Fiction Reviews
Chinese Ghost Stories
(2024) edited by Xueting C. Ni, Flame Tree Press,
£8.99 / Can$16.99 / US$12.99, pbk, 245pp, ISBN 978-1-804-17798-3
When you are called Flame Tree Press, then why not start a new imprint which keeps the fires burning? Namely Flame Tree 451, possibly a nod towards a certain novel by Ray Bradbury, or possibly not, certainly Bradbury’s story has a lot of flames in it. In their quest for world domination, or just burning the world down, Chinese Ghost Stories ends with a list taking up six pages showing current or forthcoming titles from Flame Tree 451 which ranges from books published way back in 1764 – “The Castle of Otranto” by Horace Walpole right up to 1959 with “The Galaxy Primes” by E. E. Doc Smith. Those chronological titles take up four pages, and they are followed by a list of 451’s collections of stories of ancient myths, folklore, and early literature, as well as ancient, folkloric and classic ghost stories which “Chinese Ghost Stories” falls into and is labelled H for horror and G for gothic.
After an introduction on ghosts in Chinese society and literature, even film, by Xueting C. Ni, the tales themselves are divided into four sections. First, we get four tales gathered by Lafcadio Hearn, then by the Rev. J. Macgowan, followed by some of Pu Songling’s tales, and finally three stories gathered by Dr R. Wilhelm. The oldest stories here are taken from Songling’s seminal work “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio” which contains hundreds of supernatural and fantastic stories and date back to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The rest of the stories come from books published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by people who visited China, like Hearn who was really just passing through as his first love was all things Japanese, while Macgowan was an Irish missionary. Given that Wilhelm was a German translator who translated Chinese into German, I’m not even sure if he ever visited China at all.
Under Flame Tree’s own labelling system, this collection of tales certainly falls under the gothic label, but I’m not sure they justify being labelled as horror. That is definitely to do with the old-fashioned story-telling, and the brevity of the tales, which in some cases is very short, with many of the stories only lasting 3 or 4 pages. Certainly there is some horror in some of the stories, such as when a hapless teacher opens up a coffin in “The Punishment of Greed” thinking it might be full of jewels only to be pursued by the corpse which climbs out of its coffin and follows him home, but the matter-of-factness of the story-telling takes away any feelings of creepiness, and it is more a moral tale and a warning – don’t rob the dead – always something I try to avoid.
Ghosts come in many shapes and sizes and with many different motives, some benign, some malicious. Those differences are highlighted in the very first tale – Hearn’s “The Soul of the Bell” concerning a mandarin threatened with execution if he does not produce a bell for the Emperor. He has failed so far and execution looks likely until his daughter intervenes – no spoilers here, but it is one of the most complete, and poignant of the tales. Certainly Hearn seems to get easily side-tracked into describing teas and clays in some of the other stories, so side-tracked, in fact, that he fails to include a ghost, but his story “The Legend of Tchi-Niu” introduces a common theme in some of the other stories, that is, of a man meeting a mysterious woman who isn’t what she seems, cue Songling’s tales “The Ghost in Love” and “The Painted Skin” which formed the basis for one of my favourite films A Chinese Ghost Story. But it isn’t all love and cold kisses. There are tales of imminent death such as “Magical Arts” where death can be averted but at a price, and it wouldn’t be a Chinese tale without a fox spirit or two, particularly in the story “Miss Lien Hsiang” involving a fox spirit and a ghost.
If anything, this collection highlights the wide variety of ghosts and the forms they take and it also highlights the wide variety of gods there are, from gods of the city, to gods of the mountains, even fields have their own gods, and the stories reveal that gods can be as tricky to deal with as ghosts. Chinese Ghost Stories is a good introduction to the supernatural legends of that land, and is also a good primer to delve deeper into Chinese myths, legends, and customs, just don’t expect anything too scary.
Ian Hunter
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