As this volume’s FT Forum reveals, writers in the horror/dark fantasy genre frequently use psychic research as background material for their books and stories. British author Peter James is following in a long and distinguished tradition of authors who use real-life experiences of the supernatural as a basis for their fiction.
However, the question often arises (most notably in the tabloid press or from those who believe that the genre is corrupting): is horror fiction harmful? Can reading stories about monsters and mutilation turn you into a drooling psychopath with no will-power of your own?
Most people will accept that art reflects life, not the other way around; therefore there is already plenty of ammunition to fend off the accusation that the genre corrupts those who read or watch such material.
Two notable examples, Shakespeare and Dickens, used madness, mayhem and murder (as well as the supernatural) extensively in their work, but they still drew their stories from life. Horror fiction and movies do not invent the terrors they display, they all too tragically reflect the world we live in.
But while physical violence and psychological menace are there for the writer to extrapolate from, what about the psychic? We all know that people mutilate each other, but do we also dream the future, can we remember previous lives, are some people able to control the movement of objects with their mind? If parapsychology doesn’t exist, then authors using such research are not reflecting reality but embroidering a myth (much as the writer of Arthurian fantasy might add to the legend of the Once and Future King—if you believe Arthur was purely fictitious).
However, as with all such myths which are embedded in our collective unconscious, the psychic world is disposed to hang on with amazing tenacity.
It’s easy to dismiss it out of hand: you may never have researched the subject, or you may be unable to accept what often appears to be flimsy evidence. Yet, as anyone who has read the literature will testify, the evidence is not always that flimsy. Many thousands of individuals—probably millions if you count those who have not told their story—have experienced the paranormal, from déjà-vu to telekinesis. Many have travelled beyond their bodies. Many have been given a glimpse of the future.
Can we afford to dismiss the weight of much of this evidence because it wasn’t observed under controlled conditions? If you believe the sceptics, then everyone who has ever had a psychic experience, throughout recorded history, has been duped by his or her own mind, fooled by misinterpretation, or suffered a temporary breakdown. It seems unlikely, doesn’t it?
Writers who utilise psychical research in their fiction are entering into one of the most imaginative and as yet unexplained aspects of life—along with such questions as Does God Exist? and How Was the Universe Created? (In fact, modern physics is surprisingly close to accepting certain premises of the paranormal).
Dreams, visions, ghosts, reincarnation, precognition, clairvoyance—these, and many more, are the so-called fictional “myths” that perhaps hide a reality which we stand on the brink of understanding. Writers who use psychical research are not inventing terrors of the unknown but simply dipping into the waters of life. No harm, but much insight can come from their observations.
The literature of the fantastique is uniquely placed to expand the limits of our perception. As our unending demand for knowledge continues, the best genre fiction will reflect our ability to question what we are told, and feed the imagination that allows us to accept that the unknown is nothing to be afraid of.
*
Congratulations to Jean-Daniel Breque, Kim Newman and Steve Rasnic Tem who have each had stories from Fantasy Tales chosen for the 1990 “Year’s Best” anthologies, Best New Horror 2, The Year’s Best Horror Stories XIX and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourth Annual Collection. That’s an achievement that few other titles can match, and it just goes to prove that Fantasy Tales continues to present the very best in fantasy and horror fiction by established stars and newer names in the genre.
The Editors
Peter James lives in Sussex with his wife, Georgina, their Hungarian sheepdog and the ghost of a Roman centurion. After a film school training, he founded an independent film production company in Canada where he made eight films, including Deranged, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and the award-winning Dead of Night. On returning to England he formed a new company to make the fantasy adventure Biggles and edited the picture book of the film, Biggles—The Untold Story. More recently he has published three acclaimed novels, Dreamer, Possession and Sweet Heart, and he has just completed a fourth, Twilight. In each of his novels, Peter writes about a different area of the supernatural/paranormal and he has developed a reputation for his meticulous—and frequently frightening—research, which give his books a strong ring of authenticity. Here he tells the true story that triggered his curiosity in reincarnation, the subject of his most recent novel, Sweet Heart, and gives us an insight into the background research for that book . . .
An Australian woman had a frequently recurring dream throughout her life. The dream was always the same. She was in the garden of an English country house, walked through a brick archway, and up into the woods above, carrying something. She would stop at a point in the woods and place what she was carrying in a deep hole in the ground. Then she would wake.
In 1965 she and her husband came to England, for the first time, for a motoring holiday. Travelling through Dorset they passed a house identical to the one in her dream, and she told her husband to stop the car. Ignoring his embarrassed protestations, she insisted they drove in.
The owner came to the front door, an affable old boy whose family had owned the house for generations. When she described to him the garden with its archway, and other parts of the grounds in detail, he was astounded. The garden was indeed as she described it—once—but not now; it had been changed over fifty years ago. But the woods were still the same.
He accompanied them for a walk through the grounds and in spite of the changes, she had an immensely strong feeling of familiarity with the property, and as they walked up into the woods, she felt as if she had last been in them only a few days before, at most. She led them to the spot where she had always carried the objects to in her dream and suggested they should return with spades and see if there really was anything there.
Half an hour later they uncovered a small cache of gold and silver relics. Subsequent investigations revealed these items had been buried by monks from a local priory during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536.
Many of us have at some time had that curious feeling of déjà-vu (Art: Dallas Golfin)
The story of the Australian woman fascinated me. She had no explanation for how she knew what she did; she had had no other glimpes into the past before this instance and was very frightened by it. How did she know this treasure was there? No one else living did. If there is any rational explanation (other than hoax, which I believe is unlikely in this instance) it may be either that trace memories of the burial of this treasure had somehow been passed down to this woman, perhaps in her genes—her ancestry was English—or that she really had lived before.
I determined to devote as much time as it took to try to satisfy myself whether it is possible for some part of the souls/spirits/personalities of people who have died to return here on earth and be born into new physical bodies; or whether there is another explanation for this story and many others, equally inexplicable I subsequently came across in my research.
“I’ve been here before!” Many of us have at some time had that curious feeling of déjà-vu, as we are struck by a sense of familiarity about a place we have never been to before, or a face of someone we have never met before or a conversation we are convinced has taken place before. Mostly it’s gone in a flash and we forget about it. But there are children who have, at a very early age, knowlege or skills that it is almost impossible for them to have learned in their few short years of life. Children who can speak fluently languages they have never heard, who can visit a town for the first time in their lives, yet know their way around in detail and even identify some of the residents, draw landscapes they have never seen or, like Mozart, compose music at the age of 5. Often these abilities fade after about the age of 7, even in the rare cases when they are encouraged by their parents.
In 1956 Joanna and Jacqueline Pollock, aged 11 and 6 were walking down a street near their home in Hexham, Northumberland, with their mother, when a car mounted the pavement and killed them both. Their mother survived and eight months later became pregnant again, subsequently giving birth to twin girls. From a very early age, these twins displayed extraordinary personality resemblances to their dead sisters. The older twin had the personality of Joanna and the younger of Jacqueline. The younger had an identical birthmark to the dead Jacqueline’s, and a second birthmark on her forehead that corresponded exactly to a large scar Jacqueline had had.
Both twins were able to describe trivial things their parents had done long before the accident. They discovered a box of their sisters’ toys in the attic and pulled them out as if they had found long lost friends, each taking the corresponding toys to their dead sisters, and calling them by the same names their dead sisters had called them. One day, aged four, they were walking with their mother down the same street where their sisters had been killed and both suddenly screamed in panic about a car coming at them, and ran out of the way.
The twins are now grown up and no longer have any recall whatsoever. So how did they come to have it then? Had they picked up their mother’s thoughts whilst in the womb? Inherited something in their genes? Received telepathic thoughts from their mother after they were born? Or are they a genuine case of reincarnation?
Four years ago if asked whether I believed in reincarnation I would have given an emphatic no. Now I would have to say there is evidence that has intrigued me, spooked me and baffled me. This particular period of research has been a strange odyssey, during which time I have been hypnotised into numerous alleged past lives, and rebirthed back into my mother’s womb. I have read extensively, studied religions and philosophies and talked both to clergymen, and to many other people ranging from total sceptics to the utterly convinced, and I have tried to keep a detached view.
By far the most intriguing aspect of my research—and which I have used pivotally in the novel—was regressive hypnosis. There are thousands of documented case studies on people reliving past lives under hypnosis. Among my own previous lives I appear to have been a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War, a fishmonger in Hull who died when a crane fell on me, a Frenchwoman who was murdered by a lover, a writer in 17th-century London and the primitive native of a South Seas island.
Is regression real? Or is the mind fantasising? The evidence suggests a combination of the two. Clergymen to whom I talked cannot agree about reincarnation either. The clergy has always had an uneasy relationship with the supernatural. Christianity treads an uneasy path on reincarnation. Pre–existence is an accepted tenet (“Before Abraham I was . . . The soul that was in Jesus chose the good before it knew evil,” etc) but reincarnation is a no–no—except for Jesus who came back and ate with his disciples in order to prove he was not a ghost. In the way that religion needs to justify its anomalies, and ties its logic into knots in the process, Christianity seems to think it’s OK for us to have lived before, and even for the dead to come back to life, provided it’s in our own bodies. Could poor Frankenstein ever have been confirmed C of E?!
Postscript
There are some eerie postscripts that have happened since finishing Sweet Heart, and since its hardback publication: the first has to do directly with the plot of the novel, which is the story of a married couple, Tom and Charley Witney, who have decided to move out of London to the country. When they get the particulars of Elmwood Mill in Sussex, Charley has an odd sensation of déjà-vu. But when they go to view the property, although she again gets a strong sense of familiarity, she believes it must be reminding her of somewhere else, because the house that keeps coming into her mind has a distinctive stable block, which Elmwood Mill does not.
They buy the house, and shortly after moving in Charley visits a widowed neighbour, who tells her that her late husband was a keen amateur painter, and one did a fine watercolour of Elmwood Mill. She produces it, and Charley is freaked: in the grounds, exactly where she had imagined it, is a stable block. The neighbour explains that the stable block burned down in 1953.
I used a real mill house property as my model for Elmwood Mill, which I saw by chance one day and approached the owners to ask their permission to use it. They were very co-operative, but never asked me about the plot of my . . .
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