Things that go 'Oink' in the night

A few posts ago, I mentioned the discovery of a series from Wordsworth Editions called Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural.  Three titles from this range were delivered on Christmas Eve by St. Nicholas, whose ashen face, nervous demeanour and somewhat dilated pupils suggested that he had been sampling the wares, (purely in the interests of quality control, I imagine).  In any case, his condition was nothing that a few fortified mince pies could not reverse, and he was his archetypal blithe self again as he sped into the night.  My wife and I have now both enjoyed The Casebook of Carnacki, the Ghost Finder, by WH Hodgson, and I thought I would celebrate this rare and happy spousal coincidence of literary satisfaction with a few words about this book.

Our hero, whose exploits first appeared in The Idler in 1910, is a gentleman of leisure who frequently invites a quartet of friends to dinner - one of whom narrates the stories - and regales these companions with post-prandial accounts of his investigations into apparently paranormal phenomena.  These ghostly goings-on range from mysterious stabbings, through apparitions of phantom children to malign, other-worldly equine and (in the particularly unsettling final tale) porcine manifestations, and are discovered by Carnacki to be caused variously by elaborate human chicanery, genuine supernatural entities, or both. The environment favoured by Hodgson for these tales is that of a vast country estate, populated by families and friends who may be harbouring sinister intentions, and by servants who tend to flee in a huddled mass in the face of apparent mystical mischief, but who occasionally make a reluctant stand.  Imagine Downton Abbey written by Dennis Wheatley, or Scooby Doo by Julian Fellowes, for that matter.

Carnacki investigates these cases by applying a combination of Holmesian forensic and deductive techniques and his knowledge of the supernatural realms, and brings to bear a range of marvellous devices related to the non-earthly aspect of his work.  Thus the stories embody the profound fascination of this period with both the scientific / technological and the spiritual, which is one of the reasons they remain interesting and worthwhile. Another appeal to the modern reader is that these stories (and the genre of which they are among the finest examples) prefigure many later forms and trends, for example: the paranormal detective novels that are so in vogue at present; a fair amount of graphic novel work (e.g. Alan Moore's John Constantine, who became the hero of 'Hellblazer'), many children's TV series and even some aspects of steampunk (witness Carnacki's deployment of the amazing Electric Pentacle).  The best justification for the stories' continued availability, however, is that they are beautifully written.  Hodgson combines a mixture of elegant prose, droll characterisation and vivid description, especially when it comes to delineating various forms of terror and anxiety, to which his protagonist is endearingly, far from immune:

'It produced in me a temporary dazedness in which things and the horror of things became less real.  I stared at them, as a child stares out from a fast train at a quickly passing night-landscape, oddly lit by the furnaces of unknown industries.'

The supernatural lore and literature drawn on by Carnacki is sketched in with a tantalising coyness, providing just enough detail to intrigue and lend an air of (within the context) credibility.  There are constant references to the Sigsand text and the gorgeously vowel-bloated Saaamaaa Ritual, with its unfathomably powerful Unknown Last Line.  This cocktail of precision and vagueness is enhanced by references throughout the stories to the Case of the Black Veil, which is never expanded upon. It is not until the conclusion of The Hog, which features the aforesaid swine of Satan, that Carnacki does anything like flesh out his view of the nature and location of the forces against which he has battled, and the beautifully sustained tone of near-pastiche is continued as he does so.

Please read these stories, and support their estimable publisher by buying the book, several times.  Before you open it, however, do ensure your Pentacle is plugged into the mains.

In search of invisible books

Time, I think, to open another window in the advent calendar that is Christmas life in a modern independent book emporium.  I mean, of course,  The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden City (it does what it says on the fascia).

We are, (need it be said?) on close personal terms with most of the titles in our shop, but to enquire about the few exceptions, we rely on our EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) system.  This, as any (retailing) fule kno, is a suite of linked computer programs that records and analyses the flow of stock in and out of shops. It cannot, of course, be relied upon unquestioningly, but is in most cases preferable to that combination of neglected stock cards, faulty memory and voodoo that pertained before the advent of affordable I.T.  

Every so often, possibly because it has downloaded 2001, a Space Odyssey during closing hours too many times and adopted HAL as a dubious role model, it likes to amuse itself by pretending that a book is in stock when the opposite is very much the case, sending booksellers hurtling vainly around the shelves while it sniggers electronically in a corner. The three titles that our Enumerating Phantoms on Shelves system has selected recently are a football book about Crystal Palace, Conference of the Birds (a Persian epic poem) and The Book Thief.  If, in fact, the stock discrepancy is due to eccentric shoplifting, we must alert the North Hertfordshire constabulary to be on the lookout for a Crystal Palace supporter with a taste for ancient literature who - probably due to a psychological quirk arising from childhood trauma - always betrays his or her activities by liberating an appropriate object.  I expect they're very erudite people on the Crystal Palace terraces, and can imagine  them using allusions to Plato's cave allegory to cast doubt on the referee's interpretation of his sense data, before hurling withering insults in rhyming Persian couplets at their visiting counterparts.  It's a funny old game.

The major event of the day was a very substantial stock delivery of Wordsworth Editions, an imprint that combines budget price points (from £1.99) with attractive, elegant designs, highly readable fonts and good quality paper; (and does not sponsor this blog).  We've been doing very steady trade with their adult and children's classics and poetry, but have now branched out into larger format hardback collections, non-fiction and supernatural classics, the last genre including many authors whose work prefigured the current supernatural literary crime wave.  The hapless colleague who was attempting to tell our Eccentric Piece of Software system about the arrival of these goodies was not assisted in her task by the rest of us wandering in every few minutes and snatching up the books which particularly took our eye, and cradling and cooing over them in a manner that wasn't in the slightest bit peculiar.  That any of the books made it to the shop floor was a minor miracle. How Wordsworth achieves this, I'm not sure.  Their website offers some explanation, but I think they've read some of their own more esoteric publications and have Employed Dark Forces, probably including a Satanic printing press staffed by doomed souls.


Lastly, it's good to see that the notion of supporting one's local book boutique (and other shops) is being given noticeably more frequent and more overt expression by our customers, who often engage us in detailed and interesting conversations about this phenomenon.  For many of our regulars, indeed, a 'reverse showcase' effect is in place, whereby they may come across a book on-line and then choose to buy it through physical means.  This wouldn't be the case, of course, if we didn't include excellent service, literary knowledge and (occasionally) the slapstick  entertainment of running around the shop chasing invisible books.