I was about to write grandly: 'Television and film occupy very little of my time these days, since most of it goes on writing, tinkering, or whatever project has opened that week.'

And then I remembered we watched a lot of Grace set in Brighton and I tried to watch the Magic Faraway Tree because I loved the book when I was five. However, that was sixty years ago. I didn't think the film was bad. It was just like drinking caffeine free diet coke — sweet but really nothing to hold your interest. I found myself reading a PDF about Lancashire place-names instead.

Anywayz. The summer's reading began with a run of Victorian novels,then I went to Shrewsbury and picked up Tom Doyle's biography of Kate Bush for some nostalgia in a bookshop called Left For Dead. Enjoyed it. Then started reading Clive Barker's Weaveworld. I'd read it before in the 1980s or so when it came out.

Barker is a genuinely good writer, and what marks Weaveworld out is not simply the scale of the imagination behind it but its boldness, its shift from the supernatural being the preserve of musty academics and lords and posh folk and instead it happens in working class Liverpool.That is part of what he helped establish in modern horror, a tradition that runs through Ramsey Campbell as well, where the supernatural moves into kitchens and stairwells and makes them strange rather than announcing itself from somewhere grand.

I have to say that some of Barker's sex-horror sits outside my own taste, to put it mildly. The Madonna thing. Yukkers. The Weaveworld is a good idea, and at the time was cutting edge. I see him alongside Gaiman, though Gaiman is far far far more whimsical (in his writing at least) though Gaiman in earlier stories like Feeders and Eaters also verges on yuk horror. But in the 1980s it was in the air.

Now I'm reading the novelisation of The Wicker Man, which has a stranger history than the usual tie-in. Robin Hardy began writing it before Anthony Shaffer had even finished the screenplay, working out of the same weekend of conversation about folklore and comparative religion that produced the film itself, so it grew up alongside the story rather than after it. It carries Shaffer's co-credit for the dialogue Hardy borrowed, but Hardy is the principal author, and what he produced is closer to a parallel expansion of their shared conception than a restoration of a butchered film: EMI's new management did cut the film without Hardy's involvement and dumped it as a supporting feature to Don't Look Now, and some of that lost material does turn up in the book, but the novel goes further, giving Howie a fuller interior life and his religious conviction more room to argue against Summerisle's, and closing with an epilogue that leaves his fate less settled than the film's ending does. I'm reading a modern edition with commentary alongside the text, and although I'm not far into it, I'm enjoying it.

Me and Fiction

I'm having a rest from fiction. This year I completed a collection of short stories: The London Fae and did a novelisation of the audio drama Ashridge, tying up the loose ends. That has left me drained a bit and given them sell about as well as sick pie to a busload of folk with hangovers, I'm not writing fiction for a bit.

That isn't true. I just remembered, I wrote a Sherlock Holmes story set out as a puzzle book. This came about because I re-started the Detective Stories Channel with some Sherlock Holmes stories and I liked them, and, I have been writing D&D and Call of Cthulhu Scenarios, but I'm interested in running some Gumshoe Trail of Cthulhu games too.

So I got into the science of writing mystery stories: nodes, spine, red-herrings, dead-ends and I thought i'd try it with my The Case of the Cumberland Kidnapping. You could buy it on Amazon if you want as it helps the Algorithm even if we don't like Amazon, or if you can't bear to give the billionaires your money, you can buy it directly from me

Amazon: https://amzn.to/46z8uWr

My Payhip: https://payhip.com/b/edCsa

The Black Dog of Lyme Regis

We spent a fortnight in Dorset near Bridport at Eype. It is such lovely countryside, but this year, hot, dry and very busy, especially at Lyme Regis and Corfe Castle! Not so bad at Wareham or Bridport or Dorchester. Here's a supernatural tale from there:

There are few creatures more deeply embedded in English folklore than the black dog. For centuries, people have told of enormous black dogs appearing on lonely roads and in dark lanes. Sometimes they are described as shaggy and dog-like, sometimes almost monstrous in size, with eyes that seem to shine in the darkness. They may follow a traveller for a while before suddenly disappearing, or simply stand watching from the roadside.

And they are rarely regarded as ordinary animals. In Dorset, stories of spectral black dogs have long belonged to the landscape, and the ancient town of Lyme Regis has its own associations with the mysterious creature.

Imagine the town after dark. The last visitors have gone from the Cobb. The lamps are burning in the windows and the narrow streets are quiet. Beyond the houses, the coast disappears into darkness, and the sound of the sea carries up from below the cliffs.

It is then, according to the old tradition, that a traveller might encounter a strange black dog.

It is not quite like an ordinary dog. It may be unnaturally large, its coat seeming to absorb what little light there is. It may walk silently beside the road, keeping pace with the traveller without ever coming quite close enough to touch.

And then, just as mysteriously as it appeared, it is gone. You don't necessarily know whether the creature has come to harm you—or to warn you.

Perhaps that is why the legend fits Dorset so well. This is a landscape of ancient tracks, isolated farms, deep lanes and dramatic cliffs. Even today, there are places where it is easy to imagine yourself completely alone.

And if, walking home late at night, you were to see a large black dog standing silently ahead of you in the road, you might be tempted to call out. But perhaps you would think twice.

Because the old stories have one piece of advice in common:

Don't follow the black dog.

And if it follows you...

don't look back.

Poet and the Failure of Death

In Poe, death is often less an event than a conclusion someone has reached.

• A husband decides that his wife is dead.
• A doctor decides that a patient has crossed the boundary between life and death.
• A household accepts a burial.
• A narrator supplies an explanation.
• Sometimes the police arrive to confirm what everyone thinks they already know.

Yet again and again, Poe makes that certainty collapse.

The unsettling question is not simply whether the dead can return. It is who had the authority to declare them dead in the first place.

That distinction is seen particularly in the stories involving women. Poe repeatedly places a woman's body inside systems of interpretation controlled by other people: husbands, doctors, relatives, servants, narrators.

The woman becomes something to be identified, named, buried, remembered, or explained. When the certainty surrounding her finally breaks down, what returns is not necessarily the woman herself. Sometimes it is only the evidence that the people around her had misunderstood what they were looking at.

The six stories approach this problem in different ways. Morella and Ligeia make identity unstable, allowing it to pass through names, resemblance and inheritance. Berenice and The Fall of the House of Usher turn on the possibility that someone has been buried before death has actually occurred. The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar pushes the boundary between life and death into the realm of medical experiment. The Black Cat, by contrast, needs no returning corpse at all: a murdered woman's body becomes the evidence that finally destroys the man who killed her.

"The Premature Burial" provides something like a rehearsal for the whole problem. Poe presents a succession of supposedly factual cases in which living people have been mistaken for corpses, before placing the fear inside his own narrator. The narrator becomes convinced that he too will be buried alive. Eventually the spell is broken: he discovers that his latest experience was not a near-death burial at all. Rationality appears to have restored him to normal life.

But the story cannot restore the reader so easily. By the time the narrator reaches his conclusion, Poe has already filled our minds with examples of mistaken death. The possibility has been established. We have been taught that a body can be misread, that apparent death can conceal consciousness, and that the declaration of death may itself become the source of catastrophe. The narrator can recover his confidence. The reader cannot quite recover the old certainty.

Madeline Usher and Berenice suffer the consequences of that certainty in particularly brutal forms.

Madeline is declared dead and placed in the family vault. Roderick and the narrator believe that the necessary judgment has been made, but Poe soon turns their confidence against them. Madeline has not remained in her grave. When she emerges, she does not provide an explanation or reclaim her story through speech. She appears as a body: bloodied, exhausted, still wearing the evidence of the burial. She reaches Roderick, and the two fall together as the house itself collapses.

Her silence is significant. Madeline never gets to tell us what happened to her. There is no account of the burial from her perspective and no opportunity for her to interpret what has been done to her. Her body has to speak for her, and even that testimony is immediately overwhelmed by the destruction of the Usher house.

Berenice's fate is stranger still because the story makes the distinction between death and burial almost impossible to locate. A servant arrives carrying a spade and a box containing thirty-two teeth. Egaeus gradually realises what he has done, although his own memory cannot supply a reliable sequence of events. Berenice appears to have been alive when she was buried, suffering from a cataleptic condition rather than actual death. Yet Poe deliberately leaves the precise circumstances of Egaeus's violence obscured.

The obscurity is part of the horror. Egaeus does not merely kill Berenice; long before that, he has already transformed her mentally into an object. His attention fixes upon her teeth until the living woman disappears behind them. He remembers them as "thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances". The language itself performs the reduction. Berenice has become a collection of things to be examined and possessed.

Ligeia and Morella shift the same uncertainty away from burial and towards identity.

In Ligeia, the narrator cannot supply his first wife's family name. The woman who dominates his imagination is therefore also strangely resistant to ordinary identification. His account of her is already filtered through memory, obsession and opium. When the dying Rowena appears to transform into the woman he believes to be Ligeia, Poe refuses to tell us exactly what has happened. It may be metempsychosis; it may be hallucination; it may be something the narrator has constructed because he cannot accept the disappearance of Ligeia.

The uncertainty is crucial. Rowena never becomes an independent centre of consciousness within the story. She functions largely as the body upon which the narrator's memory of Ligeia is projected. Her death becomes another opportunity for him to encounter the woman he has never ceased imagining.

Morella approaches the same problem through a name rather than a physical resemblance. The narrator refuses for years to give his daughter her mother's name. He cannot bear to hear or speak of Morella, and so he attempts to prevent the dead woman from continuing to exist within the family through language. Yet the withheld name eventually returns at the baptismal font. When he tries to name his daughter, the word that emerges is "Morella".

The effect is more disturbing because the narrator's own resistance has helped create the conditions of the return. He attempts to control the dead woman by refusing her name, only to discover that the name has remained inside the family. Morella does not have to come back from outside. The inheritance is already there.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar relocates the problem into medicine. Here the question is not simply whether someone is dead, but whether the medical vocabulary used to describe death can cope with a body that occupies an impossible intermediate state.

Valdemar is placed under mesmerism while dying. His physical condition continues to deteriorate, yet the mesmerist maintains the trance. The doctors therefore confront a body that cannot be comfortably classified. "Life" and "death" no longer describe two cleanly separated conditions. Valdemar's body is failing while something resembling consciousness remains.

Poe is careful not to make the mesmerist straightforwardly responsible for Valdemar's death. The experiment instead exposes the danger of refusing to allow death to finish its work. The trance is maintained for seven months. When it is finally broken, the accumulated physical decay arrives almost instantaneously. The narrator can only describe what follows as "a nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of detestable putridity."

The clinical language makes the scene worse rather than safer. The observers have the vocabulary of medicine, but their vocabulary cannot make sense of what they have created. They can observe the body. They can describe its condition. They cannot restore a meaningful boundary between patient and corpse.

In The Black Cat, Poe finally removes the need for a supernatural resurrection. The dead woman does not have to rise. Her corpse is enough.

The narrator murders his wife and conceals her body inside the wall. By this point, his account has repeatedly presented his actions as consequences of circumstance, drink, temper, or some external malign influence. His wife has ceased to be a person within his narrative and become an obstacle that has to be removed.

Then the police arrive.

The narrator is sufficiently confident to draw attention to the wall behind which he has hidden the corpse. When he strikes it, the house answers with a sound that reveals what he has done: "a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph." The voice is not the wife's. It is the cat. Yet the distinction scarcely matters. The hidden body has become evidence, and the narrator's own need to display his supposed security provides the means by which that evidence is discovered.

This is where the six stories converge. Poe's recurring horror is not simply that the dead might return. It is that the living are unreliable judges of death.

Again and again, a body is classified before the truth has been established. Madeline is buried. Berenice is treated as an object before she is properly understood as a person. Ligeia survives, perhaps, only within the narrator's imagination. Morella survives through a name her husband tried to suppress. Valdemar occupies a condition in which the usual distinction between patient and corpse breaks down. In The Black Cat, the corpse never returns at all; instead, it becomes the piece of evidence that exposes the murderer.

What returns, then, is not always the dead woman. Sometimes it is a face, sometimes a name, sometimes a body emerging from a vault, sometimes a box of teeth, sometimes a voice coming from a body that should no longer be capable of speaking, and sometimes simply the evidence concealed behind a wall.

Each return arrives after somebody has already reached a conclusion. That is what makes Poe's treatment of death so unsettling. The catastrophe begins not when the dead come back, but when someone becomes certain that they are goneThe Authority of the Grave: Premature Certainty in Poe

In Poe, death is often less a biological event than a conclusion someone has reached.

A husband decides that his wife is dead. A doctor decides that a patient has crossed the boundary between life and death. A household accepts a burial; a narrator supplies an explanation; sometimes the police arrive to confirm what everyone thinks they already know.

Again and again, Poe makes that certainty collapse.

The question is not simply whether the dead can return, but how anyone becomes certain that death has occurred in the first place.

Poe unsettles the boundary between life and death by making it depend on observation, testimony, memory, and diagnosis. His apparent dead are examined, mourned, and buried, yet the evidence is often partial or distorted by fear and obsession. In tales such as Berenice, Ligeia, Morella, and "The Fall of the House of Usher," women's illnesses and apparent deaths are known chiefly through troubled male witnesses.

Poe does not always give us a simple return from the grave. Sometimes the supposed corpse is still alive. Sometimes no one can explain what has happened. Sometimes the narrator has misunderstood what he saw.

Before turning to six tales shaped by this uncertainty, begin with "The Premature Burial." Poe opens with apparently factual cases of people mistaken for corpses, then gives the same fear to his narrator. Convinced that he too will be buried alive, the narrator becomes obsessed with the possibility. His final terror proves to be an awakening in the confined berth of a small vessel, not a coffin.

The vault of diagnosis: The Fall of the House of Usher and Berenice

Madeline Usher and Berenice suffer the consequences of terrible mistakes about the bodies before them.

In "The Fall of the House of Usher," Madeline is declared dead and placed in the family vault. Roderick and the narrator act as though there is no doubt about it. Roderick says he wants to keep her body from the "obtrusive and eager inquiries" of her doctors, and the family burial-ground is some distance away. For these reasons, they place her in the vault beneath the house.

They are wrong. Madeline has not remained in her tomb. Poe leaves us to conclude that she was buried alive, or at least that Roderick and the narrator were disastrously mistaken. When she returns, she offers no explanation. She is bloodied and exhausted, still bearing the marks of burial. She reaches Roderick, and they fall together as the house collapses.

Madeline never tells her own story. We do not know what she experienced in the vault or how she escaped. All we have is the sight of her return, and then the destruction of the house.

Berenice turns on a similar mistake, but its horror lies in Egaeus's obsession. A servant arrives with a spade and a box containing thirty-two teeth. Egaeus slowly understands what he has done, though he cannot remember it clearly. Berenice seems to have been alive when she was buried, suffering from catalepsy rather than death. Poe does not tell us exactly what Egaeus did.

That uncertainty is part of the horror. Egaeus does not only mistake Berenice's condition. Long before he acts, he has stopped seeing her as a person. He becomes obsessed with her teeth until the woman herself disappears behind them. He remembers them as "thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances." In his mind, Berenice has become a collection of things to examine and possess.

The control of identity: Ligeia and Morella

In Ligeia and Morella, the uncertainty moves from burial to memory and language.

In Ligeia, the narrator cannot give his first wife's family name. The woman who fills his imagination cannot be properly identified. His account is shaped by memory, obsession, and opium. When the dying Rowena seems to become Ligeia, Poe does not tell us what has happened. It may be metempsychosis. It may be hallucination. It may be the narrator refusing to accept Ligeia's death.

Rowena never becomes fully present in the story. She is mainly the body onto which the narrator projects his memory of Ligeia. Her death gives him another chance to encounter the woman he has never stopped imagining. Ligeia may have returned. Or the narrator may simply have failed to see Rowena as herself.

Morella turns on a name. For years, the narrator refuses to give his daughter her mother's name. He cannot bear to hear or speak of Morella, and tries to keep her from living on in the family through language. But at the baptism, when he tries to name his daughter, he says "Morella".

His silence has changed nothing. The name was already waiting to return. Morella does not come back from outside the house. She has never quite left it.

Institutional limits: The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and "The Black Cat"

In The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and "The Black Cat," Poe moves beyond the household. He asks whether medicine or concealment can keep death under control.

In Valdemar, the question is whether medicine can describe a body caught between life and death. Valdemar is mesmerised as he is dying. His body decays, but the mesmerist keeps him in the trance. Life and death no longer seem like separate states.

The mesmerist does not cause Valdemar's illness, but he keeps him in a condition from which he can neither live nor die. The trance lasts for seven months. The mesmerist and the doctors observe Valdemar's decaying body and record its condition. When the trance is broken, the decay that has been held back arrives at once. The narrator calls what remains "a nearly liquid mass of loathsome--of detestable putridity".

Medical language does not make the scene safer. The observers can describe the body, but cannot explain what they have done or restore the line between patient and corpse.

In "The Black Cat," Poe removes the need for a supernatural return. The dead woman does not have to rise. Her corpse is enough.

The narrator blames drink, temper, and outside forces for his actions. His wife becomes an obstacle, and he kills her and hides her body in the wall.

When the police arrive, he is so confident that he draws attention to the wall. He strikes it, and a cry reveals the body behind it: "a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph". The sound comes from the cat, not his wife. But the difference hardly matters. The body has become evidence, and the narrator's need to show his confidence leads the police to it.

Conclusion

These six stories share a pattern. The living treat death as a way of tidying another person away. Once someone is thought dead, they can be buried, hidden, examined, used in an experiment, reduced to a relic, or remade in memory.

Poe undoes that confidence. Madeline returns from the vault. Berenice's teeth reveal that she was not safely beyond harm. Ligeia remains in the narrator's mind, perhaps strongly enough to remake Rowena. Morella returns in the name given to her daughter. Valdemar's body defeats the language of medicine. The corpse in "The Black Cat" becomes the evidence that exposes the man who hid it.

What returns may be a body, a name, a voice, a box of teeth, or evidence behind a wall. In each case, it shows that death has not made the person passive, manageable, or finished with the world.

The horror begins when the dead do not allow the living to tidy them away.

Conclusion after the Conclusion

I conclude that I am now concluded with this newsletter. I will conclude all over again next time I bet too. Ruby is sitting at my feet. She is a naughty girl. She ran over an punched a spaniel today. I had to apologise. She knows I still love her. It is raining. I am listening to Queens of the Stone Age. All is well.