"To See the Sun" (1980) by Kingsley Amis

 In his essay “Horror Fiction and the Mainstream,” Ramsey Campbell tosses this off parenthetically: 

Kingsley Amis…. describes the process which led to his writing…. Ghost stories: essentially, becoming interested in a genre to the extent of of feeling able to contribute. In his case this produced several fine shorter pieces—I continue to regret not including “To See the Sun” in Uncanny Banquet, with nothing to blame but my own laziness…. [1]

To open my Complete Stories (2011) was the work of a moment.

Fourth paragraph:

     The first shades of dusk are here and I must pause to light my candle. With the passing of the day, what I see from this window has changed a little and goes on changing as I write. Beyond the dark-red roofs of the peasant cottages, sharply sloped against the heavy winter snows, there’s a level grassy stretch something like a mile across (though it’s hard to be precise) and bounded by an irregular line of low hills that give place to higher hills, these being in turn topped by summits of what must be pretty considerable elevation, seeing that Nuvakastra itself can’t be much less than two thousand feet up. Until a few minutes back, the expanse of the plateau, broken here and there by a farmhouse with its outbuildings, a mill, a church, at one point a tiny village of tiny houses, had a warm and inviting look, and the distant mountains, though indeed wild, seemed to offer a noble mystery, a kind of primeval innocence. But now, how remote, how lonely everything seems! Imagine what it must feel like to be a wayfarer on that exposed plain with night closing in, even more to be lost among those desolate ravines and crags, beset by strange sounds and half-fancied movements in the dark! What makes us think that hidden forces are likely to be benevolent?

"To See the Sun" (1980) is a remarkable short story and a hidden gem of the horror genre. Set in 1925, it relates in epistolary style the encounter of an English folklore researcher with the chatelaine of a castle in Dacia. As with all Amis fiction, its structure, style, and point of view are handled flawlessly.

I first heard about the story four days ago in an essay in the collection Ramsey Campbell, Probably (2020), wherein Campbell regretted not getting the story into his anthology Uncanny Banquet.

"To See the Sun" is available in both the collected and complete Amis short story collections.

Don’t miss it.

Jay

29 April 2023

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1.  Ramsey Campbell, Probably: Revised and Expanded (2020) p.31.