"A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell

"A Ghost Story for Christmas" is the second story in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue (2023). The author is Paul Cornell, who has written for comic books and television. He is also a writer of novels, short stories, and non-fiction. Among his books are TV tie-in novels. The pattern still holds, then: the contributors to this issue of Weird Tales are TV and comic book people--at least so far. To write original prose fiction seems secondary to them.

Mr. Cornell was born in Chippenham, England, in 1967. He is married to a vicar of the Church of England. That fact will come into play in a while.

"A Ghost Story for Christmas" is six and a half pages long with lots of breaks. Each of these breaks is denoted with the image of a small tentacled creature in black and white. I guess it's a representation of Cthulhu. The title page makes a seventh page, but not of text. Instead, there is a full-color illustration showing an old-fashioned tube TV against the wall of a house. The TV picture is of a man. I guess he's from a real-life TV show, possibly a British show. Already, then, there is a meta-reference in Mr. Cornell's story, actually two. The first has to do with showing a scene from a (presumably) real-life TV show. The second has to do with showing a picture of a picture. There will be more of that on the title page of the next short story in this issue.

Paul Cornell's story is set in the present day. The setting is obviously England, for their are Britishisms in his prose: mum, tat, charity shop, telly. The story is told in the present tense. That can keep things interesting sometimes. The protagonist is home alone for Christmas. His wife and his autistic son have gone to her family's place for the holiday. He stays home to watch TV. And then the brandnames, names of commercial products, and meta-references begin: Orson Welles' Great Mysteries, "the Sky box" (whatever that is), Blu-ray disks, Whatever Happened to Jack and Jill (I think he means What Became of Jack and Jill?, a British horror movie from 1972), and A Ghost Story for Christmas, a British TV show that ran from 1971 to 1978. So, like "The City in the Sea," "A Ghost Story for Christmas" takes its title from another work and refers to another work, actually more than one.

Is this what "cosmic horror" means? Do authors of today find inspiration for their fictions in those dreamt up by others before them? Are they capable of thinking up anything on their own, anything that exists independently of all other works? I thought we were supposed to have something new.

The naming continues: Whistle and I'll Come to You, a British film from 1968, and Diary of a Madman with Vincent Price (1963). The protagonist thinks of how things are in fiction, and how fiction is different from real life. (The author, then, is writing a bit of fiction about a fictional character who thinks about the difference between fiction and real life, without realizing that he doesn't live in the real world but instead inside of a fictional world. No wonder the illustration on the title page is a picture of a picture of a fictional work written by a real-life author.) He thinks of M.R. James. He mentions the Navigator, a pub, I guess, where he drinks a pint of Parky (whatever that is). Jane Austen comes up.

On his way home, the protagonist stops in front of his house. It looks curious. Wrong. "Is it something to do with how it's placed against the stars?" he wonders. "How can the stars be wrong?" Well, I don't know how the stars can be wrong, but we know what happens when they are right: Cthulhu returns. And maybe the man's second question here is an allusion to Lovecraft.

"A Ghost Story for Christmas" is about nostalgia, family, dreams, the past--people who are gone, either from home or entirely from our lives on this earth. The protagonist has a dream in which he opens a door inside of his house: "He's opened it inward. And he's just looking at darkness. Just space. This is now frightening. Very frightening." Here, then, is the first of two recurring images or themes in the Cosmic Horror Issue. I see "darkness" and "[j]ust space" as just another way of saying "the abyss" or "the void." We'll see these words again.

More naming, more references: M.R. James again and Scrooge; Quatermass, starring John Mills (1979). Then the second theme, but only a hint: "There's something out there that only cares about humans as something to be harvested across time, like fields of crops before the scythe." Evidently this theme is in Quatermass, but the protagonist here senses it in the fictional real-life that he lives, contemplating a real-life fiction featuring a fictional character played by a real-life actor.

And now it occurs to me that maybe authors of today write about watching television because that's the only experience they have. Life experience, I mean. Writers are instructed to write what they know. Well what if all you know is what it's like to sit in front of the television for endless hours? What if there is nothing else in their lives? And what if the darkness, emptiness, and void they see before them is simply the darkening of the picture tube when the TV is turned off or the night's programming ends? It shrinks to a point of light . . . and then it's gone. All black. (Boomers and Gen X know what this means.) If all you have is TV, what a disaster it must be--a true living horror--for it to cease. How sad. How small.

In his nighttime walking back from the pub, the man stops to talk to a female vicar. Is this the author's real-life wife, cast into fiction? Is the man in this story the author casting himself into it? She invites him into the church, for this is Christmas Eve and Midnight Mass is about to begin. "I'm not a believer," he says. And yet he feels guilt. He wants her to judge him. (A sickness of today: the guilt of the unbeliever that goes on unrelieved, his sins unforgiven, redemption and salvation denied him because he doesn't believe. How easy it would be to begin to believe and to set off on a path to something better--instead of to face the horror, in the words of Archibald MacLeish, of nothing, nothing, nothing at all.)

The man watches The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971). He dreams again. He's looking for a key to the door to nothing. The author uses a twenty-first-century inanity: "He interrogates her desk anyway." Emphasis added. (I guess if a table can have a ghost, as in Weird Tales, February 1928, a person can interrogate a desk.) In his dream, the man pulls off the mask of a frightening figure that approaches him. Is this now an allusion to The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers?

A final question raised by this story, in my mind at least: is the protagonist autistic like his son? Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote, "Hell is other people." Has horror been reduced to an autistic shrinking from love, feeling, human experience, and connection with other people? Maybe so if you're an unbeliever. After all, an atheist is necessarily a materialist (at least in the West). All feelings and emotions, including horror, must then have material explanations. There can be nothing else. We don't have human or existential or spiritual problems. We simply lack a diagnosis.

"A Ghost for Christmas" is kind of a twenty-first-century reenactment of "A Christmas Carol." It's a horror story, a chronicle of a nightmarish few days in the life of an unbeliever separated--by choice--from his family. Evidently he would rather watch television. Yes, this is the twenty-first century and a story for our time.

The protagonist is presented with two good choices in "A Ghost Story for Christmas": his fictional wife offers him a Christmas with her family; his real-life wife, in the person of the fictional vicar, invites him into church. He refuses both and experiences something terrifying in their place. But in the end, he gets to have it both ways. His punishment for his transgressions--denying life, denying faith--is mild and fleeting, and his choices are evidently affirmed as being the right ones after all. So can this really be considered weird fiction?

"La trahison des images"--"The Treachery of Images"--by René Magritte (1929).

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley