In the meantime, though this isn’t goodbye, I’d like to take the time to thank again all of the talented, dedicated contributors who have helped make the site a success — and the readers who have made visiting the site a habit. More soon…

Reviewed:
The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune by Richard Kluger
Knopf, 801 pp., Currently out of print

Relatively early in Richard Kluger’s bulky, somewhat excessive but always excellent The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune — a National Book Award finalist first published by Knopf in 1986, but now out of print — the author establishes the connection between technological innovation and the news. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution (steamboats and railroads drastically cutting travel time between continents and coasts, telegraph cables redefining the limits of communication), “the problems created by time and distance were being annihilated by human ingenuity, and the notion of what was ‘news’ altered sharply.” According to Kluger, this was the context, roughly in the middle of the 19th century, in which the American press solidified, and the art of modern newspaper journalism was born. Since that time, equally radical developments, like telephones, jet aircraft, and the Internet, have continued to dramatically shrink space and time, and change both what makes for news and how we get it.

The qualities that we value in our news have not changed as noticeably. Whether we are reading in print or online (or not reading at all), most of us want a good story that is timely, accurate, and well told. Kluger argues that, despite being a perennial also-ran in terms of circulation and advertising revenue, the New York Herald Tribune excelled at what mattered. It was as good as any newspaper in the country in the quality of its reporting and the quality of its prose.

James Gordon Bennett, an irascible Scot, founded the New York Herald in May 1835. The high-minded Horace Greeley — an eventual presidential candidate who Kluger esteems “one of the nation’s truly fabulous characters” — published the first issue of his Tribune six years later. In 1924, under the often-inebriated leadership of Ogden Mills Reid, the Tribune consumed the Herald, and the Herald Tribune was born. In 1967, after hemorrhaging money for roughly two decades, the paper came to its end under the charitable stewardship of John Hay Whitney, known to his friends as Jock.

Many legendary names — Karl Marx, Mark Twain, and Henry James among them — wrote for the three papers during their combined life of 132 years. When Henry Morton Stanley tracked down David Livingstone in Africa in 1871 and, as the story goes, greeted him with the words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” he was on assignment for the Herald. Jacob Riis’ groundbreaking study of poverty in New York, How the Other Half Lives, grew out of reporting that the author did for the Tribune. Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Lippmann’s popular column “Today and Tomorrow” — syndicated to millions of readers — originated in the Herald Tribune’s pages. Composer Virgil Thomson (also a Pulitzer winner) served as the paper’s music critic for more than a decade. And in the Herald Tribune’s final years, its trendsetting Sunday magazine New York (which survived the paper, and still survives) helped introduce readers to Tom Wolfe and other distinctive new voices.

One of the greatest pleasures of The Paper is Kluger’s eye for quirky characters and the stories most worth telling. He wonderfully handles James Gordon Bennett’s spoiled, loutish son James Gordon Bennett, Jr., who took over management of the Herald (sans qualifications) in his father’s later years. Kluger calls him “a splinter off the old block” who “rarely stifled an impulse.” On New Year’s Eve, 1876, the younger Bennett attended a posh party at the family home of his fiancee, where he proceeded to urinate “either in the fireplace or the grand piano, accounts differ.” The wedding was called off, and the junior Bennett moved to Paris, where he began a foreign edition of the Herald. One day, the paper published a letter inquiring how to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, signed “Old Philadelphia Lady.” In Kluger’s words, “Bennett’s exceedingly misshapen funnybone was so struck by this that he ordered the letter to appear every day thereafter, without answer or comment — and it did for more than 30 years, until a few days after his death.” And yet Kluger salvages Bennett, Jr., in his final act. The First World War forced most newspapers out of Paris in 1914, but the Herald’s cantankerous second owner was determined to stay: “for the first time in his career as a hereditary prince of American journalism, he became a working newspaperman, editing copy, sweating over headlines, and writing editorials that urged French heroism at the ramparts and called on his countrymen back home to rally to the Allied cause.”

This last anecdote about the younger Bennett illustrates another of The Paper’s virtues: not just the story of the Herald Tribune and its predecessors from 1835 to 1967, it is necessarily also a history of the events that made headlines during that long span. Kluger writes a number of times that journalists are “historians on the run,” who craft their work from the vicissitudes of everyday life, and help to define the occasional watershed moments that in turn define their eras. Consequently, the book includes vivid accounts of war — most notably the Civil War and World War II — via the stories of the daring reporters who covered them. Our understanding of other major historical events — from the Titanic’s sinking, to Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic, to the assassination of John F. Kennedy — is deepened when seen through the lens of how they were originally reported. The Herald Tribune, a staunchly Republican paper, was, for better or worse, an influential actor in political life: its editors took part in scaremongering during Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt, and went hard to the mat for presidential candidates Wendell Willkie in 1940 and Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, the latter of whom returned the favor by reading the paper every morning.

By the 1950s, however, the Herald Tribune was in need of much more than an influential fan in the White House. According to Kluger, the final 20 years of the paper’s run featured a parade of managerial mistakes and financial decline. It was presided over by the same family for roughly 85 years. A young journalist named Whitelaw Reid won the job of running the Herald Tribune after Horace Greeley’s death in 1872, and was able to purchase the paper after marrying into a fortune. His son Ogden Mills Reid followed him in 1912, and his two sons Whitie and Ogden, Jr. — the third generation of Reids at the paper — each took a turn as president between 1947 and 1958. But no one played a bigger role in the paper’s success than Helen Rogers Reid, wife of the first Ogden.

Helen Rogers was a small, determined woman from a humble background who became the private secretary of Elisabeth Mills Reid, Ogden’s mother, after graduating from Barnard College. She married into the family — and the paper — in 1911. She eventually worked on the business side, selling advertising space. Revenues at the paper jumped up by a million dollars in her first year there, and another million and a half by the end of her second. Her alcoholic husband remained nominally in charge, but in Kluger’s telling the paper experienced its golden age under Helen Reid’s primary guiding influence. Following Ogden Reid’s death in 1947, however, the paper desperately needed aggressive management and new blood to keep it competitive with the New York Times, at a time when an increasing number of alternative forms of entertainment were vying for attention. Instead, Helen Reid, “blinded by dynastic pride,” turned to her sons, neither of whom had the experience or creativity needed to put the Tribune back in the black. At the end of the 1950s, Jock Whitney bought the paper and took a noble if uninspired shot, but the institution’s fate was already awfully close to written.

Kluger — who served as editor of the Tribune’s Sunday book review supplement in its final years, and won a Pulitzer Prize of his own for Ashes to Ashes, his history of the tobacco industry, in 1997 — concludes The Paper with these sentences:

Each time a voice in the press is cowed or stilled, democracy in America loses something of its essence. Every time a newspaper dies, even a bad one, the country moves a little closer to authoritarianism; when a great one goes, like the New York Herald Tribune, history itself is denied a devoted witness.

They’re compelling words, but events of the ensuing 25 years have complicated them. It is a terrible thing every time a newspaper dies, but the journalistic impulse does not die with them, and history will probably never lack engaged witnesses. The dominant forms of media have changed and will continue to change, but the function that has been served by great newspapers will always be served by something, and the best values they have embodied will continue to be embodied elsewhere. The argument that the newest technological innovations could help to bolster democracy with unprecedented efficacy is, I think, a persuasive one, even if its ultimate truth remains to be tested.

On the other hand, the distinctive culture Kluger brings to life exceedingly well — from the daily grind of the beat reporter to the electric atmosphere of a busy city room — will probably disappear or change beyond recognition (if it hasn’t already). Reading this book, we’re left with the sense that it will be a terrible shame. Despite the fact that I was born about 15 years after the Herald Tribune closed shop, Kluger convinced me it was something special, an imperfect institution engaged in a worthy pursuit. On the paper’s final afternoon in operation as an independent unit (it would limp on for a short time as part of a merged venture with the Journal-American and World-Telegram & Sun), the New York office received a spate of goodbye cables from the Washington bureau. The final one — which Kluger quotes in its entirety — came at 5:10 p.m., and captures the spirit of that worthy pursuit as well as anything in this wonderful book:

TO SS NEW YORK FROM SS WASHINGTON BUREAU:

WE TAKING WATER SLOWLY. POWER ALMOST GONE. LIST INCREASING. UNDERSTAND YOUR SITUATION SIMILAR. MORALE GOOD HERE, CONSIDERING. REPORTS SOME DRINKING BELOW DECKS, BUT CREW STILL LOYAL AND MUTINY UNTHINKABLE. SOME FEAR ABOUT CASTING OFF IN LIFEBOATS ON ICY SEAS, UNKNOWN WATERS. BUT WHAT THE HELL. SHE’S BEEN A GOOD OLD SHIP WHICH KEPT AFLOAT LONG AFTER FINKS ASHORE SAID SHE WAS DOOMED TO SINK. SO DOWN WE GO, LADS, BUT WITH OUR ENSIGNS FLYING AND GUNS FIRING. GO TO HELL, NEW YORK TIMES. DAILY NEWS, YOU DIE. BERT POWERS, BE DAMNED. AND MAY TRUTH IN PRINT, AND HONESTY IN REPORTING, AND INTEGRITY IN PUBLISHING REIGN FOREVERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR . . .

Stephen Weil is a publicist at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He blogs about old movies at Images Worth Repeating.

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

“You have to change. . . . You kill women. You’re a serial killer. Can you grasp that?” So says Mary Foxe, the fictional creation and erstwhile muse of St. John (S.J.) Fox, a 1930s-era author with a penchant for subjecting his female characters to grisly (he says “meaningful”) deaths and dismemberments. A quick survey: a bride saws off her limbs and bleeds to death at the altar; a housewife hangs herself over a ruined dinner; a husband beheads his wife, thinking he would “replace her head when he wished for her to speak.” Tired of being subjected to such fates herself, Mary Foxe — apparently unbound by the pages of the books in which she has existed — casually appears in S.J.’s study and challenges her progenitor to enter a fictional world of her own making, one where he just might find himself the victim for a change.

As those who are well-versed in European folkloric traditions will have guessed, Mr. Fox, the fourth novel by 26-year-old Helen Oyeyemi, takes its inspiration from the myriad fairy tales and traditional narratives about murderous men luring attractive young women to their deaths. Oyeyemi’s novel references Bluebeard and the famous French character based on the 15th century soldier/serial killer Gilles de Rais, and also draws from the Grimm Brothers’ tale “Fitcher’s Bird,” a Victorian ballad about a werefox named Reynardine, the German folk character of the Robber Bridegroom, and, of course, the English fairy tale “Mister Fox.”

The heroine of “Mister Fox” (which coined the refrain “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold”) is Lady Mary, who witnesses her dashing suitor, Mr. Fox, chopping off the hand of a young woman before dragging her to certain death in his castle’s “bloody chamber.” The stalwart Mary escapes with the young woman’s hand, and later reveals Mr. Fox as the villain he is by telling the “dream” she had of the young woman’s murder and furnishing the hand as evidence. Bluebeard mythology includes several tales in which the female characters safely escape in the end, but in the context of Oyeyemi’s novel, “Mister Fox” is all the more noteworthy because the heroine bests her would-be murderer with her storytelling.

While this framework provides a rich context (most of the aforementioned murderers and heroines make appearances within the book), Oyeyemi’s novel is not a simple retelling of the Bluebeard legend or a bland metafictional exercise in which author becomes character and vice versa. There are no exact parallels or allegorical stand-ins. Through S.J. and Mary’s dueling narratives, Mr. Fox submerses us in a series of inventive, complex worlds, each uniquely voiced and easily standing on its own. Within one story, a young governess and writer enters into a troubling correspondence with a famous author; in another, a Yoruba woman barters with a mysterious man named Reynardine to recover her dead lover. “Hide, Seek” is about an Egyptian boy and his adoptive mother, who are building a woman piece by piece with art works they find all over the world. “Some Foxes” tells of a fox and a young woman who fall in love. The result is nothing short of pyrotechnic: this is classical, magical storytelling at its finest.

S.J. and Mary’s fantastical tales are juxtaposed with real-life scenes from the marriage of S.J. and his wife Daphne, blurring fiction and reality until it’s difficult to distinguish one from the other. The often dangerous fusion of fact and fiction, reality and text, is a recurrent concern in the novel. For S.J., there is no harm in routinely victimizing women in his stories because “[i]t’s not real . . . It’s all just a lot of games.” For Mary, this sets a dangerous precedent. “What you’re doing is building a horrible kind of logic,” she says.

People read what you write and they say, “Yes, he is talking about things that really happen,” and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You’re explaining things that can’t be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre — but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door; it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day’s scraping and bowing at work; it was because she was irritating and stupid; it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him; it was because she had to die, she just had to, it makes dramatic sense; it was because “nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman”; it was because of this, it was because of that. It’s obscene to make such things reasonable.

It’s possible to read in Mary’s impassioned speech the sort of logic that guides Parental Advisory labels, but it becomes clear that Oyeyemi is making the case that the very act of creation, of storytelling and writing, has the potential to be violent and dangerous. The storyteller must understand the gravity of this process, because in creating a story, one is, in a sense, creating him- or herself. We see this repeated several times in Mr. Fox: an abusive father forcibly writes text all over the body of his wife until she leaps about chirping, “Am I in the poem? Or is the poem in me?” In one chilling scene, Mr. Fox himself “remembers” deliberately killing Mary Foxe, only to figure out that he’s recalling a story he once wrote about a jilted lover.

Oyeyemi raises this theme of authorial responsibility without offering any well-defined conclusions. But she is a masterful storyteller, and fearless in creating tales whose conclusions are never as straightforward as “The End.”

Larissa Kyzer lives in Brooklyn and regularly reviews for The L Magazine, Reviewing the Evidence, and Three Percent. She blogs at The Afterword.

Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga

“It’s your society. Keep it clean.”

So reads a sign in the elevator of Tower A of the fictional Vishram Society apartment complex in Mumbai — the “rainwater-stained, fungus-licked grey building” that serves as the focal point of Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga’s new novel. Decades of monsoons and erosion have left the building standing “in reasonable chance of complete collapse.” But, Adiga writes, “no one, either in Vishram Society or in the neighborhood at large, really believes that it will fall. Vishram is a building like the people living in it, middle class to its core.” Mumbai’s real estate boom is the driving preoccupation of Last Man in Tower, and Tower A, situated in the respectable but unremarkable neighborhood of Vakola, is about to become the latest building demolished to make way for bigger, shinier, pricier apartments.

Present-day Mumbai, described adoringly by Adiga, is a city alive with contradictions: “In the market by the station, mango sellers waited for the returning commuters: ripe and bursting, each mango was like a heartfelt apology from the city for the state of its trains.” It is a city teeming with inefficiencies, but also with flavor and life, and it is in the midst of a dramatic transformation: “Bombay, like a practitioner of yoga, was folding into itself, as its center moved from the south, where there was no room to grow, to this swamp land near the airport.”

As the center of the city shifts, real estate tycoon Dharmen Shah sets his sights on expanding his empire into Vakola. After sending his “left-hand man” Shanmugham to scout the property, Shah makes a generous offer: He’ll buy out each of Vishram Society’s units for nearly twice their market value to make way for the luxe Confidence Shanghai. It’s a windfall no one in the building ever dreamed of, but there is a catch. The offer only stands if everyone in the building accepts its terms. Shah and Shanmugham are experienced in coercing stubborn holdouts into approving such agreements — and they are prepared to use their usual tactics in Vakola — but this time, they hardly need to. Almost as soon as Shah’s Confidence Group announces its offer, the residents of Vishram Society’s tight-knit Hindu-Muslim-Catholic community immediately begin lobbying one another.

A potent mixture of loyalty and class envy has long been the glue of Vishram Society, and Tower A in particular. Now it becomes a powerful psychological driver. Describing one of the building’s residents, Adiga writes:

She envied Kudwa and his happy family life — just as she knew he in secret envied Ajwani for owning a Toyota Qualis; just as Ajwani probably envied someone else; and this chain of envy linked them, showing each what was lacking in life, but offering also the consolation that happiness was present right next door, in the life of a neighbor, an element of the same Society.

Their middle class aspirations are communal, and above all, material. “Who am I, Arundhati Roy?” Mrs. Rego, one of the building’s residents retorts when one of her neighbors suggests that her low-paying social work might provide the kind of fulfillment money can’t buy. It’s a subtle reflection on the zeitgeist of the last decade, the time span during which novelist-turned-crusading-activist Roy has become an international star and India has seen unprecedented economic growth. Like Adiga’s 2008 Booker-winning novel The White Tiger, his latest effort looks closely at the tensions of this new India. Now, as Adiga observes, “in Bombay caste and religion had faded away, and what had replaced them . . . was the idea of being respectable and living among similar people.” The Arundhati Roy poster on Mrs. Rego’s wall is primarily an expression of taste. No social cause can trump her desire for a bigger apartment.

In the end, there’s just one resident immune to the seduction of Shah’s offer and the promise of new money — a retired schoolteacher known simply as Masterji. A respected widower who had long ago “accepted his lot with dignity” and grown set in his ways, Masterji is an anachronism in modern Mumbai. In a city of strivers, his wants are simple. “Vishram Society Tower A is my home” he writes, “and it

Will not be sold

Will not be leased or rented

Will not be redeveloped

Simply refusing to be bought, brokered, or bullied out of his home becomes dispassionate Masterji’s defining act of civil disobedience. It’s also a position that quickly makes him a pariah among the community that had long held him in esteem. Drunk on greed, the respectable residents of Vishram Society turn on Masterji.

There are dark figures in this book — among them, Masterji’s “respectable” neighbors — but none are as unchecked, unreflective, and unrelenting, the novel insists, as modernization itself. In Last Man in Tower, the construction industry embodies the city’s naked ambition: “All of Bombay was created like this: through the desire of junk and landfill, on which the reclaimed city sits, to become something better.” There is something noble about the unceasing pursuit of betterment, but as the city transforms, it doesn’t always improve. The novel is laced with the sadness and decay of what can only be called development without foresight — a condition that belongs among Gandhi’s famous list of moral blunders, or at least in the pages of the Times of India, where Masterji reads about a building toppled by a rainstorm after its residents install heavy water tanks on its roof against the advice of the municipal engineer: “The desire for self-improvement had been the cause of destruction.”

Mythili G. Rao has written for the New York Times Book Review, Words without Borders, Publishers Weekly, and other publications.

Mentioned in this review:

Last Man in Tower
The White Tiger

I specifically did not want to make Alice into a symbol or symptom of female oppression, victimhood, hysteria, etc. At times, during the process of “living with” and writing about her, I grew frustrated by the radical limitations of her life — even though of course I knew all along how the story was going to turn out. I couldn’t help, in the day-to-day evolution of her story, wanting it somehow to come out better, for her to have been happier, to have found more real pleasures and satisfactions.

What kept me honest was the admonition she sent to William as she was dying: “Pray, don’t think of me as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born.”

By “neurotic” she meant the science of nervous disorders—and she was right: Freud published his Studies on Hysteria in 1895, three years after Alice died. She knew her family and posterity would want to imagine who she “might have been.” Yet her prescient plea — “don’t make excuses for me; take me for what I am” — expressed her fierce sense of integrity, her hard-won philosophical acceptance and brave acknowledgment of her failures. Who she was turned out to be much more interesting than who she might have been.

And at Dead Critics, Lisa Levy writes at length about Strouse’s book, placing it in the context of the entire James family biography-industrial complex, including Leon Edel’s five-volume life of Henry and F.O. Matthiessen’s portrait of the clan:

Strouse is explicit in her book about building on Edel’s work as well as Matthiessen’s, specifically using Edel’s ideas about the bond between Henry and his sister. She writes, “Alice and Henry shared throughout their lives a deeper intellectual and spiritual kinship than either felt with any other member of the family. Within the family group the second son and only daughter were more isolated than any of the others.” While eldest brother William looked to their father and the outside world for approval, and middle children Wilky and Bob clung to each other, “what bound Alice and Henry together was a different kind of exclusion, and a profound mutual understanding. Henry had withdrawn early from the competitive masculine fray to a safe inner world, taking the part of the docile, easy, ‘good’ James child.” Henry had unknowingly occupied the “girl’s place,” which he and Alice then had to share, somewhat uneasily.

This time of year, as the days get shorter, the nights longer and more crisp, even city dwellers can feel the inherent tension of the season: after a hard summer of work, the harvest is in, and bountiful, but — quickly — it must be put up, canned, dried, stored, made ready for the dark months ahead, for winter ravens at the door, and the weak and the old and the ill-prepared will not likely see the spring.

No wonder the dead walk the earth in late October. No wonder fitful spirits wander. No wonder, as the harvest moon ices over to a steely, unwelcoming blue, that thoughts of mortality grip us, and the boundaries between this world and the next weaken for a while.

Halloween is here. But before you lay in some cider and lock the door, stop by your library with this list in hand: recommendations and favorites from a number of writers and critics who have one thing in common — they love a creepy tale. —Levi Stahl

Algernon Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” from Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories (1912)
Selected by James Hynes

The plot of Algernon Blackwood’s story “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” can be summed up in a sentence: A retired forester and his wife, David and Sophia Bittacy, live at the edge of Britain’s New Forest, and the wife battles the collective will of the trees for the soul of her husband. Blackwood was one of the three greatest Edwardian writers of supernatural fiction (along with M. R. James and Arthur Machen), and his best stories traffic in his own syncretic mash-up of pantheism, English occultism, and paganism. He believed that the natural world has a consciousness that operates apart from and, at times, in direct opposition to that of humankind. In his best-known story, “The Willows,” which H. P. Lovecraft called the finest supernatural tale in English literature, nature is flat-out malevolent, as two canoeists discover when they barely escape a marshy region of the Danube. The effect of “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” is less terrifying, but more mysterious and heartbreaking. Not much happens in the story, and very little of it is dramatized — it violates “show, don’t tell” on almost every page — and the story works in large part through the cumulative power of Blackwood’s overripe late-Victorian prose. The story is told entirely from the point of view of Sophia, and in spite of the author’s rather sexist condescension toward her, she emerges as a tragic figure, a simple woman of deeply felt if conventional Christian faith, who battles the overwhelming hold the forest has on her husband with a kind of desperate courage. While the story lacks the galvanic jolt of fear you get in a conventional ghost story, it lingers much, much longer in the imagination, and after reading it, you will never hear the wind in the trees the same way again.

James Hynes’ own ghost story, “Backseat Driver,” has just been published in the anthology Ghost Writers, edited by Keith Taylor and Laura Kasischke, from Wayne State University Press.

*****

John Wyndham’s “Mars,” from The Outward Urge (1959)
Selected by James Morrison

Let’s set the scene: You’re one of three crew members on the first manned mission to Mars. As you land, after a long journey, something goes wrong; there’s an accident. One crew member is killed, and the other suffers a severe head injury. The only one alive and conscious, you’re now the most isolated human being in history, at least 30 million miles from home and help, on a lifeless desert planet. This is the situation facing Brazilian astronaut Geoffrey Trunho in John Wyndham’s “Mars.” So it’s a relief, at least at first, when the other survivor finally comes round.

Camilo was now awake — not only awake, but sitting up on his couch, regarding me with nervous intensity.

“I don’t like Martians,” he said.

I looked at him carefully. His expression was serious, and not at all friendly.

“I don’t suppose I would, either,” I admitted, keeping my tone matter-of-fact.

His expression became puzzled, then wary. He shook his head.

“Very cunning lot, you Martians,” he remarked.

The Outward Urge is an oddity in John Wyndham’s oeuvre, a novel in short stories set over a period of 200 years, and quite different from his usual present-day explorations of various apocalypses and their aftermaths — including the two unqualified masterpieces The Chrysalids and The Day of the Triffids.

He was presumably a little uncertain about the direction he’d taken in The Outward Urge, publishing it as written by John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes (both drawn from his own unwieldy birth name, John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris), so that he could attribute any problems to his imaginary co-author. And though the book does have its faults, in “Mars” it also has a tremendous creepy story of isolation and paranoia: the sort of story that reinforces the fact that for all the monsters and ghosts we can imagine, it’s other human beings and what they’re capable of that is truly frightening.

When I woke, there was daylight outside the ports, and Camilo standing beside one of them looking out . . .

“I don’t like Mars.”

“Nor do I,” I agreed. “But then, I never expected to.”

“Funny thing,” he said. “I got it into my head last night that you were a Martian. Sorry.”

“You had a nasty knock,” I told him. “Must have shaken you up quite a bit. How are you feeling now?”

“Oh, all right — bit of a muzzy headache. It’ll pass. Damn silly of me thinking you were a Martian. You’re not a bit like one, really . . .”

James Morrison is a writer and editor from Australia. He blogs at Caustic Cover Critic and publishes books under the imprint of Whisky Priest.

*****

Five for Frightening
Selected by Ed Park

Think you’re tough? Don’t scare easily — certainly not over something as old-media as a book? Try this triple shot, to be downed greedily in a single sitting: Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” (1920), and Stephen King’s “Strawberry Spring” (1978). Not only does the spine-tingle quotient crescendo as you move across that span of nearly 150 years, but the writers — three undisputed masters — seem to be in conversation with each other. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that the W’s in “William Wilson” are significant in Lovecraft’s and King’s stories as well: double yous, hinting that your identity isn’t nearly as fixed as you think. As a coda, program your mp3 alarm clock to play Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” at precisely the instant you finish King’s story — in my opinion, the best thing he’s ever written. If that’s not enough, read (you still have time, the night is young) Sara Gran’s Come Closer. Now you are definitely screaming your head off.

No?

OK. Time for the secret weapon: Bridget Clerkin’s “Twenty Questions,” in McSweeney’s #34.

Ed Park is the author of the novel Personal Days. He is also, with Levi Stahl, co-librarian of the Invisible Library. You can follow him on Twitter: @tharealedpark.

*****

Joan Aiken’s “As Gay as Cheese,” from The Far Forests: Tales of Romance, Fantasy, and Suspense (1977)
Selected by Andrea Janes

Joan Aiken’s “As Gay As Cheese” concerns a Cornish barber named Mr. Pol who has the uncanny ability to foretell a person’s death merely by running his hands through their hair. He rents the room above his rickety shop to a surly artist who panders to the tourist trade with seascape watercolors. Mr. Pol is an untroubled, fatalistic soul, the very embodiment of equanimity, accepting his strange gift as just one of those things. He whistles cheerfully and speaks in homely cliches as he cuts hair, sweeps floors, and putters around the shop: “I’m as bright as a pearl this morning,” he’ll say, or, “I’m as gay as cheese today.”

One morning a young couple, summer visitors, comes into the shop. Brian is an emotionally abusive bastard who strides in demanding a shave while ordering Mr. Pol to give Fanny a haircut (“You look like a Scotch terrier,” he says to her); Fanny is a scared and gentle fawn of a woman. Throughout, Brian is very anxious to take a certain cliff walk to Pengelly. In fact, he seems extremely focused on this.

As Mr. Pol cuts Fanny’s hair, he feels a shudder run through him like an electric shock. With horror, he sees her floating in the water, bits of seaweed wreathing her face, her thin arm floating out into the water. “Death by drowning,” he foretells. “And so soon.”

The story ends with the surly artist running downstairs too late to sell a painting to Brian and Fanny. He notices Mr. Pol’s pallid face as the barber stares after the departing couple. “What’s the matter?” he asks. “Nothing,” Mr. Pol says. “I’m as gay as cheese.”

I love this story because it says so much while stating so little. With only a few comments and pointed insults, we are given full understanding of Brian’s character; Fanny’s frightened reactions sketch in the rest. And then there is Mr. Pol, who knows he is powerless to stop what happens; his powers do not grant him the right to intervene, and he must quietly let life — and death — run its course, as a river runs to the sea.

Andrea Janes is the author of Boroughs of the Dead, a collection of 10 short horror stories set in and around New York City. She blogs at Spinster Aunt, and you can follow her on Twitter: @spinsteraunt.

*****

Arthur Conan Doyle (1890), Franz Kafka (1919), Jorge Luis Borges (1949): Three Stories
Selected by John Crowley

Scary stories come in many flavors: the ghastly, the haunting, the loathsome. I can’t decide. Conan Doyle’s “The Sign of Four”? When I first read it (age 10) it was terrifying in the awful sense of paranoid possibility it awoke. I didn’t understand it was a mystery that would be solved; for all I knew it would simply go on generating horrid complications forever, and I didn’t see that the ending resolved anything. Much later, I read Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” — the most disturbing dream-story I know; reading it is almost identical to dreaming, imbued with all the unsettling sense of compelling but unresolvable meaning. But I think the prize would go to Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Zahir.” By chance a man picks up a coin, the latest instance of the Zahir: a demonic thing that, once seen, can never be forgotten and which in the end replaces everything else in the mind. It’s not the only one of Borges’ stories that opens into what can only be called a claustrophobic infinity at the end, but it’s the most terrifying.

I see that the three define a flavor: dreadful endlessness, damnation. “A false alarm on the night bell once answered — it cannot be made good, not ever.”

John Crowley is the author of many novels, including the Aegypt tetralogy, Little, Big, and Four Freedoms. He blogs at John Crowley Little and Big.

*****

Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” from A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)
Selected by John Eklund

I’ve burned through lots of literary enthusiasms in my life, but one constant has been Flannery O’Connor. I’ve read and re-read her Complete Stories for decades now, and they never get stale.

She’s no horror writer, and she bristled at the “southern gothic” label. “Anything that comes out of the south is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader,” she wrote, “unless it is grotesque, in which case it’s going to be called realistic.”

But her incredible stories, each one a master class in the art, are often served up with a dash of menace — or so it seems to this Yankee reader. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a story that makes me shudder every time I read it.

A crafty, strong-willed, slightly comical old woman — an O’Connor staple — tries to badger her family into re-routing a planned road trip so she can “visit some of her connections in East Tennessee.”

“Now look here, Bailey” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it.”

Her hotheaded son ignores her pleas, and the family — grandmother, wife, baby, and two bratty kids — set out toward Florida. I don’t think I’d be giving anything away to report that the grandmother was right to be worried. The shocking, bloodcurdling, weirdly mesmerizing denouement is something you won’t shake off anytime soon.

O’Connor once described a good short story as one with a plot twist that seems both utterly surprising and absolutely inevitable. A tall order when you think about it. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a perfect example of O’Connor’s craft, and a chilling entry point to her oddly skewed world.

John Eklund is a sales representative for Harvard, Yale, and MIT university presses. He blogs at Paper Over Board.

*****

Walter de la Mare’s “Seaton’s Aunt” (1909)
Selected by Will Schofield

Walter de la Mare is a perennially underrated writer best known for his poems for children and the fabulously strange Memoirs of a Midget, which Harry Mathews called “a perfect, utterly original novel.”

In “Seaton’s Aunt,” limp, sallow Arthur Seaton begs his only friend at school — Withers, the narrator — to stay with him overnight at the gloomy country estate where he lives with his fat old aunt, who gives him plenty of spending money and sweets when she’s not plotting to destroy him. The character of the repulsive, cynical aunt with her big head and “penthouse lids” conjures for me none other than Yubaba from Spirited Away.

Withers finds the lurking aunt creepy, but refuses to buy into Arthur’s conspiracies, and they survive a tense night in the echoing house. Years later, back on the estate in the Shadow of the Aunt, Arthur and his equally limp fiancee Alice entertain Withers for an evening. Arthur tries one last time to convince his friend about his aunt’s intentions: “I know that what we see and hear is only the smallest fraction of what is. I know she lives quite out of this. She talks to you; but it’s all make-believe. It’s all a ‘parlour game.’ She’s not really with you [. . .] She’s living on inside on what you’re rotten without. That’s what it is — a cannibal feast. She’s a spider.”

Withers meets the aunt once more, and I can say no more without spoiling the story. De la Mare doesn’t seem to care if you blame lonely paranoia or psychic vampirism for the events in his story, though he might argue that either is worthy of horror.

Will Schofield blogs as 50 Watts, and is one-third of Writers No One Reads.

*****

“My Kinsman, Major Molineux” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, from Twice-Told Tales (1837)
Selected by Joseph G. Peterson

If there were ever a ghost who wrote stories trying to convince himself that he had once been real, that ghost would surely have written in the prose of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His prose is famously uncanny, and haunting; or, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, no one writes in ghostlier demarcations than Nathaniel Hawthorne.

His most famous short story collection, Twice-Told Tales suggests that an earlier telling haunts the teller of these tales. Hawthorne writes with such authority — as if he had been there in the early days of the original settlers of America — that you sometimes wonder if he isn’t himself some ghostly recurrence.

Both the rich eeriness of his language and the sense that he is a ghost lingering over the events of an earlier time are on wonderful display in his story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” This is a dark fable of what awaits the stranger who enters our cities. In this tale, Robin, a country yokel, travels five days through primeval woods to the town only to watch, by the antic glow of moonlight, Major Molineux, his kinsman and sole contact there, paraded through the village square at midnight by a rowdy mob. Major Molineux has been tarred and feathered, but when Robin laughs at the absurdity of his kinsman’s torture, he is told by one of the village gentleman that he has a bright future: “You may rise in the world.”

Whether you’re newly arrived or part of the gathering mob, this surreal tale about the dark side of American power continues to resonate.

Joseph G. Peterson is the author of the novel Beautiful Piece, the forthcoming novel Wanted: Elevator Man, and the forthcoming verse novel Inside the Whale.

*****

Penelope Fitzgerald’s “Desideratus,” from The Means of Escape (2000)
Selected by Levi Stahl

Penelope Fitzgerald’s fictional world is simultaneously wholly material — which allows her to recreate such lost places as Edwardian Oxford and pre-revolutionary Russia — and breathtakingly numinous. Her characters think and act as if they can understand and manipulate the world, but time and again they come up against the unlikely or the inexplicable, as if, amid her realism, Fitzgerald wants to remind us of all that lies beyond our ken. There are poltergeists and possibly even miracles; certainly, there is their counterweight, incipient, inescapable disaster. Fitzgerald’s sentences are concise to the point of asperity, her insights equally incisive, and their preferred end point is ambiguity.

Which leads me to “Desideratus.” It tells of a poor boy, Jack Digby, who has one prized possession: a gilt medal, inscribed with his birthdate, an image of an angel, and a motto, Desideratus. He carries it with him everywhere. Fitzgerald — seer of disaster — dryly notes that “anything you carry about with you in your pocket you are bound to lose sooner or later,” and one late autumn day the medal goes missing.

Its journey from there and Jack’s pursuit of it resemble a dream verging on nightmare: it appears beneath a foot of ice in a deep puddle but disappears with the thaw, and Jack tracks its likely journey down a drainpipe into the yard of a stately home. At the door, he’s greeted by a “peering and trembling” schoolmaster and a quarrelsome cook; their demeanor suggests that all is not well within the house.

Jack is taken in to see the master, who offers him money for the medal, then, refused, leads him by candlelight to an open door:

“Am I to go in there with you, sir?”

“Are you afraid to go into a room?”

By that point, yes, Jack is afraid, and so are we. What he finds there — and Fitzgerald’s refusal to strip the discovery of the mixture of eeriness, terror, and pity that it holds for the boy — is wholly plausible, yet as wrenchingly unsettling as any horror out of Lovecraft.

Levi Stahl is the promotions director at the University of Chicago Press and, with Ed Park, co-librarian of the Invisible Library. He blogs at I’ve Been Reading Lately and @levistahl

*****

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp” (1891)
Selected by Jenny Davidson

As a child, I loved reading scary stories: it was movies that scared me in a bad way. When you’re that young, you can’t even tell what is and isn’t supposed to be scary. I saw Star Wars the year it came out, for instance, when I was about six, and the trash compactor scene (in adulthood purely comic) gave me nightmares for years. And as a teenager, whenever my brothers and I watched The Shining, I would cover up my ears and they would tease me by trying to tear my hands off them — it is the soundtracks that make TV and movies scary, I had already realized, and restricting oneself to the visuals stopped the heart rate from racing.

I always had lots of anthologies of tales of the uncanny lying around — people gave them to me as Christmas presents, perhaps. (And again, with the eyes of adulthood, there is money to be made off cheaply printed anthologies of out-of-copyright tales!) Joan Aiken wrote some wonderfully scary stories as well as the more magically homely ones recently reissued as The Serial Garden by Small Beer Press. Poe’s stories got to me, too: “The Black Cat”!

One story that I read again and again, to torment myself with the shiver of near escape, was Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp.” A man buys a bottle that can grant him all he desires — but the fortune he asks for comes to him by way only of the death of a beloved uncle, and he follows the rules explained by the person who sold it to him and sells it to another for a price less than he bought it for (if you die with it in your possession, you’re cursed forever). The bottle comes back to him, though, and if you’ve bought it for two cents, who’s going to be stupid enough to buy it for one cent? You can go to a different country whose currency is lower-denomination, of course — and then there’s the leprosy . . .

“The Bottle Imp” was perfectly calculated to arouse all my anxieties and desires as a child: it still seems to me a cautionary tale whose happy ending doesn’t stop it from leaving one with a chill.

Jenny Davidson teaches at Columbia and blogs at Light Reading.

Dear Norman,

Thank you for your two letters: I received them with pleasure & read them with delight, & put them neatly together on one side — answering the buggers is another matter, though. My busy lazy life seems to have no time for letter writing. I liked the first letter a lot. You seem to have got your life taped, & not red-taped either. Don’t know how you do it.

As regards the second one, & your request for help in getting published, well, nothing I can say will make any publisher accept work he doesn’t think worth it. A year or so ago a woman whose six novels I much admire had her seventh rejected by her publisher: I charged in like a mixture of Sir Bedivere & Lloyd George to try to persuade Faber’s to take the seventh — played on the old-boy network like a harp. Nothing happened. So there you are. I’d be happy to read the poems, & give what advice I can, but in the end you’ve got to please the publisher, unless you’ve got money in the firm or are screwing his wife or something.

In a way you are lucky — you like your poems, & write a lot of them: perhaps you should produce them yourself, like Blake. I’m sure if Blake had sent me The Book of Ahania I’d have told him very much what I told you. Anyway, shoot them along. Don’t tell anybody else to do so, though. I get an increasing amount of such correspondence & haven’t really time to deal with much of it. [. . .]

I hope to get some new hifi stuff soon. Bachelors are always very keen on hifi — care more about the reproduction of their records than the reproduction of their species, haw haw. Not that I’ve many classical records — I keep putting it off until the evening of my days. Was that the 6 o’clock pips I heard just now?

Kind regards
Philip

The arts promise more than they perform. This idea — or, rather, this charming sentiment — has just been given to me by a German street-organ which played, as it passed through the street next to mine, a tune of which two passages are new to me — and, what is more, are charming, in my opinion. The tears almost came into my eyes.

The first time I ever took pleasure in music was at Novara, a few days before the battle of Marengo. I went to the theatre, where they were playing Il Matrimonio Segreto. The music delighted me like an expression of love. I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase. This pleasure came to me without my in any way expecting it: it filled my whole soul. I have told you of a similar sensation that I once had at Frascati when Adele leant against me while we were watching fireworks: I think this was the happiest moment of my life. The pleasure must have been truly sublime, for I still remember it although the passion that caused it is entirely extinguished.