Customer Reviews

The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield

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While H. Russell Wakefield is one of the most critically admired masters of the short horror tale, his work has nonetheless been almost completely ignored by publishers since his death in 1964. In the U.S., the only way to sample Wakefield's swiftly paced and terrifying tales is via this now out of print collection of fourteen stories, first published by Academy Chicago in 1978 and reprinted in 1982. (According to the brief but informative introduction by Richard Dalby, the situation in Wakefield's native Britain was even worse...his last book was published there in 1940!) Wakefield's taut and deft style can be reasonably compared to M.R. James, as his stories are often just as richly atmospheric and brooding. However, Wakefield multiplies the terror quotient a fair degree by relentlessly leading up to the kinds of horrific and often cruel endings that James usually avoided. While there are somewhat conventional ghosts in haunted houses ("The Red Lodge" and "Blind Man's Bluff"), Wakefield's supernatural interests ran a little wider than the title of this collection implies. "He Cometh and He Passeth By", arguably Wakefield's most acclaimed tale, is a small masterpiece of black magic terror featuring a particularly fiendish villain. "The Triumph of Death" is an unusually sadistic tale of vengeance. And the Lovecraftian, cosmic horror of "`Look Up There!'" packs a surprisingly potent wallop; this short tale about a man on holiday who becomes obsessed with a vision of something evil in the clouds shows just how frightening and disturbing pure suggestion can be. For the horror connoisseur with an appetite for unusual thrills, this collection is very much worth seeking out.

I really enjoyed these ghost stories. The first story, "The Red Cottage" nearly gave me nightmares. Interestingly, some of the descriptions Wakefield uses for his ghosts show up in another ghost story I'm reading, Affinity and I'm enjoying the synchronicity between these two books. The introduction to the story collection says that Wakfield was a contemporary with Lovecraft and it shows in his stories, in the subtle way he turns the oridinary into the extroridinary and ultimately into the horrific. I find that his shorter stories pack more of an emotional punch than his longer ones. His best stories are the ones that stay under twenty pages. The longer ones lose their pacing. He doesn't throw in enough smaller scares in to compell rapid page turning. Nonetheless, stay with the longer stories and enjoy the endings. They all do satisfy at their conclusions.