Fall is a time for dark and stormy nights. Windy nights and chills up the spine - it’s definitely the time for ghost stories! So when the season starts turning to tea-and-blanket weather, we at JamBear Press like to pull out an old favorite: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.
Le Fanu was an Irish writer from the nineteenth century who wrote horror and mystery stories at the time when the genres were just developing. He probably owes a lot of his current recognition to M. R. James (
Turn of the Screw), who was a fan of his work and collected and edited a compilation of his short stories in 1923, fifty years after Le Fanu’s death.
Le Fanu doesn’t seethe or brood – in fact, for a writer who dealt in vampires and ghosts, his style is often somewhat gentle, leading you in with a smoothness that carries over and past the prose structures of his day. If he had to be summed up, he’s a storyteller you can trust to take care of you – he doesn’t make a point of being puzzling or shocking, and the normalcy with which he narrates can only add a certain chill factor, because he’s not shy either.
The short story that gets the most love at JBP is probably
An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street, which is essentially the story of two college student friends undergoing the age-old tradition of rooming with someone in order to afford the worst apartment ever, except they really do choose the worst lodgings ever.
He holds up in novellas, although we have mostly read his short stories and only have
The Evil Guest to recommend. Still,
The Evil Guest, which takes place in an isolated, crumbling manor hidden by swathes of mist and sleeping forests, offers up a scene-setting that still gets a lot of rib-nudging:
“If our modest fare does not suit him,” said Marston, with sullen bitterness, "he can depart as easily as he came. We, poor gentlemen, can but do our best. I have thought it over, and made up my mind."
…
Having said this in a cold, decisive way, he turned and left her, as it seemed, not caring to be teased with further questions. He took his solitary way to a distant part of his wild park, where, far from the likelihood of disturbance or intrusion, he was often wont to amuse himself for the live-long day, in the sedentary sport of shooting rabbits. And there we leave him for the present, signifying to the distant inmates of his house the industrious pursuit of his unsocial occupation, by the dropping fire that sullenly, from hour to hour, echoed from the remote woods.Ghost stories over at JBP are treated a lot like meals – that is, the experience is better when they’re shared. So wait until it’s dark and grab someone to read with! You can find samples of his stuff at
Project Gutenberg (make sure to check on your local copyright laws!) or you can head down to your local bookstore and
look him up.
