Introduction

  Sometimes just one book can be enough to enough to confirm the presence of a major talent in the field of the supernatural tale. If M. R. James had published only Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary, Fritz Leiber Night's Black Agents or Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer, they would certainly each be guaranteed a secure place in the pantheon. I'm not wishing for an instant that the present book prove to be Glen Hirshberg's sole collection, but I'll stake my reputation that history will hail him as a crucial contributor to the field. With a writer of his talents to bear the tradition into the new century, it's in no danger of becoming irrelevant.

  With very few exceptions (Lovecraft and Leiber come immediately to mind) the best work in the genre has emerged from literature, not the pulps. Hirshberg's certainly does. He brings enviable skills to his work: a stylistic precision that comes of loving language, an unerring eye for character and the moments that define or reveal it, a keen sense not just of place but how light and the time of day transform his settings. It's his sense of the spectral, however, that puts him up there with the best. In this book it informs and underlies five of the most haunting recent tales in the field.

  This said, the stories seldom deal with the merely ghostly. While "Struwwelpeter" is beset by it - not least in an abandoned house so variously restless it's close to becoming a spectre in itself - the tale reminds us how adolescence could be full of small everyday terrors, and not all the characters survive. Like most of the contents, this story is a novella, a form often thought to be ideal for the genre. It also allows Hirshberg the space to make his situations real.

  His concern for young people out on some edge of themselves reappears in "Shipwreck Beach". We may reflect that he is a teacher; somebody in every tale is one. Some of the characters they are involved with choose to be beyond their or anybody's help. This story conjures up a Hawaiian landscape that borders on the numinous, while the mysterious finale suggests a myth so ancient it's past identification. The foundation of the story and of its fellows is their moral sense. Too often, when the supernatural story turns moral it just takes dusty puppets representing good and evil out of their box and bangs them together until the evil one falls down, but Hirshberg's vision is too clear and rigorous to settle for cliché. Nor does he preach, thank God.

  "Mr Dark's Carnival" makes explicit a theme that others of the stories touch on: the allure of terror. It goes so far as to find a redemptive power in spectral excitement, but things aren't so simple; indeed, in Hirshberg's work they never are. It's the second of these tales to celebrate Halloween. His inventiveness is admirably demonstrated by the way he reimagines that ghostly night in both - no repetition there. The story presents a carnival exhibition as unconventional as it is (very) disturbing, not least because the spectral isn't confined to it. Often in Hirshberg one senses it everywhere.

  I believe "Dancing Men" was written in response to a request by Ellen Datlow for ghost story writers to scare her. I had a go myself, but this tale goes much further. It faces the worst human beings can do to one another and to themselves, and reaches conclusions more lasting and more devastating than any scare. Though it has recourse to myth, that isn't reassuring either. "Grow up," the narrator is told, an exhortation that resonates through all these stories, but neither the process nor its outcome is comfortable. I'd call that truth to life.

  Perhaps the title story offers consolation after we have lived through some of the most harrowing experiences in the book. I hope nobody need wonder why the author read it aloud to his students only once. Like other tales here, it's a good deal more moving than conventional expectations of the genre would anticipate. Central to it is the notion that terror comes with simply living. Tales like these help give it shape and contribute insights into it. They certainly also provide the aesthetic experience only ghost stories can furnish. Glen Hirshberg is true to his own experience and to the best of his field. May he continue to enrich it and develop it. He's an original and a considerable talent, and I'm proud to be associated with his book.

              Ramsey Campbell
              Wallasey, Merseyside
              8 May 2003

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