John Linwood Grant

The Casebook of Carnacki — the Ghost-Finder

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Before reading any more of William Meikle’s Carnacki pastiches, I decided I should actually read the original Carnacki tales by William Hope Hodgson since, before this book, the only one I’d read was “The Hog”.

Review: The Casebook of Carnacki – the Ghost-Finder, ed. David Stuart Davies, 2006.th0CG7RAKT

It’s easy to mock the Carnacki tales.

They are not the first occult detective series. Hodgson seems to have created the character to cash in on the potential of a series character. The large number of magazines in 1910, when the first story was published, meant, unlike today, short fiction was usually better paying than writing novels. Carnacki was inspired by the success of Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence stories, another occult detective series.

Carnacki’s tools seem somewhat ludicrous, even for the time. There’s a heavy patina of pseudoscience what with the occult significance of various colors and Carnacki’s famous Electric Pentacle, essentially a string of colored lights for magical defense.

The otherworldy is often signified by strings of repeated vowels: Carnacki’s go-to reference the Sigsand Manuscript and its Saaamaaa Ritual, the Incantation of Raaaeee, and the Aeiirii “forms of materialization”.

Yet the stories work. Continue reading →

Occult Detective Quarterly Presents

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Longtime readers of the blog may wonder what I have against occult detective stories since this is the second anthology of such stories I haven’t done a complete review of.

Nothing really. I’m contemplating restricting the focus of this blog. In any case, I’m not looking to expand the type of books I cover. While I occasionally like to read occult detective tales, I’m not a big fan of them. Usually, I don’t really consider them science fiction or weird fiction, so I won’t be covering them.

Low Res Scan: Occult Detective Quarterly Presents, eds. John Linwood Grant & David Brzeski, 2018.

occult detective quarterly presents
Cover by Sebastian Cabrol

The only reason I bought this story was for William Meikle’s “Farside”. And a good decision that was.

This story combines his Derek Adams occult detective series with his Sigil and Totems series.

And one of the Seton clan shows up, one Alex Seton, the granddaughter of the protagonist of Meikle’s The Concordances of the Red Serpent. She’s being stalked – by Andrews, an old classmate of hers – in mirrors. Everywhere there are mirrors, Andrews watches her. He thinks, being a Seton, she has the secret to immortality. But Adams finds out the stalker is in fact dead by his own hand in a Sigil House. It’s a trail that will take Adams into the mysteries of the Sigil Houses and their unexpected uses and the choices offered by the “rainbow eggs” that are a feature of the Meikle Mythos, and hear talk of the Sleeping God. He’ll also find himself growing close to Alex. Surprisingly, given Adams’ origin story involving screwing around in his apartment for ten minutes while his despondent girlfriend bleeds to death in the bathtub from slit wrists, he won’t take advantage of the Sigil Houses ability to reconnect with the dead.

Also of note in this issue is Mike Ashley’s very informative essay on the history of occult detectives, “Fighters of Fear”. Editor Dave Brzeski adds some notes to Ashley’s article since it was last updated in 1994. Ashley starts his history in 1830 and, amongst other things, talks about the two great types of occult detective stories: “predominately detective stories with a supernatural background” and “supernatural stories involving detection” Ashley casts his net wide to include some authors I’d never heard of.

Each story in this anthology gets an original black-and-white illustration near its end (to prevent spoilers).

 

 

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