Book Review: Friends and Spectres, edited by Robert Lloyd Parry

In 2020 Swan River Press published Ghosts of the Chit-Chat, a collection of short stories edited by Robert Lloyd Parry and featuring the work of a number of writers who had, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, been members of the Chit-Chat Club, a gathering of undergraduates and staff of Cambridge University that met every Saturday evening during term time to regale each other with anecdotes, jokes, and readings of scholarly essays, whimsical mock investigations, and occasional ghost stories.

For a significant period of the club’s existence, the glue that held it together was M. R. James, the eminent writer of ghost stories, and to varying degrees he inspired several of the club’s members to write and publish stories of the macabre and uncanny, some of which Parry assembled with relevant biographical material in the aforementioned anthology.

To this book, Parry now adds a companion volume called Friends and Spectres, which gathers the work of a number of writers who would have had less formal connections with M. R. James but were most likely equally influenced by his work in the writing of their own tales of the supernatural.

Friends and Spectres licks off with a short piece by James himself called ‘A Night in King’s College Chapel’, which details in whimsical fashion the events that unfold when the story’s narrator is accidentally locked in at night in the eponymous chapel. The piece is accompanied by a fragment with the same title that looks to be an early attempt that served as inspiration for the later completed story. And the collection finishes with a short amusing mock essay called ‘A Theory of Black Cats’ that Parry convincingly attributes to James and which serves to demonstrate his impish side.

One other writer features in both Ghosts of the Chit-Chat and Friends and Spectres: A. C. Benson, albeit in this new volume under the pseudonym of “B”. Writing as “B”, A. C. Benson published eight short ghost stories between 1911 and 1919 and Parry includes three of them here, the best of them being ‘The Sparsholt Stone’, which tells the story of Mr. Duquantoy, who spots a curious large stone boulder with strange incisions in a field during a walk with a friend and arranges for it to be transported to his lodgings back in Cambridge. And it’s the moving of the stone that is the start of Duquantoy’s troubles.

The standout story in Friends and Spectres is ‘The Greenford Ghost’ by E. G. Swain, in which an abandoned baby is discovered by a miller and handed over to the local Rector to be raised in his household. The child, named Simon Coston by the Rector, grows into a wilful and unpleasant youth who runs afoul of Dame Gigs, acknowledged by the inhabitants of Greenford as a witch. And it’s the developing feud between the two that leads to unforeseen consequences and dramatic and grotesque developments as Simon reaches adulthood, leaves Greenford to make his fortune in the Netherlands, and returns to the village of his birth to build a house for his Dutch wife and children. It’s a marvel of the macabre and well worth the price of admission to this book alone.

Other highlights include ‘The Wraith of Barnjum’ by F. Anstey, a humorous story in which the narrator disposes of an irksome acquaintance and is subsequently haunted by him, ‘The Breaking-Point’, also by Anstey, where the guilt of a betrayal builds to an unbearable degree in the protagonist, and ‘The Sundial’ by R. H. Malden, in which a retired civil servant returns to England after twenty-five years’ service in India and rents an old house in a remote area sixty miles north of London. The narrator is troubled by strange dreams while staying at the house, and by visions of a gruesome man in the garden, and it’s the removal of a large tree stump to make way for the installation of a sundial that seems to release this malevolent entity to potentially wreak further havoc. There’s a particularly effective scene in this story where the narrator as hunter becomes the hunted that is chillingly well realised.

Parry ties the whole book together with meticulously researched and informative essays on each author that serve to paint a vivid picture of what life was like at the various colleges in Cambridge and of how interconnected all these writers were.

While Friends and Spectres functions as an admirable companion to Ghosts of the Chit-Chat, it is not necessary to have read the preceding anthology to thoroughly enjoy this one.

Friends and Spectres, edited by Robert Lloyd Parry (Swan River Press, hb, 255pp, €40.00)