The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield

This collection of Wakefield's stories is very good. Although there is a slightly larger range of supernatural horror than might be suggested by the title's category of "ghost stories," most are in fact about spectral hauntings and the effects of genii locorum -- always malign. "The Red Lodge" and "Blind Man's Buff" are, for example, almost painfully traditional haunted house tales in terms of plot, but told with great skill and effect. Wakefield's curses and ghosts are never exorcised; at best (and that rarely), the living characters manage to flee and escape their further influence.

A couple of the stories are concerned with sport. "The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster" drew on the author's own long-term enjoyment of golf, and is in many ways a solid example of his work in the ghost story genre. As usual, the origin and nature of the spirits are much murkier than their effects. "Professor Pownall's Oversight" is a chess ghost story, and not only a good one, but perhaps the best chess ghost story possible.

Another notable feature is in the two stories featuring characters modeled on the magus Aleister Crowley. In "He cometh and he passeth by ..." Crowley is made over into the homicidal sorcerer Oscar Clinton, while in "A Black Solitude" Apuleius Charlton is based on an older and more benign Beast: "He was sixty odd at this time and very well preserved in spite of his hard boozing, addiction to drugs and sexual fervour, for it was alleged that joy-maidens or temple-slaves were well represented in his mystic entourage. (If I were a Merlin, they would be in mine!)" (128)

The stories are a rough mix between those in which evildoers meet some justified comeuppance, and others where the supernatural afflicts characters merely mediocre or already cursed with unusual talent. In several cases, there are both, or it is left to the reader to judge which of these categories applies. Wakefield's work had the admiration of M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft alike, and it is easy to see why.

The Red Lodge was a story I had read first many years ago and I still find that it has the same emotional impact on me now that it did originally. That all encompassing sense of dread that pervades the story made me feel claustraphobic at times. Perhaps my favorite previously unread tale in this collection was, The Triumph of Death, with the odious Miss Pendleham. With little inferences to other gothic style tales throughout the story it was amusing to find them and try and identify them. One question though. Was it The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford or a tale by M.R. James that had the bedclothes coming to life and strangling the man in the tale?
Other ones I enjoyed were: Blindman's Buff, Look Up There, Damp Sheets and A Black Solitude. ( )

I read this as I do most short story collections, slowly and intermittently. Like a box of Godiva chocolates, it's better tasted one piece at a time, no gorging!

These stories reminded me very much of M.R. James, but out of academe ("He Cometh and He Passeth By" strongly echoes Casting the Runes). The same suggestiveness, the same lack of explanation, that gives James' tales a miasma of evil. Not for Wakefield (or James) the benevolent ghost. Only malignant spirits need apply.

Wakefield is a more contemporary ghost story teller, however, and it is very interesting to see how he introduces the new disciplines of psychiatry and psychology into his work. Writing after World War I (and in at least one story, World War II)*, he nods in a few of his stories to what was then called "shell shock", and we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, with the then popular idea that a shock would cause a lesion in the brain which, under stress, would cause delusions. And one story, A Kink in Space-Time, begins by sounding like a description of paranoid schizophrenia, but of course there's more to it than that.

The Red House and Damp Sheets were my favorites here. I thought Death of a Bumblebee the least successful.

* I really wish the copyright page had given the dates of the first publications of these stories, or that the otherwise excellent Introduction had dated them.