The Dark Masters Trilogy by Stephen Volk

Three of Stephen Volk’s recent novellas, portrait stories of significant figures in the fields of horror and the macabre, have been lovingly and lavishly repackaged and conjoined as the ‘Dark Masters Trilogy’. Here we meet, in youth, middle age and premature old age, ‘Fred’ Hitchcock, Dennis Wheatley and Peter Cushing in the environs of Leytonstone, Netherwood and Whitstable. It’s a resonant overarching title. The real characters embedded in these tales of psychological suspense, uneasy horror and occult powerplay were all masters of the dark arts. But the darkness is also the existential void, the crisis of the soul with which Volk confronts them. Peter Cushing’s sense of desolation after the death of his beloved wife Helen; ‘Fred’ Hitchock’s childhood bewilderment at the strange machinations of the adult world; and the sense of inadequacy and social inferiority which bedevils Dennis Wheatley.

There is a thematic coherence which fully warrants the use of the word ‘trilogy’, and subtle links are included which connect the worlds of the three focal characters. In Whitstable, a waitress is referred to as ‘a Kentish Kim Novak’; Both Hitch and Aleister Crowley are likened to Buddha; Alesteir Crowley recalls an encounter with a young and enthusiastic Christopher Lee, who professes to be an ‘enormous fan’ of Dennis Wheatley (a gentle dig at Sir Christopher’s tendency to name drop); and Dennis Wheatley recalls his friendship with Hitch and Alma. But is this testing, this drawing out through the psychic scouring of adversity and terror, which draws the three portraits together and provides us with such a rich, ambiguous and ultimately loving depiction of legendary figures made human, revered icons rendered vulnerable. The stories, inflected with biographical detail but straying far from the straight path of fact, nevertheless feel true. Volk’s investment in the lives and the work stamps them with the hallmark of authenticity.

Novellas they may be, but Whitstable, Leytonstone and Netherwood are highly concentrated, multi-layered works which encompass a complex array of themes. As the titles suggest, they are partly evocations of place. The East End London of Leytonstone, where Fred’s father owned a grocer’s at 517 The High Road; The Kentish fishing town of Whitstable where Peter Cushing became such a well known resident; and the Hastings guest-house where Alesteir Crowley lived out his declining years. But these are also places rooted in particular historical moments, hence the appending of dates to the titles in the contents pages. Leytonstone is set in 1906, the pre-First World War twilight of Empire; Netherwood takes place amidst the post-war ruination and austerity of 1947 – ‘the blighted land’ as Dennis Wheatley thinks of it whilst gazing out of the train window; And Whitstable is situated in 1971, at the beginning of the steady decline of the decade following the euphoria of the 60s.

Together, they offer a kaleidoscopic portrait of England (more particularly, South Eastern England) across the twentieth century. Volk has a way of nailing time and place with a keen, haiku-like phrase. An ‘airfix blue sky’ is the perfect simile for a clear 70s day. And the use of the word ‘malachite’ to describe the particular shade of green livery employed by southern railway carriages somehow immediately fixes them to the 40s world, to British Transport Film colour. Indeed, the very fact that Dennis Wheatley, a writer at the height of his bestselling renown with the wealth attendant upon it, travels by train says much about the nature of post-war, pre-Beeching Britain. Small details are also used like cuttings in a nostalgic scrapbook to summon the particularities of an era. In the case of the 1971 of Whitstable, songs on the radio (Grandad and My Sweet Lord), Pan Books of Horror and a Doctor Who Radio Times cover heralding the first appearance of Roger Delgado’s Master.

This national portraiture also encompasses a keen sense of class division, which Volk delineates with great subtlety. The ‘monster’ of Whitstable is a working class character, and Peter Cushing’s entrance into his ‘lair’ and encounter with a working class mother is a finely observed distillation of the bristling class conflicts boiling to the surface at the time. It’s a measure of the novella’s loving tribute to Cushing (it was first published in his centenary year) that he is shown as being entirely understanding of her verbal hostility towards his refined accent and bearing, even though he feels each ‘fuck’ thrown at him as a blow. The class distinctions of the East End Edwardian milieu are exemplified by the division of the local into saloon and public bar areas. Even within the fairly narrow economic range of this neighbourhood, there seems some inherent need to put up barriers to make the stratifications of social position visible, to ensure they are correctly observed. The tensions created by the maintenance of such appearances are one of the barely understood influences which go towards forming the character of young Fred, and thereby, of course, his subsequent art.

Dennis Wheatley is plagued by a sense of social inferiority, of the hollowness of his achievements. Joan, his wife, is from an aristocratic background and he never feels a part of her circle; ‘they were Joan’s people, not his’, as his inner chorus comments during a recollection of a grilling at a particularly awful party. Like Hitch, the persona put on by the adult Fred, he feels the obligation to put on a front, an affable, clubbable façade. Peter Cushing, feeling utterly hollow in his grieving for Helen, also finds himself compelled to don his outward cloak of charm and gentile courtesy when all he really wants to do is hide from the bright life and expectations of the world. Pedro Marques’ cover art captures this aspect of the trilogy perfectly. The sense that we are glimpsing a series of authentic, troubled selves behind a carefully fashioned masquerade. This is not to say that we are offered the kind of one-dimensional ‘dark-side’ portraits of well-loved characters which have been a staple of TV biopics for some time now. These three stories are an attempt to create rounded, human characters by taking biographical details and fleshing them out with themes and preoccupations distilled from the work.

It’s an interesting fictional form, a blend of tribute, biographical meditation and auto-commentary on the subjects’ work. All three masters are caught within refractions and inversions of their own archetypal tales. Peter Cushing’s confrontation with a monster whose ‘evil’ seems inherent and ineradicable; Fred’s early reification of the ‘fair-haired girl’ icon, his manufacture of a suspense narrative whose ultimate, ever-receding aim is self-discovery; and Dennis Wheatley’s reluctant involvement in an occult thriller with the model for one of his own villainous magi, Alesteir Crowley - A scenario which complicates his own need for a world in which the forces of darkness and light are clearly defined, as they had seemed to be during the war.

These all work magnificently as tales of terror, unease and suspense in and of themselves. But the moulding of the fictional narratives around psychological portraits of actual artists (whether their artistry comprised of writing, film directing or acting), the splicing together of art and biography, results in a reflection on the extent to which authors, auteurs and actors invest truthful elements of their own being into their work (to whatever degree of self-consciousness or fanciful disguise). This also becomes a comment, particularly pertinent in an age of rampant celebrity, on the way that readers or viewers can mine books, films or performances for seams of the creator’s authentic inner life, which may be hidden by the cultivated public persona presented to the prying world. Dennis Wheatley’s experiences at Netherwood, his co-option and testing by the arch manipulator Alesteir Crowley, leads him to contemplate the theme for his next novel, the book which will free him form a debilitating period of writer’s block, a crisis of self-belief. He comes up with the title and the character sketch of the protagonist: The Haunting of Toby Jugg. With its portrayal of an airman physically and psychologically traumatised by the experience of war, it’s generally considered his most substantive and personally nuanced achievement.

Oddly enough, I have recently come across two further pieces of writing which have directly reflected upon the Dark Masters Trilogy. Earlier this year, I saw the film The Ballad of Shirley Collins and later read Shirley’s excellent autobiographical memoirs All In The Downs. Collins was a young girl growing up in Hastings during the post-war period. Her mother was a member of the local Communist party and would send Shirley and her sister Dolly out into the town to sell the party magazine the Daily Worker. Dennis Wheatley would have been horrified to see it. In the film, Shirley is seen watching the revived Jack In the Green ceremony in her old home town. More Pagan rituals in Hastings. She was aware of Crowley’s presence at Netherwood at the time. She notes that she and Dolly first sang in public at Oakhurst Hotel on The Ridge as part of a Hastings Communist Party social weekend. Netherwood was just nearby. Crowley ‘had a reputation as a person to keep clear of – and I know that when Dolly and I were walking along The Ridge to The Harrow where our Uncle Wally and Aunt Nell in their Tudor farmhouse, we’d always cross to the other side of the road and creep by. Then run!’ This is no doubt an anecdote which she has regaled to her good friend David Tibet, who was instrumental in encouraging her back to singing once more. Tibet creates powerful music of an incantatory, recitative nature with Current 93, constructing his own occult mythologies in which the forces of good and evil battle struggle for ascendancy in scenarios of Gnostic apocalypse. He was also one of the authors of Netherwood: The Last Resort of Alesteir Crowley, by a ‘Gentleman of Hastings’, a book which Volk found in a bookshop in the Old Town (an area which Shirley’s mum considered ‘rough’) and which proved indispensable for the writing of his own Netherwood tale. The introduction of All In the Downs is written by Stewart Lee, a great fan and supporter of Collins. Lee is one of the writers appearing in an anthology of horror stories written by comedians and edited by Johnny Mains and Robin Ince, Dead Funny (and its follow up, Dead Funny Encore). Volk dedicates the Dark Masters Trilogy to Johnny.

Another comedian with a story appearing in Dead Funny is Matthew Holness. His story Possum, about a tormented puppeteer, is the basis for a forthcoming film of the same name (with a very, very disturbing poster, particularly if you are an arachnaphobe). Holness was interviewed by the Guardian about it. He talked about his childhood in Whitstable, and his early obsession with the horror genre. He met with Peter Cushing in town, of course. Cushing ‘expressed concern that the six-year old asking for an autograph knew so much about Hammer’. Did young Matthew have a copy of Dennis Gifford’s Monsters In The Movies, I wonder. When he passed his 11-plus, Cushing gave him a copy of his autobiography with a lengthy inscription (yes, he really was a lovely man). Connections, connections.

In telling tales whose focal characters are key figures in the literature and cinema of horror and the macabre and incorporating them within contemporary variations of their own archetypal narratives, Volk also interrogates the nature of the genre. He suggests the insights into human nature, the understanding of the moral struggles constantly at work in the world and, strangely enough, the comforts which it can afford. Dennis Wheatley, in being granted a glimpse of his eventual obscurity, comes to the conclusion that there is a certain nobility and honour, an essential usefulness in providing people with imaginatively diverting and luridly exciting entertainments in a post-war era which has left people in a state of psychological shock. The names of Dachau, Buchenwald and Belsen are recited like an appalling dark litany in both Netherwood and Whitstable. In Leytonstone, the celebration of Empire Day, a tableau which is built around the famous photo of young Fred, clad in military attire, sat upon a pony outside his dad’s grocers in a street bedecked with Union Jacks, anticipates the clash of Imperial powers in the First World War, and the disastrous fractures of world politics and economics which ensued. What can a literature of terror do to encompass (or even to attempt to exclude) such terrible knowledge of the depths to which humanity can sink? How can the old Romantic and Gothic traditions continue to provide their sublime terrors, their subtle frissons in the face of the numbing extremity of the horrors starkly presented in newpaper photos or on the TV screen throughout the 20th century. Peter Cushing perhaps speaks for Volk in his self-defence of the genre for which he had unwittingly become such a defining figure. Answering a no-doubt oft-voiced question as to why he made such ‘horrible films’, he explains ‘I think the best so called “horror” shows us our worst fears in symbolic form and tries to tell us in dramatic form how we can overcome them’.

For Volk, a romantic humanist, the answer is connection, always connection. It is Hitch’s tragedy that he never truly seems to find it. There is always a hollow chamber within, a cell inhabited for life by the confused and frightened boy who must keep the world at bay with ordered systems (from train and tramspotting to the plotting of perfect cinematic thrill rides) and a bluffly remote façade of macabre joviality. The damage sustained in childhood and carried through into adulthood, and the threat to children from the damaged or simply monstrous is a theme which recurs in Volk’s fiction, from Afterlife to Ghost Watch and The Awakening. It is present throughout this trilogy too.

Both Cushing and Wheatley are firm believers in a benevolent Christian God, a force for good in the world. Their worldview is strongly moral, with an underpinning commitment to confronting evil wherever it might be encountered. For Wheatley, as for so many others, the Second World War was a fight against the encroachment of an evil ideological poison in the world. The ritual battle he takes part in with Crowley as an unlikely ally is a struggle against a kind of occult fascism, an attempt to use magic potency attained through pitiless cruelty and brutish bullying to exert a violent, self-aggrandising power. The dark magus whom they oppose is the antithesis to Wheatley’s values and it turns out, surprisingly, Crowley’s. His utter disconnection from all human connection, fellow-feeling and compassion are what makes him truly monstrous. The same is true for the monster whom Cushing confronts in Whitstable. He talks of life being about satisfying ones appetites, and talks of developing the taste for the once prevalent local delicacy of oysters (a scene with uncomfortable echoes of Laurence Olivier’s seduction of Tony Curtis in Spartacus). This is stated as if it were a self-evident truth. Cushing quietly offers an alternative credo in his mind. Life is given meaning through love. Peter’s love for Helen, and Dennis’ love for Joan. This is the redemptive force. Whether it derives from a benevolent God or from the shining heart of the Human spirit.

Solarference present Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde at Exeter Phoenix

Solarference are a duo, Nick Janaway and Sarah Owen, who make electronic music which uses traditional folk song as its familiar source and emotional anchor. The resulting hybrid, which the name poetically evokes, successfully casts both forms in a new light. It reflects both the rural character of their Westcountry background and the experimental musics which they encountered in the course of an art school education in London. This blend of musical traditions follows an oral lineage back through the generations and introduces an exploratory use of new technologies, drawing on paths forged in the era of post-war modernism. Such a superimposition of old and new raises the spectre of hauntology, that awkward academic term which has been applied to certain kinds of music and graphic design invoking the ghosts of memory inhabiting a post war period which ended with the onset of the 80s. These ghosts are also often imbued with more ancient layers of time and folk memory, reflecting the fascination with the deep history of Britain which was prevalent in 1970s culture. It has to be said, the term often seems to function largely as a label which its supposed practitioners can reject or express bewilderment as to the meaning of. Whatever terminology is applied, however, the drawing together of the old songs, which seem to rise with uncanny familiarity from some collective strata of the unconscious, with electronic sounds and digital concrète manipulations redolent of an age super-saturated (and perhaps sated) with technological magic, produces a bewitching and very powerful effect.

This fusion of old and new was lent a further dimension on March 9th at the Phoenix in Exeter when they provided a live, semi-improvised accompaniment to the 1920 film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of hubristic scientific alchemy and the duality of the human soul, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The digital projection was taken from a poor quality print, the shadows and fog of the gaslit London street scenes rendered even more murky and obscure by the abrasion and chemical erosion of time. This made for an interesting disjuncture with the duo standing to the side of the stage beneath the screen, their studiously intent features illuminated by the megabyte glow of their lectern-perched laptops. The impression of eras facing one another across a century’s gulf, analogue and digital interpenetrating in some interstitial zone beyond normal temporal bounds, was reinforced by the Victorian/Edwardian casual garb which the two musicians wore for the occasion.

The film, with John Barrymore in the dual lead role, was the most prestigious of three versions made in 1920, and really served to establish the portrayal of the Jekyll and Hyde personae, and set the accepted tone of the story, in the popular imagination. Jekyll is upright and observant of conventional Victorian middle-class social etiquette; Hyde is bent into a devolved, simian stoop and is amorally intent on sating any of the sexual appetites of venting any of the violent urges which define his being. This idea of Hyde as the embodiment of the repressed side of the superficially noble and respectable Dr Jekyll which physically manifests itself as an ape-like monster was first put forward in J.R.Sullivan’s 1887 theatrical adaptation. It was not an interpretation which pleased Stevenson himself. But his creation was soon developing into something beyond his control. The film drew on this sensational and highly successful stage version, and the transformation scene became the central dramatic moment, a testing challenge for actor and special effects artist. There is a definite aura of the limelighted stage suffusing the 1920 film Another faultline between the ages is evident here – the grand world of the late Victorian theatre suddenly fixed on the screen in the new global medium of the movies.

In this instance, it is a rather less successful conjunction. Many of the drawing room scenes are stilted and dull, and John Barrymore’s broad gestural acting can come across as the most overcooked ham in the unforgiving close-up glare of the studio arc lights. His transformation scene in particular raised unfortunate titters and snorts of derision. He mugs frantically, grasps his throat and seems to throw himself bodily about before finally taking a spectacularly melodramatic dive onto the laboratory floor. His performance as Hyde is at times memorably flesh-crawling, however. His lank hair is clammily pasted to his temples and his skull disturbingly distended (a phrenologist’s dream, or nightmare) in the shape of a coconut husk or a bulbous spider’s abdomen. There is indeed one truly horrific fever dream sequence in which a giant, hairy spider with Hyde’s leering face at its head clambers stiffly up onto the four poster bed in which Jekyll restlessly sleeps, crawls over his body and settles down to merge invisibly into it. The figure who then wakes up is, of course, Hyde.

Solarference draw on the wide folk ballad repertoire which mournfully tells of false love and tragically thwarted romance to accompany the scenes involving the ‘pure’ object of Jekyll’s repressed affections and the musical hall artiste (played by Nita Naldi, the future co-star of Rudolph Valentino in some of his biggest pictures) who falls prey to Hyde’s unsubtle and ruthlessly calculating advances. Many of these ballads have appeared on the death-haunted late 60s albums of Shirley Collins (The Sweet Primeroses, The Power of the True Love Knot and Love, Death and the Maiden), on which she was often accompanied by the hauntingly fragile piping of her sister Dolly’s home-built portative organ. It’s possible that it was here that Solarference discovered the songs – a fine source if so. They certainly create a cohesive, melancholic mood which emphasises the female aspects of the story’s tragic trajectory. Barbara Allen and The Sweet Primeroses are both songs of false and violently opposed love. The latter has a verse which begins with the line ‘So I'll go down to some lonesome valley/Where no man on earth shall there me find’, which is used for some of the darkest parts of the story. The words are cut and repeated, creating a truncated echo which makes it seem as if we really have descended into that deep, desolate valley. Barbara Allen, a tale of love scorned and mocked by its object, is particularly appropriate for the scenes in which Hyde taunts and dismisses the musical hall artiste whom he has reduced to his domestic drudge, and whom he later encounters in the opium den. Go From My Window also has the highly apposite line ‘oh the devil’s in the man that he will not understand, he can’t have a harbouring here’. Solarference have evidently chosen these songs with great care and attention to detail.

Black Ships Ate the Sky

They also use the old Charles Wesley hymn tune Idumea to stunning effect. Its opening question, ‘and am I born to die, to lay this body down/and must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown’, once again highlights the tragic nature of the story, its inexorable progression towards a fatal conclusion. But it also points to the spiritual anxieties which underlie Stevenson’s stories. The concern for the state, or even the existence of the soul in an age of scientific breakthrough – of the telescoping of time into geological millennia, and of psychoanalytical and evolutionary theories which began fundamentally to change humanity’s perception of itself and its position in the scheme of creation. The song was also incorporated into the eschatological worldview of David Tibet and his Current 93 project. It was sung by a number of people on the Black Ships Ate the Sky album, one of whom was Shirley Collins.

Much of the soundtrack was created on the fly from numerous ‘concrète’ sources, sounds recorded and instantly transformed by a powerful and swiftly responsive sound-editing programme. Comb teethe were thumb-raked, miniature music box handles cranked, the bodies of glass bottles chinked and their mouths breathily blown across, Chinese-sounding flutes piped, paper slowly torn and a dulcimer plucked. The resultant noises were expanded, multiplied and dispersed into rich and colourful fogs of sound. The principal source was the human voice, however, the vast potential of which was used to produce whispers, clucks, slurps, sighs, shhhhhs and grunts. These sometimes lent the sequences they accompanied an inner soundtrack, as if they were sounding out the film’s subterranean layers of meaning. For the scene in which Hyde enters the Limehouse opium den, for instance, the recorded voice was atomised, replicated and scattered. This expressed both the fragmentary, partial nature of Hyde’s persona, and the dislocated dreams drifting up from the squalid pallets of the dazed pipe smokers. For the dinner party scene in the Victorian parlour, we heard a layered swarm of sibilant whispers. They were somewhat akin to the susurrus of inner voices heard by the angels in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire as they watch over the readers in the Berlin State Library. This parlour whispering was interspersed with slurping, sucking and the smacking of lips, suggesting that this was a milieu in which the appetites for food and gossip were indistinguishable.

Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian

The extended vocal techniques, subsequent electronic transformations and their expression of inner states brings to mind the 1960s and 70s collaborations between Italian composer Luciano Berio and his then wife, the soprano singer Cathy Berberian. Her extraordinary vocal performances on Visage and Sequenza III take the listener on an intense, kaleidoscopically shifting voyage through a dizzyingly fragmented mirrorworld of psychological moods. It feels discomfortingly at times like experiencing a monumental breakdown from the deep interior of an individual psyche. Berberian also sang Berio’s more straightforward Folk Songs suite, which gathered together folk melodies from various countries (and included the modern standard Black Is The Colour of My True Love’s Hair), providing a further parallel with Solarference’s blending of the experimental and the traditional. Berio would have created his vocal collages through a thousand cuts and splices of tape, of course. A modern artist who has used less fiddly and laborious (although in their own way equally painstaking) digital means to make music from the isolated, compacted and stretched sounds of the human voice is Oneohtrix Point Never (aka Daniel Lopatin), whose latest album, R Plus 7, is another point of reference. The isolation and reproduction of fragments of human utterance also served to create syllabic rhythms, which provided a propulsive sense of momentum to some of the film’s more dramatic moments.

In the second part of the evening, Solarference returned in modern day civvies to play a small selection from their album Kiss of Clay (the chilly phrase deriving from the haunting graveside song Cold Blows the Wind). The record is, perhaps understandably, more solidly song-based, with the experimental elements restricted largely to creating background colour and atmosphere. Live, however, those elements came to the fore, and the songs were allowed to stretch out into more unusual shapes before returning to their melodic harbour. It was a genuinely thrilling and innovative balance of the traditional and the experimental. The harmonies were lovely in themselves, particularly on the bilingual Welsh song which they ended with, Ei Di’r Deryn Du. This is a fusion music which really works in exciting ways, without sounding remotely contrived or forced. It manages to unite the seemingly alien and irreconcilable worlds of Xenakis, Stockhausen and Pierre Henry with those of Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins and Anne Briggs. The folk tunes and the tales they tell form the human heart, the familiar core, but they are moulded into all manner of new and strange configurations, whilst never losing their essential character.

After the final song, we were invited to come and look at the technology involved, and ask any questions which might occur. Looking at the sound wave patterns and the shadowed sweeps which gathered selected splinters up to transform them, it became evident how intuitive and visually cued the process was (once thoroughly learned and absorbed, of course). This is sonic painting or sculpting in real time, a digital development of the ideas of drawn sound synthesis which Daphne Oram in Britain and Eduard Artemiev in the USSR experimented with in the 1970s. This invitation to come and talk and see how things were done pointed to a real desire on the artists’ part to reach out and communicate their own excitement about their music and the ideas behind it. It was an excitement and daringly exploratory spirit which came across forcefully in the committed and immensely enjoyable performances they gave at the Phoenix in Exeter.