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.)
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