Review: The Alabaster Hand...

MUNBY, A.N.L., The Alabaster Hand and Other Ghost Stories, Dennis Dobson Ltd., London, 1950.

Second edition: octavo; hardcover, with silver-gilt spine-titles; 192pp., top edges dyed red. Very mild wear; slightly rolled; some faint spots to the text block edges and endpapers. Price-clipped dustwrapper is very lightly edgeworn; now protected by non-adhesive plastic. Very good to near fine.

A.N.L. Munby makes clear his debt to M.R. James on his dedication page in this collection; unfortunately, my Latin isn’t really up to it so I have to take it on faith, but I can decipher it enough to work out that Munby considers himself to be standing on the shoulders of a master. It’s a completely valid viewpoint too – all of the stories gathered here have the Jamesian touch and unfold in much the same fashion that Montague Rhodes unpacks his little horrors. Still, these are not the works of the master and while they approach the chilliness of James’s tales, they fall a little short in execution.

That’s not to say that any of the stories here are bad. None of them are Jamesian pastiche in the manner of Susan Hill’s ghost stories for example. It’s just that Munby makes things a little too explicit and wraps things up four-square. James tends to imply a rationale, not provide one in his stories; Munby pins everything down a little too neatly.

In his defense, Munby wrote all of these ghost stories while languishing in a prison camp outside Eichstatt in Upper Franconia between 1942 and 1945, and three of them appeared in a camp magazine named “Touchstone” which the prisoners organised. The editor of that magazine was an Eliot Viney, who was also one of the printers of this book. I guess that writing fanciful ghost stories might be an interesting way to divert oneself from the all-too-real horrors of the Second World War!

When I settled down to read this collection I immediately turned to the title story – “The Alabaster Hand”. It wasn’t a wise choice. Of all the tales in this book, this is the weakest. It involves a priest, new to his parish, who flouts tradition and conducts his service from a prayer stall standing next to an elaborate marble sarcophagus in the church. While delivering the sermon, he feels the cold marble hand of the carved effigy on top of the coffer clutch him below the knee. Shaken, he calls in a friend, an antiquary, who arrives with a stone mason: they cut off the carved alabaster hand and discover that it is hollow and contains the skeletal hand of an ancient saint, a relic hidden there after Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Churches. The relic is removed, the hand re-attached and everyone goes back to work, mystery solved. It was a disappointing end to an otherwise excellent set-up – an expert swanning in at the end and offloading a bunch of historical facts to ascribe a complete explanation. However, it didn’t address the fact that a marble statue moved and grabbed a man by the leg!

I have to admit that I put the book down at this point and turned to other, more promising, things. I came back to it later and decided to start from the beginning and work my way through. This turned out to be the best approach.

All of the other stories carry familiar hallmarks: Oxbridge educated men of varying ages meet past friends in London Clubs or country estates and discuss peculiar events which have happened to them. These generally involve antique books or artworks, odd pieces of furniture, or architecture. Inevitably, it turns out that some ancient taboo has been transgressed, or some dead relative offended, and there’s a rush to try and understand how this occurred and what needs to be done to rectify things – traditionally ghosts don’t verbalise too much; they’re not good at sharing.

There’s a story about a four-poster bed that kills those who sleep in it; it turns out that the fellow who made the curtains and bolsters had a sideline in grave-robbing and used the graveclothes to line and pad his products. There’s another about a young man who removes an ancestor’s folly (never a good idea) and who later gets pushed off a wall; turns out he misread an inscription which threatened death to any demolishers. For the most part these stories work like algebra: A+B=C. Now and then, however, there’s a surprise.

In “Herodes Revivivus” a book collector is asked to see a fellow collector’s acquisitions and recognises one of the titles as having once belonged to the paedophilic murderer who almost killed him as a child; the two discuss the event and work out that the villain was Gilles de Rais reincarnated. In “The White Sack” a holidaymaker sleeps after a gruelling walk on the Isle of Skye and dreams of being locked in a mill and slowly smothered by white bags of grain; waking later and rushing to get back to base, he is pursued by a scrap of white fog that deliberately follows him with evil intent and which turns out later to be an evil Scots bogey-man. For my money, this handful of tales where the connexions aren’t so cut and dried, are Munby’s best efforts.

James’s instructions to horror writers were clear: make the setting cosy and comfortable, then let the horrid thing stick out its head. For the most part Munby does this, but he gives in to a desire to tie off all the loose ends and pin everything down. As we know, and so did James, a little mystery goes a long way!

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.