The Christmas Horror

There’s a time and a place for horror and this is not, apparently, when you are putting your nine year old nephew to bed and you tell him the story of the ghost of the little boy who haunts his house, a little boy who was beaten to death by his enraged uncle with a hammer because he would not go to bed when he was told. (Success with this story? You’ll probably need the sequel: the ghost of the boy who drowned in his own pee because he kept wetting the bed).

M.R. James wrote horror stories that are traditionally associated with Christmas. Not because they take place at Christmas but because he was a house master at Eton and, on Christmas Eve, would invite the senior boys to his study and after plying them with sherry tell them ghost stories. At the turn of the century such behaviour was quite normal, well, about as normal as having one of the greatest masters of the ghost story genre who ever lived being a house master. OFSTEAD would, I am sure, have something to say about such behaviour but judging by the behaviour of today’s senior boys at public school, you’d have a hell of a job getting the spliff out of their mouths for long enough to ply them with sherry.

The Christmas connection has been reinforced by the BBC who, on and off for the past decade or two, have broadcast MR James stories in their ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’ slot. Sometimes an eminent ac-tor plays James himself (memorably Christopher Lee and Robert Powell) narrating a story from a cosy looking study. If you think it’s shocking to regale your nephew with ‘the story of the hammered child’, that’s as bloody nothing to the effect of an impressionable young teen, up late because it’s Christmas, tuning innocently into BBC2 and hearing, all unprepared, the story of ‘the Mezziotint’. I’ve been terrified of paintings, the BBC, MR James, Robert Powell and Christmas ever since.

James’s stories, good on teevee, are great on the page but reading them at any other time of year just feels, well, wrong.

The same has to be said for that other master of horror, H P Lovecraft. Maybe it’s because there’s nothing quite like an initial impression and the first time I read Lovecraft was on a summer holiday in a caravan park in Great Yarmouth. It was, I seem to recall, great weather almost every day, not that this mattered to me because I had discovered that the campsite’s amusement arcade had a Star Wars video game and was spending quite a lot of time using the force, and most of my pocket money, trying to blow up that freaking Death Star.

One day though the fog rolled in and we were pretty much confined to the caravan – never a problem for a family that likes to read. So I read my Lovecraft omnibus; mostly about old sea-towns on the New England coast that, cut off by geography fog and inbreeding, are hosts to diabolical going on. I think I finally got to sleep about seven years later.

Since that formative/traumatic experience I’ve always associated Lovecraft with the season of mists, except The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which I associate with beads of rain falling against a car window. But all the stories are associated with a sort of nagging dread.

Judging from their proliferation on the shelves of most bookshops (and that’s just Stephen King), people still love a good horror story, or even a mediocre horror story. There’s something about reading a horror story and I think it may be that one can always close the book and trap the horror safely between the pages. Certainly if you want horror in real life, you can simply watch the news or the ‘Why? Factor’ or something. Of course, sometimes the horror escapes the page and follows you, which is why it’s perfectly acceptable to check under the bed and inside the closet before retiring and to always keep handy the ultimate ghost deterrent – a camera, I mean, have you ever seen a convincing picture of one?