"my final and irrevocable overthrow"

I'm missing the latest readings of Creepy Tales! at the bookstore today. Wish I were there. Today's readers have neither of them done this sort of thing before. I've listened to both, in rehearsal, and I expect both stories will go off well. The M. R. James story that D. will be reading, "The Ash Tree," is a classic. The other, that our own N. will be doing, Aimee Bender's "Marzipan," is one of those marvelously weird modern stories that rather defies category. It isn't really a supernatural story in the traditional sense; no ghosts or things going bump in the night, but it certainly describes a reality unlike our own, at least in the details, while commenting in a very funny and surprisingly touching voice, about what it is to be a family, accept the unexpected, cope. I didn't know Aimee Bender's work before N. brought me this story. It really is quite wonderful, specially as N. reads it.

Preparing for this project of month-long readings has been a marvelous excuse for me to read all sorts. In addition to the two grand volumes of American Fantastic Tales from the Library of America that first inspired the idea of reading stories every Saturday in October, I've been reading and collecting up ghost stories and the like from all over for months now. Algernon Blackwood and Mrs. Margaret Oliphant had a reprint, at my request, from our Espresso Book Machine, Homer. I've gathered up various Dover books -- always an excellent source for classics at affordable prices, and specially strong when it comes to the Gothic. What I've gone in search of all over the place though are the classic anthologies I remember reading as a kid, and any others of the same style; substantial collections, with marvelous covers and wide selections of ghost and ghoulish stories from authors beginning usually with Poe and then coming down to whatever the original date of publication. I've written here already about a couple of my better discoveries.

Now, just because our readings are already set for the month, I haven't stopped looking. This trip to Portland, and that means to Powell's, I couldn't resist having a look just to see what might be had in the way of ghost stories and the like. In the "Gold Room," where the bookstore's cafe is and where they keep the genre stuff, like mysteries and SF, I found a whole wall of Horror. The selection was much as I expected: endless rows of pulp in uniformly black jackets depicting soppy vampire romance, slavering zombies, and the sadly usual retreads, reruns and revolting gore. There were the full runs of Stephen King and Anne Rice, and half a shelf each of genre stalwarts like Lumley and Straub, and then just... all the rest. It's depressing to think that there might be a reader working his or her way from A to Z on these gloomy shelves. Like eating nothing but candy corn. I like candy corn, but as a steady diet? Sick making.

I finally had to ask the clerk a second time where the ghost stories might be. He'd explained this to me once already -- just at the top of the stairs on the left -- but I hadn't turned the corner sharply enough after the Science Fiction anthologies and the embarrassingly large selection of Warhammer books, and I'd missed it. Poor man finally had to get up from his desk and show me. There they were. Barnes & Noble have reprinted in cheap hardcovers a number of the standard collections I remember from childhood. I can't usually bring myself to actually buy a Barnes & Noble reprint, even used. Feels wrong, somehow, perhaps disloyal. I contemplated buying a collection of Irish ghost stories from among the B&N books, but then my eye fell on an old friend, a book I only dimly remembered from the hours I spent reading in a dark corner of the unfriendly little library in my home town. I recognized the spine of that old Modern Library Giant, but wasn't sure until I'd seen the front of the dustjacket, shown above. Yes! The very book. Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural.

"52 Stories: Over 1000 pages," it says, right there on the cover. I remember the thrilling potential in those words when I was all of nine or ten. By then I'd gobbled up all of the standard Poe and was hungry for more. Here it was then that I first read Bierce's "The Boarded Window," and Saki's "Sredni Vashtar," M. R. James' "Casting the Runes," and Le Fanu's "Green Tea." The copy I found at Powell's tells me on the flyleaf that "Charlotte Ruthkowaki" read her way through this handsome Giant, "June 7, 1962 to July 15, 1963." That gave me a delicious shiver. The latter was the day I was born. What more supernatural encouragement did I need yesterday to buy the thing? Done.

So last night, since I won't be back to Seattle today in time to attend our Saturday reading, I stayed up all hours reading ghost stories to myself. Some that I've avoided as too long or too familiar when we were still planning our events, I decided to read again, probably for the first time since I'd read them as a boy. The Ambrose Bierce story gave me just the same jolt of horrible surprise I must have felt then. I'd quite forgotten what happened in that squalid little cabin in the woods. Reading both of the Poe stories included, and reading "The Black Cat" aloud to just the four white walls of my hotel room, proved to be about the best time I've had on this trip. (That, and discovering Kenny and Zuke’s Delicatessen just across the street from my usual hotel, the Mark Spencer -- just a happy stroll up the street from Powell's. I ate the second half of my enormous and deliciously authentic chopped liver sandwich while I read Poe's stories. That may explain what kept me up late; the stories and that sandwich. Well worth it.)

The amazing thing about discovering this old book and finally rereading some of these genuine masterpieces -- mit a masterpiece of "gehakte leber" no less -- has been the thrill of tasting what really is the best again. There is a reason anthologists tend to repeat. (There's a reason my sandwich has too, but still well worth it, trust me.) While we consciously, for the most part, avoided giants like Edgar Allen Poe for our readings; over-familiarity, of the name if not the actual stories, sometimes somewhat difficult language and the kind of long sentences that don't always trip so easily from contemporary booksellers' tongues, a cruel lack of sentimentality regarding animals that would be unpalatable for a modern audience, there is still a very good reason to read these stories again.

The narrator of Poe's "The Black Cat," is one of the first and best of that unreliable line of murderous psychotics that have been holding the American reader in their sway now for more than a century. I can't think of a more genuinely unsettling first person story than that of poor Pluto's murderer, or a perverse voice it would have been greater fun to assume, reading to the ghosts gathered in my hotel room. When I'd done, I could almost hear a cat yowling, indignant, from the street below. I might have offered a bite of my chopped liver, by way of appeasement, if I'd thought of it. Instead, I got up and closed the window before I went so tardily to bed.

So it seems my greediness for great ghost stories and related terrors is far from stated, even now. Just as one may still be surprised to find an authentic and delicious bit of Yiddishkeit in Portland, Oregon, of all places -- who knew? -- so, by turning an unexpected corner in a familiar bookstore, one may yet find another, thoroughly creepy and enjoyable old friend, just waiting to be remembered.

More. That's what I want.

Evidently, I am indeed a lost soul.

(I should have asked for an extra pickle. Can I get an extra pickle? It was a really good pickle, just not so big as maybe it should have been. I'm not complaining, you understand.)

Found in a Book

This is just a little something, found in the battered little leather bound volume of Hume's Essays I purchase down the road. Parsing what I could, and accepting that this little slip may in fact have had no better connection to the volume than any other place-mark, I like to think that the undated book may once have been of sufficient import to its owner as to have been insured as part of a parcel. Possible, yes? The book itself is small, and was probably never so very expensive as to warrant insurance of itself, so I prefer to think of it as part of a larger, though still portable library, sent after someone from my own home state out here to what was at the period most likely still just the West and not yet the state of Washington.

It's a lovely thought, isn't it?

The wear to the covers and the tears on the spine, while making the book worth no more than the four dollars and fifty cents I spent for it, also suggest a devoted yet respectful reader, or rather a whole history of them between its original and its present possessor. There are indications throughout the text that the ribbon has rested between more pages than just the ones where I found it. Two or three very delicate annotations, all in pencil and quite discreet, not however in the same hand, likewise indicate multiple owners. That the book has survived even in the shape it is in for what may well be more than one hundred years, tells me first that "The New Universal Library" of which this is one volume from E. P. Dutton & Co. was meant to last, and secondly that the Essays of David Hume were assumed likewise to be required by future generations. I like the confidence expressed by both assumptions and the fact that it has been justified, if only by me.

As for the little coupon from the Insurance Company of the State of Pennsylvania, as it stipulates to both "Automobile" and "Horse & Wagon Floaters," whatever that may mean, as being on offer, I like to think my own grandmother may well have been a client of the company as well whoever dropped this slip into the book. My grandma was almost exactly six months old the day the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, and lived to see the Space Shuttle circle the planet. I suspect the Insurance Company of the State of Pennsylvania, as such, is probably now something less than the memory of my grandma is to me. Yet this scrap of paper, slipped in a book, testifies, however inarticulately, to the fact of that company's existence, much as the photograph of my grandparents dancing that I keep in my office reminds me of where I came from.

It is, as I've recently discovered in reading so many ghost stories, less the connections to our past that are familiar or that can be proved than the suggestion of connections previously unsuspected or hitherto unnoticed that remind us to attend to whatever presence the dead reveal to the living. True, reading ghost stories has also reminded me that to make too much of minor coincidence; the recurrence of a name, the reminder of a past home, the change in a familiar photograph when studied again for the first time in who knows how long, to see in such things signs of anything, is more symptomatic of, in the kindest construction, a fallacious, even dangerous self reflection rather than any visitation of spirits either benevolent or otherwise. Still, as I'm very much in the mood for ghosts, let me just quote briefly from the passage in Hume's Essay X, Of Superstition and Enthusiasm, where I found the insurance slip:

"Every thing mortal and perishable vanishes as unworthy of attention; and a full range is given to the fancy in the invisible regions, or world of Spirits, where the soul is at liberty to indulge itself in every imagination, which best suits its present taste and disposition."

So if my grandmother, or some previous owner of this little book, or even the presumably defunct Insurance Company of the State of Pennsylvania meant to communicate nothing to me tonight, even if they could, clearly David Hume at least would seem to be suggesting it was a good thing I picked up his book to read with my supper rather than the Algernon Blackwood stories I'd intended to read, but somehow could not find in the stack by my bed, though right there it was when I looked again just now.

Clearly, I had more need of more rational companionship than I had tonight of ghosts.

Thank you, Mr. Hume, wherever you are.