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– THE WRONG TURNING – ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ begins its steady crescendo of horror. We are lulled into a false sense of ­security, and so are less able to dismiss or diminish the terrible thing when it finally reveals itself. For Robert Aickman, the still undervalued creator of what he preferred to call ‘strange stories’, there was a lot more to all this than the enjoyment of a little adrenalin-boosting fun. Aickman set out his theory in a letter he wrote on his acceptance of the World Fantasy Award in 1976: I believe that at the time of the Industrial and French Revolutions . . . mankind took a wrong turning. The beliefs that one day, by application of reason and the scientific method, everything will be known, and every problem and unhappiness solved, seem to me to have led to a situation where, first, we are in imminent danger of destroy­ing the whole world. Whatever one thinks of Aickman’s comments as a philosophical or historical summary – an explanation of where humankind as a whole went astray – the notion of some kind of ‘wrong turning’ does seem to lie behind a lot of the most enduring literary ghost stories. No matter whether it involves a literal wrong turning or something more mysterious and elusive, in each case a character makes a mistake and places trust in the wrong kind of mental compass: nemesis is waiting in the wings to punish hubris. Something within us, the ‘superior spectre’, needs to be encountered and 6
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– Introduction – reckoned with, and when we meet it, Poirot’s little grey cells aren’t adequate to deal with it on their own. Whether what we confront in the haunted chamber is the Freudian ‘return of the repressed’, the Jungian ‘shadow’ self, the embodiment of some buried childhood trauma or simply a personification of the terrible fact of death (for M. R. James, the ‘King of Terrors’), to come to terms with what the ghost represents we must expand our mental horizons. If we are to achieve fully integrated minds, we can’t go on being left-brain supremacists, insisting on the primacy of analytic language, scientific logic and objective truth: we must accept that the right hemisphere of the brain, with its resources of fantasy, poetic symbolism and subjective insight, has something vitally important to tell us too. That has certainly been my experience. Looking back over nearly a quarter of a century of serious therapeutic work, I’m struck by how often, in trying to explain my own terrifying mental states to psychiatrists or psychotherapists, I’ve resorted to images or turns of phrase in some of my own favourite ghost stories. Shakespeare famously spoke of how, ‘as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown’, the poet ‘turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.’ The poet, mark you, not the clinician or the neuroscientist: and when, with his or her help, our shadows acquire that shape and that name they somehow become less frightening, more manageable, or at least liveable with. 7

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– THE WRONG TURNING –

‘The Monkey’s Paw’ begins its steady crescendo of horror. We are lulled into a false sense of ­security, and so are less able to dismiss or diminish the terrible thing when it finally reveals itself.

For Robert Aickman, the still undervalued creator of what he preferred to call ‘strange stories’, there was a lot more to all this than the enjoyment of a little adrenalin-boosting fun. Aickman set out his theory in a letter he wrote on his acceptance of the World Fantasy Award in 1976:

I believe that at the time of the Industrial and French Revolutions . . . mankind took a wrong turning. The beliefs that one day, by application of reason and the scientific method, everything will be known, and every problem and unhappiness solved, seem to me to have led to a situation where, first, we are in imminent danger of destroy­ing the whole world.

Whatever one thinks of Aickman’s comments as a philosophical or historical summary – an explanation of where humankind as a whole went astray – the notion of some kind of ‘wrong turning’ does seem to lie behind a lot of the most enduring literary ghost stories. No matter whether it involves a literal wrong turning or something more mysterious and elusive, in each case a character makes a mistake and places trust in the wrong kind of mental compass: nemesis is waiting in the wings to punish hubris. Something within us, the ‘superior spectre’, needs to be encountered and

6

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