"Uncanny Stories" by May Sinclair

Seven short stories with a supernatural theme told in a matter of fact way. There is no feeling that the supernatural might not exist. 

All stories are written in the past tense and third person, although they may contain first person perspectives. May Sinclair was the author who first used the term ‘stream of consciousness’ in a literary context when she reviewed the first volume of Pilgrimage (Pointed Roofs) by Dorothy Richardson. However, there is little hint of modernism or experimental writing in her style.

The stories are very much of their period in terms of the tension 

generated at a time when sexual transgression generated high levels of social disapproval. They are also contemporary in terms of the social hierarchies: the characters (except in The Victim) are well-educated upper-middle-class people who don’t really need to earn their living and have servants to assist them with the earthier aspects of life.

It's also of its time in the number of semi-colons the author uses.

The stories:
Where their fire is not quenched

Harriott Leigh is unlucky in love. Her father said she was too young for George Waring and, as she was waiting to grow up, George died. She is sure that Stephen Philpotts will propose marriage to her but instead he tells her he is in love with someone else. So she becomes the mistress of married Oscar Wade, an affair which has its moments of horror. But when she dies ...

The token

A man who can't express his feelings. A wife who longs to be sure of his love. They row about a paperweight. That night she dies. And her ghost haunts the room where he works, forever hoping to know whether he loved her.

The flaw in the crystal

The longest story in the collection. Agatha has the gift of making people well. But when she tries to cure Harding of his insanity, things start to go wrong. How can she help others and at the same time protect herself?

The nature of the evidence

A barrister’s adored first wife dies. Her ghost then prevents him having sex with his second wife.

If the Dead Knew

Organist Wilfred Hollyer’s mother who raised him from a sickly child, protecting him ... or over-protecting him and preventing him from being able to earn a decent living. As as result he can only marry love-of-his-life Effie Carroll when his mother dies which might be twenty years away. But he loves his mother. But ...

Guilt in the form of supernatural phantasms.

The Victim

Chauffeur Steven Ackroyd becomes violently angry if he perceives anyone coming in between him and his girlfriend, Dorsy, a fellow servant. So when she leaves Mr Greathead’s employ, he plans the perfect murder to revenge himself upon his master. What could go wrong?

The Finding of the Absolute

Mr Spalding develops his own metaphysical consolation in place of religion after his wife leaves him for an Imagist poet. Then he dies. Heaven seems remarkably like the role-playing computer simulation Second Life, decades before it started. With Kant.

Selected quotes:

“Women never seem to consider that a man can get all the talk he wants from other men.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“Sleep made him beautiful and innocent; it laid a fine, smooth tissue over his coarseness; it made his mouth gentle; it entirely hid his eyes.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“Then, suddenly, the room began to come apart before her eyes, to split into shafts of floor and furniture and ceiling that shifted and were thrown by their commotion into different planes. They leaned slanting at every possible angle; they crossed and overlaid each other with a transparent mingling of dislocated perspectives, like reflections fallen on an interior seen behind glass.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“The revolving doors caught her and pushed her out into the street.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“The strange quality of her state was this, that it had no time. ... She was aware of things happening and about to happen; she fixed them by the place they occupied, and measured their duration by the space she went through. So now she thought: If I could only go back and get to the place where it hadn’t happened.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“Their passion weighed on them with the unbearable, unescapable boredom of immortality.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

"All Milly's plans had been like that; they fell to dust; they were dust. There had always been that pitiful, desperate stirring of the dust to hide the terror; the futile throwing of the dust in the poor thing's eyes. As if he couldn't see through it." (The Flaw in the Crystal)

"The Easter moon, golden-white and holy, looked down at her, shrined under the long, sharp arch of the beech trees." (The Flaw in the Crystal)

"It was now as if her being drunk with every pore the swimming darkness." (The Flaw in the Crystal)

"This is the story Marston told me. He didn't want to tell it. I had to tear it from him bit by bit. I've pieced the bits together in their time order, and explained things here and there, but the facts are the facts he gave me." (The Nature of the Evidence) It seems a nice way of asserting that this is gospel truth while leaving room for an unreliable narrator. But I couldn't help feeling that the reader might have had more fun if they had been presented with Marston's incoherent jumble and had to organise it themself.

"He was one of those bigoted materialists of the nineteenth century type who believe that consciousness is a purely physiological phenomenon, and that when your body's dead, you're dead." (The Nature of the Evidence)

"The library was the room Rosamund liked best, because it was his room. She had her place in the corner by the hearth, and they were always alone there together in the evenings when his work was done, and when it wasn't done she would sit still with him, keeping quiet in the corner with her book."  (The Nature of the Evidence) Very few of the women in this collection have any agency in this world. Many of them achieve it in the next.

"Before they could marry, they would be fifty-five and forty-five; old, old; too old to feel, to care passionately." (If the dead knew) I'm 68. Hmmm. 

"His beliefs were always the expression of his fears."  (If the dead knew)

"He knew the joy that made Jerry, the black cat, dance on his hind legs and bow sideways and wave his forelegs like wings." (The finding of the Absolute)

July 2025; 197 pages

First published in 1923

The paperback edition was issued by Renard Press in 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Beloved" by Toni Morrison

It is shortly after the end of the American Civil War and the ending of slavery in the USA. House number 124, isolated on the outskirts of Cincinnati, is  haunted by the ghost of a baby girl, Beloved. It has already driven away her elder brothers, and her grandmother has died; now only her mother, Sethe, an ex-slave and her younger sister, Denver, live there. Then Paul D, who had known Sethe when they were slaves together, arrives. He banishes the ghost and starts a relationship with Sethe. Then a girl calling herself Beloved arrives ...

The book deals with the horrors of slavery. Even though the characters are now free, the psychological  scars remain. Their experiences have shaped them; their experiences have made them the people who they are. The novel is a powerful condemnation of the slave-owners; even the white people who secretly worked to help slaves escape, and who helped them once they had, and still help them, are judged.

As is fitting with a book about haunting, the narrative flits backwards and forwards. It is written in the third-person past tense and sometimes, for example at the start, from an omniscient perspective, although it usually sees things through the eyes of one of the characters, usually a principal character. 

It is a well-written book and an interesting exploration of the principal characters. The back and forwards narrative leading to the slow discovery of what happened in the past means that there is a significant amount that the reader has to puzzle out at the start of the novel. I found this mystery challenging; it motivated me to keep reading.

This book won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Time magazine chose it as one of their 100 best books since Time began. Toni Morrison won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature. A list of other winners can be found here.

Selected quotes (page numbers refer to the 2007 Vintage paperback edition):

• "Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it." (p 4)
• "It made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world." (p 7)
• "Except for a heap more hair and some waiting in his eyes, he looked the way he had in Kentucky." (p 8)
• "That was the year winter came in a hurry at suppertime and stayed eight months." (p 34)
• "They had pretty manners, all of 'em. Talked soft and spit in handkerchiefs. Gentle in a lot of ways. You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face." (p 44) They go on to commit rape.
• "To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay." (p 51)
• "Sethe, if I'm here with you, with Denver, you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you 'fore you fall.Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out." (p 55)
• "The closer the roses got to death, the louder their scent." (p 57)
• "Women who drink champagne when there is nothing to celebrate can look like that: their straw hats with broken brims are often askew; they nod in public places; their shoes are undone." (p 60)
• "Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life." (p 68)
• "'Today is always here', said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never'." (p 72)
• "Hey! Hey! Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain't a goddamn axe. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside." (p 81)
• "Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn't get back from." (p 86)
• "Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that free self was another." (p 112)
• "Loaves and fishes were His powers - they did not extend to an ex-slave." (p 161)
• "The woman junkheaped for the third time because she loved her children." (p 205)
• "Each seemed to be helping the other two stay upright. ... Making their way over hard snow, they stumbled and had to hold on tight, but nobody saw them fall." (p 205, p206)
• "She couldn't read clock time very well, but she knew when the hands were closed in prayer at the top of the face she was through for the day." (p 223)
• "She is the laugh; I am the laughter." (p 255)
• "She was a practical woman who believed there was a root either to chew or avoid for every ailment. Cogitation, as she called it, clouded things and prevented action. Nobody loved her and she wouldn't have liked it if they did, for she considered love a serious disability." (p 301)
• "She turned to him, her face looking like someone had turned up the gas jet." (p 315)
• "She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order." (p 321)
• "Sethe ... me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow." (p 322)

March 2023; 324 pages

Selected by Time magazine as one of the best 100 novels since Time began.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Turn of the Screw" by Henry James

A classic ghost novella. A never-named governess goes to an old house to take charge of a little girl, Flora, and her older brother Miles, who has been expelled from school though no-one is quite sure why. The governess then starts seeing apparitions which she decides are the ghosts of valet Peter Quint and his paramour, the last governess Miss Jessel, who were considered by housekeeper Mrs Grose to have had too much influence on the children. But are the ghosts real or is the hysterical governess hallucinating? Are the children naughty or in league with devils? Why was Miles expelled (the governess tells us that the school say was was "an injury to others"; what does this mean?)? And have the children been damaged by their experiences of the ghosts when they were still alive?

The book is brilliantly written. Narrated by the governess, a classic early example of an unreliable narrator, the book is full of ambiguities that are never resolved. How, for example, did Quint and Jessel die? Miss Jessel dies while on a holiday (reading between the lines she is pregnant by Quint and dies having his baby but this is never stated). As for her lover:  “Peter Quint was found ... stone dead on the road from the village: a catastrophe explained - superficially at least - by a visible wound to his head” and it is assumed he has, in liquor, slipped on the icy road but the words "superficially at least" allow the possibility that there is a more sinister interpretation

The governess is a hysterical character (although she is described as "a most charming person ... my sister’s governess ... the most agreeable person I’ve ever known in her position ... awfully clever and nice” in a frame narrative by someone who appears to have had a crush on her when he was a boy) who has immense mood swings. She is convinced that 'the master' has fallen in love with her at first sight, as she clearly has with him. One moment she believes that the children  are paragons of innocent perfection and the next that they are in league with the devil. When she explains her self it is in long, convoluted and complex sentences in which words are used in unusual contexts (I wasn't quite sure is this was just Henry James whose prose style is sometimes fiendishly complicated). She repeatedly jumps to conclusions: “He was looking for little Miles ... But how do you know? ... I know, I know, I know!” (Ch 5). In dialogue she repeatedly interrupts her interlocutor and finishes their sentences for them (for example when the housekeeper, meaning Miles, says “Surely you don’t accuse him -” but before she can say what Miles shouldn't be accused of the governess says “Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me?”), thus putting words into their mouth and so validating her own opinions, whilst leaving the reader uncertain as to what they wanted to say. (All dialogue is naturalistic, so that people rarely ever make definitive statements.) 

The book has provided opportunities for debate for generations of scholars and the discussion in the Eastbourne Central U3A English Novel group had a very stimulating discussion which covered a number of topics.

• One member insisted that James had been purposely ambiguous and so trying to work out what 'really' happened missed the point.
• One member felt sorry for the two children who had suffered repeated bereavements: they had been forced to leave India (where they might have been very close to the servants) on the death of their parents and had then suffered the death of their uncle; they were now living under the guardianship of another uncle who refused to have anything to do with them and had suffered the death of the two servants who had looked after them most closely: Quint and Jessel. Miles had then been sent to school. The children were therefore likely to be traumatised, which might explain all sorts of behaviours.
• There was the member who suggested that all these deaths was no more than a plot device so that the two children would be at the mercy of the mad governess and the single protective figure of the illiterate housekeeper, Mrs Grose.
• Several members saw this as in the tradition of gothic literature. The narrator refers to "Udolpho" (the Mysteries of Udolpho was perhaps the first work of gothic literature, written by Ann Radcliffe) and there is also reference to “an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement” which suggests either Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte or A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family by Sheridan Le Fanu. There was one member who felt the entire story was a sort of parody of Jane Eyre: there is a governess in love with the master and something sinister going on upstairs.
  Several members thought that the children had been sexually abused by Quint and Jessel and that this was the reason that Miles was sent home from school. Clearly, Henry James could not write openly about sexual abuse of children in the dying days of the nineteenth century when the book was written. But the way the governess set up the children (Flora is described by the narrator as the “most beautiful child”, and to possess “extraordinary charm”, and “without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael's holy infants”; of Miles the narrator says: “To gaze into the depths of blue of the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgement.”; Ch 8) may be a sign that Henry James is critiquing the Victorian paradigm of childhood innocence. The idea that Miles is expelled for being "an injury to others" fits the interpretation that he has somehow morally subverted his schoolmates (he says he told his friends things and they told their friends ... ?). Mrs Grose hints at improper influence but gives it a class spin: “For a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually together ... she liked to see young gentlemen not forget their station.” (Ch 8) To support this theory it was pointed out that Henry James was the brother of William James the philosopher and psychologist and this may have given him an insight into children, although he never fathered any himself.
• Some members suggested that Miles in particular was just a little boy seeking the freedom to be a little boy and that he felt smothered by the governess.
• Some people hated the sudden ending and thought that the frame narrative should have been resumed to remove some of the perplexities of the story but most members thought the sudden ending was perfect. I myself have used sudden endings in my novels Motherdarling and Bally and Bro and the epilogue in The Kids of God is designed to challenge the reader. 
• But the biggest debate of all was: were the ghosts real?
• Immediately before her first sighting (of Peter Quint), the governess has been imagining meeting the master with whom she has fallen in love. “It would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone who would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn’t ask more than that ... What arrested me on the spot ... was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!” (Ch 3) This seems to suggest that the governess has conjured the ghost out of her imagination.
• She says, talking of the children: “I walked in a world of their invention” (Ch 5). This suggests that she is susceptible to suggestion which in turn implies that the ghosts aren't real.
• “There was no ambiguity in anything: none whatever at least in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should see” (Ch 6) and this is the point where she has her second sighting, this time of the other ghost.
• When, in chapter 20, the governess, accompanied by Flora and Mrs Grose, sees Mrs Jessel the others don't see anything. “What a dreadful turn, to be sure, Miss! Where on earth do you see anything?” says Mrs Grose (I love the word ‘turn’: another and another and another turn of the screw). This event leads to Mrs Grose taking charge of Flora (presumably at Flora's, frightened, request) and keeping her away from the governess.
• In the last few pages, Miles doesn't see the ghost either. The governess believes she has prevented this (so protecting him): “At last, by my success, his sense was sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was in presence but he knew not of what, and knew still less that I also was and that I did know.” When Peter Quint appears, Miles asks “Is she here?” (presumably thinking about Miss Jessel. “His head made the movement of a baffled dog’s on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly" Even after Miles, in response to a leading question from the governess, says identifies Peter Quint "his face gave again, round the room, its confused supplication. ‘Where’?” Miles still can't see the ghost. He never will.

Selected quotes:

• “He seems to like us young and pretty!” says the governess, referring to the master who she has fallen in love with on first sight and whom she is never going to see again, and the housekeeper replies “Oh he did ... it was the way he liked everyone!” and this use of the past tense tells us that she is referring to Peter Quint and then she corrects herself “I mean that’s his way - the master’s” (Ch 2)
• "I was struck, throughout our little tour, with her confidence and courage, with the way, in empty chambers and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even on the summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, her morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than she  asked, rang out and led me on.” (Ch 1)
• “I learnt something - at first certainly - that had not been one of the teachings of my small smothered life; learnt to be amused, and even amusing, and not to think of the morrow” (Ch 3)
• “And then there was consideration - and consideration was sweet.” (Ch 3)
• “An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred.” (Ch 3) I'm intrigued by 'privately bred'. Surely she means 'privately brought up'. Her thoughts seem to have been infiltrated by thoughts of sex.
• “I was in receipt in these days of disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well.” (Ch 4)
• “The silence itself ... became the element into which I saw the figure disappear.” (Ch 10)
• “She was a magnificent monument to the blessing of a want of imagination.” (Ch 11)
• “He could do what he liked, with all his cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to the old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who minister to superstitions and fears.” (Ch 11)
• “I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it's a wonder I’m not. What I’ve seen would have made you do; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things.” (Ch 12)
• “They’re not mine - they’re not ours. They’re his and they’re hers.” (Ch 12)
• “It revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad time - for there had been a worse even than this! - must have occurred.” (Ch 12)
• “Another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue” (Ch 22)
• "Peter Quint - you devil!" (Ch 24) But does the devil refer to the valet or the new governess?

A literary tour de force.

October 2022; 121 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Unburied" by Charles Palliser

A Victorian murder mystery with an air of ghostliness.

Dr Edward Courtine, academic historian, goes to Thurchester Cathedral to stay with Austin Frickling, someone he knew as an acquaintance when they were undergraduates together twenty years ago but whom he hasn't seen since then because Austin somehow betrayed him and caused his wife to leave him. Whilst at the Cathedral, Dr Courtine searches for a new manuscript which he hopes will explain how Alfred the Great was involved with the Cathedral's history. There are also two more historical mysteries: how and why ean Freeth was killed during the Civil War and what happened to Cathedral Mason John Gambrill  who disappeared after killing William Burgoyne some years before the Freeth killing.

And then Courtine gets involved in his own murder mystery.

This book, therefore, is multi-layered: three historical mysteries, the mystery about Courtine's marriage and one modern murder. This makes it difficult to follow. And Dr Courtine is a reassuringly Watson-like figure, wrongly interpreting every single fact.

But of all the stories, the reader is most engaged with the present-day murder and most wants to solve that. And here I was disappointed. The book starts with an "Editor's Foreword" in which the editor (not Courtine whose narrative provides the bulk of the story) visits an old woman who had once been an actress and talks about the performance she gave, the performance of her life. This gives a huge clue which makes the modern mystery relatively easy to interpret despite the attempt of the author to strew red herrings in the reader's path from the rather transparent bumblings of Courtine and the utterly comical interpretations of the Superintendent. And, of course, any closed community of men and choirboys is expected to have its seamy side in today's literature.

There is a lot to celebrate in this book with its invocation of December mists in a haunted Cathedral Close but the story would have been better with fewer layers and more mystery to the ones left.

October 2015; 387 pages