Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites

Katy Soar (editor)

British Library Tales of the Weird

Standing stones, stone circles, tumps, barrows and ancient clearings still remain across the British Isles, and though their specific significance may be obscured by the passing of time, their strange allure and mysterious energy persist in our collective consciousness.
Assembled here in tribute to these relics of a lost age are accounts of terrifying spirits haunting Stonehenge itself, stories of awful fates for those who impose modernity on the sacred sites and grim tales in which unwitting trespassers into the eternal rites of pagan worship find themselves part of an enduring legacy of blood. To represent the breadth of the sub-genre, authors include Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and Rosalie Muspratt alongside lesser-known writers from the periodicals and journals of the British Library collections.

It's been a little while since I dug into one of the Tales of the Weird series but this one had the perfect subject matter to lure me back.

The book opens oddly with an extract from the wonderful 'Ringstones' by Sarban, the pen name of British diplomat John W. Wall, a story I thoroughly enjoyed when I read it in the Tartarus Press edition a few years back and it doesn't deserve to be experienced in this diminished manner.

Through the rest of the book we are provided with the usual array of authors of note - Algernon Blackwood, E.F. Benson, Arthur Machen, H.R. Wakefield and Nigel Kneale  - and those who are unfamiliar.  There are a number of standouts.  The quintet metioned are all well represented with Wakefield's 'The First Sheaf' being a long time pulpy fun favourite. Whilst, of those lesser known, Frederick Cowles' 'Lisheen' proved to be a devilish read and Mary Williams' 'The Dark Land' was a poignant tale of the power of the land.

For the most part this is a solid read and lovers of a stone circle or a standing stone will find much to enjoy here and the collection has a number of highlights but it's odd beginning, a stuttering ending and some thematic repetition between the stories means I'm left with a slight feeling of incompleteness and I'd love to see the series revisit the topic in a more definitively wide ranging fashion. 

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The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan

Michael Wheatley (ed)
British Library Tales of the Weird

Many writers in the early twentieth century particularly were fascinated by Pan as a figure of unbridled vivacity and pagan ecstasy, but also associated the god and folk hero with a sense of danger and even horror.
Selecting an eclectic cross-section of tales and short poems from this boom of Pan-centric literature, many first published in the influential Weird Tales magazine, this new collection examines the roots of a cultural phenomenon and showcases Pan’s potential to introduce themes of queer awakening and celebrations of the transgressive into the thrillingly weird stories in which he was invoked.

I wonder if there's a deity more suited to these times than Pan; a god continually remoulded through his renaissance over the centuries to reflect our changing attitudes towards the untamed and the natural, a god cut adrift from his roots in Greek antiquity and now free to roam across our wildest imaginings.

Opening this fascinating collection of prose and poetry is the poem 'Pan A Double Villanelle' by the arch-decadent Oscar Wilde, a lament for the absence of the wild, the free, the colourful and imaginative in the grey lifelessness of England at that time.  

Following it we have the story that gives this collection its subtitle, Arthur Machen's 'The Great God Pan' which despite being amongst the most famous stories revolving around the goat footed god it should be noted that Pan is entirely absent from the story. In the tale a young woman is operated on and "a slight lesion in the grey matter" is made to allow her "to see the god Pan".  Whether or not this is what happens to poor Mary we never know but after waking from the operation she experiences a moment of wonder followed by utter insanity at which point she exits the story to be eventually replaced by another.  I remain unconvinced that in his use of the name Pan that Machen is actually invoking the god but is instead using the name as a metaphor for life beyond the confines of civilisation and conventional morality.  In the aftermath of the operation Mary sees the wildness within and becomes absent of morality and sanity, a condition passed on to her daughter who lives her life in a state of wildness, in the amorality of nature, until it's pointed out to her and she crumbles away, an example of the flimsiness of a life lived without the moral restraints that modern civilisation brings.

George Egerton's 'Pan' takes a different track to its predecessor, a feature common to the rest of this very well curated anthology, where it's the music of Pan that awakens a longing in a young woman that is misunderstood until it's too late.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem 'A Musical Instrument' tells of the God's chase of Syrinx and the creation of his characteristic pipes before Barry Pain allows the God to catch a different quarry in his tale of irresistible compulsion, 'The Moon-Slave'.

One of the unexpected delights of the book was the chapter from Kenneth Grahame's 'The Wind in the Willows' which I've never read or even remotely wanted to due to an aversion to anthropomorphised animals but 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' which tells of Rat and Mole's encounter with Pan proved to be a complete delight.

The brilliant Edwardian satirist Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) is represented by 'The Music on the Hill', the first of a run of stories here that I'd read before in other collections, but very happily it makes for an enjoyable re-read as a town bred socialite falls foul of Pan's more vindictive side after she spurns his existence.  Edith Hurley on the other hand is rueful for his absence in the modern world but is open to hints of his presence in her poem 'The Haunted Forest'.  

E.M. Forster's 'The Story of a Panic' positions  Pan as a liberator of the spirit, one who frees those who need it from the straightjacket of 'normal' society, in this case with a thinly veiled story of a young man's realisation of his own sexuality.

Shining above many of the others, even in a collection as good as this, is Algernon Blackwood whose 'The Touch of Pan' with its characteristic rejection of industrial society and it's submergence in the rural and the wild tells a tale of erotic freedom and purity of desire whereas A. Lloyd Bayne's poem 'Moors of Wran' tells of the more destructive aspect of the God..

Until I read it here I was convinced I'd already read Margery Lawrence's 'How Pan Came to Little Ingleton' but I'm not so sure now and very glad to now have done so as it proved to be an amusing tale of Pan's more bucolic and pastoral nature as he guides a belligerent priest to a more caring and accepting place that provided a gently wonderful and witty highlight.

In 'The Devil's Martyr' Signe Toksvig (great aunt of broadcaster Sandi) brings the gothic in the form of avaricious flagellating monks and an escape within the groves of Pan which are lamented in Willard N. Marsh's poem 'Bewitched' and which call to the newly wed Constance in David Keller's 'The Golden Bough'.

The excellent collection ends with a poem and a story by Dorothy Quick, the former an ode to the ecstatic nature of an encounter with the god whereas the latter - actually the older of the two- digs deeper into that idea and the toll it takes as a bride hankers for wildness in a time of domesticity.

At the end when we close the book we are holding a fantastic collection, possibly the best in the series, that encompasses many of the ways which authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries developed and explored and utilised Pan to express notions of freedom, of beauty and of self-determination often placing him in the face of an increasingly homogenised modern, industrial age and one is left wondering how Pan could be once again recalled in our own time of imminent ecological collapse as an avatar for a new green awareness.

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Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-Bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird

Henry Bartholomew (ed)
British Library Tales of the Weird

Unlike the Gothic, which tends to fixate on the past, the haunted, and the ghostly, early weird fiction tends to probe, instead, the very boundaries of reality, exploring the laws and limits of time, space, and matter. This new collection assembles a range of tales from the late 19th and early 20th century that showcase weird fiction’s unique preoccupation with physics, mathematics, and mathematicians. From tales of the fifth dimension and higher space, to impossible mathematics and mirror worlds, these stories draw attention to one of the genre’s founding inspirations—the quest to explore what "reality" means, where its limits lie, and how we cope when we near the answers.

'Mind-Bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird' is an audacious subtitle for a book which one would imagine may deter more potential buyers than it would entice and I would probably put myself, mostly, in the former camp.  However I'm not entirely averse to having my brain boggled and the presence of a favourite Algernon Blackwood story that I hadn't read in a while was enough to get me to take a chance.  Indeed, Blackwood's playful John Silence story 'A Victim of Higher Space' along with the mirror dimensions of his 'The Pikestaffe Case' were the only stories here I already knew and it was fun to revisit them but even more so to have so many new things to try.

The rest of the collection plays fast and loose with time and geography in entirely entertaining ways and has many standouts including the infinite shelves of Jorge Luis Borges' 'The Library of Babel', Robert Heinlein's tesseract architecture '-and He Built a Crooked House -', the pulp romps of Frank Belknap Long's cosmic 'The Hounds of Tindalos' and Henry S. Whitehead & H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Trap'.  But alongside these are six more tales, including by such notables as H.G. Wells and John Buchan, and a fascinating introduction deserving of equal praise in what proved to be an entirely engrossing collection.  Now what are the odds of that.

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Holy Ghosts: Classic Tales of the Ecclesiastical Uncanny

Fiona Snailman (ed)
British Library Tales of the Weird

Churches, monasteries and convents have long been associated with sanctuary: sacred spaces should offer protection from evil in all its forms. This new anthology raises questions about the protection offered by faith, bringing together a collection of tales in which holy places are filled with horror; where stone effigies come to life and believers are tormented by terrifying apparitions. In a host of uncanny stories published between 1855 and 1935, Holy Ghosts uncovers sacrilegious spectres and the ecclesiastically eerie. 

The British Library continues apace with it's collections of the strange and the supernatural with a collection of stories based around churches and those who inhabit them.  These collections have on the whole been pretty solid and some indeed have been excellent - the Pan and the occult detective collections spring to mind - this one is somewhere in the middle.

Theme wise it seems strange that it's taken them this long to get around to a churchy collection and I'm glad they have as there were a couple of stories in here that I didn't know and enjoyed very much.  Sheridan Le Fanu opens the book strongly with the temptations of 'The Sexton's Adventure' and John Wyndham's rather slight 'The Cathedral Crypt' is good pulpy fun to finish the book.  In the intervening pages both Amelia B. Edwards' 'In The Confessional' and Robert Hichens' 'The Face of the Monk' provide engaging stories of redemption and I'm reminded that I need to further explore Hichens who was the author of one of the great strange tales, 'How Love Came to Professor Guildea'.

While we're on the subject of classics, there's a line in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's 'Good Omens' about how every cassette left long enough in a car will eventually turn into 'Best of Queen' well, I'm making a corresponding prophecy that into every unsuspecting supernatural anthology will eventually appear Edith Nesbit's 'Man-Size in Marble'.  I'm pretty sure the number of copies of this story I have in my collection far exceeds the number of books I have.  It's fabulous and deserves it's reputation but by god it's also ubiquitous and it is, of course, here.

Most of the other stories here are quite readable but perhaps not re-readable such as Edith Wharton's devious but obvious 'The Duchess at Prayer' and Mrs Henry Woods' equally obvious 'The Parson's Oath' but Elizabeth Gaskell's 'The Poor Clare' is far, far too long for it's scanty plot and Marguerite Merington's 'An Evicted Spirit' is sentimental claptrap rescued by an occasional enjoyably pithy phrase.

In summary a solid but stolid collection that I can't help but think would have been enlivened by replacing Gaskell's 70 pages with something a little more maverick like 'The Cicerones' by Robert Aickman or enigmatic like Arthur Machen's 'Opening the Door'.

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