it. The plot, as such, is straightforward. Our narrator tells us in the opening sentence that he was embroiled with someone else in committing a murder; he then recounts what happened but much of the book concerns the rambling, surreal and often quite confused adventures that follow this wicked deed.

Things get very surreal. At one point, the narrator descends to an underground chamber where his every want can be produced from a machine - but not taken out of the chamber. He is sentenced to death by hanging but rescued by a union of one-legged men (more or less). In a sequence that calls back to Pluck's elucidation on Atomic Theory, the narrator develops some kind of relationship with a female bicycle. In all, it's generally funny-peculiar but peppered with funny-ha-ha, and I can see why some readers might find it insufferable. What saves it is that through these comic, quixotic adventures, the reader is haunted by a sense of something more sinister being involved.

Concise but illuminating notes at the end of this edition cite the influence on O'Brien of A Rebours (1884), the French decadent novel that also inspired Oscar Wilde and is seen in the closing moments of Withnail and I - a film with similar rambling, daft adventures in the countryside with something sad and bitter underneath. The notes also say that "de Selby", a philosopher whose daft theories are expounded here, largely in footnotes, returns in person in O'Brien's later novel The Dalkey Archive (1964), and also in work by Robert Anton Wilson (co-author of The Illuminatus Trilogy). The sequence on pp. 103-105 where the narrator is invited to guess the name of man he doesn't know, and we get a long list of odd monickers interspersed with "No", surely influenced the same gag in the Christmas episode of Father Ted. The notes provide evidence of the novel's influence on the TV series Lost. There's even a "De Selby" referenced in an audio play I produced nearly two decades ago, too. Reading this novel has been akin to when my children see the film or TV episode that inspires a well-known meme.

But The Third Policeman - and its final revelations - more than anything reminded me of stuff that can't have influenced it, or been influenced by it in turn. It's difficult to mention these without a risk of spoiling the novel for those who haven't read it, so I'll leave some line breaks.

Yes, I'll leave some line breaks.

Like this.

And this.

And this.

And this.

In particular, I thought of the horror film Dead of Night (1945), the defining structure of which came about by accident during the edit, and also William Golding's novel Pincher Martin (1956) and the brilliant, unsettling short story 'I Used to Live Here Once' by Jean Rhys (also used as the title of her biography). The odd thought is that all these works and their authors (including O'Brien and The Third Policemen) somehow trod the same surreal, sinister paths independently. That implies that this unsettling space is in actual fact common ground.

The Victorian Chaise-Longue, by Marghanita Laski

On Sunday, 23 July 1963, BBC staff director Waris Hussein met for the first time with Verity Lambert, the newly appointed producer of a series to be called Doctor Who. “So far we have one writer and no scripts,” Hussein wrote in his diary. “I put forward Marghanita Laski’s name as a possible.” 

“I’ve no idea now why I suggested her," Hussein said earlier this year. Laski was best known at the time as a critic and panelist on TV shows such as What's My Line? But she was also a novelist and of her various novels my bet is that, 60 years ago, Hussein had in mind her odd, 100-page The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953). He might even have had in mind the TV version: adapted and directed by James MacTaggart, it was screened on BBC Television on 19 March 1962.

The story is told from the perspective of Melanie or Melly Langdon (who has the same initials as Laski), a young woman who has recently given birth to a healthy son but is herself ill with TB. In an attempt to aid her recovery by exposing her to more sunlight, she's allowed out of the confinement of one room in her  Islington home and can spend afternoons in the drawing room. There, she lies propped up on an old chaise-longue.

We cut back to her visit to an antique shop (also called a junk shop), seeking a cradle for the then forthcoming baby. There's some fun stuff as she projects an air of idle fancy rather than of being after something specific, to prevent the staff trying to foist something on her for an unreasonable price. This done, she then forms a bond with the young man serving her and they locate the shop's sole cradle - a "hopelessly unfashionable" Jacobean model in dark-carved oak.

“‘I can't say I fancy it myself,’ admitted the young man. ‘It will probably go to America. There's quite a demand for them there, for keeping logs in, you know.’

‘My cradle will have a baby in it,’ said Melanie proudly, and they enjoyed a moment of sympathetic superiority, the poor yet well-adjusted English who hadn't lost sight of true purposes.” (p. 18)

In short, she's a demonstrably intelligent, driven young woman with agency and attitude. When she then spots an old chaise-longue that takes her fancy, she buys it on the spot.

We return to the present - but briefly because soon after the recuperating Melanie/Melly is seated in this antique piece of furniture, she finds herself somewhere else amid people other than her husband. To begin with, Melanie thinks she's been kidnapped but we come to realise that she's been transported back in time 90 years to 22 April 1864 (p. 37), and into the body of another young woman, Milly, who is trapped on the same chaise-tongue while also suffering from TB. At times, Melanie can access Milly's thoughts and memories, and is even swamped by them. She struggles to make her predicament understood and to find a means of escape. As she fails to escape or get through to those around her, she uncovers Milly's awful story.

One issue is that Melanie's knowledge of the 1860s is imperfect and she can't think what to say to convince anyone. Then, when she settles on an idea, there is a further obstacle:

“If I speak of Cardinal Newman and he's happened already, it proves nothing at all. If I could say that the Government will fall and the Prince Consort will die, there's no proof it's going to happen. Discoveries and inventions, she thought then, that's what I'll talk about, that must prove it to him. We have aeroplanes, she said tentatively in her mind, and then she tried to repeat the phrase soundlessly with her mouth, but the exact words would not come. What did I say, she asked herself when the effort had been made, something about machines that fly or was it aeronautic machines? Wireless, she screamed in her mind, television, penicillin, gramophone-records and vacuum-cleaners, but none of these words could be framed by her lips.” (p. 58)

In short, some powerful force prevents her from saying anything aloud that Milly would not understand, which effectively prevents her from altering future history. This is similar to the strictures in the early background notes on Doctor Who revised in July 1963 - soon after Waris Hussein recommended this book - about not being able to change or affect established events. 

However, I think I've identified another source for the conception of the mechanics of time travel seen in early Doctor Who, which I get into in my imminent book, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television (plus details of when Whitaker worked on something with Laski). Instead, I think Hussein was probably thinking of the tone and feel of this short story. The website of Persephone Books, which published the edition of Laski's novel I read, comes with an endorsement by novelist Penelope Lively: 

“Disturbing and compulsive ... This is time travel fiction, but with a difference… instead of making it into a form of adventure, what Marghanita Laski has done is to propose that such an experience would be the ultimate terror…” 

The first broadcast episodes of Doctor Who are scary, the events an ordeal for the crew. So I wonder if that's what Hussein brought to the series, via Laski...

Oh, and one last excellent fact about Laski, from the introduction by PD James to my edition of the novel:

“In one of her obituaries, Laurence Marks described how she gave evidence in the 1960s for the defence in the prosecution of the publisher of John Cleland's bawdy comic novel, Fanny Hill. Miss Laski told the court that this book was important because it illustrated the first use in English Literature of certain unusual words. The judge asked for an example, to which Miss Laski replied 'chaise-longue'.” (pp. viii-ix)

See also: me on The Inheritors by William Golding (1955) and its influence on the first Doctor Who story 

The Day No One Woke Up, by Polly Ho-Yen

This is another excellent, creepy novel by the author of Boy in the Tower. Ana feigns sickness to get out of going to school, where she's being bullied by Tio - her next-door neighbour and one-time best friend. Another friend, Layla, tries to intercede and only makes things more awful. Then Ana's aunt is suddenly taken ill, suffering from a weird, unsettling loss of memory. And then everyone starts getting sleepy...

As with Boy in the Tower, this is John Wyndham for kids. We start in grounded reality and very relatable problems, and then the weirdness slowly creeps in, ever more unsettling. That means the more outlandish, sci-fi bits of the plot feel solid and real; they are earned. Without spoiling the central wheeze, it's a fun reversal - things being done to humans that humans to do others. 

The conclusion satisfying ties up all the mysteries but leaves a couple of questions - what might the children remember of all they've been through, and what is the fate of the character-I-won't-spoil they encounter? A brilliant book, one that linger longer in the memory...

Skyward Inn, by Aliya Whiteley

This was the perfect accompaniment to my journey to London and back for the Nigel Kneale centenary, and not only because it fitted the drive time almost exactly.

A long time ago, Jem escaped her home in Devon and young son to cross through the Kissing Gate and journey into space. There she met and bonded with an alien called Isley, then brought him home to run a pub, the Skyward Inn, and reconnect with her own people. But the "brew" that Isley supplies has unusual properties, forging connections across time and memory, even giving visions of the future. As a disease takes hold of the Earth, the community starts to break down, people together and yet somehow utterly alone...

As strange and haunting as Whiteley's previous books, Skyward Inn is full of threat just under the surface, a pervasive wrongness that we can't always quite touch. The last section plays out as a nightmare, as unsettling as any Kneale. It's horrible yet beautiful, too - the prose full of feeling and pathos. We're made to understand why people make the awful choice to surrender entirely to the thing that's happening. The ending hangs on our belief in the strength of a connection between two individuals on separate planets and in different periods of time; it's brilliant.

The book owes something to Jamaica Inn, and is about the cross-pollination cultures. At its heart is the colonisation of another, populated world, its native people not resisting human invasion. As with previous Whiteley, that passivity is deeply unsettling. But this is all mirrored with an incursion by humans from across the boundary wall round Devon (now known as the "Western Protectorate"). There's lots on "good" immigrants bringing needed skills and expertise, deemed more worthy of acceptance than other individuals. There's lots on dysfunctional families and how we choose our connections. There's lots about how we interact and are shaped by interaction. We are our connections.

• On The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley

Silverview, by John le Carre

Julian Lawnsdsley has set up a bookshop in a small town, escaping from the evils of the City. One potential customer is a peculiar old man who claims to have been a friend of Julian's father - though Julian's father was meticulous in keeping records and there's no reference to this man. The old man, Edward, has a modest proposal for Julian: to establish in the basement of the shop a club, a society, a Republic of Literature. Oh, and there are maybe some errands that perhaps Julian could help with...

As always, le Carre quickly ensnares us in his world of secrets, conflicted loyalties and keenly observed detail. How deceptively easily he makes it look. There's wry humour and that awful sense of loss - this is all familiar territory, comfortingly unsettling. However, this, le Carre's last novel and published posthumously, is also noticeably slight: 207 pages in relatively large type. Perhaps Julian volunteers a little too easily to help Edward. Perhaps there's something overly convenient, too, in the way he's so quickly taken in by Edward's family - tested by Edward's wife, bedded by Edward's daughter. Perhaps it doesn't add up to a whole huge amount that we've not seen before.

But perhaps none of that really matters one jot. It's good; it's arresting; it's a last taste of this world. Towards the end, when things close in on Edward, it all gets suitably tense. There's the constant sense of horror under the surface. And it's full of haunting moments: an interview with a married couple where they know it's more that just an idle chat; posh dinner with a dying woman; a meeting amid bird life and the ghosts of Cold War at Orford: 

"'We are famous for our bird life here, actually, Julian,' he announced, with proprietorial pride. 'We have lapwing, curlew, bittern, meadow pipit, avocets, not to mention duck,' he declared, like a headwaiter reciting the day's specials. 'Look now, please. You hear that curlew calling to her mate? Follow my arm.'

Julian made a show of doing so, but for some minutes he had been able to follow only the horizon: the remains of our own civilisation after its destruction in some future catastrophe. And there they stood: distant forests of abandoned aerials rising out of the mist, abandoned hangars, barracks, accommodation blocks and control rooms, pagodas on elephantine legs for stress-testing atom bombs, with curved roofs but no walls in case the worst happens. And, at his feet, a warning to him to stick to marked paths or reckon with unexploded ordnance." (p. 159)

In fact, it's all about ghosts: the legacies of old wars, old trauma, old connections and betrayals. There's also the ghost of the author, of course - or authors plural. Le Carre's son Nick Harkaway gave a moving interview last year about completing the book in the absence of his late parents. And there's another ghost for me; this is the first le Carre in a long time that I've bought for myself, not borrowed from my father. The loss is keenly felt, but communing with these spirits one last time I am more than anything grateful.

Threading the Labyrinth, by Tiffani Angus

Toni Hammond is in her office in New Mexico when she's called by a lawyer in England and told she's inherited an estate. Two weeks later, she arrives at the house and gardens known as The Remains. The property dates back more than 500 years but is in a sorry state, the result of neglect and a plane crashing into it during the Second World War. Toni has obligations back in Santa Fe but is drawn to the house and its history, and the garden crowded with ghosts...

Threading the Labyrinth is the debut novel by my friend Tiffani Angus, published by Unsung Stories whose books I've followed closely. It's a strange and compelling story, as Toni - and we - learns the story of the house and gardens through the lives of the people who've tended them. We cut away to four stories from the past - in the 1770s, the early 1600s, the Second World War and then the 1860s. There are mysteries to unpick - the identity of spectres, the links between different generations - and it's never quite as simple as first appears. It's rich and vivid, full of characters who feel rounded and real.

Toni is an American in England for the first time, a little out of her depth and overwhelmed by the cultural differences. But Tiffani the author feels utterly at home in the English past, her characters and their worldviews all utterly convincing. Many of them share a love of the gardens, of grubbing in the soil, and that work compensating somehow for frustrated hopes and desires. It's a strange, unsettling ghost story, less about what is lost in the remains but how the past threads through us.

Shirley Jackson in Lancet Psychiatry

The new issue of medical journal Lancet Psychiatry features my essay, "There's someone in my head but it's not me," on Shirley Jackson's 1954 novel The Bird's Nest. You need to pay to read the full article but here's the opening paragraph:

"When we first meet Elizabeth Richmond in the opening pages of Shirley Jackson's 1954 novel The Bird's Nest, she is 23 and, to her colleagues at the local museum, 'not even interesting enough to distinguish with a nickname'. She has worked for 2 years answering letters from the public, a job that requires 'no very sparkling personality'. She ably, punctually completes the tasks assigned to her but does not seem the kind of protagonist whose ambitions will power a plot. Rather, Elizabeth is someone to whom things happen: and things quickly start to go wrong..." (Simon Guerrier, "There's someone in my head but it's not me," Lancet Psychiatry vol. 6, iss. 11 (1 November 2019), pp. 899-901 - DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(19)30411-0)

I read a bunch of Shirley Jackson's books last year, and posted some thoughts here:

• The Bird's Nest (1954) by Shirley Jackson
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) by Shirley Jackson
• Dark Tales (2016 collection) by Shirley Jackson

The Bird's Nest, by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson's 1954 novel The Bird's Nest is extraordinary. Elizabeth Richmond works in a museum, the wall beside her desk removed during renovation, so that she sits beside an open chasm. If that were not sufficiently unsettling, she's getting anonymous hate mail. And then there are her Aunt Morgen's accusations of her wanderings in the night...

The basis for the malady suffered by Elizabeth - Lizzie, Beth, Betsy and Bess - is spelt out on pp. 57-8, when Jackson quotes directly from Morton Prince's The Dissociation of a Personality (1905):

"Cases of this kind are commonly known as 'double' or 'multiple personality', according to the number of persons represented, but a more correct term is disintegrated personality, for each secondary personality is a part of a normal whole self. No one secondary personality preserves the whole physical life of the individual. The synthesis of the original consciousness known as as the personal ego is broken up, so to speak, and shorn of some of its memories, perceptions, acquisitions, or modes of reaction to the environment. The conscious states that still persist, synthesized among themselves, form a new personality capable of independent activity. This second personality may alternate with the original undisintegrated personality from time to time. By a breaking up of the original undisintegrated personality at different moments along different lines of cleavage, there may be formed several different secondary personalities, which may take turns with one another."

I'm writing an article about the book, and Jackson, and the psychoanalyses of her time. More to follow...

• Me on Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
• Me on Jackson's Dark Tales

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson

Straight on from her Dark Tales, I've ploughed through Shirley Jackson's final (and greatest, says the back cover) novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962).

It's told by 18 year-old Mary Kate Blackwood, known to everyone as "Merricat", a strange, scared girl with much to be afraid of. To begin, we follow her on an essential, regular trip into town to shop for food, where she must endure the mostly passive tyranny of ordinary people. It's incredibly effective, a threat that feels horribly real. Only once we've experienced and felt it does Jackson reveal why: almost all of Merricat's family died six years ago, poisoned by arsenic intentionally put in the sugar bowl.

Merricat now lives in the old family house with her agarophobic elder sister Constance - acquitted of the murder but still generally thought guilty - and her uncle Julian, who survived the poisoning at some cost. Wheelchair-bound and mentally disturbed, he's determined to uncover what really happened that night... Merricat is the only one to ever leave the family home, and her head is full of strange thoughts about magic ways to protect the house and also journeys to the Moon.

Into this unsettling space comes cousin Charles, who soon casts a spell over Constance and threatens the whole household. But he's just one of many tensions: the townspeople are never far away, and Merricat is herself bound by all kinds of rules - things she seems innately to know she is not allowed to do. The immaculate, ordered domestic space is a place beset with danger.

As in the Dark Tales, Jackson makes this strange situation so credible. In her afterword to the Penguin Classics edition, Joyce Carol Oates speaks of Jackson's own agoraphobia and says:

"Jackson's difficulties with her fellow citizens in North Bennington, Vermont are well documented in Judy Oppenheimer's harrowing biography, Private Demons (1988): the suggestion is that Jackson and her husband, the flamboyant 'Jewish-intellectual' cultural critic Stanley Edgar Hyman aroused resentment, if not outright anti-Semitism, in their more convention neighbours." 

Joyce Carol Oates, afterword to We Have Always Lived in the Castle, p. 152.

I think Jackson drawns on more than her own experience of real horror, too. There's repeated mention of a figurine, an object that survives a fire in the house. It's surely significant that it's always described as the "Dresden figurine", conjuring images of another conflagration.

The fire involves the most chilling moment of the whole novel. We know the townspeople are antagonistic to the Blackwoods, but in a moment of crisis the local men rush to help put out the fire. Only then, emerging from the house to the expectant crowd, the head of the men picks up a stone and throws it back at the building to smash a window. It gives licence to the mob, who stampede on the house...

Whatever the strange and murderous qualities of the household, it's the ordinary people outside who are most to be feared. 

Dark Tales, by Shirley Jackson

I've read loads since completing Space Odyssey - chapters of various mates' works in progress and all sorts of material for work, including a sizeable chunk of Amelia Edwards' 1878 travelogue, A Thousand Miles Up The Nile. Then there's Shirley Jackson.

Dark Tales is a collection of seventeen short stories by a writer who really ought to be a household name. One is a ghost story, one involves psychic abilities, one involves a painting that's like something out of MR James. But the rest are unsettling stories of very human monsters, the tyranny of ordinary snobbery, pettiness and meaness, of social conventions and small communities. They all take place in the modern day, in settings busy with people getting on with everyday life. The best of them are at their most disturbing because they're psychologically real. Women are usually central.

"The Good Wife" is about a jealous husband who incarcerates his wife. The twist ending reveals that the husband is more monstrous than first supposed, but what lingers is the awful detail of the wife's gradual acquiesence - having clearly tried to resist him to no effect, she now presents nothing but sweetness in the vain hope he will relent. In "The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith", a young bride accepts her imminent murder rather than make a fuss. In "Home", a woman learns better than to speak of the ghostly experience that almost killed her. The horror is not only of passivity, but of the ways these women are rendered passive.

In the brilliant "The Possibility of Evil", a respectable old lady notes the strains affecting her neighbours, before we discover that she's been sending them all anonymous, poisonous letters. Yet there's real tension when this malicious creature unwittingly risks being exposed. Jackson has deftly make us sympathise with the monster.

I'm keen to know more about Jackson and what shaped her extraordinary vision. It's surely no coincidence that her first story, "The Lottery" (not included in this anthology) was first published in 1948, in a post-war world lacking moral certainties - though some readers felt strongly otherwise, and she received death threats in response. I feel something noirish, something Hitchcock, in her stories, something haunted by the Holocaust and the Bomb, something deeply ill at ease with "ordinary" life.

It all feels so very contemporary, but not overtly political. In the final story in the collection, "The Summer People", there's mention of degeneration and inbreeding (p. 183), but the story is about the growing anxiety of an old couple when the local shops are out of groceries and oil. It's so relatable, the horror is horribly real.

I'm keen to see the new film version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle once I've reread Jackson's novel and adore the 1963 film The Haunting (based on The Haunting of Hill House), which first got me reading her stuff in my teens. I've also got a biography of Jackson - so more of this to come.

Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders

I'm afraid that this odd but acclaimed novel about a grieving father (namely, Abraham Lincoln) left me a bit cold.

All sorts of things appealed: the lively cast of miscreant ghosts; the mixing up of different historical sources to convey particular moments, the contradictions of the witnesses included; the general weird and morbid tone.

The ghosts are great fun, from all classes and backgrounds, each with their own story to tell (which is what sustains them, and keeps them from moving on). They're a lively dead, and it's a pleasure to be in their company - but is that enough?

Cynically, I can see why this won awards, such as the covetted Man Booker. It's made up of snippets from different sources - apparently real first-hand sources describing Lincoln and fictional ghosts who meet his son (the first-hand sources now long dead, so also ghosts). Often, the snippets are no more than a sentence, so there are few words to a page. The effect is that one races through the book. Imagine the delight of the burdened judge of an award, faced with mountains of volumes to get through! That, and the strange conceit of Lincoln's dead son being in a throng of strange ghosts, and the insights afforded into Lincoln himself, and other novels would seem hard work and boring.

Even more cynically, this might be a novel to appeal to people who don't really like reading novels. Clever, strange, apparently about something important - and quick to get through. It doesn't leave us with torturous questions to mull over long after, as other serious and acclaimed books often do.

For all I raced through it, I didn't think the plot sustained 341 pages and 108 chapters. It's a novella, really - perhaps even a short story. What actually happens? Well, spoilers, but...

The boy dies; Lincoln grieves and goes at night to the cemetery to look upon the body; he lingers and then leaves, determined to fight on in the Civil War. Meanwhile, the cemetery's ghosts, in trying to aid the boy, come to their own kinds of peace. But as you read it, there's a lot of, "Lincoln entered the tomb... The ghosts tell amusing, rude anecdotes about their lives... Lincoln had just entered the tomb..." Get on with it, I thought.

I think my disappointment might stem from having just read The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, set in roughly the same period and roughly the same geographical area. That rattles along at speed, with something profound to say about America and history, and without saying it directly. Instead, this is too much of what Patricia Highsmith referred to, in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, as a gimmick novel.

There's also my own status as a grieving father, which I'm sure shadows my response. But this novel takes us to Lincoln at a key moment in his life: the awful death of his favourite son, and the publication of the casuality lists showing the brutal cost of the Civil War. The fundamental problem is that to make the encounter with the ghosts shape or influence what Lincoln then does next would be utterly crass, but not to do so makes the whole thing a bit pointless.

I liked the idea, I liked the characters in it, but couldn't shake a sense of disappointment.

1927 review of William Hartnell

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, William Hartnell – later, the first Doctor Who – trained as an actor at the Italia Conti Stage School. In 1924, aged 16, he joined the repertory company of actor-manager Frank Benson.

The ODNB says Hartnell “often” appeared in eight plays in a single week. I've found little supporting evidence for this in the contemporary press – but then the press wouldn't necessarily name every member of a cast, especially if they played only a small role.

Benson's company was well known for its productions of Shakespeare and Wikipedia lists appearances by Hartnell in The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Hamlet, The Tempest and Macbeth all in 1926. The same year he also appeared in She Stoops to Conquer and School for Scandal, and the following year in Good Morning, Bill. I've seen his name in cast lists but no reviews that comment on his performance - until now.

The following review was published on page 8 of The Devon and Exeter Gazette on Tuesday, 15 November 1927.

A THRILLER
“The Man Responsible” at Exeter Theatre.
SENSATIONAL PLAY
The Theatre Royal, Exeter, during the past season or so has staged a number of “thrillers”, but they have been, with the possible exception of “Dracula”, thrillers of a wholesome character. We recall such dramatic sensations as “The Ghost Train”, “The Bat”, “No. 17” and “The Cat and the Canary.” This week a thriller of a totally different character is being presented in “The Man Responsible.” The play, it is true, is full of thrills, but thrills of a nature which hardly appeal to the ordinary theatre-goer we should imagine. It opens upon an unpleasant note, and as the play develops situations arise which are unpleasant in the extreme. The drugging and hypnotising of a promising young doctor by a specialist driven mad by revenge for the death of a daughter by an illegal operation, and the forcing of the young medico to perform a critical operation on his mother, who dies while under the influence of the anaesthetic, form sensational thrills, but whether they are of a wholesome description is another matter. The reference to the “Justice of the Almighty being too slow” in the “trial scene” is not pleasant, to put it mildly, even though it be the ravings of a madman. To our mind “The Man Responsible” strikes the note of “melodrama gone mad.” Probably we shall be hauled over the coals for our opinion, but the duty of a critic seems to us to be to express his opinion, and this is the opinion of our critic. By the way, what has Exeter done to be mentioned as near the scene of the play?
    The company who present the play have a difficult task, and the most difficult of all is that which falls to the lot of Mr. William Hartnell, to whom is entrusted the all-important role of Dr. Ronald Warden, the tortured young medico. It was a realistic playing of the part for which Mr. Hartnell was responsible. First there was the brilliant young medical man, eager and enthusiastic, standing at the threshold of what promises to be a useful and splendid career. Then there comes the transformation into the drugged, nervous wreck, the tool of the medical maniac. A wonderful realistic presentation Mr. Hartnell gave, and his audience accorded him the whole-hearted applause he deserved. Miss Mabel Heath gave a sympathetic rendering of Annie Ritter – another part calling for careful handling. Mr. A Fellows Bassett gave a “Svengalistic” touch to the role of the hypnotising maniac, Dr. Morris Morton, while Mr. Harold Greaves was convincing as Dr. Felex Gordon. Miss Hazel Morne did well as Marion, and the minor roles of Vernie (Miss Dulcie French), Mrs. Warden (Miss Eugenie Vernie), and Jensen (Miss Sylvia Rimmer) were well presented. There will be the usual Friday matinee.

The following year, Hartnell had a role in Miss Elizabeth's Prisoner, alongside the actress Heather McIntyre. They married in 1929. In 1932, Hartnell made his first appearance on film in Say It With Music.

Colin and the Carrionites

July sees the release of Doctor Who: Classic Doctors, New Monsters vol. 2, and I've written the Sixth Doctor's encounter with the witchy Carrionites (last seen battling the David Tennant and Shakespeare on TV).

As I said for the news story at the Big Finish website,

"Matt Fitton asked me to write for Colin and the Carrionites. The Carrionites get their power from words, and the Sixth Doctor is the most logophile of Doctors, so I knew there was something potent there. David Richardson suggested the 1980s setting, invoking something of the Enfield poltergeist of the late 1970s, and I drew a bit on Hammer's To The Devil a Daughter, or at least my memories of being terrified of that in my teens. And I was keen to ensure that this was definitely the Carrionites, not just any witchy aliens, so I looked for something to link it firmly to The Shakespeare Code..."

On MR James for the Lancet

The new issue of the Lancet Psychiatry - vol. 3, no. 10 (October 2016) - is out today, and includes my article on the mind of ghost story writer MR James, who died 80 years ago this year. To read more than the first paragraph you need to pay money.

Also in the issue is Laura Thomas's typically erudite look at Star Trek (2009) and the mindset of leadership.

Here's a helpful link to all my articles for the Lancet.

Graceless on the wireless again

Graceless - the science-fiction series I created and wrote - is back on BBC Radio 4 Extra this week.

The first episode was broadcast last night and you can listen to it for free on iPlayer for the next seven days. Episode 2 is on tonight at 6pm and available to catch-up afterwards.

The series stars Ciara Janson, Laura Doddington and Fraser James, with guest stars David Warner, Derek Griffiths, Patricia Brake, Susan Brown, Michael Cochrane and Joanna Van Gyseghem.

Doctor Who: 2007

Episode 733: Blink
First broadcast: 7.10 pm on Saturday 9 June 2007
<< back to 2006

The Doctor explains in Blink

Blink is something special in Doctor Who. For some it's the best ever episode, for others it's the one to show someone who's never seen the show before and ensure they're hooked.

I don't think the latter is quite right. A bit like City of Death (1979), part of the brilliance of Blink is how it plays with expectations and clichés, and the usual form of Doctor Who. If we know Doctor Who, it's more rewarding. That's why it helps that it's some way into the run - it wouldn't work earlier on in Season 3; it wouldn't work in Season 1.

(Much better, I think, for a novice to begin with season opener Smith and Jones, but surely a novice ought to start from Rose.)

The wheeze is to show what happens when the Doctor isn't around to stop the monsters - an idea used again to great effect in the following year's Turn Left. Instead, here it's up to two ordinary people - Sally and Larry - to work their way through the clues.

Since they're not familiar with the format of Doctor Who like we are, we're often a few steps ahead of them. We know to be worried as they walk into danger. We know to shout at the screen. Our own knowledge of the series makes the episode more scary.

But, on first viewing, even we are lost in the intricacies of the plot. A story like this depends on a sort of contract between writer and viewer. We agree to accept the strange, confusing world we've been landed in on the promise that it will be explained. In fact, we're given all the clues we need to solve the mystery - we just don't realise it yet.

The best example of that is right at the end, when it seems the Doctor has abandoned Sally and Larry, the TARDIS dematerialising round them, leaving them to the mercy of the Angels. It's heart-stopping stuff, the Doctor seemingly callous, Sally and Larry with no chance of escape...

But, once the solution is presented, it seems to desperately, wretchedly simple. We realise it's clearly been signposted all the way through the episode. Of course that's how to get out it.

My chum James Goss once described the six episodes (including Blink) that Steven Moffat wrote for Russell T Davies as,

"perfect puzzle boxes, full of heart and drama but also where every single bit of the mystery is in place like clockwork."

That "heart and drama" is exactly right. The Doctor and Martha appear in just three scenes of Blink but we get a great sense of their relationship. I can readily imagine a whole episode - or series - of them stranded in the 1960s, an exasperated Martha forced to take a day-job to support his building contraptions that might help them get home.

Best of all is how concisely the complex plot is spelled out in simple terms. So much of Doctor Who is exposition, building worlds and politics and problems from little more than words. There are tricks to getting through it - the Doctor says it at great speed, or peppers it with odd asides full of jokes and weird mental images, or the companion shares some of the burden.

Blink does a trick with exposition that still utterly thrills me. It's so simple, so quick, so what a real person would say. The Doctor holds up an all-important gadget, vital to him solving the problem at the heart of the episode. And explains:

"It goes ding when there's stuff."

Next episode: 2008 

Doctor Who: 2000

After episode 696 (Doctor Who): Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) - A Man of Substance
First broadcast: 8.50pm on Saturday, 22 April 2000
<< back to 1999

"I wonder if you could help me?"
Tom Baker in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)

In the long years that Doctor Who was off the air, the belief seemed to be that television viewing habits had changed and there was no longer an audience for family entertainment on a Saturday evening.

Instead of TV drama, it seemed, the general population were more interested in light entertainment that put ordinary people on screen, often live to make it more of an event. There was Noel’s House Party, The Generation Game, Stars in Their Eyes and the string of shows presented by Michael Barrymore or Ant and Dec.

Yet the BBC persisted in making shows for a Saturday evening that had a sci-fi / fantasy element: Bugs (1995-8), Crime Traveller (1997), Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (2000-1) and Strange (2002). I’d be tempted to include Jonathan Creek (1997- ) in that list, too.

Like Doctor Who, each of these shows tended to involve a peculiar, even outlandish, mystery and would then build up to a chase. Each had a certain tongue-in-cheek knowingness, a sense that the production teams didn’t expect us to take anything too seriously. (You see the same thing in reviews of sci-fi: a reviewer feels the need to tell us that they know the events depicted weren’t real.)

I really liked the revived Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). It had a good mix of the eerie and daft, with lead actors it was easy to warm to. It's also beautifully shot and directed. The last episode of the first season, A Man of Substance is particularly good - strange and unsettling, funny and sinister, with a ridiculous plot that it plays perfectly straight. It hinges on Marty Hopkirk having to choose between his friends and his every desire, and right to the end we're not sure what he'll decide. At the time, I thought it a perfect template for how Doctor Who might be done - not the plot, just the feel of it.

It's still a brilliant episode, but watching it again I'm surprised by several key elements: the heavy drinking, the sex, the whole blokey attitude. The show is riffing on the style and tone of the original Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), but watching it now it feels like having Gene Hunt in Life On Mars but without the moderating influence of Sam.

I said of 1991 that the New Adventures books were no different from Batman or James Bond at the time in being darker and more violent, and excluding children. This was simply how drama was done. In Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), I think there's a glimpse of what Doctor Who might have been like had anyone else brought it back to TV.

The belief was that there wasn't a family audience for TV drama on a Saturday night. Russell T Davies, though, knew that was wrong.

"Early on in the Doctor Who production process, Davies knew he had the Saturday night 7pm slot, and it informed the feel of the programme he was going to make. 'If you channel-hop on a Saturday night,' he says, 'you're up against the big Light Entertainment shows, like Ant and Dec, with a shiny black floor and a huge audience. With background music behind everything. They're phenomenally loud, those shows, and I believe that's what draws an audience. So we decided to make Doctor Who really noisy.'"

Richard Johnson, "Master of the universe", Telegraph, 11 March 2007.

Next episode: 2001 

Doctor Who: 1992

After episode 695 (Survival, part 3)
Resistance is Useless, first broadcast 3 January 1992
<< back to 1991

Confessions of an anorak
Resistance is Useless (1992)

Who was Doctor Who for?

As I've argued so far, by 1992 it was no longer on telly, no longer for children and - in the New Adventures books - being written for and by fans. I was thrilled by those books for their bold take on Doctor Who and the feeling I got from reading them (and pitching my own paltry efforts to the poor editorial staff) of being part of a community.

But not everyone shared that excitement. Plenty of fans didn't like the books: indeed, editor Peter Darvill-Evans felt moved to defend the range in Doctor Who Magazine #200 (cover dated 9 June 1993):

"I've just received another letter of complaint. 'Why are the New Adventures so awful?' is the opening line..."

In the letters pages of DWM, and in the ever more professional-looking fanzines, there were earnest debates and essays about the relative merits of the range and what constituted proper Doctor Who.

Though new adventures for the Doctor were limited to books and comic strips, he was then suddenly back on TV. On 3 January 1992, BBC Two broadcast Resistance is Useless as a lead-in to a series of repeats of old Doctor Who. Nowadays we're used to clips shows and Doctor Who being repeated but at the time this was very unusual: it was the longest series of repeats in 10 years.

Yet while the Five Faces season of repeats in 1981 - and the Monsters repeats in the 1980s - had been aimed at a mass audience of general viewers, the 1992 repeats seemed to target a more select group.

It's weird watching Resistance is Useless now: the clips themselves are full of excitement: monsters, deaths and strangeness, the Doctor being brave and funny. There's a madcap mix of the scary and daft that makes up much of Doctor Who. The programme does a great job of selling the prospect of full episodes, even if those episodes are nearly 30 years-old and in ropey black and white.

But, undercutting the actual evidence of the thrilling nature of Doctor Who, the clips are presented by a croaky-voiced anorak, imparting nuggets of trivia.

"Everyone knows that TARDIS is an acronym for Time And Relative Dimensions [sic] In Space but not many people know why this Type 40 TARDIS, which the Doctor stole from the Time Lords, is shaped like a police telephone box. Well, that's due to a malfunction of the chameleon circuit which enables it to change its shape and blend in with its surroundings. It jammed in London in 1963, the date of the first episode. It's interesting to note that a horse named Call Box won a race at Doncaster on that very day."

The implication is that Doctor Who appealed chiefly to dreary nerds.

That same presumption seems to be there in the BBC Videos of the time. Doctor Who sold well on VHS, often appearing in the top 10 charts, competing well against movies. But who did the people producing the videos think they were selling them too?

In March 1992, The Pertwee Years offered tantalising clips and three episodes from the third Doctor's era - at a time when it seemed impossible that all his episodes would one day be available to buy. It includes an episode from the story Inferno - one of my brother Tom's favourites.

In it, the Doctor steps sideways in time to an England ruled by dictatorship, and meets sinister versions of his friends Liz and the Brigadier. The exterior scenes shot round the Kingsnorth industrial estate have a particular, eerie bleakness. But (as Tom pointed out to me) the episode chosen for the video - episode 7 - shows little of this atmospheric stuff: we glimpse the alternative Liz and are then back to reality.

Why choose this episode? It's the least atmospheric, exciting and strange of the whole story. But, as Jon Pertwee says on the tape, it's of interest because it includes the final appearance of the original TARDIS control console prop. I'm sure the anorak would approve.

I don't mean to criticise the people who produced these videos and programmes: they made judgements based on the perceived market. As we saw last time, the audience for Doctor Who had got older and more niche. If these teens and grown-ups were going to justify time and money spent on a daft old family show, perhaps it's no wonder they took it rather seriously, and mined it for ever more trivia.

At least, that's what I think I was doing at the time. My name first appeared in Doctor Who Magazine in 1992 (alongside Tom Spilsbury who is now editor):

Me and Tom Spilsbury in the letters page of
Doctor Who Magazine #186 (1992)

I glimpse in that letter an oleaginous teen trying to get in with the grown-ups. That painful eagerness to please is also there in the 'stories' I wrote at the time - I still have a box of them, but no, you're not getting a look. They're not exactly stories anyway, as any plot has been squeezed out by all the references to past Doctor Who adventures, grown-up science-fiction and other books I thought of as worthy. I genuinely thought the more clever references I crammed in, the better the story got - but I was being semiotically thick (sorry).

I was so keen to win acceptance and justify my sticking with Doctor Who that I rather lost track of its appeal in the first place. What I wasn't writing, what it never seemed to occur to me to write until years later, was stories that were scary and exciting and fun.

Nightshade
by Mark Gatiss
- via Virgin Territory

But if did occur to Mark Gatiss. His first Doctor Who story, the novel Nightshade, was published in August 1992.

"The book moves at a cracking place, full of drama. It’s built up of dialogue and action sequences, so reads like the novelisation of a TV story. It’s brief compared to many of the later books – only 228 pages – and keeps the reader on tenderhooks right until the end. The fact that it’s set in the days up to Christmas 1968 lends a significant atmosphere of invaded cosiness, as well as establishing a strong sense of time and place."

Me, "Attack of the Memory Cheats", a review of Doctor Who: Nightshade, posted 31 August 2006.

(Thanks to Jonathan Morris for the scan from DWM.)

Next episode: 1993