Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season (2020) edited by Tanya Kirk

Varieties of spectral Yuletide fiction

....How different from the grey light of dawn, that ushers in the cheerful day, is the solemn rising of the moon in the depth of a winter night. Her light is not to rouse the sleeping world and lead men forth to their labour, it falls on the closed eyes of the weary, and silvers the graves of those whose rest shall be broken no more.

— "The Real and the Counterfeit"

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Readers unfamiliar with Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season may prefer to read these notes only after reading the anthology.

Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season (2020) edited by Tanya Kirk is a varied collection of horror fiction from the period 1890-1955. The stories range from the traditional UK supernatural short story to more modern strangenesses. Authors vary; Hume Nisbet and Frank R. Stockton do not measure up to Baldwin, Burrage, Bowen, Bowen, and Timperley. Reading Lovecraft's “The Festival” for the first time in forty years was a refreshing experience: the story's elegant simplicity has a nightmarish authority.

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"A Strange Christmas Game" by Charlotte Riddell

A brother and sister inherit an estate left intestate by a distant relative. The previous squire disappeared on Christmas eve, leaving no clues. Once in the house, the brother and sister use nocturnal knocking and footsteps to triangulate a solution to the mystery.

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"The Old Portrait" (1890) by Hume Nisbet

 I wonder the surrealists didn't use this bizarre method of culling the unconscious for artistic motivation:

  Old-fashioned frames are a hobby of mine. I am always on the prowl amongst the framers and dealers in curiosities for something quaint and unique in picture frames. I don’t care much for what is inside them, for being a painter 

it is my fancy to get the frames first and then paint a picture which I think suits their probable history and design. In this way I get some curious and I think also some original ideas.

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“The Real and the Counterfeit” (1895) by Louisa Baldwin

Brooks and Warren (1943) have this to say about fictional use of coincidence: 

The use of coincidence is in one sense unavoidable in fiction, for the original situation in any story may be defined as a coincidence. But the use of coincidence is, generally speaking, illegitimate when it functions to solve the fictional problem; that is, when the events which bring about the resolution of a plot have no logical connection with preceding events.

“The Real and the Counterfeit” raises the issue late in the story, when one of three chums sharing a house over Christmas reports:

Musgrave suddenly exclaimed, as he reached down a book from an upper shelf, ‘Hallo! I’ve come on my grandfather’s diary! Here’s his own account of how he saw the white monk in the gallery. Lawley, you may read it if you like, but it shan’t be wasted on an unbeliever like Armitage. By Jove! what an odd coincidence! It’s forty years this very night, the thirtieth of December, since he saw the ghost….’

Like the coincidence of dates that opens “Randall's Round,” this pulls us up sharply. We already know one of the chums plans a prank reenactment of the hoary old scene on the night when moonlight will hit the sweet spot in the long gallery at two a.m. isn't Baldwin gilding the lily with this late discovery on the very day?

Brooks and Warren would rule it a “legitimate coincidence,” since it adds dramatic urgency to a resolution already sketched. Once we know the house's ghost legend, and know one character plans a prank reenactment, we also know — as good readers of horror fiction — that real ghost and prank ghost will meet. The diary’s discovery changes none of that.

In fact, Baldwin folds this moment into her plot as a bit of misdirection: the reader is thus unprepared for the fatality at story's end.

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“Old Applejoy's Ghost” (1900)  by Frank R. Stockton

Great-grandfather's ghost rescues a plucky heroine from a miserly uncle-guardian's spendthrift ways at Christmas. The story is a joyless example of popular fiction. “The Canterville Ghost” is a richer and more complicated execution of a similar plot.

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“Transition” (1913)  by Algernon Blackwood

  But a man came in soon after, a man with a ridiculous, solemn face, a pencil and a notebook. He wore a dark blue helmet. Behind him came a string of other men. They carried something… something… he could not see exactly what it was. But, when he pressed forward through the laughing throng to gaze upon it, he dimly made out two eyes, a nose, a chin, a deep red smear, and a pair of folded hands upon an overcoat. A woman’s form fell down upon them then, and he heard soft sounds of children weeping strangely… and other sounds… as of familiar voices laughing… laughing gaily. 

  ‘They’ll join us presently. It goes like a flash…’

Was it standard police procedure in 1913 to bring a gory hit-and-run victim's corpse back to his family? 

“Transition,” with its straightforward depiction of a middle class family man and his milieu, is atypical Blackwood. He carries off the effect very successfully, and comes to grips very frankly with the situation’s emotional poignancy. It's an interesting alternative to E. F. Benson's “Mr. Tilly’s Seance.”

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“The Fourth Wall” (1915)  by A. M. Burrage

The “fourth wall,” of course, is no wall at all. It does become an idée fixe, however, for several members of a small group renting a cottage. Lines of melodramatic dialogue come unbidden, and insist on being spoken aloud. Intermittently, there is the whiff of smoke.

     But we were practical people, and we did not theorise overmuch. We simply left the cottage and went to Malvern. Anybody may have that cottage at a very modest rental, but we do not recommend it. There may not be such things as ghosts, but there are a lot of things, pleasant and unpleasant, which are beyond our ken.

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“The Festival” (1925)  by H. P. Lovecraft

  ....Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember.

Lovecraft begins his tale with a reassuring quotation from the early Christian, Lactantius, that demons may cloud our vision of reality, but it is only a clouding, not physical reality.

Lovecraft’s narrator operates with clouded vision until he wakes up in a hospital. As the story opens, he enters not modern Kingsport but the ancient town of three hundred years ago. “The printless road was very lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as of a gibbet in the wind.”

Once at “the seventh house on the left in Green Lane,” the narrator meets a masked man and a woman busy at a spinning wheel. The narrator finds the couple and the house “morbid and disquieting.” Told he must wait, he inspects literature on a nearby table. A copy of The Necronomicon is one of the titles available to kill time. It's a clever touch, one of the cleverest Lovecraft devised. 

And: “....the whir of the wheel as the bonneted old woman continued her silent spinning, spinning.” Shades of R. Murray Gilchrist's “The Crimson Weaver”? “The Festival” is a story very obliging to symbol hunters.

Even before the subterranean festival rites begin.¹

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“The Crown Derby Plate” (1933) by Marjorie Bowen

Bowen is crafty with all elements: with landscape and interiors, with dialogue-as-action, and with the smell of wrongness evoked even in unrecognized moments of danger. "The Crown Derby Plate" is about the perils of vacation side-trips and completist collectors misunderstanding the obvious because unconsciously they know it is a check to their desires. 

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“Green Holly” (1944) by Elizabeth Bowen

Hush-hush war work at secret country house location. Boffins left alone at holiday: 

     These three by now felt that, like Chevalier and his Old Dutch, they had been together for forty years: and to them it did seem a year too much. Actually, their confinement dated from 1940. They were Experts—in what, the Censor would not permit me to say. They were accounted for by their friends in London as ‘being somewhere off in the country, nobody knows where, doing something frightfully hush-hush, nobody knows what.’ That is, they were accounted for in this manner if there were still anybody who still cared to ask; but on the whole they had dropped out of human memory. Their reappearances in their former circles were infrequent, ghostly and unsuccessful: their friends could hardly disguise their pity, and for their own part they had not a word to say. They had come to prefer to spend leaves with their families, who at least showed a flattering pleasure in their importance.

Miss Bates, Mr. Winterslow, and Mr. Rankstock, a trio not unlike ghosts themselves, face a lonely and irritable holiday, left behind by colleagues with more substantial lives. Mopsam Grange, their new quarters, however, has some of its own inhabitants to contribute to festivities.

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“Christmas Re-Union” by Sir Andrew Caldecott

A Santa "from down under" entertains a family at Christmas. This is Caldecott's expansion of one of James's "Stories I Have Tried to Write."

     There may be possibilities too in the Christmas cracker if the right people pull it and if the motto which they find inside has the right message on it. They will probably leave the party early, pleading indisposition; but very likely a previous engagement of long standing would be the more truthful excuse.

Caldecott meshes his point of view with the knowing tone-of-voice James employed,  similar in confidence and daring to Reggie Oliver's "A School Story" prequel, "Between Four Yews."

https://hypnogoria.blogspot.com/2023/12/from-great-library-of-dreams-097.html?m=1

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“A Christmas Meeting” by Rosemary Timperley

A "a woman of nearly fifty, a spinster schoolma’am with grim, dark hair, and myopic eyes that once were beautiful,” and “a kid of twenty, rather unconventionally dressed" meet in a boarding house at Christmas. The middle aged "schoolma'am" relates the adventure in a very up-to-date manner.

She begins:

  It gives me an uncanny feeling, sitting alone in my ‘furnished room,’ with my head full of ghosts, and the room full of voices of the past. It’s a drowning feeling—all the Christmases of the past coming back in a mad jumble: the childish Christmas, with a house full of relations, a tree in the window, sixpences in the pudding, and the delicious, crinkly stocking in the dark morning; the adolescent Christmas, with mother and father, the War and the bitter cold, and the letters from abroad; the first really grown-up Christmas, with a lover—the snow and the enchantment, red wine and kisses, and the walk in the dark before midnight, with the grounds so white, and the stars diamond bright in a black sky—so many Christmases through the years.

Timperley should not be neglected.

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“Someone in the Lift” (1955) by L. P. Hartley

After a "domestic crisis," a family relocates to a hotel at Christmas ." Is there any site more suitably uncanny than a hotel? Everything Hartley's young protagonist observes is familiar, yet unhomelike. While "Someone in the Lift" may not match the qualities that make "Podolo" and "Cotillon" masterpieces, the story's impressionist style of telling creates a gruesomely topsy-turvy effect.

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“Told After Supper” (1891) by Jerome K. Jerome

"Told After Supper" is JKJ enjoying vacation at home -- as opposed to joining friends in a boat on the Thames or on a bicycle tour of Germany. Readers of 1890s horror fiction will find much to appreciate: the notes here are flawless. Episodes from "Told After Supper" are often published as sepatate short stories, but the tale is best read as a single work, a knowing novella that celebrates a popular genre. Best read in a single setting. After supper.

An outstanding audio version can be enjoyed here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9KpSYrEl6oBqfzge8WTMN48fXVwYAas7&si=glCzJxvcl0xmqL3Q

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Jay

21 December 2023

1. P.S. Chill Tidings offers a good sampling of horror writers at their best. But I have to wonder why Lovecraft was the only author singled-out for backward political views. Is our enjoyment of an author dependent on first tisk-tisking them, but not others?