Our revels now are ended
Jan. 9th, 2012 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustFriday being Twelfth Night, Christmas is now officially Over - for I am a traditionalist, and my Christmas both begins and ends later than other people's. We celebrated with one last treat, Phantoms at the Phil, three new ghost stories read in the library of the Lit & Phil by their authors - a treat all the sweeter for the probability that the company will not reassemble next year, that our actors themselves will melt like spirits into air, into thin air.
First, though, the apparitions each in turn told us their stories. Sean O'Brien, not for the first time, opted for a narrative of supernatural horror without a ghost: Ex Libris is an account of a man trapped in a nightmare in which all the world is paper and all the seas are dark and ominous as ink. Why was this so very funny? Because it was happening to someone else and not to us, because of the interesting companions he met along the way, because Sean O'Brien is a master of this particular mixture of menace, unease and black hunour?
Gail-Nina Anderson's story, Expanding the Business, returned to the real world and a very traditional ghost: a young man accepts the challenge to spend the night alone with something reputed to be haunted, and suffers an ordeal by unseen presence. The laughter this time was of recognition and surprise - and just a touch of shock at the macabre presence of Mr Moorcock's toes.
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desperance always reads last: you wouldn't want to follow a Chaz Brenchley ghost story. For one thing, he is very, very good at this, and for another, his ghosts are not in the least funny, and while they may be horrifying, they are also pitiful. So, in In the Broken Heart of Glass, a man watching over his dying friend in a gorgeous glass palace overlooking the Tyne encounters a ghost - and the ghost is terrible, but mortality and loss are also terrible, and it is the awareness of these which gives the ghost its particular force.
When I write my literary critique of the writing of Chaz Brenchley, there will be a chapter on 'the haunted bathroom' - and I might have had more to say about that, butdurham_rambler needs to use my printer, so it will have to wait.
First, though, the apparitions each in turn told us their stories. Sean O'Brien, not for the first time, opted for a narrative of supernatural horror without a ghost: Ex Libris is an account of a man trapped in a nightmare in which all the world is paper and all the seas are dark and ominous as ink. Why was this so very funny? Because it was happening to someone else and not to us, because of the interesting companions he met along the way, because Sean O'Brien is a master of this particular mixture of menace, unease and black hunour?
Gail-Nina Anderson's story, Expanding the Business, returned to the real world and a very traditional ghost: a young man accepts the challenge to spend the night alone with something reputed to be haunted, and suffers an ordeal by unseen presence. The laughter this time was of recognition and surprise - and just a touch of shock at the macabre presence of Mr Moorcock's toes.
desperance always reads last: you wouldn't want to follow a Chaz Brenchley ghost story. For one thing, he is very, very good at this, and for another, his ghosts are not in the least funny, and while they may be horrifying, they are also pitiful. So, in In the Broken Heart of Glass, a man watching over his dying friend in a gorgeous glass palace overlooking the Tyne encounters a ghost - and the ghost is terrible, but mortality and loss are also terrible, and it is the awareness of these which gives the ghost its particular force.When I write my literary critique of the writing of Chaz Brenchley, there will be a chapter on 'the haunted bathroom' - and I might have had more to say about that, but
durham_rambler needs to use my printer, so it will have to wait.
