horror, page 18 of 65

Researching Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows for a recent Mewsings, I was intrigued by the book that won the Carnegie Medal the year after it, Margaret Mahy’s The Haunting, which was published in 1982. Mahy, it turns out, was another who, like Westall, won the Carnegie twice.

The Haunting opens with young Barney Palmer seeing a ghost. He’s not entirely shocked, as he’s seen something similar before — though these were more by way of extremely vivid imaginary friends he’d had in his earlier years — but is a bit concerned by what the ghost says:

“Barnaby’s dead! And I’m going to be very lonely.”

Barney’s full name is Barnaby, after his great uncle, and he can’t help wondering if the ghost is telling him he’s going to die. When he gets home he finds his two sisters (both older) waiting for him, mostly silent Troy (the oldest) and her wordy opposite Tabitha (who intends to be the world’s greatest living novelist). They’re bursting to tell him the news: Great Uncle Barnaby has died. Partly in relief, partly in fright, Barney faints.

Great Uncle Barnaby Scholar is a relative on the children’s mother’s side. She died giving birth to Barney, and the Palmers haven’t since had much contact with the Scholars, particularly after the kids’ father remarried (to Claire, who, contrary to all YA novel expectations, is a wonderful step-mother, loved by her step-children). One of the reasons, perhaps, the Palmers have seen so little of the Scholars is that the Scholars are an off-putting bunch, largely due to their matriarch, Great Grandmother Scholar, a judgemental and unforgiving old woman whose intensely controlling way with her children has left them all slightly damaged. As Great Uncle Guy says:

“My mother wasn’t a woman who enjoyed having children… She would have preferred to have a set of chessmen, I think.”

And:

“She clipped and pruned us as if we were a family of standard roses.”

It turns out one child escaped her clipping and pruning — at least for a short while. Not present at the funeral, and not mentioned till the subject can’t be avoided, is Great Uncle Cole, the boy who ran away and was, it seems, drowned shortly after. He and his mother didn’t get on (they were “at war from the moment he was born”), and he’s since become, as Guy says, “a guilty secret, and it’s always been easier just to be silent.”

It’s evident, though, that Great Uncle Cole is still around in some form, for he’s the one haunting Barney. This is confirmed by a scrapbook Barney finds while at the Scholar household, containing a photo of Cole that looks exactly like the ghost he saw — and which immediately spawns inky words, writing themselves on the page before his eyes: “Barnaby’s dead! And I’m going to be very lonely.” After this, Barney finds his world increasingly invaded by visions and messages from Cole, as well as the constant awareness of his presence:

“Someone was walking behind him — a long way off — still hidden in a misty distance but coming closer and closer, holding out a hand lined with the map of another world — a magical world, wise and beautiful perhaps, but not Barney’s own.”

The visions are:

“…little pictures, coming and going without warning… things that someone else was seeing… They were given to Barney as presents, as promises, for the person who was seeing these things thought they were beautiful and wanted to share them with someone.”

But they’re scary all the same, because Cole makes it clear he’s coming for Barney, to claim him and take him away, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

But while Barney lapses into despondency, his would-be-novelist sister Tabitha is keen to do something, because, in an unusual move for a ghost story, she also saw the writing appearing around the photo in the Scholar scrapbook, and needs no convincing it’s real. The only reason she can’t immediately enlist adult help is that Barney insists their stepmother Claire shouldn’t be told, because she’s pregnant, and Barney (whose birth resulted in the death of his natural mother) is terrified of causing Claire any worry in case it increases the chances that she might die, too.

Cole, Tabitha learns, is or was a “Scholar magician”, a type the family produce every generation or so, someone with “powers and peculiarities” that “have nearly always brought misfortune on them and on those around them”. They can make things happen, induce visions and create objects out of thin air. Cole’s powers seem too strong for Barney to resist, and he tells Barney he’s a Scholar magician too, and so is best separated from his “normal” family, just as Cole himself had to escape his.

The Haunting treads a line between the comic (usually when in the company of Tabitha, to whom everything is material for her novel) and the despondent (for Barney), and builds up to something like a supernatural equivalent of Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, where a family get-together, plus an unexpected guest, results in a whole host of long-held secrets tumbling out into the open. (None of The Haunting’s were complete surprises to me as an adult reader, but may well have bowled me over in my early teens. Still, the revelation scene was very satisfying.)

In essence, The Haunting is about how a family can become entirely skewed by its need to repress some innate characteristic. To all outward appearances such families are entirely “normal” — perhaps, even, a little too normal for comfort, being too regimented and controlled. Here, of course, that characteristic is magical ability, but I tend to read it as a metaphor for other, similar tendencies families can feel the need to repress, particularly in more buttoned-up times, such as creativity, sensitivity, particular emotions, or even all emotion. All of this is centred on Great Grandmother Scholar, who is unrepentant to the end, even when everything’s explained and in the open:

“I’m not one of your weak, whining ‘sorry’ people. I’m too old to be sorry for anything now.”

The Haunting was made into an hour-long children’s TV film in New Zealand (Margaret Mahy’s homeland) in 1987, as The Haunting of Barry Palmer. Perhaps because it was a co-production with a US network, it has some good effects for a kids’ TV show of the time (it seems to have had a slightly higher budget than an equivalent UK show, anyway), and only alters the plot to bring a bit more explicitly magical conflict on screen. (It can be seen, cut into 10-minute segments, at NZ On Screen. It’s probably on YouTube, too.)

(There seem to have been a few supernatural/science-fictional kids’ TV productions in New Zealand around the same time, and it’s a pity they’re not more available in the UK. There was Under the Mountain in 1981, based on Maurice Gee’s novel about telepathic twins, and the TV-original Children of the Dog Star in 1984, which features those two 80s standbys, unscrupulous property developers and child contact with aliens. I wonder if there are more. Do tell me if you know of any.)

Mahy’s second Carnegie win was for another supernatural YA, The Changeover (1984), and odds-on I’ll be reviewing that in Mewsings some time soon.

Six years after the death of his father, 13-year-old Simon Wood (“Awkward age”, as one character puts it) learns his mother is to remarry. Simon pretty much worships his father, a major in the army who was killed in Aden in circumstances that hint he may have been acting a little more imperialistically than he should have. His mother’s new man, Joe Moreton, is his father’s opposite: “pacifist, ban-the-bomb”, an artist no less (a newspaper cartoonist and painter), a man who rose to success from a working class background, with the result that he has, to Simon’s mind, “too much money and no sense of how things were done”. Simon — who comes across as a bit of a snob, for instance in the way he’s ashamed of his school’s plastic guttering — finds him “animal and yobbish”.

Worse, Simon learns what’s going on not from his mother, but through an overheard conversation at the art gallery where she works. They’re having a show of Joe Moreton’s paintings and cartoons, and Simon, bored, drinks a few complimentary glasses of wine before hiding away behind some decorations. From there, he hears a couple of snide, gossipy patrons talking about Joe Moreton and “the brigadier’s daughter”. “Hot little lady, that one,” one says, before Simon realises they’re talking about his mother. I love how Westall describes the moment Simon is found and confronts his mother and Joe:

“Then suddenly, without a thing being said, everybody knew that everybody knew.”

The next thing, Simon’s mother is informing him they’re selling the family home in Croydon and she and Simon’s young sister Jane are moving up to Joe’s house in the village of Gorsley in Cheshire. Simon at first refuses to go with them. He’s a boarder at a private school, and is going to spend some of his holidays at an army camp. But when that’s finished, he relents and hitchhikes up to join them. (So we now have drinking alcohol and hitchhiking unaccompanied, both at age 13. There’s worse to come.) But he takes one look at how close his mother, sister, and Joe have already become — loving and playful, warm and far more domestic than his own father ever was — and just has to run away from it. Taking refuge in an abandoned mill in the next field, he spins a fantasy around three old coats hanging on the wall, of:

“…a mum who stayed home and was always there when you needed her; a father around who you could help and ask questions.”

But when he finds a starving cat and her kittens near the mill, he goes back to his mother so they can help the kittens. He can show a fierce, almost angry protectiveness for this helpless animal family, but can’t show affection for his own human one. He agrees to move in with his mother, sister, and step-father, but is constantly finding himself driven to destructive attacks against Joe and his mother. (As he owns his father’s army kit — his most precious possession — he at one point ends up with a loaded revolver. At age 13.) And this is where the supernatural starts to find its way in.

Simon sees three scarecrows in the field by the old mill. They weren’t there before. He feels there’s something familiar about them, and finds himself constantly watching them. When he finally connects them with a story he’s heard about the mill — a love-triangle that turned murderous — and connects that with how he feels about his mother and her new husband, he starts to grow afraid. And each day, the scarecrows get closer. Even if Simon knocks them down, the next day they’re up on their stilts again, heading for him.

Simon obviously has “issues”. He has sudden, uncontrollable bursts of anger he calls his “devils”. The only emotion he’s been taught to process is fear, and that by his father, whose advice was to turn towards what you fear and deal with it in the most confrontational way — which may be what finished him off. This is why Simon’s grief for his father is so unacknowledged and unprocessed, until it becomes so strong it can only be dealt with as anger. And how does he deal with the many complex emotions brought up by his mother’s remarriage? Anger. And one of the first things we learn about Simon is that his anger, his “devils”, have left him “very frightened of himself”. So, if his only way of processing fear is through anger, and that anger makes him afraid of himself, it’s no wonder he’s messed up.

The scarecrows, seemingly driven to relive a past event through Simon’s pent-up emotion (a situation that recalls Alan Garner’s Owl Service and Penelope Lively’s Astercote) are themselves things of unresolved, frustrated anger:

“They had lived on their own hate for thirty years, and it was a thin, bitter, unsatisfying thing.”

Reading The Scarecrows is like being jostled between Simon’s increasingly unpleasant outbursts (calling his mother a whore, waving a loaded revolver) and how poorly he is dealt with by his mother and step-father. It’s evident nobody has helped him process the death of his father — he has been stuck away in a private school most of the time, with fellow pupils as likely to bully him as befriend him. While his sister has had plenty of time to get to know Joe Moreton as a person, and so love him as a stepfather, it’s a done deal by the time Simon gets to know him. And while his mother, thanks to Joe, is only now learning how unloving her first husband was, how self-destructive and ultimately afraid of the human part of life — “afraid of going grey, getting old, coming home every night and letting the kids jump all over him while he was watching the telly” — she doesn’t give any thought to how having such a father must have affected Simon, how it must have taught him all the wrong ideas about what it was to be a man. “I never knew what love was, till I met you,” she tells Joe, but doesn’t seem capable of passing the lesson on to her much-in-need-of-it son. It’s a situation of emotional blindness in one generation inculcating it in the next, and so perpetuating the misery.

The Scarecrows was first published in 1981, and won the Carnegie Medal (making Westall the first person to win it twice). Published for the first time today, I think any review would likely bring up the term “toxic masculinity”. For here we get a look at its origins in the ways some families deal — or don’t — with that “awkward age”, and with such supposedly un-masculine emotions as grief and vulnerability. Troubled boys, forced to act like little soldiers, become hounded by devils, and end up acting like them.

The Scarecrows doesn’t spell this out, but leaves it to the reader to judge both Simon and his situation, which seems to be another characteristic of the more powerful YA novels of that era — an often unflinching harshness of material, dealt with in a very matter-of-fact style, and no explicit authorial judgement. In this way it reminds me of Alan Garner’s Red Shift and William Rayner’s Stag Boy. But also of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls, proving it’s not just a thing of that era, after all.

I didn’t feel The Scarecrows had quite the cathartic resolution it needed — I’ve no sense that anything is definitely going to change for Simon, though it’s certainly not as bleak as Garner’s Red Shift — but it’s a powerful novel all the same, and certainly makes me want to read more from Westall.

First published in October 1914 (shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, which can’t have helped sales much), The Hole of the Pit is the only novel by Adrian Ross, and aside from a short story (“By One, by Two, and by Three”, published in 1887), his only work of weird fiction. But when it was reprinted for the first time in Ramsey Campbell’s anthology Uncanny Banquet in 1992, Campbell wrote: “Only its extreme rarity has prevented it from being acknowledged as one of the first masterpieces of the novel of supernatural terror.” Its base-under-siege main plot, romantic subplot, and first person narration in a 17th century style recall William Hope Hodgson, while the novel itself is dedicated to M R James. (Whom Ross — real name Arthur Reed Ropes — knew, both of them being dons at King’s College, Cambridge, at one point. By the time he wrote The Hole of the Pit, though, Ross had given up his academic career and had been working for over two decades as a lyricist and producer of musicals in London. He’d also translated fiction for the Oxford University Press’s for-schools imprint, Pitt Press, collaborated with his sister on a children’s novel, On Peter’s Island, and written poetry.)

The Hole of the Pit is set in 1645, shortly after the Battle of Naseby, when Cromwell’s forces have defeated the King’s. The narrator is Hubert Leyton, a 27-year-old scholar and gentleman who has avoided taking any part in the Civil War, siding with neither “the ravaging rakes of the King’s army or the slaughtering saints of the Parliament”. (And a passing acquaintance with Cromwell means he has been mostly left alone.)

One day he’s visited by Eldad Pentry, a self-appointed Puritan preacher from Marsham, the closest village to the castle of Deeping Hold. This is the seat of the Earl of Deeping, who happens to be Leyton’s cousin, though a very different sort of man. After spending years involving himself in wars on the continent, and building up a crew of hard-bitten soldiers, the Earl returned to England to fight for the King, but fled when things turned against them at Naseby. Now he’s holed himself up at Deeping, and is demanding the people of Marsham provide him with enough supplies that he can withstand the inevitable siege when Cromwell comes looking for him. (Deeping Hold is built on an outcrop of rock in a treacherous salt marsh, so it’s unlikely to be assaulted.) The people of Marsham can’t provide what he needs without impoverishing themselves, but the Earl has said if they don’t, he’ll simply take it, and with violence. Normally, the villagers would have appealed to the Earl’s wife, but she has recently died under suspicious circumstances. Pentry, then, wants Leyton to appeal to the Earl on the villagers’ behalf.

It so happens Leyton has just discovered, in his library, an old rhyme about that branch of the family:

When the Lord of Deeping Hold
To the Fiend his soul hath sold,
And hath awaken’d what doth sit
In the darkness of the Pit,
Then what doth sit beneath the Hole
Shall come and take him body and soul.

Leyton goes with Pentry, and after witnessing how the Earl and his men have already assaulted the village (among other things, blowing up Pentry’s house, upon hearing he’d gone for help), sets out alone in a boat to reach the castle. On the way, he passes directly over the underwater “Hole” of the prophecy:

“There was nought to frighten a man, save the evil odour; and this seemed to rise from a certain grey glistering slime, whereof streaks and patches lay on the thick water, or coiled lazily towards the side, and now and then a bubble rose and hung long ere it burst. To one so near the water as I was, the blackness of the Hole did not so much appear as from the height above; but even there I could see that it made a round of some eighteen yards across, as I judged.”

He finds his cousin the Earl a doom-haunted man, alternating between bouts of dangerous vivacity and forlorn despondency, and seeming at times to see his dead wife (whose death he obviously feels guilty for). With him at the castle, as well as forty or so soldiers, is an Italian woman, Fiammetta Bardi, who joined him and his men some years back after they rescued her from a mob that had just killed her father, a reputed wizard. Perhaps the book’s most interesting character, Bardi combines Machiavelli and the Borgias in one, with an added dash of black magic. She’s constantly trying to manipulate the power-play on even so small a stage as Deeping Hold, has an evident knowledge of poisons, and in the novel’s most explicitly supernatural scene, performs a rite to summon a devil to get advice on how to deal with their desperate situation. Also at Deeping Hold is Rosamund Fanshawe, a gentlewoman and cousin to the Earl’s late wife, who soon comes to be Leyton’s only real ally once he finds himself trapped at the castle — for, as soon as he arrives, the Earl takes him as a hostage and has his boat broken up for firewood.

It’s a dangerous enough situation as it is — only exacerbated by the Earl having an enormous store of stolen gunpowder in the castle’s cellar — but there’s also the Thing from the Hole. (The title The Hole of the Pit seems a bit tautologous, but the novel uses “the Pit” as a name for Hell, so it could be taken as meaning something like “The Hole into Hell”. It’s a crude title nonetheless, and can’t have helped sales, but for a now classic work of weird fiction seems oddly perfect.) Ross handles the horror aspects of the novel well, building up the assaults of the creature (if creature it is) from the Hole subtly and gradually. At one point the narrator and several soldiers go out in a boat to bury one of their dead on a small islet among the marshes, only for that section of land to be suddenly sucked away. It might simply have been unstable ground, but Leyton noticed an odd stirring in the waters of the marshes just beforehand, as well as the telltale stink of slime. Later, a man in full armour is thrown into the Hole, only to float up again a moment later. They haul him in, but find the armour an empty shell — all but one boneless foot.

We never really learn the true nature of the Thing in the Hole. (It’s never even called a Thing.) Fiammetta Bardi is the only one familiar with the supernatural, and she gives dark hints:

“There are strange things in this world we see, and in the world unseen, and yet stranger, perchance, in the world of the border.”

(Which makes me wonder if Ross had read Hodgson’s House on the Borderland.)

It’s an enjoyable short horror novel, one that would have been perfect for Hammer or Amicus, if they’d had the budget for a sea-dwelling slime-thing and the destruction of a small castle. Ross’s pastiche on 17th century prose feels spot on (Arthur Reed Ropes was a lecturer in history and poetry, after all), with small details — like Cromwell being referred to dismissively as “Noll Cromwell”, or the way Eldad Pentry doesn’t doff his hat when brought in to see Leyton — adding to the feel that this author knows the times he’s writing of, but is wielding his scholarship lightly. The slow vice-grip of the Earl’s instability, Bardi’s constant scheming, and the ever-encroaching attacks of the slime-thing, are all handled with a nice balance of subtlety and shock, counterpointed by the understated romance between Hubert and Rosamund.

Ultimately, it’s a book about moderation, particularly in regard to religious beliefs. Leyton sees both sides in the Civil War as driven by extremes, forcing everyone in the country to be polarised into one camp or the other, backed up on one side by the unforgiving nature of religious Puritanism, and on the other by the established but tyrannical idea of the Divine Right of Kings. The more practical Leyton knows that, though he may be a Christian, “the Lord has been known to let the worse cause win the field”, so it’s a man’s actions, not his beliefs that count. And those actions should tend towards forgiveness and humanity: “I have seen more than once that a man eaten up with the zeal of religion is wont to think but little of the earthly good of others,” he writes. His own secret belief is that “the infinite mercies of the Lord… are beyond the bounds of our creeds and controversies.” But to say so — to say anything, really — would be considered heresy, so he keeps quiet.

This theme is handled lightly, though, and never gets in the way of the weird yarn. Ross doesn’t have that peculiarity of outlook you find in the more classic writers of weird horror — Machen’s belief in the extremes of sanctity and sin, Blackwood’s in the technicalities of the occult, Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, or even James’s stuffy male-only academicism — which may be partly why The Hole of the Pit doesn’t have more of a reputation. But most likely it’s down to simply not being read, and it’s a book that deserves to be. The Hole of the Pit is a treat-in-waiting if you like classic weird fiction. I would certainly like to have had more in the same vein from Ross.