By M.R. James, Leah Moore & John Reppion, Aneke, Kit Buss, Fouad Mezher, Alisdair Wood, George Kambadais, Abigail Larson, Al Davison, Meghan Hetrick &various (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-91422-441-6 (HB)
Thanks to cinema, television and the internet, in modern times our deepest emotions are mostly prodded and provoked by creators through sounds and most especially by visuals, but for the longest time artists got into our heads through words and occasionally static images, letting our own imaginations do all the damage.
A truly Great British tradition is the Christmas Ghost Story. The art form, at least in literary iteration, has never been better expressed than in the cool, dry, chillingly understated tales of scholar and cleric M. R. James, whose sinister soirees and skilful acts of after-dinner revelry ruled in an empire of clerks and bureaucrats, and incredibly high levels of literacy across the classes.
A series of BBC TV adaptations appeared on our small screens sporadically from the late 1960s onwards, thoroughly warping the unformed minds of a generation of kids like me and Mark Gatiss who, in fact, revived the tradition in 2013 with his dramatization of The Tractate Middoth on December 25th 2013 with A Ghost Story for Christmas…
So successful were M. R. James’ painfully small canon of stories that he has been given the honour of defining a genre. “Jamesian” style revolves around and usually includes a familiar if bucolic setting such as an English hamlet, manorial estate or seaside town, ancient European edifices like old Abbeys and University libraries where quiet, naive bookish types finds lost books or ancient artefacts, thereby arousing the ire of something far better left dead and forgotten…
A man equally well known for his educational, scholastic and ecumenical achievements as his horrorist hobby, Montague Rhodes James OM, MA, FBA (August 1st 1862 – June 12th 1936) – when not disturbing the dreams of a nation and empire – was a medieval researcher and latterly Provost of King’s College Cambridge and Eton College. This sedate secondary existence somehow was not at odds with his ceaseless forays into tales of darkness, retribution and debts paid at all cost. His works are a cautionary cavalcade of subdued, understated, ferociously evocative revelations wherein comfortable elements of the ordinary and safely commonplace are over and again suddenly compromised by the relentless howling unknown.
This fearsome full-colour compendium revives and combines eight of his best, as first unleashed in a brace of comics adaptations from Leah Moore & John Reppion realised by an international cast of crafts-folk and published in 2016 – 2017. These tales sacrifice the vague self-inflicted scourging of prose and one’s own warped imagination for visual certainty – if not any greater degree of comfort or safety…
Each volume came with an arcane Introduction (Ramsey Campbell’s ‘Pictures That Live’ in the first and ‘Something is Coming’ by Jason Arnopp in the second), and they are included in this graphic grimoire of eerily arcane anticipation and unspoken outcomes, which also offers a full biographical breakdown of the creators/adaptors.
The perilously refined literary pilgrimage begins with Spanish artist Aneke (Carmen: The Graphic Novel, Ripcord) whose vivid interpretation of ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book’ (first published in National Review, March 1895) finds a student and collector of scriptural antiquities re-experience the close call he had when offered an illicit mediaeval manuscript volume. He had no qualms about purchasing the relic… until he saw what was hidden at the back of the text…
This is followed by Kit Buss (The Thrill Electric, The Masked Knight), whose stylish take adds fresh lustre to the classic ‘Lost Hearts’ (debuting in Pall Mall Magazine, December 1895 and adapted into a TV masterpiece by Robin Chapman for the BBC’s Christmas top-slot in 1973). This describes how young orphan Stephen is adopted by his elderly cousin resident in a remote mansion. The lucky lad’s extremely distant benefactor is obsessed with immortality but the truly disturbing problem is frequent peripheral glimpses of a gypsy girl and Italian boy with holes in their chests…
Both tales were later included in 1904’s anthology Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, as were all the rest that follow.
A far more sedate yet equally sinister situation unfolds here with slow perversity after a university museum curator acquires a rare artwork in ‘The Mezzotint’ (1904). Odd corner of the eye, almost unnoticeable shifts are captured by Fouad Mehzer (Saraya, Samanodal) who brings to unlife a photomechanical print of a local scene depicted seemingly changing whenever people look away. Moreover, research finds elements of that subtly shifting picture bear ghastly echoes of a local atrocity from years past…
From that same landmark 1904 anthology volume comes ‘The Ash-Tree’ – reconfigured with dark vigour here by Alisdair Wood (May Payne, Horrere, Claret) – and forcefully exposing how the inheritor of an ancient, much-accursed country estate discovers to his horror the Things which have caused so much misery over the centuries and where they’ve been hiding…
Without pause, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary Part II continues the Devil’s dance with ‘Number 13’ converted into a potently claustrophobic pictorial narrative by Greek illustrator George Kambadais (The Lion King, John Carter of Mars). Also premiering as prose in GSoaA, it traces the path of a church historian visiting Scandinavia, who whilst staying at one Danish inn uncovers true terror through the uncanny appearances and disappearances of both his sometime neighbours and even the aforementioned thirteenth room itself…
Another gift of that landmark book, ‘Count Magnus’ is limned here by Abigail Larson (The Cats of Ulthar) and coloured by Al Davison, observing as travelogue author Mr Wraxall tours Sweden and becomes obsessed (or maybe possessed?) by the legend of a long gone local potentate. Wraxall breaks all bounds of propriety in his prying – and even some of the padlocks holding the Count’s coffin closed in his fortified mausoleum – before he is done, but by the time the writer regains his senses it’s all gone far too far…
Another deservedly legendary and indeed infamous tale from GSoaA is ‘…Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad…’ It’s one of James’ most celebrated chillers which, as adapted by Jonathan Miller in 1968, set the entire tone and format for the BBC’s seasonal horror-offerings for decades to come. The original prose piece concerns a stuffy, solitary academic who discovers an old whistle whilst poking about in a ruin once occupied by the Knights Templar. He then unleashes something incomprehensible and malign after he blows on it. Here that macabre inescapable concatenation of events is stylishly reconfigured by Al Davison (The Spiral Cage, Doctor Who, The Minotaur’s Tale) and cunningly adds some much-needed gallows comedy to the enterprise, before Meghan Hetrick (Fairest, Young Justice) tackles the last tale of the tome.
Gleaming like starkly exotic stained glass cut to chilling panel size, ‘The Treasure of Abbott Thomas’ was written to “fill up” Ghost Stories of an Antiquary but also included in 1931’s The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James on its own merits. Anthologised many times and places, it was adapted as 1974’s BBC Ghost Story For Christmas.
Delivered in a non-linear narrative, it is a clever treasure hunt tracing scholarly antiquary Mr Somerton and his valet William Brown as they seek a fabled trove of gold reputedly hidden in Germany’s Steinfeld Abbey by renegade feudal cleric Abbot Thomas von Eschenhausen. Smart and ingenious, Somerton gradually deciphers long-unsolved clues and is pulled to numerous locations across Europe, but ultimately is not wise enough to leave what he unearths well alone…
Calmly disquieting, approachably uneasy and superbly scary, these are stories every fear fan should know; and there are plenty more artists and so many more stories just waiting to be exposed to the light of the modern day…
Part I Introduction © 2016 by Ramsey Campbell. Part II Introduction © 2017 by Jason Arnopp. All rights reserved.
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Timeless Terror Treats to Traumatise All Night Long… 8/10