REVIEW: “Lost Hearts” by M. R. James

Review of M. R. James, “Lost Hearts,” in Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth, edited by Jen Baker (British Library, 2021): 167-180 — Order here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Many — but not all — of the stories in this collection are first-person recollections of events experienced first-hand, all told to a present audience who is clearly expecting to receive something extraordinary. James’s narrator is recounting his tale in a similar fashion, but unlike some of the other narrators he doesn’t claim to have witnessed the events himself: In fact, the most perplexing part of the story is how it is that the unnamed narrator actually knows any of these events to recount in the first place, if he did not see them first-hand. In particular, we are given insight into the actions and experiences of Stephen Elliot, an 11yo orphan who has come to live with a distant cousin Mr. Abney, that by rights no one but Elliot himself should have had. So: Who is the narrator, and how does he know the story he is narrating? That’s the mystery I want solved!

(First published in The Pall Mall Magazine, 1895.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Was it an Illusion?: A Parson’s Story” by Amelia B. Edwards

Review of Amelia B. Edwards, “Was it an Illusion?: A Parson’s Story,” in Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth, edited by Jen Baker (British Library, 2021): 139-164 — Order here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Something that is incredibly interesting about reading an anthology like Baker’s is the way it allows you to compare styles of horror stories over time. Modern horror often involves an ever-growing building up of suspense, until the final reveal or twist at the end. Many of the 19th-century stories in this volume, however, are less horrorful and more horribly mundane, and Edwards’s is a perfect example of this: The parson’s retelling of his tale has little of suspense in it, and even less of building tension. Much of his report is taken up with the trivialities of being a Schools Inspector in the north of England, who passes his time examining grammar schools and being hosted by curates and squires. The few supernatural events that fill the story are deal with in such a cursory manner that even if the reader wanted to find them scare, they’re so mundanely told that it’s almost impossible.

(First published in Arrowsmith Magazine, 1881.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Walnut-Tree House: A Ghost Story” by Charlotte Riddell

Review of Charlotte Riddell, “Walnut-Tree House: A Ghost Story,” in Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth, edited by Jen Baker (British Library, 2021): 113-136 — Order here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Riddell’s story of Walnut-Tree House, haunted by the spectral grandson of a previous owner, seems in many respects to be a fairly tame, ordinary sort of ghost story: The house lies vacant for many years before a new owner takes it up; he sees the ghostly child; he seeks out the story of the child. What Mr. Stainton finds out about all seems perfectly ordinary, full of all the familiar tropes of 19th-century society: an imprudent marriage, an orphaned brother and sister, a dour grandfather who wants to be rid of them. The story was also strangely unscary, despite the haunting child — the ghost gets a happy ending, the missing will turns up, and the orphan girl, now grown up, becomes an heiress and a bride. It’s almost too many tropes to bear.

(Originally published in Illustrated London News, 1878.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Kentucky’s Ghost” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Review of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “Kentucky’s Ghost”, in Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth, edited by Jen Baker (British Library, 2021): 87-108 — Order here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Content note: Graphic child abuse.

What’s the 19th-century equivalent of “No shit, there I was”? It’s the opening line of Phelps’s story: “True? Every syllable.” (p. 89), and a cracking line it is.

Phelps’s story is a departure from the earlier ones. For one, it’s the first story of the anthology that has a male narrator, Jake, a seasoned sailor who is swapping tales with a compatriot. Indeed, the entire story is thoroughgoingly masculine: At sea, the only lady is the ship Madonna; women intersect with the story only when the ship intersects with land. For another, the doomed child is quite a bit older than the ones met so far (nearly 15), and while there is a mother to mourn him, she is far away and would never have known of her son’s demise were it not for Jake. Finally, it’s not often that a ghost is seen by so many people.

What was most interesting, to me, was the very small discussion at the end when Jake recounts how he’d told the tale to his parson recently, and the parson speculates on wether the boy’s soul is in heaven or hell. It provided an interesting insight into the 19th-century theology of ghosts.

(First published in Atlantic Monthly in 1868.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Ghost of Little Jacques” by Ann M. Hoyt

Review of Ann M. Hoyt, “The Ghost of Little Jacques”, in Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth, edited by Jen Baker (British Library, 2021): 55-84 — Order here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

There was very little in this story to arouse sympathy in the reader. Christine is a serving woman for a loveless family where “the death of a child was no very solemn or very uncommon thing” (p. 58), where death was “the very best thing that could have happened” (p. 59) to a child. Though she likes to think of herself a philosopher, her actions throughout the book are pragmatic, aimed at preserving herself at the expense of the truth. There are two theories as to how little Jacques came to die (for if his death were not in some way unnatural there would have been no reason for him to return in ghostly form) and both of them are distasteful.

Baker in her introduction to the story quotes a contemporaneous review of it, which was not especially favorable, and attempts to provide a different account of it. I, alas, come down on the side of the anonymous New York Times reviewer: This is a story the reader may very well question why they read it.

(First published in Atlantic Monthly, 1863).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell

Review of Elizabeth Gaskell, “The Old Nurse’s Story”, in Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth, edited by Jen Baker (British Library, 2021): 25-52 — Order here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

The old nurse of the title narrates to her young charges a story of their mother, whose upbringing she also had in her care. Through Gaskell’s deft facility with language we are given a clear picture of the nurse’s class and character; her voice is extremely vivid. The story she tells is one of prejudice, bitterness, and hatred — and, of course, a ghostly child –, and pretty much all of the major characters come across as thoroughly unsympathetic — no mean feat!

(First published in Household Words in 1852.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Dead Daughter: A Tale” by Henry Glassford Bell

Review of Henry Glassford Bell, “The Dead Daughter: A Tale”, in Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth, edited by Jen Baker (British Library, 2021): 13-23 — Order here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Baker chose this story as the one to kick off the collection because it is “one of the first literary sources in English to utilise the ghostly revenant child as the source of terror and grief” (p. 13).

This isn’t the only distinct characteristic of the story. It is also told in beautiful prose that is extremely effective at evoking all required emotions, not just terror and horror. In the opening when we are introduce to Adolphus Walstein and his young daughter Paulina, it only takes Bell a few paragraphs to draw the reader into deep sadness with the awareness that Paulina will eventually die — the outrageous sadness that a child should ever not outlive their parent. The rest of the story capitalizes on this sadness, and turns it to horror with brilliant deftness. An absolutely smashing story, would easily fit into any 21st C horror canon.

(Originally published in The Edinburgh Literary Journal, 1831.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth edited by Jen Baker

Review of Jen Baker, ed., Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth (British Library, 2021) — Order here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Do you like ghost stories? Do you like haunting stories about dead children? Do you like to delve into the history of speculative fiction! This is the anthology for you! Jen Baker has collected thirteen (of course) Anglo-American and Irish stories (most written by women!) first published between 1831 and 1925 (and accompanied by a bibliography of sources cited and further reading, in case you want a bit more on the academic side of things.)

The genre of “dead children literature” is pretty popular in that era — unsurprising given the high child mortality rates — but Baker (an academic at the University of Warwick) draws a distinction between the Gothic horror of the stories in her collection with the more common “twee” (her word, p. 7) approach of many poems and elegies of the era. In these stories, the ghostly children are not returning to console or comfort their parents, but for more sinister and strange purposes. But to say more would be spoiling things!

Each story is accompanied by brief biographical information about the authors, and the original publication history of the story. As usual, we’ll link the reviews of the individual stories back to this post as they are published!

Sara L. Uckelman13 Comments

REVIEW: “Diamond Cuts” by Shaoni C. White

Review of Shaoni C. White, “Diamond Cuts”, Uncanny Magazine Issue 41 (2021): Read Online. Reviewed by Isabel Hinchliff.

The first person protagonist of “Diamond Cuts” is magically forced to perform in a two-person play where they must act out real, physical harm. When their former partner dies, their new partner, a hasty replacement with more knowledge of the outside world, makes a plan to break the spell and leave the theater. But his plan might be more likely to kill them than save them, and even if they succeed, it will have far-reaching consequences…

The story begins with a sparkling, visceral paragraph about the narrator eating a star: plucking it from the sky, biting down, and spitting out “shards of glass coated in spittle and blood.” It is terribly beautiful and remains my favorite part of the piece. From that point on, I was a little disappointed in the main plotline of the story and particularly in its conclusion. I was getting ready for an expansive space opera narrated by some sentient heavenly body that could (masochistically) consume stars, but I was given a play about magic, a story trapped within the four walls of a theater house. This subversion of expectations feels deliberate: it brings the reader into the magic of the theater for a moment, since they assume the events of the play are a real part of the story. Still, that opening set up an expectation that I felt wasn’t quite fulfilled. While the physical pain and danger of our narrator’s acting comes up throughout the piece, I wanted more exploration of what it meant to them and why it had to exist in this world. 

Without giving away the exact events of the ending, it leaves many possibilities open and revolves around a theme that doesn’t have a lot of relevance to the rest of the story. It’s just classic; you’ve likely read some version of it before. I wanted more.

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REVIEW: “Embracing the Movement” by Cristina Jurado

Review of Cristina Jurado, “Embracing the Movement”, Clarkesworld Issue 177, June (2021): Read Online. Reviewed by Myra Naik.

A fantastical tale of a strange sort of first contact. Things don’t go the way you may anticipate. There’s delicious buildup about existence in outer space and the different kinds of lives people live. It also features a very creepy payoff.

Different sorts of living spaces, structures and communication types exist in our universe. We have barely begun to understand this universe, and stories like this throw that fact into sharp relief.

A subtle queasiness exists throughout the story. If you enjoy feeling creeped out, this one will be right up your alley.

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