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Ghost Stories and Mysteries
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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Ernest Favenc (1845-1908) is a neglected master of Australian supernatural and mystery fiction. Best known for his History of Australian Exploration, 1788-1888, he was also a prolific author and journalist, writing for some of the most popular and important literary journals in colonial Australia. His considerable output is now largely forgotten, even among aficionados of weird and mystery fiction. This book collects thirty-one of Favenc's best stories, many published here for the first time since their original publication; and aims to showcase Favenc's talent as the most important Australian colonial writer of Gothic and supernatural fiction. The stories span the period 1875-1907, and demonstrate the richness and variety of his art, making this a major publishing event for enthusiasts of nineteenth-century crime and weird fiction.
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Reviews for Ghost Stories and Mysteries
Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars
4/5
2 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fairly interesting, mostly horror, stories set in Australia during the times of the gold rushes and the continent’s gradual invasion by whites. As the editor states, there’s a fair amount of casual racism. with the n-word being used to describe the Aboriginal people, and their roles are generally relegated to either savagely attacking white men who are just doing their usual thing of enclosing land, putting cattle and sheep on it, or finding and claiming mineral deposits (especially gold) to exploit for their own profit, or genial collaborators. On the positive side, white men killing or otherwise messing with the Aboriginals usually get their well-deserved comeuppance, and the narrators generally side with and criticize the abusive or murderous actions of their companions.Frankly, the white men are their own worst enemies, constantly scheming against each other to keep valuable finds to themselves, often murdering their companions in cold-blooded and cowardly ways. Vengeance often comes from ghostly encounters, although a few attempts to even the score by more mundane methods still usually result in death for both parties. (There are a lot of white men to hate here.)Along the way, we get some interesting details of the ways of the bushmen and a sense for the alien emptiness of Australia’s hostile wilderness, where death from dehydration or starvation always lurks in the background.We also get a really funny piss-take on Christmas romance stories in “The Lady Ermetta; or, The Sleeping Secret: A Sensational Novelette in Three Parts, with an Orthodox Christmas Introduction”; the humorous “The Girl Body-Stealer”, “An Unquiet Spirit”, and ‘M’Whirter’s Wraith”; and a chilling apocalypse in “What the Rats Brought”.I was surprised by how modern the prose felt—mostly very straightforward language and matter-of-fact dialogue (although there were a few sentences whose grammar was twisty enough to require a couple of extra readings to make sure I’d parsed them correctly).I also feel like I have to mention the haphazard editing. It’s clear from some of the misspellings that the text is based on a scanned copy of the stories, and the thoroughness of the proofing clearly decreases as we near the end of the collection, sometimes resulting in confusion.Overall, I enjoyed this (hopefully less-than-wholly accurate) portrayal of late-nineteeth through early twentieth century Australia, and you might as well.
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Ghost Stories and Mysteries - Ernest Favenc
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