posted on 12 Dec 2022

A Fit of Shivers by Joan Aiken

At this time of the year it feels almost obligatory to search out engaging collections of ghost stories that are guaranteed to give you a pleasant thrill and the occasional chill. Increasingly, I tend to turn to authors with some real pedigree in the literary stakes because even when the story doesn’t quite hit the mark, it’s always unfailingly well written.

So it is with this collection from the great Joan Aiken which was first published in 1990. The tales are ostensibly written for the teenage or ‘young adult’ market but in reality they are stories that are so well written that anyone from their early teens upwards will find them captivating.

The book contains ten stories that vary in length and - in truth - in quality. They are not all stories of the supernatural but all of them have a dark underside and go to show that sometimes our imagination can create more of a fearful frisson than something as prosaic and cliched as the ghost that rattles chains and slams doors.

My favourite story - Birthday Gifts - has no supernatural influence but is deliciously wicked. Two sisters find themselves in a state of perpetual competition that follows them down through the years and culminates in their old age. But it’s not them that reap the wild wind of their animus, it’s the children of the sister who seems to be the most successful in worldly terms. It’s a splendid story of passive aggression that bubbles along until it suddenly takes a surprising and ultimately tragic dogleg turn.

In Watkyn, Comma the ghostly presence of a long-departed mouse brings comfort to a woman trapped in a room over the weekend while in The Rose-garden Dream, a troubled young boy discovers he has the ability to teleport himself out of confrontational situations - but not always with positive results.

But, as I suggested earlier in this review, not every story works as well as these. An L-Shaped Grave is a rather silly story of a self-satisfied art critic getting his comeuppance when he’s cursed to grow a giant set of antlers than induce a brain hemorrhage and The Shrieking Door is a very run-of-the-mill tale of witches and familiars with the twist being that it is the inanimate plank of wood that is the familiar rather than the usual cat or toad.

But the writing is always first rate as you’d expect from Joan Aiken and I was happy to spend an afternoon with these stories even though there’s no sense of a single unifying theme that holds them together. I think that because of this absence of unity they might be best appreciated read individually with a little bit of space and time between each reading.

Paperback copies of the book are pretty easy to find and won’t set you back a King’s ransom but the original hardback is a little scarcer than you maybe imagine.

 

Terry Potter

December 2022