Muckross Abbey and Other Stories

January 2, 2023
Ghosts haunt this smart if repetitive collection from Murray (The Human Zoo). In “Apartment 4D,” a highlight, the 20-something narrator becomes obsessed with the strange and possibly spectral behavior of a single mother and daughter who live down the hall from her. The equally strong “Remote Control” involves a vacationing man and his wife, who are irked by the TV in their room, which switches on every night at two a.m. Here and elsewhere, a ghost ends up shaping the proceedings. Even the dialogue-driven “First Cause,” which has a less paranormal vibe than the others and mainly involves a couple’s argument about their unhappiness, introduces a ghost. Over time, unfortunately, the formula loses its impact. After the protagonist of “The Third Boy” gets locked out of her home, for instance, it’s not hard to suspect that the unsettling neighbor who takes her in may not be fully human. Still, on their own, Murray’s gothic stories pulsate with ornate prose (“The house was so silent that one understood how quiet and still could be synonyms”). Each story has plenty of spookiness and intelligence, though with diminishing returns.

January 1, 2023
This is a tongue-in-cheek take on gothic fiction, though the stories don't veer into humor or parody; rather, Murray tweaks familiar elements. The title story is a modern take on du Maurier's Rebecca, detailing the disappearance of Simone, a woman who's married to a man about whom the protagonist has always had reservations. Like most of the stories, ""Remote Controls"" features characters inherently suspicious of one another; in this case, they're staying at a hotel together. ""Vanishing Point"" profiles a troubled artist who has to contend with his meddlesome parents at a rental on the Cape before being shipped off to Andover. There's a dark energy that looms over each of the stories, with most of the characters being academics, art historians, or artists. Horror readers who enjoy more prosaic elements will admire Murray's drawn-out, elaborate pacing. Overall, it's a well-written, satisfying collection with mystery elements for fans of Sarah Waters and Kate Morton.

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February 15, 2023
Moors, mists, and mirrors: all expected in classic ghost stories. Careening cars, TV sets with minds of their own, and cellphones: Welcome to a new iteration of spectral spookiness. Murray provides 10 updated takes on gothic ghost tales in this short story collection. Set in contemporary times, each tale riffs on tropes from the past. Along the way, children are lost to sinister (or sadly mundane) forces, and shadowy figures haunt hallways, mirrors, and run-down apartment complexes. In "Remote Control," the young wife of a previously married older man struggles to piece together the circumstances of her predecessor's demise in an homage to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (complete with an errant TV set which might be a stand-in for Mrs. Danvers). A haunting (literally) tale of a strange mother and daughter duo encountered by a narrator years prior takes its cue from Henry James' The Turn of the Screw as the narrative grows bleaker and more surreal with its retelling around a fireplace on Christmas Eve. Two stories, "The Dead Children" and "The Flowers, the Birds, the Trees," rely on each other to flesh out the details surrounding the years-ago death of a young student (or students!) at a convent boarding school. Some of Murray's characters approach their situations from a more analytic--or meta--perspective than those populating more classic ghost stories: One opines that the function of time is to make things disappear and, "without time, everything is still there." Another muses that the dead and the living each belong in their own "place"; yet another that the dead may not even need a justification "to come back." The cumulative effect of the parade of ghosts may blunt the surprise factor in later stories, but each tale presents a uniquely crafted poltergeist. These are not your father's ghost stories.

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Starred review from December 1, 2022

In Murray's new story collection, following her novel The Human Zoo, the suspense starts at the table of contents, with story titles building the requisite dread of all good ghost stories. The stories themselves are delightfully abundant, with well-wrought spookiness. Classic elements of the Gothic terrain--fog, shadows, scratching branches, whispers, knocks, and lots of ghosts--are all featured. What raises these stories to a fresh level is the juxtaposition of such tried-and-true tropes against the mundanity of the 21st century--the dropped cell service when lost on a shrouded moor or the romantic get-away to a darkly charming old house with a possessed TV. These modern elements cleverly charge the narrative and ratchet up the creep factor. As one character muses: "There was, apparently, an entire field of study that was devoted to this, that tied into physics, that was there to take the everyday and to torture it into something so complex and deranged as to make life fraught with inexplicable, limitless horror." VERDICT With frequent nods to both contemporary and classic ghost-story writers (Daphne Du Maurier, Henry James), the success of these stories lies not just in the well-crafted writing but in the conscious mixing of a shape-shifting old world with an unreliably secure modern world. A masterly recharging of a treasured literary tradition that Murray clearly loves and respects.--Laura Florence

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