‘Misery’s Demons’

Review of Brian Showers, The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories. Cork: Mercier Press, 2008. Introduction by Jim Rockhill. Illustrated by Duane Spurlock, with a jacket illustration by Scott Hampton.

(ISSN 1932-9598)

Many writers have tried to invoke the spirit and style of dead authors, but literary spiritualism is a complicated process. Ghosts don’t always obey the rules, and texts that were supposed to recall the manner of classic stories sometimes end up as tepid pastiche. Susan Hill re-visits the haunted worlds of Collins and Braddon in novels such as The Woman in Black, and Brian Showers brilliantly revives the troubled shade of Le Fanu in his outstanding collection of short stories, The Bleeding Horse.

      Showers’s book is a poetic evocation of the district of Rathmines, the author’s home in Dublin, and in close proximity to Chapelizod, where Le Fanu placed his early ghost stories. Nominally a sort of guide-book, and loaded with historical and topographical detail, The Bleeding Horse recounts a series of weird tales which eerily echo and recall the situations and techniques of the master. As in Ghost Stories of Chapelizod and In a Glass Darkly, the ‘real’ world of everyday Dublin is shown as a volatile surface, a place where the actual and the strange can merge imperceptibly: the more prosaic it seems to be, the more subject it is to the powers of an unexpected Other, a revisiting from a turbulent past or another reality. The jovial pub in the title story, complete with drinkers and scabrous physical detail, becomes the site of a terrifying haunting by a spectral horse; the smooth waters of the Grand Canal open up to reveal a tale of omnibus passengers, drowned when the ’bus plunges ‘backwards into the lock chamber’; the quaint Blackberry Fair somehow conceals a bizarre incubus, a place of terror where ghost hunters (kitted out with the latest, powerless equipment) are apparently killed by rats; and even the seminary, the Catholic College of Maynooth, is haunted by a shape-shifting monster. Nothing is fixed and nothing can be taken for granted. Even the architecture is ruptured, dislocated, out of joint, a world where buildings stand out of alignment and reality and dream are placed at an ‘oblique angle.’

    This focus on the ‘angle incongruent’ is powerful, invoking the dead world of In a Glass Darkly, of Jennings and Barton, Judge Harbottle and Laura. At the same time, Showers insists on the weird interconnectedness of it all. Reality/dream, past/present, fiction/truth may exist in a fractured relationship, but they all interpenetrate as well. In Le Fanu’s fiction the key events and situations endlessly recur, and so do those in The Bleeding Horse. The unfortunate horse is itself endlessly replayed, reappearing in the horses who plunge into the lock with ‘terrified snorting’, and again, as a half-echo, in the ‘stable passage’ of Blackberry Fair. Painters and paintings refuse to die, and Molly’s scarab earrings in ‘Quis Separabit’ are eerily echoed by the ‘mummy’s mouth’ in ‘Lavender and White Clover’. Even time is caught up in an endless loop, an endless, haunted revisiting of what was, is and will be. In The Bleeding Horse the events are inscribed in the very walls and roadways of Rathmines, where everything is uncannily familiar and unfamiliar at one and the same time. 

     Monsters walk the streets and so does Freud; like all good dreamers, Showers offers much he could have analysed. The richest dream, if we can put it like that, is ‘Father Corrigan’s Diary’. Framed by an apparently objective account of circumstances (an echo of Dr. Hesselius’s introductions for In a Glass), the story presents a series of ‘interesting entries’, essentially a charting of the mental decline of Father Sheridan. This recalls the sufferings of Jennings in ‘Green Tea’, but its climax is (if anything) more shocking. Corrigan sees Fr Sheridan menaced by some terrible shape-shifter, a creature bearing (or seeming to bear) both Sheridan’s face, and the narrator’s, appears (like Barton’s incubus) to shrink in size, and alternates between human and animal form. This is the very embodiment of the Gothic project, a form where the very opposites otherwise charted in The Bleeding Horse are brought together in a horrifying moment of fusion and uncertainty.

   The moment invokes Le Fanu, but it also made me think of the wider traditions of Gothic and horror, of Machen’s shape-shifter in The Great God Pan and even of William Friedkin’s visceral but ambivalent demon in The Exorcist. The Bleeding Horse links to all of these greater conventions, and like all good writing in the genre it still manages to be original, unexpected, surprising. It isn’t derivative and I didn’t know what to expect as I walked with Showers through this most haunted of literary visitations. Written in a cool, elegant and measured prose, which ironically heightens the sense of horror, it effectively fuses the author’s knowledge of the area with a certain deceptiveness. What is real? Or unreal? And can we trust the author? Such questions trouble Jim Rockhill in his erudite introduction, but knowing the answer would spoil the séance. Ghosts can be tricky, but Showers shows himself to be an able medium who allows a new glimpse of the malevolent world beyond, the zone of horror, where ‘Misery’s demons need give no purpose’.

Highly recommended.

Simon Cooke