flemmings | (no subject)

There are advantages to being an Ancient of Days. As in: I'm rearranging the Kitchen Art Gallery (the sidewalk-dollar-store pictures and cards that soften some of the rectangularity of that unfortunate window between the kitchen and mudroom, and also block sight of the ugly mudroom itself); I go to line things up from the mudroom side of the window, where kitchen grunge can't get at them; I catch sight of The Year's Best Fantasy doorstopper I unearthed from-- oh what? the mudroom bookcase? And I say to myself, which year is that, could it be--? It could. 1989, number 2, and contains the text of M John Harrison's The Great God Pan.

(Parenthetically I see why they changed the name to The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror in short order, because half the stories at a guess are already that.)

So I read it, and a brilliantly unpleasant read it is too. But I'm someone with an anxiety disorder, apt to find horror lingering in the oddest of places; and I wonder why it works for people who aren't? (Just as, for whatever reason, I never had the first clue why anyone would find The Turn of the Screw scary. MR James' odd things seen out the corner of the eye-- hell, the whole tatty late Victorian setting of James' stories-- are instinct with menace to the point I cannot read them. James? As frightening as Lovecraft, which is to say, risibly not at all.)

The horror in Harrison's story, for me, is caused in great part by the English setting: because all of England gives me the fantods now. I have no idea why. Streetview, photographs, even the English landscape paintings featured at First Known When Lost, carry an unplaceable but sharp sense of unease. 'This place is not *right.*' 'Something terrible is about to happen.' Exactly as Pam in the story finds the physical world about her-- not right, not friendly, falling into chaos. No surprise when that segues into odd glowing things in the passageway.

My antidote BTW is to think of Tokyo: an unreal city, but not menacing in the least.

(Googling around I find Harrison himself saying that the novel owes more to Charles Williams than Arthur Machen. I can see that: but Williams always tips his hand; you know where you are with him; and with Harrison you don't.)

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I apologise for England. :) And I hope the Library stories don't give you too many fantods.

I have to admit my mental reference for The Turn of the Screw is the Britten opera, rather than the original James book. Of course, that does actually make the ghosts explicit, because it's hard to make them figments of the governess' imagination when they're actually standing on stage and singing, especially when she's not present. But the music is lovely.

I used to love England, but I was probably seeing it filtered through the mental England I'd grown up-- Nesbitt, Garner, and the Beatles. I still like it in certain literary settings- Holmes, steampunk, and the kids' view of children's books- where its very mundane fantods (if that isn't an oxymoron) are superceded by style and generally cancelled by subject matter.

Nothing with Chinese dragons, however business-suited they may be, can fantod me. A world away from grimy glass and dishes left dirty in the sink.

Id say the 20th century undid much of the Turn of the Screw. If it's all in the governess' imagination: why then, she's suffering from a nameable psychological condition, and unseen horror vanishes like ghosts at sunrise. And if they *are* ghosts-- well then, this is a ghost story, and will go the way of such. Boxes can be useful.

MR James' ghost stories slay me because they're so random. No hint of psychological input and hence-- there are ghosts (empirical fact), this might actually happen, this might actually happen to meeeee....!!!! (turns on all the lights and doesn't sleep till it gets light)

That supports a feeling I have, that a lot of horror depends on uncertainty (is/isn't it true?) and possibility (it could happen to me). Outright badness of a scale which really can't be imagined as happening to one's self defeats the attempt to be horrific. Disgusting, certainly, but not horrific.