Review: The Penguin Book of the Undead

BRUCE, Scott G. (ed.), The Penguin Book of the Undead – Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters, Penguin Books/Penguin Random House LLC., New York NY, 2016.

Octavo; paperback; 295pp. Mild wear; front cover lightly creased. Very good to near fine.

I’ll qualify this review right from the get-go by saying that this isn’t a book for everybody. Sure, if you’ve come to this blog it’s because you’re vaguely interested in things that slither in the night; but this book is more than just a selection of ghost stories from across the planet. Rather, it’s an academic look at the notions of death and undeath across the ages - from the early days of the Ancient Greeks - and the official responses to such phenomena to be found in the works left behind by major religious, philosophical and other commentators. Yes, there are things that go bump in the night to be unearthed herein; but they stumble and lurch alongside the intellectual viewpoints of the likes of St. Augustine and Shakespeare.

As further qualification, I should point out that it's clearly stated that this selection focusses upon the Western, literary traditions surrounding the walking dead. It contains nothing from Asia, Africa or the Americas and certainly nothing from the Australasian perspective - books on any of those subjects would necessarily be immense and many of them would stretch the definition of "literary". I've read some reviews of this book on places such as Good Reads and there're a lot of people out there getting sniffy about what this work doesn't cover, rather than what it does, which, to my mind, is rather beside the point. If I'm running a car-yard selling red Toyotas, don't come to my house asking for a blue Ford, that's all I'm saying. And to those people who've complained about this book being "too church-y"? Just go away. Moving along...

In another instance of serendipity, a friend gave me this book which had been mistakenly included in a shipment of books delivered to the bookstore where he works. Given the time, cost and effort involved in correcting the error - sending the book back and so on - it was decided to just write the thing off; my friend took it, decided that it didn’t really melt his margarine, and forwarded it on to me. I had been trying to find a reference to Odysseus raising the shade of Tiresias the Seer for another piece I’d been working on and – voila! – here it was, included in this selection. I plundered the material I’d been looking for to aid in that other project and then stayed on to absorb the other morsels within. They were many, varied and delectable.

Taking this long view of the notion of ghosts, revenants, vampires and zombies, the editor provides the reader with a fascinating insight into how the earliest ideas concerning the undead became established and then built slowly on top of each other, adding accreted layers of theological, philosophical and artistic thinking atop the concepts established by the Greeks and Romans. For example, the early thinking of the church, as outlined here by St. Augustine, fairly unequivocally dismissed the idea of ghosts as false reportage, wilful misdirection, or the uncanny actions of the Divine; later, when the medieval church was more interested in garnering wealth on earth by selling indulgences and intercessory masses, the idea that souls in the new-minted theological construct of Purgatory could contact their living relatives to seek assistance, gave ghosts a shiny new acceptability.

The Greeks and Romans saw ghosts as simply a means to obtain information though necromancy. Troublesome spirits were usually roused by one of two things – either, they had been unburied, their bodies left to rot somewhere without requisite prayers sung over them, or there was some unfinished business that prevented them from resting peacefully. In the case of Odysseus, he needed to summon the seer Tiresias in order to find out if he had been cursed by the gods in some fashion and to see how he could avoid it (he was, and he couldn’t). While talking to him, he encounters other shades of Erebus, including Achilles (who tells Odysseus that his recent thoughts of suicide are a bad idea because Hell sucks) and his mother who had died of grief in his absence; he also sees a fellow shipmate who, while the crew languished with Circe the witch, fell off a roof on which he was sleeping and broke his neck: since none of the other crew members had seen this happen, they sailed off without him, leaving him unburied, assuming that he’d just run off. Odysseus promises to return and give the chap a decent send-off.

This is all fairly mild stuff compared to the section in the Roman writer Lucan’s Pharsalia in which he depicts a meeting between Sextus the son of Pompey and a witch named Erictho, who dwells amongst the graves and tortures the dead to do her bidding. He pays her to raise a talkative shade who can reveal if either Pompey, or Caesar, will prevail in the war that the two of them are waging:

“…She wanders among slain bodies cast off and denied their burial. Straightaway fled wolves, hungry birds of prey pulled out their talons and fled, while the Thessalian [Erictho] selects her prophet; probing entrails chilly with death, she finds the fibres of strong, unwounded lungs and seeks the voice in a body discharged from life. Many fates of slain men already hanging there – which one would she want to call back up to life? ... At last she picks a body with its throat cut, takes and drags it by a hook stuck in its fatal noose, a wretched corpse over rocks and crags, then lays it high up under a mountain’s cave, which gloomy Erictho damned with her sacrifice.”

Sextus receives a response he probably could have done well without and the dead soldier, having already been apportioned his fate and now standing cheated of it by the witch Erictho, is left to crawl onto a pyre which she lights for him, since Death will not take a human being twice.

By the time we get to Pope Gregory the Great (c.540-604) the Church’s vested interests are showing. Ghosts now appear to the living to urge them to intervene in their afterlives by buying masses and prayers to ease their pains in Hell. The great monasteries of Europe, such as that at Cluny, became huge engines of prayer, staffed with large numbers of monks who prayed daily at all times for the rest of souls in torment. In return, the orders were given tracts of land, farmsteads, city properties, gold and other tokens of wealth to ensure that those who had passed over would be spared the horrors of Purgatory. Editor Scott Bruce serves up an entertaining selection of colourful tales, designed to argue in favour of this wholesale spiritual racket, many of which retail a story in which a monk apparently dies, then returns to life with information concerning the horrific conditions of the Afterlife. That these church-spawned tales do not square with St. Augustine’s belief that ghosts cannot be real is plainly shown: the opinions of a saint are liable to fall on economically-deaf ears where there is a stack of money to be made by preying on the insecurities of the masses.

(This shows the modern-day Church’s outrage about such things as Spiritualism in a particularly poor light; pots ought to be very careful about calling the hygiene of the kettle into question…)

After this we are treated to various schismal treatments of spooks, incorporating the Scandinavian ideas of ghosts as unresting nuisances that wouldn’t simply lie down and be dead, for God’s sake, but continued to linger about the places where they had lived, eventually bringing them to ruin due to their predilections for fright-causing and wanton destruction. These ideas passed into Protestant theology, treating spirits as goblins, or imps (literally, offshoots of the Devil), imitating those who had died, and flying in the face of the Catholic ‘prayers-for-gold’ mine. By the Renaissance and into the 1600s, ghosts had become hardly more than the province of dramatists, character tropes to be launched on stage for the education and edification of paying audiences. Thus, the book ends with an overview of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Hamlet’s father’s ghost, and examines the way in which the Bard of Avon marries together both the Catholic and Protestant notions of what a ghost should be to brilliant effect.

There are fan-boys out there who will leap onto this book by virtue of its outré cover and its spooky title; however, they will probably derive little from perusing it. It’s not Dracula; it’s not World War Z; it’s certainly not Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. What it is, is a valuable and deftly-compiled collection of real, actual literary sources, discussing manifestations of the undead across fifteen centuries of theological and philosophical discussion, revealing how we got from Odysseus talking to Tiresias on the banks of the Ocean in the land of Cimmeria, to Rick Grimes waking up from a coma in Atlanta GA, during an outbreak of the walking dead. For that reason alone I’m giving it the full five Tentacled Horrors.