A Properly Unhaunted Place by William Alexander, illustrated by Kelly Murphy, reviewed by Sarah Hammond

I seem to have developed a taste for ghost-hunting stories of late, including treasures such as Jonathon Stroud’s rip-roaring Lockwood & Co series, and the dazzlingly and original Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge. A Properly Unhaunted Place is another good 'un. It provides an unusual take on traditional ghost stories in which the living seek to send ghostly beings firmly on to the lands of the dead. 

In this middle grade novel, William Alexander skillfully introduces us to the unsettling town of Ingot.  The protagonist, Rosa Diaz, has just moved in with her mother and is not happy about her new home. Something is not right here.Something is missing. Something important. Although, as yet, we do not know what. 

The story unfolds on two levels. We learn that Ingot is strange because it is unhaunted: the ghosts that ordinarily exist alongside the living are notably absent. So why would Rosa’s mother, an appeasement specialist, bring her daughter, who is also skilled in these arts, here? Appeasement specialists respect the dead. They negotiate with restless or troublesome ghosts and strike deals with them so that they settle. And why is Ingot ghostless in any event? 

Rosa befriends Jasper, a local boy, whose parents are heavily involved in the renowned Renaissance Festival that reenacts historical events on a grand scale all summer long. As Jasper introduces Rosa to the festival, the unthinkable happens -- a ghost bursts out of the forest towards the living. 

Alexander's writing is tight, poetic and concise. Humour threads through the story too, introducing the reader to memorable characters: the motorbike riding ghost who does not realize he is dead; the candlemaker who will only converse in old-fashioned speech; the librarian with 'wispy hair, white gloves, and aggressive eyebrows.'

Kelly Murphy's illustrations are scattered sparsely throughout the text. My favourites include her depictions of the otherworldly creatures, and also the image of Jasper with his armour-clad father, cleverly reflecting the face of Rosa in the chest-plate. 


Rosa confronts the questions raised by the unexpected ghost and, together with Jasper, begins to investigate its origins and ultimately Ingot’s past that seems lost beyond the townspeople’s collective memory. 

And this leads us to the second, deeper level underpinning the story. Rosa’s mother describes herself as a ‘servant of memory’ in her ghostly appeasement work. Without memory, without our past and our ghosts, what is left? Rosa comes to realize that Ingot’s celebrated Renaissance Festival is, in fact, ‘a funeral… a wake. They hold it every summer, all summer long, to mourn the history they don’t have and don’t even remember losing.’ ‘Starved of history, they patched together new echoes from mismatched fragments. Unhaunted, they learned how to haunt themselves.’

Ultimately the past and the present must make peace with each other and learn to coexist. It is healthy to remember our ghosts and welcome them in. 

www.sarahhammond.org 

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EVIE’S GHOST – by Helen Peters

Reviewed by JackieMarchant

Evie’s Ghost is the sort of book I loved to be engrossed in when I was a child – a real curl-up-and-read.  That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it equally as an adult – I might not be as physically able to curl up without a bit of creaking now, but I loved this from the moment Evie was sent to an aged (in child’s terms) godmother who lives in a flat in a big old house.

OK, child being sent to live with aged person in a big old house might not sound the most original start, but it’s one that always gets me going.  I loved what happens after Evie arrives and it is made clear she will left to her own devices, because aged godmother is far too busy digging up skeletal remains. 

This is when, at the invitation of a distraught ghost, Evie finds herself 200 years in the past, in the same room, in the same house.  Unfortunately she’s no longer a guest, but a housemaid.  Plunged headlong into the drudgery and sheer hard work of household staff, Evie soon appreciates the things we have today – like hot water from a tap and a switch to bring instant light.  A vacuum cleaner to suck up dust instead of having to brush carpets every day.  A fireplace that doesn’t have to be scrubbed until it shines every morning.  Sorry, I mean eight fire places – this is 200 years before central heating has been invented.

While Evie’s hands blister and cut thanks to lack of rubber gloves (not invented yet) and the caustic cleaning products that sting and scald sensitive skin, she is also supposed to be saving the daughter of the owner of the big house from a horrible fate.  But Evie soon learns that in those days maids did not talk to the daughters of the owner of the house.  Evie can’t even talk to the housekeeper without a clip round the ear – which was a perfectly legal thing to do in those days.

But there are moments when Evie manages to see the delights of living in that era – the scent of an unspoiled bluebell wood, the peace due to lack of motor cars, the splendid gardens of the house she knows will be long gone when she returns.  If she returns.

Evie can only hope that she will return once she has fulfilled the task of solving the desperate plight of the ghost.  But, as a lowly maid, this is not easy and Evie learns a hard lesson in class division.  Tension builds as Evie tries and fails until she despairs of ever returning.  At the same time, she learns a lot about the injustices of that world.

I could say that this is a book about being grateful for what you have, but that might make it sound preachy, which it certainly isn’t.  It’s a good story and a page-turning read.

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MARIANNE DREAMS by Catherine Storr. Review by Penny Dolan.

When I saw a copy of MARIANNE DREAMS re-issued in the Faber Classics imprint, I had to buy

it.

My curiosity about this heard-about but unknown, “classic” book was increased by the attractive cover, the slightly squat and chunky shape and the generous font and layout. MARIANNE DREAMS was inviting: a  pleasure to hold. 

The story seems quite simple. Just as Marianne is looking forward to the summer, she is struck down by a serious illness. Because the doctor insists Marianne must stay in bed for six weeks convalescence, her mother arranges for Miss Chesterfield, a kind of "governess", to give her lessons. 

 One day, rather bored, Marianne opens her drawing book and, using a special silver-topped pencil, draws:

“a house with four windows and a front door. . . she drew a fence round the house and a path leading from the front door to the gate . .  . (and) flowers inside the fence and all around she drew long scribbly grass . .  .waist-high, at least . . and outside the fence, a few large, rough-looking stones or lumps of rock.”

Later, as Marianne falls asleep, she dreams she is walking through a strange empty house. When she wakes, Marianne realises that the house in her dream was the house she’d drawn. Not liking the empty feeling of the house, she decides to draw a boy’s face, looking out of one of the upstairs windows, Inevitably, in yet another dream, meets Mark, the boy she has drawn, right down to having one leg thinner than the other because she hadn’t drawn him well enough.

Gradually, as the dreams recurr, Marianne discovers that "dream" Mark is an invalid too, barely able to walk, and that he is also a pupil of Miss Chesterfield, “her” new governess. Marianne starts drawing useful things that are needed in the eerie dream house but although the children get to know each other, their relationship is often prickly. Mark himself seems unwillingly trapped in Marianne's dream but unable - or too ill - to do anything about his situation..

There is a very big falling out. Wanting to be liked, Marianne has spent all her pocket money on a few expensive roses for Miss Chesterfield on her birthday, However, while waiting, Marianne hears that not only has Mark given their governess with an enormous bouquet of the same flowers but that Miss Chesterfield won't be visiting her that afternoon.

Marianne completely loses her temper with Mark and with her pitifully few roses. In a jealous rage, she scribbles strong dark lines across the windows of the house, and puts some tall stones outside the fence, giving them dots for eyes, as shown in the child-like drawings within the book.

When Marianne dreams again, she finds a much-weakened Mark. His room is now darkened by puzzling bars that criss-crossed the window and he feels that the stones outside have begun watching him. 

Worse, Marianne hears the real-life Mark is now in a hospital ventilator machine and the eerie dream steadily develops into a nightmare. The stones are threatening the children, trying to get inside the dream house, although it is never clear why or to what end. The illogical but inevitable quality of the dream greatly adds to the tension.of the tale, and how can the pair escape when  they both feel almost powerless?

Gradually, with the help of The Pencil, Marianne decides to draw things that will help Mark grow stronger, both in the dream and - according to various reports from the grown-ups – in his real life too. Finally, with Mark-in-the-Dream better in health and spirits, the pair make a desperate cycle-ride towards the lighthouse and to freedom. Marianne herself is left on a gentle cliff-hanger of an ending, possibly best suited to a dream.

MARIANNE DREAMS has a truly mesmeric quality, reminding me of the anguish of trying to solve problems you only partially understand and the powerlessness one feels when trapped within a recurring dream. Catherine Storr is also accurate about the annoyance of being ill and stuck in bed – as was prescribed in the past - and how that feeling can often make people behave badly. MARIANNE DREAMS might be fantasy, but it felt based on firm emotional ground.

Originally published in 1958, MARIANNE DREAMS does show both its age and social context, although the writing is admirably clear. The book would have been written around the time of a polio epidemic, when there were scary news items about children suddenly struck down and kept alive by the use of an “iron lung”. All this would have been familiar to Storr as she herself had been a Senior Medical Officer in the Middlesex Hospitals Psychiatric Department, and this book is definitely strengthened by a deep knowledge of illness and psychology.

I am glad that the book was re-issued, and I missed out on it first time around, but I am honestly not quite sure who I would recommend MARIANNE DREAMS to, other than KS2 and pre-teens who like different books and any adults who read it in the past. The steady pace is unlike any modern “busy” fantasy, the ending is more dream-like than fully resolved and there is no “romance” in the relationship between Marianne and Mark. Yet Storr has created a ghost story without any of the traditional horror but one that is scary enough in its own right: there is a memorable sense of  suspense as the reader experiences the strongest sense of being trapped with Marianne inside her darkening dream. 

The book has been made into a tv film, into an opera, and interpreted in drama. Here's the publicity video of a production some years ago in Dublin that gives a good sense of the feeling one gets reading the book. I hope the play did well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDL2zrPXfnY 

Catherine Storr also wrote the popular CLEVER POLLY AND THE STUPID WOLF series, which makes quite an interesting contrast!

 

Penny Dolan.

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HAPPY CHRISTMAS and THE COMPANY OF GHOSTS by Berlie Doherty, reviewed by Adele Geras.

With this review of a wonderfully seasonal book, Awfully Big Review pauses for a while. Thank you for reading our 2013 reviews - and we will be back with more on the First of January 2014. A happy holiday to you all! 


Meanwhile, from Adele Geras . . . 

THE COMPANY OF GHOSTS by Berlie Doherty
 

A new novel from Berlie Doherty is always something to look forward to and yet again I have to offer a disclaimer. This writer, like so many of those I review on this website, is a friend of mine and I’m sorry about that, but if I had to avoid books by people I know, I’d be very hamstrung in the matter of reviewing and would scarcely ever be able to do it. As it is, showing good new books to readers who might otherwise miss them is something I regard as one of my main functions as a critic.

This is a ghost story and I love ghost stories, so I seized on it when it came through my door. Doherty has opted for a particular kind of tale. There are no big old houses here with creaking doors; no graveyards, no rattling chains and indeed most of the accoutrements of the traditional story are absent and instead we have an idyllic (in many ways) island off the Scottish coast and a teenager marooned there all by herself.

Ellie is running away from an unpleasant situation at home when she accepts an invitation from Morag, whom she scarcely knows, to spend some time on the island. This place is deserted. Morag’s family spend holidays there in a very basic dwelling and there’s a disused lighthouse but apart from that, nothing. It’s reached by boat, and that is an erratic sort of service, down to the availability of a local fisherman.  Circumstances combine to leave Ellie alone there for what she thinks will be only a short time but which, terrifiyingly, extends and extends until we realize, gradually, that through various accidents, no one is going to come and rescue her. She is on her own, having to cope, desperately scared at times and trying to be sensible and brave in really scary circumstances.

 
This would be bad enough, but of course, we know from the title that Ellie is not alone…..there is the ghost. The way Doherty introduces this spectre, the way the supernatural is interwoven with the natural is both spine chilling and lyrical. She specializes in wonderful descriptions of nature and in this case, because our heroine is an artistic child, of her paintings as well. Ellie writes letters to her father, who, in her opinion, has deserted her family to go off to Cornwall on his own leaving her mother to marry someone else and these letters, interspersed with what’s happening on the mainland to George, Morag’s brother, who, through no fault of his own, has failed to arrange Ellie’s rescue, both ease the tension on the island and also rachet it up a few notches as the novel progresses.

The story of the ghost turns out to be a love story, and towards the end, we sense that Ellie’s narrative, too may be moving in that direction….

This is a book full of  moments of really creepy suspense and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants something both unusual and romantic and set in a landscape which is at the same time threatening and very beautiful. It’s a well-written, intriguing and often genuinely scary story, just right for Christmas.

Publisher: Andersen Press  

Price: £6.99 (pbk)

ISBN: 9781849397292

Reviewer:       Adèle Geras

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The Sea Change & Other Stories by Helen Grant: reviewed by Gillian Philip

Honestly, that Helen Grant looks such a sweet girl. I'd like to say that The Sea Change is a delight, but of course that wouldn't be the right word. Creepy, menacing and addictive: those would be more appropriate.

I was never a fan of ghost stories as a child, because I was too much of a coward for them. I'd read them with the lights on, at noon, but I'd always regret it when the sun went down and the house started to creak. Nowadays I like to think I'm way too big and tough and cynical to be frightened by stories, but there's a certain kind of tale that can slink under your skin in a very unnerving way, no matter how grown-up you think you are. Michelle Paver's Dark Matter is one of them, and this collection is another.

This effect starts right out of the gate with Grauer Hans, a story inspired by a German folk tale of Santa Claus's less benevolent sidekick. He, it seems, is the one who deals with the naughty children, and Helen Grant presents him as a sweet, apple-cheeked little man to whom any young child would be happy to open the window. And Grant's protagonist would love to invite him in, if only her mother did not lull her to sleep with an old song each night. His friendly scratching on the window is the aural equivalent of Michelle Paver's wooden post; parents, this is a reminder never to forget the songs your own mother taught you.

All the stories have this same slow-burn, understated menace that grows quietly at the back of your mind. A scuba diver becomes so obsessed with an old wreck, he begins to disregard that immutable rule of never diving without a buddy. A pair of climbers, too young and brash to heed local superstition, decide to tackle a local crag with a bad reputation. A man goes to Slovakia in search of his vanished brother, and finds a lonely abandoned calvary and a very eerie painting. In many of the stories, the landscape itself is a part of the threat, and since you can't fight or escape the Earth itself, the terror seems all the more inescapable. I turned the pages with a mounting sense of dread each time, and I was never disappointed (and never reassured, either).

Helen Grant even completes an unfinished MR James story, The Game of Bear – a work that won her a competition in the MR James Ghosts and Scholars Newsletter and has the blessing of the James estate. In her notes to that story, she mentions the 'tinge of wrongness' that make MR James's inventions so frightening. That's a very good way of describing the horrors that haunt Grant's own creations here.

It's a truism that the most frightening stories never show you the horror, but let it fester in your imagination until it's worse than anything explicit. The Sea Change & Other Stories is so true to that, I started to worry about my creaking house all over again.

The stories in The Sea Change first appeared in various magazines and journals and have now been published in a limited edition by Swan River Press. It might be sadly difficult to get hold of a new copy – and the used ones on Amazon are pricey – but the collection is well worth tracking down if you can. It would also be well worth a second edition. Hint hint, Swan Press. And if you can't find The Sea Change, you can console yourself with Helen Grant's equally disturbing and frightening novels The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, The Glass Demon and Wish Me Dead.

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'Overheard in a Graveyard' by Susan Price - reviewed by Rosalie Warren

I love scary stories - not full-blooded horror and nothing too vampirical (is that a word?) - but ghost stories that reach down into the psyche: ones that unearth deep, unspoken, unacknowledged fears.

So how have I managed to live for more than fifty years without encountering the work of Susan Price? I don't know, but that state of affairs is now being remedied. Since reading Overheard in a Graveyard  I've downloaded - is it three or four of her other books? I'm an addict, anyway...

Overheard in a Graveyard is a collection of short stories, beginning with one of that name. The opening tale is a conversation between a night-time visitor to the graveyard and an inhabitant of one of the graves. It's creepy, to the extent that the words crawl like cold fingers down your back. I missed its power the first time I read it, as I hadn't got used to the form. When I'd read the other stories I went back and read it again. This time, it made me shudder. Shades of Heathcliff and and Cathy in Wuthering Heights (still gives me nightmares, that book), but with a compelling voice and atmosphere that is all Price's own.

The second story, 'Bus Aid', is a very different kind of beastie. There's social comment - social satire - here. There's claustrophobia; people trapped and desperately needing help. It's funny, too. And it leaves you wondering... who was doing the haunting in this tale?

Another favourite of mine is 'The Footsteps on the Stairs'. Young children left alone, and a father interrupting his evening at the pub to come home and check that they're OK. Or does he?

I'm trying to work out why these stories have such power. I think it's because of the realism - the poverty in which many of the characters live. The cosy, grimy, small-town life that surrounds them. And the shock of the supernatural, in among all that.

In Price's stories it feels sometimes as though the ghosts inhabit the true world - the one that makes more sense. Some of their transparency is coloured in by the reality of mid-twentieth century Black Country life. Almost as though it's our messy world that's doing the haunting and disturbing the cool, elegant realm we call the supernatural.

There's ambiguity, too - many more questions than answers. Was that really a ghost, or just a dream, or a frightened child's imagination run amok? And there's the delightful recognition that ghosts and spirits may sometimes be benign.

'Mow Top' is heartbreakingly sad. The picture of the toy car rusting away on its little stone on the empty moors will stay with me. This is how it works in real life. Children see ghosts and tell us. We reassure them, and ourselves, that there are no such things...

'The Familiar' is all about the cost of power, and cuts deep.

The final story, 'Overheard in a Museum', is a thing of beauty, like the ship itself. You can feel the swell of the sea beneath you as you read. It speaks of a distant era and reminds us that objects so often outlast people by a long, long time. Except that the ship is not a object - it's the spirit of an age.

You don't need to believe in ghosts to enjoy these wonderful stories, but be warned. You may dive in as a sceptic and find yourself an agnostic, or even a believer, by the end... perhaps not so much in ghosts as in another world, very close to and overlapping with our own.


Details:
Title: Overheard in a Graveyard and Other Stories
Author: Susan Price
Kindle Edition Publication Date: September 2011
Kindle Edition price £1.54
ASIN: B005NHG5XG
Click to view on Amazon.co.uk
Click to view on Amazon.com

Happy Reading,
Rosalie

Rosalie Warren
Author of Coping with Chloe and Charity's Child
See more of my reviews on my blog, Rosalie Reviews



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