Austin, Sherry. Mariah
of the Spirits and Other Southern Ghost Stories. Johnson City, TN: The
Overmountain Press, 2002. 181 p.
In Mariah of the
Spirits , Sherry Austin’s first collection, we are presented
with thirteen ghostly tales set chiefly in the South—whether it be the
author’s native North Carolina, or New Orleans, or Atlanta, or other Southern
gothic sites. Wisely, Ms. Austin places most of her tales in rural or remote
coastal locales where the incursion of the weird seems an almost natural
consequence of the forlorn decay brought on by abandonment and the wistful
pathos of glory days long past. As the author states in her introduction,
“. . . the Old South of some of these stories is itself a ghost . . . .”
In the Southern gothic, one should not expect the blood-and-thunder
spectres of a Stephen King or Clive Barker, or even the subtler but nonetheless
aggressively violent wraiths of M. R. James and his ilk. Instead, Ms. Austin’s
tales evoke the faded delicacy of a Mary Wilkins-Freeman, or the topographical
rootedness of Sarah Orne Jewett, or an emphasis on searing personal and domestic
tragedy, a la Fred Chappell (who has supplied a justifiably cordial blurb
to a fellow North Carolinian). In prose of admirable suppleness and pungency,
Ms. Austin can introduce the weird with a subtlety that makes her noisier
contemporaries in the horror field seem clumsy and clownish.
Ms. Austin never loses sight of the fact that a ghost is chiefly a metaphor—a
symbol for some human drama whose plangency is enhanced by the evocation
of the supernatural. Hence, in the story “The Other Woman,” we find the doppelgänger
motif used to good effect to emphasize marital discord. “Come, Go Home
with Me” tells with extraordinary delicacy of the end of an old man’s life
and his recognition that the time for him to join the ghosts of his past
has come. The supernatural is reduced almost to the vanishing point in “Lost
Soul,” but this tale captures with heart-rending eloquence the pangs of youthful
love and rejection. A very different type of story is “The Dressmaker’s
Mannequin,” a whimsy that is almost reminiscent of Lord Dunsany (I think
particularly of his tale “Blagdaross,” in A Dreamer’s Tales) in its depiction
of the shifting thoughts and moods of a mannequin in a New Orleans curio
shop.
Not every tale, perhaps, is equally successful. Several attempt a revivication
of the days of Southern slavery, but only the title story is effective in
its grim account of an African-American mother who seeks to prevent the
execution of her rebellious son. As a grammatical purist I also find the
bland and repeated use of “alright” highly offensive. No matter how widespread
this solicism becomes (and I confess to finding it in at least two of the
last three books I have reviewed), it will always remain a solicism. Ms. Austin
also hurts her cause by maintaining in her introduction that, although she
is “both a skeptic and a believer” as far as ghostly phenomena are concerned,
the frequency with which such phenomena are found in folklore (and particularly
in sacred texts) represents “a great cloud of witnesses to an ancient and
enduring belief.” I am not sure what she is asserting here; surely the universality
of a belief is no guarantor of its truth. Prior to 1450 there was a pretty
universal belief that the sun revolved around the earth.
But these are small blemishes in a book that is on the whole a highly
creditable first offering to the literature of the weird. Ms. Austin is
quite skilled in the short story, and seems to understand that ghostliness
is most effective in short compass. I for one would be interested to see
if she can maintain her distinctive atmosphere of quiet pathos in a novel.
But whether her next work is a novel or another collection of tales, there
is every reason to suppose it will be worth reading.
