The 6th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, edited by Robert Aickman
My previous reviews of these Fontana Great Ghosts by Robert Aickman linked here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/04/30/the-fontana-great-ghost-stories-chosen-by-robert-aickman/
My previous reviews regarding this book’s editor: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/
My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
WHEN I READ THE STORIES IN THE 6th BOOK, MY REVIEW WILL APPEAR IN THE COMMENT STREAM BELOW.
CLARIMONDE by Théophile Gautier
Translated by Lafcadio Hearn
“Poor country priest though I was, I led every night in a dream — would to God it had been all a dream! —“
Sardanapalus by Somnambulus, this seems today to have become the purest covivid dream, here engendered by the literally figurative lockdown of a Priest’s calling, entered into by a vow of a few seconds. A most powerful and carnally expressive work, even more powerful than I remember it, about his temptation by the ultimate seductress, one who borders on the edge of coquetry by death. If one airbrushes the overdone vampiredom aspect of this story, it would become even more a classic to die for!
It is also a battle that seems to be one that Aickman truly feels within himself, judging by my instinct about him… as he himself faces his own Clarimonde, this beseeching, beckoning “fair one” – “and I felt my bosom transfixed by more swords than those of Our Lady of Sorrows.”
And in tune with the two preceding Aickman Fontana volumes I have real-time reviewed so far, it contains this sentence — “From that night my nature seemed in some sort to have become halved, and there were two men within me, neither of whom knew the other.”
Pingback: Clarimonde by Théophile Gautier | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews Edit
And, with tongue in cheek perhaps (as I myself sometimes, if rarely, have in my gestalt real-time reviews), or with an eye towards political satire, Aickman chooses the next story, as attritional as the previous one above … with forces draining us of goodness like an evil laundry, a work influential upon his own “Residents’ Only” &c. , or vice versa?
THE GREY ONES by J.B. Priestley
This is now a story firmly established for our times today. A conspiracy-theory story that rings true! No longer tongue in cheek or satirical, but in raw horrifying reality. That Blakean “evil principle” manipulating our lives, with ostentatious fountain pen and a name as ordinary as Smith. A Tarr and Fether fable. New trade restrictions and export licences. A so-called painter with the name Firbright, its ‘e’ missing, representing a remorseless heat in ironic contrast to the text’s mention of a “cold, cold Hell”. Even one’s own friends and relations are part of the conspiratorial clusters, vampiric dampers all of them, “choosing skins for lampshades.” I now feel myself to be on the last balcony for real, overlooking their conclaves: the “big, semi-transparent toads” praising “Adaragraffa — Lord of the Creeping Hosts.” Seriously boorish. Seriously disturbing.