{"id":6260,"date":"2009-10-29T04:19:11","date_gmt":"2009-10-29T03:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=6260"},"modified":"2012-10-27T01:38:52","modified_gmt":"2012-10-27T00:38:52","slug":"the-watcher-and-other-weird-stories-by-j-sheridan-le-fanu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2009\/10\/29\/the-watcher-and-other-weird-stories-by-j-sheridan-le-fanu\/","title":{"rendered":"The Watcher and Other Weird Stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.archive.org\/details\/watcherotherweir00lefarich\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/lefanu.jpg\" alt=\"lefanu.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814\u20131873) has long been a favourite of mine since I first discovered his weird tales in ghost story collections, still the place you&#8217;re most likely to find his work. His ghost stories are frequently superior to the more celebrated MR James (who edited a Le Fanu collection), they&#8217;re less formulaic and often quite inexplicable. <em>Green Tea<\/em>, from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.archive.org\/details\/inglassdarkly01lefa\" target=\"_blank\"><em>In a Glass Darkly<\/em><\/a> (1872) chills for its atmosphere of apparently random and unjustified malevolence; it&#8217;s also alarming for the directness of its central idea which I won&#8217;t spoil if you haven&#8217;t read it. Anyone wanting to know why Le Fanu is still read today should start there.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike MR James, Le Fanu has lacked for illustrators so I was surprised to find <a href=\"http:\/\/www.archive.org\/details\/watcherotherweir00lefarich\" target=\"_blank\">this edition<\/a> of his work at the Internet Archive with illustrations by his son, Brinsley. The artwork isn&#8217;t of the highest quality, and it&#8217;s debatable whether tales as nebulous and evocative as ghost stories should be illustrated at all, but their singularity makes them worth a look. <em>The Watcher and Other Weird Stories<\/em> is a small collection which includes <em>A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter<\/em>, a story memorably <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0286049\/\" target=\"_blank\">adapted for television<\/a> by Leslie Megahey in 1979.<\/p>\n<p>Previously on { feuilleton }<br \/>\n\u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2007\/07\/04\/chiaroscuro\/\" target=\"_self\">Chiaroscuro<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814\u20131873) has long been a favourite of mine since I first discovered his weird tales in ghost story collections, still the place you&#8217;re most likely to find his work. His ghost stories are frequently superior to the more celebrated MR James (who edited a Le Fanu collection), they&#8217;re less &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2009\/10\/29\/the-watcher-and-other-weird-stories-by-j-sheridan-le-fanu\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Watcher and Other Weird Stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,42,22,48,19],"tags":[772,774,773,5519,2396],"class_list":["post-6260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-books","category-horror","category-illustrators","category-television","tag-j-sheridan-le-fanu","tag-leslie-megahey","tag-mr-james","tag-sheridan-le-fanu","tag-weird-tales"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-1CY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}