2007 collection of short horror stories in the style of H. P.
Lovecraft and M. R. James. Kyle Murchison Booth just wants to be left
alone to work on his antique books and letters. But supernatural
events keep happening to him.
In her introduction, Monette explains her admiration for
Lovecraft and James, and her wish to write in the same vein, but with
male characters who were more psychologically complex, and female
characters who were… well, present at all. (She also admires Henry
James and The Turn of the Screw, but nobody's perfect.) She has very
largely succeeded.
Booth was inspired by The Statement of Randolph Carter, and is a
fairly weak sort of fellow: in the first story, Bringing Helena
Back, he is persuaded by his rather more dynamic friend to help out
in a necromantic ritual to resurrect the friend's dead wife. It
doesn't end well.
In fact very little could be said to end well here. The ghosts of
Booth's world are always malevolent, and while their hatred may in
principle focus on those who did them dirt in life it often isn't
well-aimed. They make an area unpleasant simply by existing there,
they give bad dreams to the sensitive, and they may well kill people
who simply remind them of their past tormentors.
Meanwhile various facets of Booth's past and present are explored as
side notes within the stories, which I think work better taken as a
group than they would have individually: The Bone Key has him
ambushed by disturbing relatives of his deceased mother, for example,
while The Green Glass Paperweight looks at the guardianship he was
under after his parents' death. In Drowning Palmer he visits his old
school:
I found—and was filled by the discovery with something akin to
despair—that I remembered the route to the dormitories with perfect
clarity.
Even when going about his usual business he has an appealing voice:
Moreover, by that point in my reasoning, my conscience as an
archivist had calculated how long those diaries had been sitting in
that corner unheeded, and even in the midst of my dread and
indecision, I was appalled.
and although painfully shy he has an ear for the perfect line:
He left me then, with Miss Chatteris to sit by me. I was too ill to
mind.
These are of course stories of suggestion rather than gore, and some
may find the pace slow. If you like the style of Lovecraft (as
distinct from the Cthulhu mythos) or James, this won't be a problem
for you. High points for me were Wait for Me and The Inheritance of
Barnabas Wilcox, the latter in particular being Jamesian in a way
that other pastichers simply haven't managed to capture. Highly
recommended.
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