Ghostless Stories of a Non-Antiquarian

I finally got around to reading M. R. James' anthology Ghost Stories of an Antiquarian. While his stories do indeed have the same structure as most of Lovecraft's non-Dreamlands stories (i.e., an academic stumbles upon something that Should Not Be Known By Man), the style is strikingly different. In fact, were it not for the encounter (often a Twilight Zone worthy twist -- such as a hotel room no. 13 that appears only at night, or an engraving that displays a stop motion image of an abduction), these would be James telling a mundane story about a friend who went to a town in order to study parish records or look at an old building, stayed in a hotel, and had a perfectly nice time consuming large amounts of whiskey in a genteel manner.

What makes this a prime candidate for generation is that, while James' references to architectural styles or historical events are presumably meaningful, they largely went over my head (and thus over the head of the average reader) -- in other words, without the supernatural element to act as a foil, there's very little reason to believe anything is wrong with the rest of the flavor text, and very often the supernatural element is subtle or comes in quite late!

In other words, we can readily emit descriptions of obscure historical events or technical details about architecture, the business of nineteenth century academic print distribution, the collecting of rare medieval manuscripts, or any of the other things James spends pages describing, and make these descriptions utter nonsense, but the fact that these descriptions are utter nonsense can be hidden from the reader.

Tracery is the ideal tool for such a project: we can produce descriptions of buildings, medieval or renassance local political squabbles, folios containing pieces of assorted known works, various accomodations, et cetera, in James' style and marry them together with generated descriptions of well-bred Cambridge men talking about golf over whiskey-and-soda, and preface each one with his typical introduction wherein he claims we "must remember" some acquaintance of his, who once told him this story in confidence after they met at some museum or other.

NaNoGenMo / 2018

Ghostless Stories of a Non-Antiquarian #5