No. 472 Cheyne Walk by A.F. Kidd & Ricke Kennett, Ash Tree Press, 2002

As a rule, I’m not interested in pastiche, at least when it is defined as a continuation, in the same style, of a series character created by someone else. They’re kind of like Elvis Sightings. I confess I read Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Per Cent Solution and Ellery Queen’s A Study in Terror, but I was young then. In the years since, I have been quite content to stick to the Holmesian Canon and disregard the innumerable continued adventures by other writers. I am likewise happy sticking to only the Fleming Bonds, the canonical Conan, the Dent Doc Savages, and so on. And quite honestly, though I am probably missing out on some otherwise excellent writing, I don’t read Lovecraftian stories by other writers. (OK, I have always been intrigued by Dereleth’s Solar Pons, though I have yet to r ead any of them. But his approach is unique enough that I will probably get around to them one of these days (although Basil Copper’s Pons stories – pastiches of pastiches- will probably not be on that list.))

But as I mentioned last week, I was unable to resist reading the pastiches of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, No. 472 Cheyne Walk, by A. F. Kidd and Rik Kennett. I’m sorry to say that my own personal feelings about pastiches have only been reinforced. The authors write independently of one another, collaborating only on one story. Many of the stories are at least inspired by those untold cases alluded to in Hodgson’s original stories. For my money, Kidd’s stories are the more successful, though she hasn’t got Hodgson’s knack for the genuinely creepy. Hodgson, like all my favorite fantasy authors, was a master of knowing what to leave out of s story. When he refers to an awful case where a child’s hand kept manifesting in the center of the pentacle and patting the floor, it is genuinely an unsettling moment. Kidd, forced to construct a narrative around this incident, wanders off into pagan mysticism that may be interesting but is otherwise pretty mundane. The first story in the book, The Darkness, also takes up one of the untold tales. It is more successful, though the ending is abrupt and unsatisfying.

By far, the weakest two tales in the book are Kennett’s The Roaring Paddocks and the near-interminable The Keeper of the Minter Light. The first takes Carnacki to the Australian outback, and while the monster is real, the plot is reminiscent of those Scooby-Doo stories where the villain seeks to scare the victims in order to drive down real estate values that he can then scoop up on the cheap. It’s also the second longest tale in the book.

The Keeper of the Minter Light is…hard to describe. It is the longest and most tedious story in this collection. For me, one of the great attractions of all Hodgson’s fiction but particularly of the Carnacki stories, is the notion of the Mystery of the Universe. Carnacki is a solitary explorer wandering through a fog-enshrouded universe, getting only glimpses of the Forces that surround us. There is an intimacy in those stories, where we share these partial visions. And again, Hodgson knows that his most important task is to not tell us everything. In KOTML, Kennet goes to the opposite extreme. He throws in so many cosmic this-ses and thats that they overwhelm the story and become not awe-inspiring, but simply tiresome. And Carnacki flip-flops back and forth between passive observer and action-hero. Sustaining a sense of cosmic horror and wonder for this length is possible, as witness Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland, but here, the storyteller is not up to the task.

To be fair, no one can be expected to live up to Hodgson’s standard, just as no one can be expected to live up to Doyle’s, regardless of how talented the writer may be. What we love about these writers and their creations is their uniqueness of vision. I don’t personally need any more than what they have offered.

(One of LIM’s readers commented that Carnacki had made an appaearance in a comic called Gravel, while alan Moore is using the character as part of the next League of Extraordinary Gentlemen storyline. I’m looking forward to both. And I don’t consider either of these to be pastiches.)

The Amazing Dreams of Andrew Latter by Harold Begbie, Ash Tree Press, 2002

Ash Tree Press, a small Canadian press, has done a fantastic job of resurrecting obscure and forgotten supernatural stories. They publish only 500-600 copies of each, and therefore the books are a bit pricey (around $40-$45 US), but the books are so well put together, both physically and in content, that they are still a bargain. Many of the earliest books – the press started in 1994- have become valuable collector’s items themselves, while still selling far below the original editions. Dedicated ghost story fans have turned up dozens, if not hundreds, of genre stories by popular authors and Ash Tree as salted these in amongst the better known stories to produce essentially definitive editions. H.R. Wakefield, E.F. Benson, and A. M. Burrage have merited four volumes of short stories apiece, while a number of others have two. Novels like Marion Fox’s Ape’s Face and Jessie Douglas Keruish’s The Undying Monster had never even shown up on my radar before, and neither has ever been reprinted since their first issuance in, respectively, 1914 and 1922. As you can tell, I am a big fan of Ash Tree Press, and hope before I die to complete my collection.

That said, some things that are obscure and forgotten are deservedly so. The Amazing Dreams of Andrew Latter, the fourth in Ash Tree’s Occult Detective Library, belongs to this category. The gimmick is mildly interesting: Latter can focus his dream state so that he travels into the past to solve the mystery of the moment. But the mysteries themselves fall short of mediocrity, and Begbie is a pedestrian and unimaginative storyteller. However, in the last story in the book, The Flying Blindness, amidst the lackluster prose and a plot that would shame a sixth grader, there are two pages of remarkably intense, affecting writing. Latter’s dream self follows a drunken man to the decaying attic where the man lives. The rain pours in through the holes in the roof; there is no furniture save for a filthy mattress, only a stubby candle for light. In one corner, there is a cat tethered to a wall by a stout cord. It is wet and frightened. What follows is as harrowing a scene of cruelty and torture as I’ve ever come across in classic supernatural fiction. The intensity disappears out the window with the cat. The ludicrous climax of the story, the ‘answer’ to the mystery, hinges on this scene. It’s an ill fit. The Amazing Dreams of Andrew Latter is of historical interest, but no more.