Haunted Castles collects horror writer Ray Russell’s “S” trilogy - Sardonicus, Sagittarius, and Sanguinarius - as well as the short stories Comet Wine, The Runaway Lovers, The Vendetta, and The Cage. The only good story in this collection is Sardonicus, which is also the most famous of the bunch, and it’s easy to see why.
Set in the 19th century, a famous doctor travels to Bohemia (modern day Czech Republic) to visit an old flame in her castle (nearly all of the stories take place in castles, hence the title of the collection) who’s married a Polish nobleman with the unlikely name of Mr Sardonicus. He has the unfortunate condition of having his face frozen in a ghoulish rictus grin and the good doctor is tasked with curing him of this malady.
Though he wrote in the 1950s and 60s, Russell adapts his prose here to fit the period, so he writes Sardonicus in a purple prose-y style that’ll be familiar to readers of Victorian fiction. It’s a skilful approach and works well with its Gothic flavouring of remote European castles, gloomy graveyards, sinister figures, and so on. The story is an entertaining, clever and very successful horror story in the Gothic tradition.
Having put its best foot forward, the collection falters immediately after and never recovers. Sagittarius is a convoluted story that tries to do too much, mixing in famous fictional and nonfictional figures of terror - Mr Hyde, Jack the Ripper and Gilles de Rais - trying to connect them all and failing in a messy, silly and ultimately unconvincing tale that comes off more as pastiche than anything else.
Sanguinarius takes a similar cue to the preceding tale, this time focusing on the nonfictional infamous Countess Elizabeth Bathory, known for bathing in hundreds of women’s blood to keep her looking young. The story is told from a young Liz’s point of view and spins it in a way that it becomes an innocent-corrupted tale. The story though turns out to be very dull, plodding and unmemorable - Bathory’s wiki is more entertaining to read than this story.
Comet Wine is a flat Faustian story of a forgotten Russian composer. The Runaway Lovers is about a pair who cuckold a Duke and pay the price in a dreary story. The Vendetta is the worst story in this book, about paper-thin characters taking offence of others and getting hot and bothered by it - yawn. The Cage is the shortest story here, a half-baked tale about a noblewoman and her demonic lover.
Haunted Castles is worth checking out for Sardonicus alone if you enjoy Gothic/horror fiction, though I’d skip the rest of it if you do pick it up - it’s all downhill after that first story. Otherwise I’d recommend a better Ray Russell book called The Case Against Satan, which is a decent exorcism novel (that predates Blatty’s vastly more famous Exorcist novel by a decade).
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