Glen Hirshberg's Blog - Posts Tagged "gemma-files"
Gemma Files and Marjorie Bowen
Tuesday Round-up of Everything, Week of 6/17, Post 5:
Had heard terrific things about Gemma Files, and she'll be joining me to talk the teaching of writing ghost stories at Readercon, which seemed a perfect excuse to check out her work. Her story, "Nanny Grey," which I found in Ellen Datlow's BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR VOLUME 5, maybe holds the last emotional chord a bit too long for me, spends too much time explaining more than it needs to. But the build-up is a flat-out blast, a gritty, too-real riff on the picking-up-the-wrong-girl, heading-home-to-meet-the-(in this case, extended)-family trope. Seedy, unnerving, playful, wicked.
At the more classical end, I also caught up with Marjorie Bowen's "Dark Ann," and as I usually do when I read Marjorie Bowen, wound up feeling she's an under-acknowledged titan. At an academic conference, a writer of ghostly tales attends a lecture by a brilliant, stiff, arrogant scientist. To the writer's surprise, the scientist then seeks her out at the after-party, expressly to tell her a tale about a ghost he met (but won't describe as a ghost), which triggered longings in him he can't accept as love. And vanished. That's it. Just established, credible reality, the wispy touch of wonder, the intoxicating mixture of emotional states, one of which is dread. If I didn't already have one (or ten) already prepared, the story would be a template for the way I teach the kinds of stories I write.
Had heard terrific things about Gemma Files, and she'll be joining me to talk the teaching of writing ghost stories at Readercon, which seemed a perfect excuse to check out her work. Her story, "Nanny Grey," which I found in Ellen Datlow's BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR VOLUME 5, maybe holds the last emotional chord a bit too long for me, spends too much time explaining more than it needs to. But the build-up is a flat-out blast, a gritty, too-real riff on the picking-up-the-wrong-girl, heading-home-to-meet-the-(in this case, extended)-family trope. Seedy, unnerving, playful, wicked.
At the more classical end, I also caught up with Marjorie Bowen's "Dark Ann," and as I usually do when I read Marjorie Bowen, wound up feeling she's an under-acknowledged titan. At an academic conference, a writer of ghostly tales attends a lecture by a brilliant, stiff, arrogant scientist. To the writer's surprise, the scientist then seeks her out at the after-party, expressly to tell her a tale about a ghost he met (but won't describe as a ghost), which triggered longings in him he can't accept as love. And vanished. That's it. Just established, credible reality, the wispy touch of wonder, the intoxicating mixture of emotional states, one of which is dread. If I didn't already have one (or ten) already prepared, the story would be a template for the way I teach the kinds of stories I write.
