Tuesday Terror! The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker

I want my mummy!

😀 😀 😀 🙂

Our narrator, barrister Malcolm Ross, is sent a message by the girl he’s already well on the way to falling in love with, Margaret Trelawny, begging him to come to her aid. Her father has been attacked and seriously injured. Malcolm rushes to her side, as do the doctor and the police. Abel Trelawny’s physical injuries are severe but not life-threatening, but he is in a strange comatose condition. He has, oddly, left instructions on what must be done in just such an eventuality. He must not be removed from his room, which is full of Egyptian treasures he has “collected” from tombs, including several sarcophagi. And two people must watch over him each night. So Malcolm offers to stay at the house, and helps with the watching while carrying on his wooing. Slowly he and Margaret learn that her father has been studying one mummy in particular, Queen Tera, and believes that she had magical skills. He believes that she intends to come back from the dead, and Trelawny intends to help her…

This would have made a great short story or novella, but at full-novel length it’s incredibly over-stretched and repetitive. It’s well written, of course, and the narration from Simon Vance is excellent – it may in fact have been the only thing that got me through all the repetition. There are parts that are very good, like the flashback to when Trelawny and his associate stole – sorry, I mean “collected” – the contents of Tera’s tomb, including Tera herself! Then there are parts where Malcolm tells us for the umpteenth time all about how sweet his Margaret is, to the point where I was about ready to put an Egyptian curse on both of them myself.

Bram Stoker

However my desire to know what would happen when Trelawny carried out his experiment held my interest throughout. Who doesn’t love a resurrected mummy?? But what an anti-climax! After eight hours of listening, the experiment is packed into the last quarter of an hour, and the actual climax takes about two minutes! And I don’t mean to quibble, but the happy ending seemed wildly inappropriate to the big build-up! I had already learned from another review that the story apparently had two endings, so after I’d finished I did a bit of checking. It turns out the original ending from 1903 was far from happy – in fact, it was so bleak the publisher refused to reissue the book in 1912 unless Stoker altered it. So he did, and now the happy ending is the one most commonly used. I found a copy of the original online, and while it certainly suits the tone better and is more Stoker-ish, it’s just as rushed and tacked on at the last moment as the later ending. I seem to remember complaining about the abrupt way Dracula finishes too, so maybe it was a deliberate stylistic choice of Stoker’s to end stories this way, but it felt like an unsatisfactory pay-off after a lengthy (though mostly enjoyable) listen.

(The porpy did a bit of research during the boring bits, and
discovered that even the ancient Egyptians loved porpies!)

Relief of a porcupine in an Egyptian desert; detail of a wall fragment from the grave of Penhenuka at Saqqara, Egypt. Old Kingdom, 5th Dynasty, c. 2500 BCE. Neues Museum, Berlin, Germany. Painted limestone. ÄM 1132.
Attribution: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Audible UK Link

PS Sorry I’m falling behind with answering comments and reading posts. The Australian Open has started which means I have to become even more nocturnal than I usually am, which throws out what I optimistically refer to as ‘my schedule’. I’ll catch up when the virtual jet lag wears off! Blame these men…

Meantime, good morning and good night!

The Horned God edited by Michael Wheatley

When the pipes play…

😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

The last of the British Library Tales of the Weird anthologies that the porpy and I have read for this year’s spooky season, this one contains 11 stories and 6 short poems all on the theme of Pan. As I’ve said before, the poems in these anthologies never really interest me and I tend to skim over them, so to be fair I don’t include them when deciding how to rate the book. The eleven stories, though, are very good. I’ve always liked Pan from way back when first introduced to him in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and indeed the relevant chapter of that book, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is included here and works very well as a standalone story, showing Pan in his demigod role as friend and protector of animals.

Most of the stories here, though, are more interested in Pan as everything from a champion of free sex, to a corrupter of the innocent, to a campaigner against the deadliness of some of the more joyless types of Christianity. Pan, when he’s being presented as a positive force, encourages people to find freedom from the strict conventionalities of Victorian/Edwardian society, that being the era of most of these stories. But just as often he’s presented as bad or, rather, amoral, corrupting people and destroying them either morally or physically or both. Seems to very much depend on the outlook of the author!

The blurb suggests the stories share a theme of “queer awakenings” which surprised me when I looked at the index and saw that Ratty and Mole were about to appear, along with Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan which I had also already read and loved, and which for me had themes of degeneracy and degradation rather than any kind of awakening, queer or otherwise! As I suspected, this claim is little more than a marketing ploy to tie in with the current obsession with all things queer in contemporary culture – while it could feasibly be claimed for a couple of the stories, most of the sex, actual or implied, in the stories is of the heterosexual kind (with occasional mild hints of bestiality!), and often not presented positively at all. Being of that earlier era, it is also never described graphically, though there are enough hints for the reader to be able to imagine what’s going on in those forest glades at midnight…

The Great God Pan
Illustration by
mgkellermeyer via DeviantArt.com.

This is another collection that got consistently high ratings from me, excluding the poems. Of the eleven stories, I gave seven the full five stars, and none of the stories rated as poor. Here’s a flavour of a few of the ones I enjoyed most:

The Moon-Slave by Barry Pain – a story of a young girl who loves to dance! I highlighted this one in a previous Tuesday Terror! post.

The Story of a Panic by EM Forster – Young Eustace, a “repellent” 14-year-old (is there any other kind?), is staying in an Italian hotel with two aunts and a group of dully conventional and mostly middle-aged English and American people. During a picnic, everyone suddenly feels a great fear and they all run off… except Eustace. Whatever happened to him on that hill, (and there’s a reason the word “panic” has Pan in it), Eustace is changed forever, and no matter how hard they try, the other guests are unable to “cure” him. This is one on which the “queer awakenings” claim is based, and it can certainly easily be read that way, though it can equally be read as simply a breaking away from society’s conventions. It’s very well told, with some humour but also with some depth.

The Devil’s Martyr by Signe Toksvig – (If you’re wondering, yes, she was the great-aunt of Sandi Toksvig.) An orphaned young boy has been left in the guardianship of a bishop, who has handed him over to monks to train him up for a life in the Church – a particularly harsh version of the Church, where all is sin and the monks enjoy nothing more than a good bit of self-flagellation of an evening. However, a friend of the boy’s father shows up and gets the bishop to agree to allow the boy to go away with him for a month. During that month, he introduces the boy to wine, women and song, and shows him there is another god to worship – Pan, who in this story is not unlike the Devil. This is a dark story which is certainly about sexual awakening, but also about the evils that can result when religion is taken to extremes.

Pan in The Wind in the Willows

The Golden Bough by David H Keller – Two newlyweds are honeymooning, when the rather fey young wife tells her husband that she has dreamt of a house and wants them to live in it. The husband, who is wealthy and loving to a fault, agrees to drive around till they find the house, which they eventually do. It turns out to be a castle, isolated from all other people, in the middle of a forest. The husband isn’t wildly keen but decides to stay there for a while in the hopes his young wife will tire of the loneliness. But there’s a mysterious man in the forest, who plays a mysterious pipe, and the wife becomes enthralled by him. Very dark, with elements of fairy stories and some great horror imagery at the end.

I seem to have picked out some of the darker stories, but there are lighter stories too. However, the overall lesson is that Pan is not a god to treat lightly! If you hear those pipes when you’re walking in the forest, run! An excellent collection that is interesting for showing the variety of ways in which Pan has been portrayed.

(The porpy admitted that he and his chums often sneak off
to worship their demigod Pan in the forest at midnight…)

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, the British Library.

Amazon UK Link

Tuesday Terror! The Moon-Slave by Barry Pain

That’s how you know…

This week’s story is taken from The Horned God, a British Library Tales of the Weird anthology focusing on stories starring the Great God Pan. They are a warning to us all to live in crowded cities, preferably with our doors and windows sealed to keep out the horrors and temptations of the natural world! Our little heroine in this story paid no heed to this advice, as she danced ‘neath the light of an enchanted moon…

The Moon-Slave
by Barry Pain

Barry Pain

The Princess Viola had, even in her childhood, an inevitable submission to the dance; a rhythmical madness in her blood answered hotly to the dance music, swaying her, as the wind sways trees, to movements of perfect sympathy and grace.

Like many of us girlies, she has found dancing with (most) men something of a disappointment…

‘They are all right,’ she said to herself as she thought of the men she had left, ‘but they cannot dance. Mechanically they are all right; they have learned it and don’t make childish mistakes; but they are only one-two-three machines. They haven’t the inspiration of dancing. It is so different when I dance alone.’

Even her Prince, the handsome Hugo, to whom she has become betrothed, doesn’t set her blood tingling when they dance…

With others the betrothal was merely a question of state. With her it was merely a question of obedience to the wishes of authority; it had been arranged; Hugo was comme ci, comme ça—no god in her eyes; it did not matter. But with Hugo it was quite different—he loved her.

Perhaps if she had loved him it would have been different – love is the secret ingredient that turns (most) men into good dancers, after all. The betrothal party is in full swing, but Viola, bored with the dance, slips off into the palace grounds and finds herself at the entrance to the old overgrown maze…

Many years ago the clue to the maze had been lost; it was but rarely now that anyone entered it. Its gravel paths were green with weeds, and in some places the hedges, spreading beyond their borders, had made the way almost impassable.

Viola enters the maze anyway with the idea of reaching the space at the centre, but gradually is lulled by the darkness…

She soon forgot her purpose, and wandered about quite aimlessly, sometimes forcing her way where the brambles had flung a laced barrier across her path, and a dragging mass of convolvulus struck wet and cool upon her cheek.

By chance… or is it?… she finds herself in the centre…

Here the ground was carpeted with sand, fine and, as it seemed, beaten hard. From the summer night sky immediately above, the moonlight, unobstructed here, streamed straight down upon the scene. Viola began to think about dancing.

And that’s when she makes her mistake…

‘Sweet moon,’ she said in a kind of mock prayer, ‘make your white light come down in music into my dancing-room here, and I will dance most deliciously for you to see.’ She flung her head backward and let her hands fall; her eyes were half closed, and her mouth was a kissing mouth. ‘Ah! sweet moon,’ she whispered, ‘do this for me, and I will be your slave; I will be what you will.’

Oh dear!

Quite suddenly the air was filled with the sound of a grand invisible orchestra. Viola did not stop to wonder. To the music of a slow saraband she swayed and postured. In the music there was the regular beat of small drums and a perpetual drone. The air seemed to be filled with the perfume of some bitter spice. Viola could fancy almost that she saw a smouldering camp-fire and heard far off the roar of some desolate wild beast. She let her long hair fall, raising the heavy strands of it in either hand as she moved slowly to the laden music. Slowly her body swayed with drowsy grace, slowly her satin shoes slid over the silver sand.

Le Faune by Carlos Schwabe.
Musées d’art et d’histoire in Geneva.

* * * * *

Things we have learned today:

1. Never wander off alone at night.

2. Never go into old forgotten mazes.

3. Never make pacts with powers you don’t understand!

4. If given a choice between a Prince and a desolate wild beast, pick the Prince!!

This is a short story, beautifully written and full of the kind of lush descriptions of the natural world that normally signal the arrival of Pan. It’s very clear where it’s heading but it’s done so well that it still manages to create an atmosphere of tension. In the style of those happy bygone days it’s packed full of sensuality and repressed desire without ever resorting to spelling everything out in graphic detail, and that subtlety and allusion works so much better than the hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-hammer approach of too much modern writing. The porpy and I both loved this one!

If you’d like to read it, here’s a link.

(The porpy apologises for the unseasonal story
and wishes you a Merry Christmas!)

Fretful Porpentine rating:   😮 😮

Overall story rating:            😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Amazon UK Link

Our Haunted Shores edited by Emily Alder, Jimmy Packham and Joan Passey

Get out of the water!

🙂 🙂 😐

Another anthology from the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, this one has twenty entries, all with settings around the shores of Britain. I say entries rather than stories because several of these are not stories, and often not at all what I would describe as horror or weird. There are poems, which I freely admit are not my thing and none of them made me want to change my mind. There are recountings of folk myths, which are interesting but not developed as stories. And there are pieces which recount natural disasters, such as drownings and tragedies at sea, which are done more as faux reportage than, again, being developed as horror stories. Of the twenty, I’d call fifteen of them stories, but there are only eleven that I’d classify as in any way weird, even by the most generous definition of that genre.

Unfortunately, even among those fifteen I found the quality of the selections pretty disappointing. While there are some stand-out stories, most are rather unimpressive and a few are frankly poor, feeling to me as if they’re included only because of their connection to the overarching theme rather than for any intrinsic quality in the stories. I said recently that these anthologies work best when the editor and the reader are in tune. While I don’t know Emily Alder or Jimmy Packham, I have found in the past that Joan Passey and I are not in tune – she is far more interested in the little poems and folk myths she includes than I am, and we clearly don’t share a definition of what ‘weird’ or even ‘horror’ means. So as always my reaction to the collection is subjective, and other readers may find themselves more in synch with the selections than I.

As usual, here’s a flavour of the ones I enjoyed most – a rather restricted list this time, since I gave only 4 of the entries five stars:

The Sea-Fit by Algernon Blackwood – a deliciously scary story of ancient sea gods and those who worship them. I highlighted this one in a previous Tuesday Terror! post.

Crooken Sands by Bram Stoker – another that I’ve included as a Tuesday Terror! post, this is a surprisingly humorous tale of a visitor to Scotland who insists on wearing full Highland rig despite the warnings of the local seer.

On the Isle of Blue Men by Robert W Sneddon – A manuscript is found after the death of a madman who had appeared on the Portuguese shore one day and lived out his remaining life there. The manuscript tells of how the narrator and his wife, Alice, sailed out to an island inhabited only by three lighthouse keepers, all Highland men. One of them Jamieson, is reputed to be a seer. He is horrified that a woman is on the island, especially a red-haired one. He warns that it will bring on them the curse of the Blue Men! And indeed it does! An excellent story, based on a Scottish myth, with some terrifying octopus-like creatures that would certainly deter me from taking a job on a lonely island!

Image: Warriors of Myth via The Scotsman

A Ghost of the Sea by Francis Prevost – The narrator is on a walking holiday in Cornwall and Devon when he meets an old acquaintance who had withdrawn from the world some time back. He explains to the narrator that he behaved badly towards a woman who subsequently drowned, and now he sees her dead body in the sea. Bad enough, but now he has come to see other dead people in the sea too. The writing in this one is great with some powerful imagery, and there’s a real sense of unease. The narrator wishes to be a cynic, but he gradually becomes less certain. Quite an unsettling story that reminds us of the many lives lost around our shores and the many bodies never recovered.

So a few goodies, but one of the less successful of these anthologies overall.

(The porpy says he’ll stick to puddles for a while…)

Fretful Porpentine Rating: 😮 😮

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, the British Library.

Amazon UK Link

Tuesday Terror! Crooken Sands by Bram Stoker

Arthur, Where’s Yer Troosers?

The porpy and I are always happy when Bram Stoker pops up in one of our anthologies. His stories can sometimes be a bit grim for our tastes, but they’re always well written and imaginative. This one is in Our Haunted Shores, one of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series…

Crooken Sands
by Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker

Mr. Arthur Fernlee Markam, who took what was known as the Red House above the Mains of Crooken, was a London merchant, and being essentially a cockney, thought it necessary when he went for the summer holidays to Scotland to provide an entire rig-out as a Highland chieftain, as manifested in chromolithographs and on the music-hall stage.

It has long been a joke in Scotland that if you see someone wandering around in tartan you can be sure they’ll be a tourist. Mr Markham based his knowledge of Scottish culture on a totally reliable source…

He had once seen in the Empire the Great Prince – “The Bounder King” – bring down the house by appearing as “The MacSlogan of that Ilk,” and singing the celebrated Scotch song. “There’s naething like haggis to mak a mon dry!”

(The kilt is not always flattering…)

Very true! Crooken Bay is a beautiful spot, situated between Aberdeen and Peterhead…

…at either end of the bay is a rocky promontory, and when the dawn or the sunset falls on the rocks of red syenite the effect is very lovely.

There is just one spot in the bay that presents danger to the unwary…

Between the rocks, which are apart about some fifty feet, is a small quicksand, which, like the Goodwins, is dangerous only with the incoming tide. It extends outwards till it is lost in the sea, and inwards till it fades away in the hard sand of the upper beach.

It is just above here that the Red House is situated. Mr Markam hadn’t told his family about his holiday outfit, and had had it made in secret…

He had taken some pains to insure the completeness of the Highland costume. For the purpose he had paid many visits to “The Scotch All-Wool Tartan Clothing Mart” which had been lately established in Copthall-court by the Messrs. MacCallum More and Roderick MacDhu.

These gentlemen had pointed out the possible embarrassment of wearing a clan tartan to which Mr Markam was not entitled, so Mr Markam had ordered them to design a unique tartan for him…

It was based on the Royal Stuart, but contained suggestions as to simplicity of pattern from the Macalister and Ogilvie clans, and as to neutrality of colour from the clans of Buchanan, Macbeth, Chief of Macintosh and Macleod. When the specimen had been shown to Markam he had feared somewhat lest it should strike the eye of his domestic circle as gaudy…

(…but sometimes it is…)

However, he was delighted with it and gave the makers his permission to use the design for others if they wished. He didn’t want to go completely overboard though…

“I shall not, of course, take the claymore and the pistols with me on ordinary occasions,”

He changed into the Highland outfit as the boat drew into Aberdeen, and burst upon his family in his full glory. His son was the first to react…

“Here’s a guy! Great Scott! It’s the governor!” And the boy fled forthwith and tried to bury his laughter under a cushion in the saloon.

This was nothing, though, to the reaction of the Aberdonians when the family disembarked…

The boys and loafers, and women with babies, who waited at the landing shed, followed en masse as the Markam party took their way to the railway station; even the porters with their old-fashioned knots and their new-fashioned barrows, who await the traveller at the foot of the gang-plank, followed in wondering delight.

News ran ahead of them to Crooken, and the villagers had gathered to welcome them…

When the party arrived at the gate of the Red House there awaited them a crowd of Crooken inhabitants, hatless and respectfully silent; the remainder of the population was painfully toiling up the hill. The silence was broken by only one sound, that of a man with a deep voice.

“Man! but he’s forgotten the pipes!”

* * * * *

You may well be wondering exactly where the horror is in this story, and I assure you there is some, but I couldn’t resist the humour in the beginning. I’ve never really associated Bram Stoker with humour somehow! Anyway, Mr Markam insists on continuing to wear his rig regardless, despite the warning of the village seer that…

Mon! mon! Thy vanity is as the quicksand which swallows up all which comes within its spell. Beware vanity! Beware the quicksand, which yawneth for thee, and which will swallow thee up! See thyself! Learn thine own vanity! Meet thyself face to face, and then in that moment thou shalt learn the fatal force of thy vanity. Learn it, know it, and repent ere the quicksand swallow thee!”

And one day, on the quicksand, Mr Markam sees himself…

I’ll leave it at that! If you’d like to read the story, here’s a link. The porpy and I found it very well told with lots of humour, and a great, unexpected ending!

(The porpy and I were both put in mind
of the late, great Andy Stewart…)

Fretful Porpentine rating:   😮 😮

Overall story rating:            😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Amazon UK Link

The Night Wire edited by Aaron Worth

Technological ghosties…

😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Another anthology from the great British Library Tales of the Weird series, the theme of this one is how horror writers played with all the new communications technology coming into use in the early part of the twentieth century, examining society’s anxieties about how these would change the world as they knew it. From photographs to movies, from telephones to the telegraph, from phonographs to radio to TV – all technologies we take for granted today but which were revolutionary when they were introduced. And the horror writers of the day used them with great imagination, showing how the ghosties and ghoulies of the time mastered these technologies as tools to boost their scariness to the poor victims of their hauntings!

There are seventeen stories in the book, and the mix of authors is interesting. There are perhaps fewer than usual of the biggest names, though Lovecraft is there; some that are better known, to me at least, in other genres, such as Bernard Capes and Rudyard Kipling; and lots I’ve never come across before. The more I read of these anthologies, the more I realise that their success or failure is largely dependent on the compatibility of the editor and the reader, and is therefore quite subjective. There are a few editors I look forward to eagerly, and Aaron Worth is high on that list. I find his choice of stories always works particularly well for me, and I always enjoy his informative introductions even in the shortened form the format of this series dictates. So, in short, I thoroughly enjoyed this collection! Only three of the stories didn’t work for me – the other fourteen all rated as good, very good or excellent, with eight of them getting the full five stars.

I’ve already highlighted a couple of the stories in previous Tuesday Terror! posts – The Statement of Randolph Carter by HP Lovecraft and They Found My Grave by Marjorie Bowen. Here’s a flavour of a few of the others I most enjoyed:

Poor Lucy Rivers by Bernard Capes – Our narrator is a doctor, One day he’s in a typewriter shop when a young woman comes in to request that the shop exchange a second-hand typewriter she’d bought there a week or so ago. She explains there’s nothing wrong with the machine but she simply wants a different one. The shop owner pretends to give her a different machine but in fact cheats her into taking the same one again. The doctor is intrigued, gets the woman’s name from the shop and learns she does typing jobs to earn just enough to keep body and soul together. So he decides to give her a job, as a means of prying into why she has an issue with that particular typewriter. It transpires the problem may be the person who owned the typewriter before – poor Lucy Rivers! Very effective, and it gives a good picture of how typing gave women a means to earn an independent living. Though thankfully not all typewriters are haunted!

Benlian by Oliver Onions – The narrator, Pudgie, makes his living painting miniatures, using photographs as his models. Across the yard from him is Benlian’s studio – he’s a sculptor, and Pudgie doesn’t know him. But one day, Benlian appears and asks Pudgie to photograph him. Pudgie obliges, but the photos turn out fogged and unclear. Pudgie puts this down to the materials he used in the processing and offers to take new photos, and so begins a routine of him photographing Benlian every few days. But over time the photos become odder, and Pudgie gradually learns just exactly what Benlian is trying to do with the sculpture he’s working on. This is an unnerving one, with a chilling ending that is left deliberately ambiguous as we begin to wonder how reliable Pudgie is as a narrator…

Uncle Phil on TV by JB Priestley – When Uncle Phil dies, the Fleming family inherit £150 insurance money. They decide to buy a TV – a new-fangled invention and horrendously expensive, and with only one channel broadcasting a few hours each evening. Mrs Fleming is the first to spot something rather odd – in the background of the programme she’s watching, she spots someone who looks just like Uncle Phil! Gradually the rest of the family admit that they too keep seeing Uncle Phil, and soon he’s not just in the background – he starts talking to them from the screen or talking to other on-screen characters about them. But why? This is great fun – a little bit of spookiness and lots of humour, and a kind of well-deserved ghostly revenge!

So lots of variety despite the single theme, and everything from light-hearted fun to dark, unsettling and sometimes sad. I also enjoyed the look at very early versions of the various technologies and how they changed the way people lived, creating new opportunities and new forms of entertainment but also adding to the speed and rush of life, and the anxieties that come with that. Another excellent anthology in what is turning out to be a bumper year!

(The porpy is sure if he watches long
enough he’ll see Uncle Phil…)

Fretful Porpentine rating: 😮 😮 😮 😮

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, the British Library.

Amazon UK Link

Tuesday Terror! The Sea-Fit by Algernon Blackwood

To his death singing…

Although the British Library call their series of vintage horror stories Tales of the Weird, the stories often don’t strictly fall into the nebulous definition of “weird fiction”. (Xavier Aldana Reyes defines weird fiction as ‘a subgenre of speculative fiction concerned with the limits of human experience and the unknowability of the natural world that brings together elements of the horror, science fiction and fantasy literary traditions’.) This week’s definitely does, however! I haven’t read much Algernon Blackwood yet, but he’s already left lingering horrors imprinted on my mind from his wonderful weird story The Willows. This one is less well known, but in my opinion just as unsettling. I’ve taken it from the BL’s anthology, Our Haunted Shores…

The Sea-Fit
by Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood

The sea that night sang rather than chanted; all along the far-running shore a rising tide dropped thick foam, and the waves, white-crested, came steadily in with the swing of a deliberate purpose.

Three friends have gathered in a little bungalow nestling in the sand dunes.

Foregathered for Easter, they spent the day fishing and sailing, and at night told yarns of the days when life was younger.

The owner of the bungalow is Captain Erricson…

‘Big Erricson’, Norwegian by extraction, student by adoption, wanderer by blood, a Viking reincarnated if ever there was one, belonged to that type of primitive man in whom burns an inborn love and passion for the sea that amounts to positive worship—devouring tide, a lust and fever in the soul.

His friends are half-brothers, Major Reese and Doctor Reese, so both men of learning and experience, surely not subject to superstitious fancies. The last occupant of the bungalow is ‘Sinbad’, Erricson’s servant…

‘Sinbad,’ sailor of big seas, and a man who had shared on many a ship all the lust of strange adventure that distinguished his great blonde-haired owner—an ideal servant and dog-faithful, divining his master’s moods almost before they were born.

Yes, well, it was the times! However nauseating that description, Sinbad is more than faithful – he knows that his master holds some strange views and is affected sometimes by the moon and the tides, and he tries to protect him when the sea-fit comes on him. As it does this night…

Erricson had one of his queer sea-fits on—the Doctor was responsible for the term—and was in the thick of it, plunging like a straining boat at anchor, talking in a way that made them both feel vaguely uncomfortable and distressed.

The tumbledown bungalow and the sound of the tide don’t help…

The loneliness of the sandspit and that melancholy singing of the sea before their very door may have had something to do with it, seeing that both were landsmen; for Imagination is ever Lord of the Lonely Places, and adventurous men remain children to the last.

And nor does Sinbad’s muttered warning to the doctor…

Sinbad had tugged his sleeve on entering and whispered in his ear significantly: ‘Full moon, sir, please, and he’s better without too much! These high spring tides get him all caught off his feet sometimes—clean sea-crazy’; and the man had contrived to let the doctor see the hilt of a small pistol he carried in his hip-pocket.

As the room grows cold and a strange sea-mist creeps over the bungalow, Erricson talks ever more wildly of the old sea gods, and his belief that they still exist for those who are willing to believe…

‘And I like the old idea,’ he had been saying, speaking of these departed pagan deities, ‘that sacrifice and ritual feed their great beings, and that death is only the final sacrifice by which the worshipper becomes absorbed into them. The devout worshipper’—and there was a singular drive and power behind the words—‘should go to his death singing, as to a wedding—the wedding of his soul with the particular deity he has loved and served all his life.’

And the sea-mist creeps through the cracks in the window-frames and the cold pours through the badly-fitting doors and the tide continues to sing as it brings the sea ever closer and Erricson plunges deeper with each passing moment into the sea-fit…

The man’s inner soul was on fire now. He was talking at a fearful pace, his eyes alight, his voice turned somehow into a kind of sing-song that chimed well, singularly well, with the booming of waves outside, and from time to time he turned to the window to stare at the sea and the moon-blanched sands. And then a look of triumph would come into his face—that giant face framed by slow-moving wreaths of pipe smoke.

Illustration by mgkellermeyer
via deviantart.com

* * * * *

Well! I shall be considerably less enthusiastic about going paddling in the sea after this one, I can tell you! It’s fabulously written, and although it’s clear where it’s heading somehow Blackwood still manages to build an atmosphere of real tension, and the climax is worthy of the story. There’s something about the way he describes nature that makes it utterly terrifying – there’s no romantic beauty in it, all is power and malevolence, all is ruled by beings too great for our puny minds to comprehend and so ancient we foolishly believe they must no longer exist…

‘And I like, too, the way they manage to keep their names before us . . . There’s old Hu, the Druid god of justice, still alive in “Hue and Cry”; there’s Typhon hammering his way against us in the typhoon; there’s the mighty Hurakar, serpent god of the winds, you know, shouting to us in hurricane and ouragan…’

If you’d like to find out what happens, here’s a link.

(The porpy was so scared by this one
he’s refusing to come out of hiding…)

Fretful Porpentine rating:   😮 😮 😮 😮 😮

Overall story rating:            😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Amazon UK Link

Tuesday Terror! Ghosts from the Library edited by Tony Medawar

Criminally spooky…

😀 😀 😀 😀 🙂

There has always been a strong crossover between the genres of crime and horror, and many authors have tried their hand at both. This collection brings together ghostly offerings from fifteen authors better known as mystery writers, mostly from the Golden Age or shortly after. There’s an extra story from MR James, helpfully included because Dorothy L Sayers uses it as a jumping off point for her story. All the entries bar one are stories – GK Chesterton’s is a short essay in which he advises writers how to do ghosts in fiction (oddly, since that’s hardly what he’s known for, but it gives him an opportunity to sound supercilious towards writers whose reputations have long surpassed his own). And as with the Bodies from the Library series to which this is a companion, all the stories have never been collected before (except the MR James) and in one or two cases are being published here for the first time

The overall standard is very high, with only two of the stories getting low ratings from me. All the rest were fairly evenly divided between good, very good and excellent, so a very enjoyable collection in total. What I would say, though, is, that with a couple of notable exceptions, the writers have tended to write what felt to me like crime or mystery stories with a ghostly element rather than the more traditional spooky story of, say, MR James himself and his ilk. This worked great for me since I’m a fan of both genres and actually prefer even my ghost stories to have a proper plot. But I suspect it might mean they wouldn’t work quite so well for people looking for traditional ghost stories and spooky scares – this, I’m guessing, may be why it’s getting pretty mixed ratings on Goodreads so far.

There are loads of well-known names – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Josephine Tey, Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, et al – and, because of the format, no well known stories, so even enthusiastic anthology readers like myself will find all these stories new to them. Here are a few of the ones I enjoyed most:

The Green Dress by Anthony Berkeley – a painter is helped by a ghostly model, but what does she want? I highlighted this one in a recent Tuesday Terror! post.

The Witch by Christianna Brand – A longer story this one, novelette length, it tells of a woman, Laura, alone in the world but with a small inheritance. She has a whirlwind romance with Gereth, and marries him despite barely knowing him. Then she finds a letter in his pocket from his first love, Dorion, talking about murder. Beautiful Dorion seems to have the ability to make men and animals bend to her will and is known locally as a witch. But is Gereth plotting with her to get Laura’s inheritance? A great story, full of suspense and Gothic horror. Is Dorion really a witch? I’ll leave you to find out for yourself!

The Red Balloon by Q. Patrick – This one is really more of a science fiction story, but with some great horror aspects. The narrator is a journalist, sent to report on a terrible incident when two children are killed when they run after a mysterious red balloon. The children’s bodies are kind of dried out, sort of mummified. The journalist’s uncle is a famous but eccentric scientist, and he has a theory that the red balloon comes from an invisible planet which approaches Earth every 28 years. As we will discover, the reason the balloon is red is quite gruesome! Despite the dead children motif, this story is humorous, and references HG Wells quite strongly and openly. Light-hearted, well written and shivery fun.

Run, Pooh! Run!!

Death in a Dream by Laurence Meynell – After being hit on the head during a bombing raid, our narrator begins having dreams in which he time-slips, sometimes to the past, sometimes the future – he doesn’t always know himself. One night he dreams of a nurse murdering her patient, a middle-aged woman. But has it already happened or is it still to come? Very short and more ironically humorous than scary, but very well done!

St Bartholomew’s Day by Edmund Crispin – A dilettante historical researcher is investigating Raoul de Savigny, a man who was killed in the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. He learns that de Savigny’s papers were buried with him, in his casket in the mausoleum in the grounds of his château. The historian breaks in, rather foolishly on St Bartholomew’s Day, and finds more in the mausoleum than he was expecting! This has a great mix of humour and horror and is very well told. Probably one of the most traditionally “ghost story” style tales in the collection.

So loads of variety – lots of great authors having some fun and inviting the reader along to share in it. And this reader certainly appreciated the invitation! I’d probably recommend it more to vintage mystery fans than horror fans – half the fun comes from seeing the authors try something a bit different to what we normally expect from them, most of them very successfully. Another one that would make a great Christmas stocking gift!

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Collins Crime Club.

Amazon UK Link

Tuesday Terror! They Found My Grave by Marjorie Bowen

Is there anybody there?

This week’s story is another from The Night Wire, a British Library Tales of the Weird anthology that takes as its theme the new technologies at the turn of the last century that were inspiring both science fiction and horror writers of the day. The technology here is the gramophone, complete with horn, which is used by a medium to provide a conduit from the spirit world…

They Found My Grave
by Marjorie Bowen

Marjorie Bowen

Ada Trimble was bored with the sittings. She had been persuaded to attend against her better judgment, and the large dingy Bloomsbury house depressed and disgusted her; the atmosphere did not seem to her in the least spiritual and was always tainted with the smell of stale frying.

Miss Trimble has been persuaded by her friend, Helen Trent, to come with her to visit a fashionable medium…

The medium named herself Astra Destiny. She was a big, loose woman with a massive face expressing power and cunning. Her garments were made of upholstery material and round her cropped yellowish curls she wore a tinsel belt. Her fat feet bulged through the straps of cheap gilt shoes.

Both women claim to be cynics, but Ada suspects Helen is getting sucked in to what she believes is a fraud…

….‘I haven’t seen anything yet I can’t explain, the woman is a charlatan, making money out of fools. She suspects us and might get unpleasant, I think.’
….But Helen Trent insisted: ‘Well, if you’d been going as often as I have, and noticing carefully, like I’ve been noticing…’

So despite her own boredom, Ada continues to go along…

Ada Trimble respected her friend’s judgment; they were both intelligent, middle-aged, cheerful and independent in the sense that they had unearned incomes. Miss Trimble enjoyed every moment of her life and therefore grudged those spent in going from her Knightsbridge flat to the grubby Bloomsbury Temple. Not even Helen’s persistency could induce Ada to continue the private sittings that wasted money as well as time. Besides, Miss Trimble really disliked being shut up in the stuffy, ugly room while Madame Destiny sat in a trance and the control, a Red Indian called Purple Stream babbled in her voice and in pidgin English about the New Atlantis, the brotherhood of man and a few catch phrases that could have been taken from any cheap handbook on philosophy or the religions of the world.

The spirits that turn up at these sessions are often easily traceable through historical records, which the gullible think proves them to be real, but Ada thinks is more likely to be proof of fraud…

….‘I can’t think why you are interested,’ said Ada Trimble to Helen Trent as they drove home together. ‘It is such an easy fraud. Clever, of course, but she has only to keep all the stuff in her head.’
….‘You mean that she looks up the references first?”
….‘Of course.’ Ada Trimble was a little surprised that Helen should ask so simple a question.

But one day while Ada is feeling particularly bored and disgusted by the proceedings, something rather odd occurs. Madame Destiny had been going through the usual nonsense with the gramophone when…

….Suddenly a deep masculine voice said:
….‘Beautus qui intelligit super egenum et pauperem.’
….Ada was utterly startled; she felt as if another personality was in the room, she sat forward and looked around; she felt Helen’s cold fingers clutch hers; she had not more than half understood the Latin; nor, it seemed, had anyone else.

This personality gradually becomes a regular visitor. He calls himself Gabriel Letourneau, and is boastful and arrogant, and, unlike the others, there’s no trace of him in obvious records despite his claims that he was a prominent citizen in France in his day. Ada is the only one of the regulars who speaks French, so the personality always chooses to speak to her in that language. Can it be fraud? Can Madame Destiny really be fluent in French?

Ada Trimble detested this pompous, insistent personality; she felt odd, a little dazed, a little confused; the orange glow of the gas fire, the red glow of the lamp, the metallic gleams on the horn fused into a fiery pattern before her eyes. She felt as if she were being drawn into a void in which nothing existed but the voice.

Ada’s cynicism is not proof against this voice, this personality she slowly grows to hate…

He hated her, too. When she spoke to him he told her in his rapid French that Helen could not follow, his scornful opinion of her; he called her an ‘ageing woman’; he said she was pretension, facile, a silly little atheist while ‘I am in Heaven’. He made acid comments on her carefully chosen clothes, on her charmingly arranged hair, her little armoury of wit and culture, on her delicate illusions and vague, romantic hopes. She felt stripped and defaced after one of these dialogues in which she could not hold her own.

But the one thing the personality will not reveal is the location of his grave. So Ada determines to find it…

* * * * *

The porpy and I thought this was a really excellent story, which works both as a ghost story and as a commentary on the vulnerability to charlatans and fraudsters of lonely, single women with money. The writing is great, and the personality’s cruel taunting of Ada feels like an exposé of the rather worthless lives of ladies of leisure, desperately seeking ways to fill their empty days. And yet all our sympathy is with Ada – she is sucked in through her good intentions of looking out for her friend. If you’d like to know what happens, here’s a link. The porpy and I didn’t think it was super scary, but we found it odd, effective and quite sad…

(The porpy felt the need for his snuggle rug after this one…)

Fretful Porpentine rating:   😮 😮 😮

Overall story rating:            😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Amazon UK Link

Tuesday Terror! The Green Dress by Anthony Berkeley

Karma’s a killer…

As a companion to their great Bodies from the Library series, Collins Crime Club and Tony Medawar have this year given us an anthology of ghost stories written by the mystery writers of the Golden Age – Ghosts from the Library – from which I’ve taken this week’s delicious little story of betrayal and revenge…

The Green Dress
by Anthony Berkeley

Anthony Berkeley

….Miles Carrington gazed round the comfortable studio with appreciation. “I say, old man,” he said sincerely, “this really is most awfully good of you.”
….Fletcher smiled complacently. “Not a bit! Well, as I was saying, the rent here is paid for a year, and I’ve stored all my private things away in that cupboard. Everything else is open to you. You can move in tomorrow if you like.”

Both men are artists, but Fletcher has found himself a rich widow to marry, and intends to give up his art and live in luxury instead. So he is lending his studio to Miles – a dedicated artist, but so far unknown, who is currently supplementing the little he earns from his painting by drawing illustrations for newspaper advertisements…

Fletcher had not been wrong when he called Miles Carrington a sticker. It takes a sticker to subsist for five years in a tiny attic in Battersea and devote his attention to the portrayal of cheerful gentleman in their underclothes and elderly ladies distressed by violent pains in the back in order to scrape together a bare living, when his soul is yearning after nymphs and dryads and green trees and such more fitting subjects for his brush.

Fletcher points out an old chest, which he tells Miles is full of costumes and props he may find useful. Once Fletcher has gone, Miles opens the chest and begins to lift out its contents…

….Suddenly he paused. The last armful taken out had left uncovered some material of a most delicate shade of green. Miles lifted it out almost tenderly and examined it.
….It was a little dress of stiff green silk of early Victorian, very simple and, in some curious way that Miles could not define, extraordinarily appealing.

Miles immediately begins to imagine the picture he could create with the dress – the woman who would wear it…

…her charm, her dainty beauty, just the way she would smile. The thing fascinated him.

The Green Gown
by Thomas Edwin Mostyn

He hires a model for a couple of sessions, all he can afford, and gets to work, and soon enough the dress is painted. Having run out of money, he now puts the dress on a dummy model, intending to finish the picture from his imagination. But the face of the wearer eludes him. Try as he might he can’t catch the image that seems so clear in his mind’s eye. After a long day of fruitless attempts, each one painted out as unsuitable, the gathering twilight begins to obscure his vision. Then…

Glancing across in the dim light towards where the green dress shimmered mistily upon the model’s throne, he saw a girl’s head above it and the very face of which he had dreamed.

And now each evening when the light fades, the girl appears, never speaking or moving from the throne, but taking the pose he requires for his portrait. Frantically he paints, and now his work is inspired, better than he has ever done. However, the roguish smile he dreamed of is no longer there…

Yes, that smile of hers. That was the only point upon which Miles had been wrong in his mental picture. She might have smiled roguishly once; But not now. Now there was nothing but a terrible wistfulness, a hopeless sadness in her face that made Miles ache with pity for her even as he strove to transfer it to his canvas. She seemed a symbol of dead hopes and wishes unfulfilled.

Source: wikisource
Artist unknown

The painting finished, it is promptly accepted by the Academy and makes Miles’ name. But then Fletcher returns from his extended honeymoon abroad, and turns up at the studio. He has heard about the picture and demands to see it. Miles pulls back the cloth covering it…

He heard a gasp behind him and wheeled quickly about. Fletcher was staring at the picture with wide, horrified eyes; his face was dead white and little drops of moisture were gathering on his brow.

Miles asks him what is the matter but Fletcher is muttering to himself and doesn’t reply. Then he cries out…

“I knew it would be – I knew it would be! Oh, my God, what does she want with me? What does she want?” His gaze was torn from the picture and his starting eyes fell upon Miles. “What does she want, Carrington?” he shrieked.

* * * * *

The bad news is that I can’t find an online version, so if you want to know what she wants, you’ll have to get hold of the anthology! I will tell you that she succeeds in getting what she wants though, and once all is revealed, one feels karma has done its job well!

This is an excellent story, though as with many in the collection the real emphasis is on human wickedness rather than outright spookiness – I guess that’s the way mystery writers’ minds work! But this one has a delightfully chilling, ghostly ending that gave the porpy and me a pleasurable frisson along the spinal column.

Full review of the anthology to follow, but the short verdict is it’s a definite gift idea for Christmas, though possibly more for vintage crime fans than for true horror aficionados.

(The porpy point-blank refused to wear a green dress
for this week’s photo-shoot…)

Fretful Porpentine rating:   😮 😮 😮

Overall story rating:            😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Amazon UK Link

The Ghost Slayers edited by Mike Ashley

Who ya gonna call?

😀 😀 😀 😀 🙂

Another anthology in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, this one has the theme of psychic detectives – ghost-hunters who investigate hauntings and sometimes set out to lay the ghosts. There are nine stories, some by well-known authors like Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson, and an array of lesser-known ones, to me at least. Many of the ghost-hunters appeared regularly in their authors’ output, but each of the stories stands on its own. One or two of the psychic detectives’ names seemed familiar to me, although I think that’s because I’ve seen them referenced in other books and stories, suggesting that some at least of them were very well known in their own time – in the way a modern crime novelist would feel secure in mentioning Rebus or Morse, for example. The only one familiar to me from having read some of his own stories is William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, who has appeared before in Tuesday Terror!

The overall quality of the stories is high – no duds, all rating at either four or five stars. Most of them are not terrifying, focussing more on the ghost-hunt than the scares, and they occasionally have a rather anticlimactic ending as the psychic detective “solves” the haunting. But some have plenty of thrills despite the format, and I found one or two quite chilling, even disturbing. It’s not my favourite kind of ghost story – I tend to find the psychic detective can be a bit of an insufferable know-it-all and I really prefer stories where the victims of hauntings are unsuspecting innocents or guilty people being subjected to ghostly revenge. That’s a subjective issue, of course, but perhaps meant that I appreciated these stories more than I enjoyed them overall. However, it was interesting to learn that there was a thriving sub-genre of fictional psychic detectives, and Mike Ashley’s introduction indicates how this arose out of the real-life interest in spiritualism and the psychical researchers who were developing scientific approaches to investigating reports of spiritualist events.

Here are a few of the stories the porpy and I most enjoyed:

The Valley of the Veils of Death by Bertram Atkey – terror in the Australian desert. I highlighted this one in a recent Tuesday Terror! post.

The Searcher of the End House by William Hope Hodgson – Carnacki tells his friends of an incident that happened when he was a young man, with little experience of psychic events. Staying in a cottage with his mother, he becomes aware of strange knocks and doors opening and slamming closed. But the most disturbing thing is the dreadful smell, as of something rotting, that follows these disturbances. He packs his mother off to safety and sets out to investigate. Hodgson has become one of my favourite horror writers in the last few years, and the Carnacki stories tend to be very imaginative even though Carnacki himself is a bit annoying. This one has elements of humour but is also genuinely scary and I found it a little disturbing.

The Fear by Claude and Alice Askew – The psychic detective here is Aylmer Vance, which is one of those names I mentioned as feeling familiar although I hadn’t read any of their stories before. Mr Balliston, a self-made millionaire, has taken out a lease on Camplin Castle, but has now had to leave it because he, his family and servants have all experienced sensations of overwhelming Fear. Vance and his sidekick agree to stay in the castle, and it’s not long before they too feel the Fear! They investigate, which basically involves talking to elderly villagers about the history of the castle. The ending is rather flat, but the story is dark and interesting and the descriptions of the effects of the Fear are great – really effectively scary!

Forgotten Harbour by Gordon Hillman – my favourite story of the collection! The psychic detective this time is Cranshawe, an expert in poltergeists, and the story is told by his “Watson”, who is unnamed. The narrator is visiting Forgotten Harbour in Newhaven, where there’s a lighthouse known to the locals as Dead Man’s Light, ever since two lighthouse keepers mysteriously disappeared a year ago. Now, just as happened before they disappeared, the local telephone exchange is receiving strange calls from the lighthouse, although the current lighthouse keepers deny making them. Cranshawe investigates, and the story he uncovers is one of treachery, murder and revenge! It’s very well told, and again effectively scary. What makes it even spookier is that Mike Ashley tells us in the mini-bio that the author apparently murdered his mother in real life!

So some excellent stories here, and by chance I seem to have highlighted the scariest ones. But always remember I’m a wimp – what is scary to me is still always at the mild end of horror for real aficionados…

(Though it has to be said the porpy found
a couple of these quite dark too…)

Fretful Porpentine Rating 😮 😮 😮

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, the British Library.

Amazon UK Link

Tuesday Terror! The Statement of Randolph Carter by HP Lovecraft

Dancing beneath an accursed waning moon…

In the porpy’s opinion, no spooky season would be complete without at least one story from the Master of the Adjective, HP Lovecraft, so he was delighted when this one turned up in The Night Wire. This is another anthology in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, and the theme is the various new technologies that were coming into use in the first half of the twentieth century, and how horror writers used them to chilling effect. In this story, the technology is the field telephone, which was portable and so could be taken to all kinds of places… like ancient cemeteries, for instance…

The Statement of Randolph Carter
by HP Lovecraft

HP Lovecraft

I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me here forever if you will; confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you call justice; but I can say no more than I have said already.

Oh well, if you refuse to say any more, then I guess it really is a short story! Oh wait… looks like you changed your mind…

Again I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren; though I think—almost hope—that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing.

Hmm, but that seems a bit mean. Unless the alternative was worse? Look, start at the beginning!

As I have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbidden subjects I have read all that are written in the languages of which I am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages I cannot understand.

Oh, those forbidden books again! Since it seems everyone in New England has access to them the whole forbidding process clearly needs an overhaul!

Warren always dominated me, and sometimes I feared him. I remember how I shuddered at his facial expression on the night before the awful happening, when he talked so incessantly of his theory, why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years.

Oh, yeah? Tell that to the Time Team! Were you and he trying to prove it?

Once more I say that I have no clear idea of our object on that night. Certainly, it had much to do with something in the book which Warren carried with him—that ancient book in undecipherable characters which had come to him from India a month before—but I swear I do not know what it was that we expected to find.

Okay, okay, just get on, would you? Where did you go?

The place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifold signs of immemorial years. It was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which my idle fancy associated absurdly with rotting stone.

Sounds lovely! Presumably it was a nice, sunny afternoon?

Over the valley’s rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisome vapours that seemed to emanate from unheard-of catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades; all crumbling, moss-grown, and moisture-stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation.

Yes, of course you went at night-time. What was I thinking? So, to get to the point, the two of you cleared the ground, discovered some mysterious slabs which Warren seemed to be expecting to find, prised one up, and revealed a sort of spooky entrance leading underground, eh? Or as you would put it…

…a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of miasmal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror.

But of course you decided to go down into it, didn’t you? Ah, I see – you wanted to, but Warren wouldn’t let you…

“I’m sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface,” he said, “but it would be a crime to let anyone with your frail nerves go down there. You can’t imagine, even from what you have read and from what I’ve told you, the things I shall have to see and do. . . But I promise to keep you informed over the telephone of every move—you see I’ve enough wire here to reach to the centre of the earth and back!”

Well, it’s always nice to get a call from a friend… isn’t it?

….“God! If you could see what I am seeing!”
….I could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones again:
….“Carter, it’s terrible—monstrous—unbelievable!”
….This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of excited questions. Terrified, I continued to repeat, “Warren, what is it? What is it?”
….Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently tinged with despair:
….“I can’t tell you, Carter! It’s too utterly beyond thought—I dare not tell you—no man could know it and live—Great God! I never dreamed of THIS!”

* * * * *

The porpy and I loved this, but then we love Lovecraft’s overblown language, high drama and surfeit of adjectives! It has all the usual stuff – the forbidden books, the ancient beings which may be of this world or another, the shrieking terror, the indescribable horror! You’d think a man with a vocabulary like his could find a way to describe things, but I think we can make a guess that it’s pretty bad… after all, it came from…

…the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulchre as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon.

Quite. If you’d like to read it for yourself, here’s a link.  It’s pretty short so will only take a few minutes to read, and it’s great fun! Or horribly, abysmally, blasphemously, fungoidally terrifying, depending on your tolerance level…

(The porpy is staying well away from underground spaces
for a while…)

Fretful Porpentine rating:   😮 😮 😮 😮

Overall story rating:            😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Amazon UK Link

Tuesday Terror! White Lady by Sophie Wenzel Ellis

Vegans Beware!

I came across this week’s story in Queens of the Abyss, an anthology showcasing some of the women who contributed to the weird and horror genres in the early days. There seems to be a kind of sub-genre of horror arising from the natural world, or often man’s attempts to interfere with nature. This story tells of a plant that has characteristics that make it appear almost human – the white lady…

White Lady
by Sophie Wenzel Ellis

Brynhild knew that something had waked her, something pleasant and exhilarating, which was to be expected on this strange island in the most remote corner of the warm Caribbean sea, where André Fournier, her fiancé, experimented fantastically with tropical plant life.

Brynhild, I’ve read a lot of stories about men experimenting with plants and, trust me, it never ends well. And beautiful, eerie music is never a good sign. Dump him and run! Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you then…

Presently she heard it again, music so wild and delicate that she felt its rapturous vibrations in her nerves, rather than heard them.

Of course she can’t resist going to look for the source of the mysterious music. Silly woman!

….Nature, in her most whimsical mood, had not been permitted to rule here; everywhere, among frond and spray and giant runner, bloomed hybrid blossoms whose weird forms and colours suggested André’s tampering with Nature.
….Brynhild heard the music clearer now, long notes that had an eerie, half-human sound, like the tuneless music of a demented savage. It baffled her, teased her into wilder plunges through the flower thickets, all jewelled with liquid beads.

Silly, silly woman!

When she mounted a hillock and saw, just beyond, a tiny cage built of copper screen, she knew that she had reached her goal. The music seemed to come from this little bower, which was puzzling, for the sole occupant was a blooming plant.

Uh-huh, a musical plant. That should be a warning even to the dumbest of Brynhilds, surely…

But no, she goes nearer…

….From a mass of thick frondage, white and fleshy as her own bare arms, reared a flower whose round, pallid petals formed a face like the caricature of a woman. Draped around this eldritch flower-face and flowing down to meet the colourless foliage, was a mass of gauzy matter that had the startling appearance of a bridal veil.
….But what brought a cry from Brynhild was not the human look of this fantastic plant, but what it was doing. Just below the head, almost as large as her own, protruded two slender, dagger-pointed white spines, set in sockets in such a manner that they could be moved like arms. These two spines, rubbing together, produced the music that had captivated her.

The plant doesn’t seem to like Brynhild, but it lo-o-o-ves André…

….André was coming. Like a tall young pagan priest he came forward, arms and shoulders naked, sunshine splashing his bronze curls. He had a beautiful, poetic face and a luminous smile that was now turned on the strange plant.
….Instantly the flower music commenced again, louder and more seductive than ever, the queer blossom reeling on its stem as though animal excitement quivered through its pallid flesh.
….André called out in his soft French: “Bonjour, White Lady. Are you happy this morning, eh?”
….The woman-face swayed toward him; the dagger arms caressed each other rapturously.

And quite frankly it appears André loves it right back…

“Ah, ma petite!” André whispered. “My own White Lady! If I could but bridge the gap!”

And still Brynhild doesn’t dump him! Men! Tchah! Even when there’s only one woman on an island, they still find a way to be unfaithful! But perhaps Brynhild isn’t as much of a doormat as she seems…

* * * * *

This kind of over-the-top love-conquers-all stuff isn’t exclusive to women writers, of course, but they do it so well! And while often male writers see the woman as either temptress or victim, sometimes female writers rise above the conventions of the time and let the woman be the stronger, purer one. This one actually falls somewhere in the middle – Brynhild is the heroine, ably assisted by another woman, André’s mother, but even André redeems himself a little in the end. I found it as unintentionally humorous as scary, to be honest, but it’s very well written, has a great dramatic climax and the plant truly is the stuff of nightmares – a story that should be required reading for any scientists about to genetically alter nature!

If you’d like to know how it turns out, here’s an online link.

(The porpy is showing a marked reluctance to
venture into the garden at the moment…)

Fretful Porpentine rating:   😮 😮 😮

Overall story rating:            😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Amazon UK Link

Tuesday Terror! The Valley of the Veils of Death by Bertram Atkey

Evil under the sun…

Much though the porpy and I love a good old London fog or a mirky moor, we equally enjoy being transported to foreign climes, where even the blinding sun over the Australian desert can’t bleach out the evil men leave behind them. This story is taken from The Ghost Slayers – a British Library collection themed around psychic investigators, edited by Mike Ashley. The investigator in this one is Mesmer Milann, a man who calls himself a “mediator” between this world and the unseen…

The Valley of the Veils of Death
by Bertram Atkey

Save for the deep purple curtains which were hung round the room so that they shrouded the walls and windows completely, the number and odd placing of the electric bulbs – only one of which was burning – and a huge centaur, savagely sculptured in shining, slate-hued marble, there was nothing in the room to suggest that this was a temple of the occult.

Hmm, well, sounds pretty occultish to me! This is the office of Mesmer Milann, to whom the famous explorer Mr George Tarronhall has come seeking advice about a strange adventure that befell him while he was crossing the Australian desert…

“I had camped early in the afternoon by an unexpected water hole. There were ten people, all but Rivers, the scientist of the expedition, and myself being blacks.”

(The few mentions of the indigenous Australians are stereotyped but not derogatory, and are typical of the colonial time – the story dates from 1914.)

(Some stereotypes are more fun…)

Rivers and Tarronhall wander off to explore the surrounding area and come to a valley, which looks like any other valley of the region, all sand and rocky outcrops…

“…and yet of all the strange places I have passed through, of all the odd corners of the world I have seen, that little insignificant valley is the one place that remains, and will remain always, in my mind… It was haunted – if ever any place in the world is haunted.”

The two men come across a sinister sight…

“There were two of them at the foot of the miniature cliff on which we stood. I leaned over to see them better, and found that they were skeletons, lying on their sides, with the skulls half turned upwards, so that we looked down straight into the empty eye sockets. It may have been my fancy – probably it was – but it seemed to me that there was a queer craning look about the poise of the skulls, exactly as though they were watching us.”

Near the skeletons the men find a small canvas bag and, despite the air of menace in the valley, they open it…

“I heard Rivers say, to himself rather than to me, ‘I could have sworn the thing moved.’ And he was looking at one of the skeletons behind him.
….“I affected not to hear, and turned up the bag, pouring out on the sand such a collection of precious stones as Australia, or any other country, has never before produced. Sapphires, emeralds and rubies, for the most part, with a slab of wonderful opal, dirty and uncut, of course, but magnificent.”

Naturally they take the stones – who wouldn’t? But that night, as they lie asleep in their tent, something enters…

“And, if you can imagine it, the darkness became charged as it were with warning – most horrible. Warning; it poured down on me, into me, like an electric current, enveloped me like water, paralysed me momentarily. I was frightened too – terror-stricken.”

When the feeling passes, the men discover the jewels have gone. Next morning they go back to the valley and find the bag lying again next to the skeletons. Now Tarronhall wants Milann to explain the experience but also to advise whether it would be safe to try again to take the jewels. Milann agrees to take on the case, and Tarronhall asks how he will proceed. Milann says he will visit the valley that night…

“But I shall not need my body. I shall go in the spirit!”

And he invites Tarronhall to accompany him…

“You and your fellow explorers have exhausted the globe; soon enough, now, the arc-lights of civilization will illuminate the darkest corners of this world. Come with me tonight to another – to the Sub-World. There are sights to test the courage of the bolder spirit. I will free you from the gross flesh, and we will traverse together the dim Tracts of the Elementals, enter the Red Fogs of the Tentacle-Spirits, pass over the Place of the Were-Wolves, look upon the Craters of the Unicorns, the Plains of the Centaurs, the Morass of Minotaurs!” His eyes glittered and flamed like jewels, and his voice rolled like distant thunder. “We will adventure through the Haunts of the Vampires together—”

Gosh, I wonder how many stars that little holiday would get on Trip Advisor!

* * * * *

Perhaps the actual trip they take back to the valley doesn’t have minotaurs, centaurs nor even, to my great disappointment, tentacle-spirits, but it’s still an enjoyable adventure with some lovely scary elements to it. Overall I found this very well written in that slightly high melodramatic style that works perfectly for horror, and I share Mike Ashley’s puzzlement, mentioned in his introduction to the story, as to why Atkey’s Mesmer Milann stories have been allowed to sink into obscurity. I’d happily read more, if anyone from BL-world is listening! Unfortunately its obscurity means I can’t find an online version to link to, but the anthology is well worth acquiring – full review soon! The porpy and I, meantime, have decided to remove the Australian desert from our travel bucket-list…

(After all that Australian sun, the porpy has decided that
haunted Gothic castles aren’t so bad after all!)

Fretful Porpentine rating:   😮 😮 😮 😮

Overall story rating:            😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Amazon UK Link

* * * * *

NB For the benefit of new readers since it’s the porpy’s first appearance for the season, the fretful porpentine reference comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

So the Fretful Porpentine rating is for the scariness factor, whereas the Overall story rating is for the story’s quality.

Tuesday Terror! The Festival by HP Lovecraft

Festive fun…

The porpy is ready to go into hibernation and is rather huffy because we read more mystery and science fiction short stories than horror this year, but I’ve promised him that next year I’ll be sure to build up a stock of scariness just for him! I’ve also agreed with his demand that no horror season could be considered complete without at least one story from HP Lovecraft, master of the weird, so here it is. Taken from the collection Chill Tidings, from the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, a collection I didn’t get around to reviewing before Christmas and now feel the moment has passed. We enjoyed it though – probably a four-star read overall. Anyway, here’s Lovecraft…

The Festival
by HP Lovecraft

HP Lovecraft

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten.

One feels that primal secrets should be forgotten as quickly as possible – who ever heard of a primal secret that wasn’t trouble?? Anyway, our idiotic intrepid hero ends up in the infamous town of Kingsport, known to all HPL fans as a place where slithery things are common, dark forbidden books are the only kind the local library keeps, and humans are regularly driven insane…

…snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder time.

Yes, half-fish, half-frog, half-human people if my memory serves me better than my maths! It’s a cheery old place, Kingsport – perfect for a winter weekend getaway…

The printless road was very lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as of a gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for witchcraft in 1692, but I did not know just where.

He finds the house of his distant family, whom he’s never met before…

When I sounded the archaic iron knocker I was half afraid. Some fear had been gathering in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my heritage, and the bleakness of the evening, and the queerness of the silence in that aged town of curious customs.

Curious is one word for the customs of Kingsport, but perhaps not the one I would choose. He is welcomed by an old man, dumb apparently, and with a bland face that at first strikes him as kindly, but on entering the gothic old house, he feels fear returning…

This fear grew stronger from what had before lessened it, for the more I looked at the old man’s bland face the more its very blandness terrified me. The eyes never moved, and the skin was too like wax. Finally I was sure it was not a face at all, but a fiendishly cunning mask.

The Festival in Kingsport
by mcrassuart via deviantart.com

Does he turn and run? Nope. Instead he takes a seat and waits for hours to be led to the festival. Meantime he whiles away the time with some pleasant reading material provided by his host…

I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, and that they included old Morryster’s wild Marvells of Science, the terrible Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvill, published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreia of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius’ forbidden Latin translation; a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things whispered.

Finally the time comes for the people to make their way to the festival…

We went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly ancient town; went out as the lights in the curtained windows disappeared one by one, and the Dog Star leered at the throng of cowled, cloaked figures that poured silently from every doorway and formed monstrous processions up this street and that, past the creaking signs and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying houses overlapped and crumbled together, gliding across open courts and churchyards where the bobbing lanthorns made eldritch drunken constellations.

And yet still he doesn’t run…

* * * * *

Lovecraft’s style is so instantly recognisable and while he creates a wonderfully weird atmosphere of impending horror, I must admit his overblown vocabulary always makes me laugh! This story is much shorter than many of his rambling excursions through the terrors of Kingsport and its surrounds, and is very effective. It’s also utterly typical of his style so a good introduction for newcomers to his work, though I found I had to read quite a lot of his stuff before I became a real fan. If you’d like to find out exactly what happens at the festival, here’s a link. I promise it’ll make even your worst family Christmas look cosy in comparison and your weirdest relatives will suddenly seem normal…

(The porpy has now gone off to his hibernation box to dream of ghosties and ghoulies and Gothic horrors of all kinds. He’ll be back in the autumn, refreshed and ready for more!)

Fretful Porpentine rating:   😮 😮 😮 😮

Overall story rating:            😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Amazon UK Link

Tuesday Terror! Old Applejoy’s Ghost by Frank R Stockton

The spirit of Christmas…

I know lots of you don’t like scary stories, but not all ghosts are bad. This tale, taken from the collection Chill Tidings, features a ghost who would surely be welcome at any Christmas party…

Old Applejoy’s Ghost
by Frank R Stockton

Frank R Stockton

For many years old Applejoy’s ghost had wandered freely about the grand old house and the fine estate of which he had once been the lord and master. But early in that spring a change had come over the household of his grandson, John Applejoy, an elderly man, a bachelor, and – for the later portion of his life – almost a recluse. His young niece, Bertha, had come to live with him, and it was since her arrival that old Applejoy’s ghost had confined himself to the upper portions of the house.

Old Applejoy’s ghost had had the freedom of the house because any time his grandson saw him, he dismissed him as a dream. The house has become dull indeed in the grandson’s time, but now young Bertha has brought youth and beauty back to the hall, and the ghost doesn’t want to inadvertently scare her away. However, one night the ghost realises Christmas is coming…

“Winter has come,” he said to himself. “And in two days it will be Christmas!” Suddenly he started to his feet. “Can it be,” he exclaimed, “that my close-fisted grandson John does not intend to celebrate Christmas! It has been years since he has done so, but now that Bertha is in the house, will he dare to pass over it as though it were but a common day? It is almost incredible that such a thing could happen, but so far there have been no signs of any preparations. I have seen nothing, heard nothing, smelt nothing. I will go this moment and investigate.”

He descends to the kitchen…

….“Let me see what the old curmudgeon has provided for Christmas.”
….So saying, old Applejoy’s ghost went around the spacious pantry, looking upon shelves and tables. “Emptiness! Emptiness! Emptiness!” he exclaimed. “A cold leg of mutton, a ham half gone, and cold boiled potatoes – it makes me shiver to look at them! Pies? there ought to be rows and rows of them, and there is not one! And Christmas two days off!”

Old Applejoy’s ghost is determined that Bertha shall have the Christmas she deserves, but how to achieve it? He wanders to his grandson’s room…

….There lay the old man, his eyelids as tightly closed as if there had been money underneath them. The ghost of old Applejoy stood by his bedside…
….“I can make him wake up and look at me,” he thought, “so that I might tell him what I think of him, but what impression could I expect my words to make upon a one-chicken man like John? Moreover, if I should be able to speak to him, he would persuade himself that he had been dreaming, and my words would be of no avail!”

He considers talking to the old housekeeper, but…

“It would be of no use,” he said. “She would never be able to induce old John to turn one inch aside from his parsimonious path. More than that, if she were to see me she would probably scream – die, for all I know – and that would be a pretty preparation for Christmas!”

He looks in on Bertha, sweetly dreaming in a room lit by moonlight, and quietly murmuring the name “Tom”. Then suddenly she wakes…

….The maiden did not move, but fixed her lovely blue eyes upon the apparition, who trembled for fear that she might scream or faint.
….“Am I asleep?” she murmured, and then, after turning her head from side to side to assure herself that she was in her own room, she looked full into the face of old Applejoy’s ghost, and boldly spoke to him. “Are you a spirit?”

Delighted that she seems unafraid, old Applejoy’s ghost promptly hatches a scheme that she should speak to her uncle…

“When you have told him all the events of this night, and when he sees that they must have happened, I want you to tell him that it is the wish and desire of his grandfather, to whom he owes everything, that there shall be worthy festivities in this house on Christmas Day and Night. Tell him to open his cellars and spend his money. Tell him to send for at least a dozen good friends and relatives to attend the great holiday celebration that is to be held in this house.”

And will Tom be one of those guests?

* * * * *

If you want to know the answer to that, you’ll need to read the story – here’s a link.

Charming and fun, bit of humour, bit of romance, lots of cakes and mince pies, wine and plum pudding – a sweet little Christmas story. Wish I had a ghost to arrange Christmas for me!

(The porpy wishes you all a Very Merry Christmas!)

Fretful Porpentine rating:   😮

Overall story rating:            😀 😀 😀 😀

Amazon UK Link
Amazon US Link

Tuesday Terror! Randalls Round: Nine Nightmares by Eleanor Scott

Bedtime reading…

😀 😀 😀 😀

First published in 1929, this was Eleanor Scott’s only collection of weird stories although she wrote several books in other genres. This edition includes all nine of the stories in the original collection, plus two written by “N. Dennett”, now believed to have been a pseudonym of Eleanor Scott, which was itself a pseudonym, the author’s real name being Helen Leys. The introduction is by Aaron Worth, Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Boston University, who has appeared on the blog twice before as editor of two excellent collections, Green Tea and Other Weird Stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, and The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories by Arthur Machen. In fact, Worth takes a large part of the credit for inspiring my interest in weird fiction, so I’m always pleased to see his name pop up.

In his introduction, Worth tells us that the collection didn’t sell well on its original publication, which he suggests was more to do with poor marketing than the quality of the work. While he points out that many of the stories and the general style are rather derivative of other writers of the period, especially MR James, he suggests that Scott took the weird genre in her own direction towards what would later, quite recently in fact, come to be called “folk horror”. He also says that despite the somewhat derivative quality of some of the stories she makes them her own, and describes them as “intrinsically excellent”.

Even with my limited knowledge of weird and horror fiction, I did indeed find that many of the stories felt quite derivative, not just of James but especially of Machen, and being forced into this comparison didn’t work to Scott’s benefit, since I feel Machen is significantly better at “folk horror”, even if it didn’t exist as a genre when he was writing. On reading over my notes on each story, it appears I also had some issues with her endings, being annoyed sometimes by them being left too ambiguous to be satisfying, and then with other stories lamenting that the ending was too obvious, or too neat, or too well explained. Maybe I was just in a picky, Goldilocks kind of mood! There was only one story where I felt the ending had been exactly the bowl of porridge I’d been looking for.

These criticisms notwithstanding, I enjoyed the collection overall, and there were a few stories that I thought were excellent. Scott was very good at creating an atmosphere of unease and some parts of the stories are genuinely scary, with a nightmarish quality to them. In fact, Scott claimed the stories were based on her own nightmares (although Worth amused me by commenting that “one wonders how much these were influenced by her bedtime reading”). I gave three of the stories 5 stars, one 3 stars, and all the rest either 4 or 4½, so a consistently high standard throughout with no real failures. As usual, here’s a flavour of a few of my favourites:

Celui-Lá – On the advice of his doctor, Maddox goes for a break to a small village in Breton, where he stays with the local priest. Maddox is walking on the beach when he sees a strange figure, digging in the sand. The figure sees Maddox and runs off, so Maddox goes to where it was digging and finds an ancient parchment. The priest believes the words on the parchment are an incantation – but too late! Maddox has already read them aloud! This one felt particularly derivative, but it’s well written and quite effective in creating a nightmarish atmosphere, and this was the one where I felt the ending achieved the perfect balance of being ambiguous but satisfying.

The Tree – Two young artists, a couple, take a studio, outside which grows a giant ash tree. Ralph hates it and wants to chop it down, and Nan reluctantly agrees. But then Ralph has a dream in which every axe stroke against the tree seems also to be cutting into him, so they decide to keep the tree. But somehow it has worked its way into Ralph’s mind, and now everything he paints has the tree in it, spoiling his work. Nan decides to take drastic action… Again derivative – Worth mentions Walter de la Mare’s The Tree, which overall I feel is a better story – but it’s again very effective at creating an atmosphere of impending dread.

The Old Lady – Our narrator, Honor, is a student at Oxford. She bets a friend that she can get on with anyone, and her friend chooses Adela, another student, a shrinking, silent girl. Honor duly befriends Adela, and is able to wangle an invite to her home in the holidays, where Adela lives with her guardian – a creepy, ancient old woman. Honor is invited back for the midsummer break, but Adela warns her that mysterious deaths tend to happen around midsummer. This is a spooky one, but Honor is delightfully feisty and doesn’t plan on being anybody’s victim! A very enjoyable story even though the ending is a bit too abrupt.

So a good collection rather than a great one for me, but an interesting addition to the BL’s always intriguing Tales of the Weird series.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, the British Library.

* * * * *

Later…

*Gulps* I forgot to put the porpy’s bit in and now he’s furious! So here he is…

Fretful Porpentine rating: 😮 😮 😮

(I’m off to hide now… see ya later!)

Amazon UK Link
Amazon US Link

Tuesday Terror! Wandering Willie’s Tale by Sir Walter Scott

The road to hell…

A classic Scottish horror story this week, just in time for the spookiest night of the year! This story appears in the novel Redgauntlet, which I haven’t read, but as a complete story in its own right it’s probably one of the best known pieces of Scott’s writing. It is written in Scots and although some of the vocabulary might be unfamiliar, I think it’s mostly possible to pick up the meaning from the context…

Wandering Willie’s Tale
by Sir Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott by Sir Henry Raeburn
Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Far and wide was Sir Robert hated and feared. Men thought he had a direct compact with Satan—that he was proof against steel—and that bullets happed aff his buff−coat like hailstanes from a hearth—that he had a mear that would turn a hare on the side of Carrifragawns —and muckle to the same purpose, of whilk mair anon. The best blessing they wared on him was, “Deil scowp wi’ Redgauntlet!”

Wandering Willie is a wandering musician, who tells the tale of his grandfather Steenie Steenson who was once a tenant of the wild-living and wicked Sir Robert Redgauntlet.

There dwelt my gudesire, Steenie Steenson, a rambling, rattling chiel he had been in his young days, and could play weel on the pipes; he was famous at “Hoopers and Girders”—a’ Cumberland couldna touch him at “Jockie Lattin”—and he had the finest finger for the backlilt between Berwick and Carlisle.

Steenie was a favourite with Sir Robert for his skill on the bagpipes, but business is business, and Steenie had fallen behind with his rent…

He got the first brash at Whitsunday put ower wi’ fair word and piping; but when Martinmas came, there was a summons from the grund−officer to come wi’ the rent on a day preceese, or else Steenie behoved to flit.

(Flit means move house – i.e., if Steenie doesn’t pay the rent, he’ll be forced out of his house.) So Steenie scrapes and borrows till he’s made up the full amount of 1000 marks and off he goes on the due day to pay the rent…

Dougal was glad to see Steenie, and brought him into the great oak parlour, and there sat the Laird his leesome lane, excepting that he had beside him a great, ill−favoured jackanape, that was a special pet of his; a cankered beast it was, and mony an ill−natured trick it played—ill to please it was, and easily angered—ran about the haill castle, chattering and yowling, and pinching, and biting folk, especially before ill−weather, or disturbances in the state.

‘The foul fiend, in his ain shape,
sitting on the laird’s coffin!’

Sir Robert isn’t well…

Sir Robert sat, or, I should say, lay, in a great armchair, wi’ his grand velvet gown, and his feet on a cradle; for he had baith gout and gravel, and his face looked as gash and ghastly as Satan’s. Major Weir [the ape] sat opposite to him, in a red laced coat, and the Laird’s wig on his head; and aye as Sir Robert girned wi’ pain, the jackanape girned too, like a sheep’s−head between a pair of tangs—an ill−faur’d, fearsome couple they were.

Steenie hands over his bag of money and the Laird says he’ll write him a receipt. But before he can…

Sir Robert gied a yelloch that garr’d the Castle rock. Back ran Dougal—in flew the livery men—yell on yell gied the Laird, ilk ane mair awfu’ than the ither. My gudesire knew not whether to stand or flee, but he ventured back into the parlour, where a’ was gaun hirdy−girdie—naebody to say “come in,” or “gae out.” Terribly the Laird roared for cauld water to his feet, and wine to cool his throat; and hell, hell, hell, and its flames, was aye the word in his mouth.

And Sir Robert dies! Now the new Laird, Sir Robert’s son, demands the rent from Steenie and refuses to believe it was paid. The only thing that will convince him is a receipt in Sir Robert’s hand. Steenie rides off, woebegone and angry, cursing the old Laird. But some miles from the castle he meets a stranger who offers him a solution…

“Now, I can tell you, that your auld Laird is disturbed in his grave by your curses, and the wailing of your family, and if ye daur venture to go to see him, he will give you the receipt.”

And, desperate, Steenie decides he must go…

Steenie demands his receipt…

* * * * *

This is a great tale if you can manage the Scots. While it’s told as a tale of the supernatural, most of the events have an alternative logical explanation so you can decide for yourself if Steenie really ventured into the realms of the after-life to try to get the receipt, or if maybe strong drink had something to do with the story. The first paragraph can be pretty off-putting as it refers to lots of Scots history and people who are pretty obscure even to Scots now, never mind non-Scots. But it’s not important to the story that follows, and once it gets properly underway the historical background becomes largely irrelevant. There’s too much humour in it for it to be truly scary, but poor Steenie goes through plenty of peril to both his body and soul as he faces the old Laird in his hellish halls, and the ape, Major Weir, adds to both the humour and the horror.

If you’d like to read it, here’s a link.

(The porpy wishes you a Spooky Hallowe’en!)

Fretful Porpentine rating:   😮 😮 😮

Overall story rating:            😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Tuesday Terror! Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land’s End edited by Joan Passey

Not a pasty in sight…

😀 😀 😀 😀

Another recent issue in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, this anthology contains fifteen vintage horror stories, all set in spooky old Cornwall. Well, actually two or three of them are “true” accounts from memoirs and so on, rather than stories as such, but all including some ghostly or terrifying natural occurrence. There’s the usual mix of very well known authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, along with some names that were completely new to me, like Mary E. Penn and someone going simply by the initials M.H.

This may be the most mixed of all the collections to date for me. There are some great stories in here, several well-known and others I hadn’t come across before, but there are also a considerable number of duds which I felt really weren’t worthy of inclusion. I gave seven of them 5 stars and another two rated as 4. The remaining six were evenly distributed – two apiece to 3, 2 and 1 stars. One of the 1-stars was particularly annoying since it was a story by Mary E. Braddon – Colonel Benyon’s Entanglement – which was shaping up to be excellent and then stopped abruptly what seemed like halfway through. Whether this is a publishing error or whether Braddon never completed the story I don’t know and I haven’t been able to track down an online version to check, but since the intro doesn’t mention that it’s unfinished, I have to assume error.

Some of the 4 and 5 star stories have appeared here on the blog before in the Tuesday Terror! slot: Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe, The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford and The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, a wonderfully dark Holmes story from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Here’s a flavour of a few others that I particularly enjoyed:

Ligeia – Arthur Rackham

The Phantom Hare by M.H. – Told by Bessy, a farmer’s daughter, this is the story of Hubert, a rather nasty young man who is pursuing a local heiress when he suddenly finds himself being haunted by a white hare. Local superstition has it that if a man deserts a woman and she dies of it (as you do!) then the woman will return in the form of a white hare when her former lover is about to meet his doom. Bet Hubert wishes he hadn’t deserted Bessy’s old school friend now! Very well told, with excellent characterisation of Bessy and a good local feel to the superstition, it culminates in an ending that may not be surprising but is still satisfying.

In the Mist by Mary E. Penn – Narrated by the local vicar, who tells of two young parishioners, Winnie and Noel, who are deeply in love. But Noel is a jealous type, always accusing Winnie of flirting, and one day in the midst of an argument Winnie breaks off their engagement. Later that night, they meet on the cliff edge and Noel tries to win her back. But Winnie falls over the cliff and disappears, presumably sucked out to sea. Did she fall though or was she pushed? This isn’t really horror – it’s more melodramatic romance, but it’s beautifully done and thoroughly enjoyable.

The Coming of Abel Behenna by Bram Stoker – Two Cornish fishermen, Abel and Eric, had grown up together and were best friends. But both have now fallen in love with the same woman – the frivolous and indecisive Sarah. Since she refuses to choose, the men propose they should toss a coin for her and she agrees! The winner will take the small accumulated wealth of both men and go off on a trading voyage for a year to try to make enough money to marry on. Abel wins, and duly sets off on his travels. But will Eric, mad with love and jealousy, stand by his bet? This is an excellent story, Bram Stoker at his very considerable best. It is a story of passion, guilt and revenge – nothing supernatural, purely humanity and nature combining to chill the reader’s blood, and the ending lingers long after the last page is turned.

The Mask by F. Tennyson Jesse – Another about a woman with two suitors and just as dark as the Stoker story, but otherwise entirely different. Vashti Bath chooses James Glasson, a cold and domineering man destined for success. An accident damages him badly, though, destroying his prospects and forcing him to wear a mask, and he becomes even harsher to Vashti. Soon she turns to her other old suitor, Willie Strick, a weaker man but still passionately in love with her, and they start an affair. But then one night James returns home unexpectedly and finds Willie and Sarah together… Again a story of human passions rather than the supernatural but it gets very tense towards the end and has some real touches of horror.

The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot

So plenty of excellent stuff here, but because the quality ranges so wildly and because several of the best stories are ones that have been collected many times before and may be familiar to horror readers already, I’m a little wary of giving this one a blanket recommendation. If you’re newish to the genre and haven’t read many of the stories I’ve mentioned, then there’s plenty in here to interest and entertain despite the duds. However if you’ve already read several of the stories I’ve named, you might end up disappointed with the rest of the collection. For me, there were enough good stories that I hadn’t read before to make it enjoyable overall.

(Since he was in Cornwall, the porpy
enjoyed a little paddle in the sea…)

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, the British Library.

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Tuesday Terror! The Name-Tree by Mary Webb

Torment among the trees…

Each autumn and winter for the last few years, I’ve been reading a ton of vintage horror short stories and I admit that most of them, while enjoyable at the time, are soon forgotten. But occasionally one lingers, and this is one of those. I read it a year or so ago, in the Weird Woods anthology, and it has haunted me a little ever since…

The Name-Tree
by Mary Webb

Mary Webb

Cherry Orchard was for sale. The impossible thing, the thing that had yet threatened them always out of the misty future, had become fact. She could not believe it.

Laura’s father has become an invalid and their small stock of savings has dwindled. Now her father must sell the orchard which Laura has loved all her young life…

‘I’d as lief,’ she muttered, ‘think of selling myself.’

The father and daughter have a new neighbour who has come to pay them a visit…

Julius Winter was the new owner of Bitterne Hall. He had brought with him a wife almost as rich as himself, a Lady in her own right, and exactly like a pink sweet. Before Julius shone a vista of pleasant days with many smaller pink sweets about him.

Laura’s father tells her to show Julius the orchard and as they pass the great laurel tree outside the house, Laura tells him it is her name-tree…

‘This is my name-tree,’ she said. ‘Do you know the old belief about name-trees? If the tree dies, you die. If you sicken, the tree withers. If you desert it, a curse falls.’

Julius is fascinated by Laura’s deep passion for the orchard and his fascination soon turns to lust and a desire to possess…

He watched her, standing slim and gauche, in her old brown dress, her soul tormented by love for something vague and mysterious, something he could not touch or name, that seemed to lie beneath the earthly beauty that she saw, like a dreaming god. Desire surged over him—the poignant longing that jonquils bring, the longing to touch the silken petals, to gather the brittle, faintly-scented stalks.

Apollo and Daphne by Henrietta Rae
Definite vibes of the Apollo and Daphne myth in this story…

And so he offers her a bargain…

….‘Would you like to keep Cherry Orchard for ever?’
….She looked at him, frowning.
….‘I will buy Cherry Orchard and give it you, if you will give me the keys of Heaven.’
….‘And Heaven is—?’
….‘Your love.’

Laura is silent for a long time, as if communing with her beloved trees. Then she replies:

….‘I have no love to give,’ she said at last, ‘to you or any man.’
….‘Before the fruit falls in your orchard,’ he said, harsh and low, ‘you shall give it to me.’

And Julius, sure of his own power, buys the orchard and Laura’s home…

* * * * *

It’s not just the obvious masculine dominance in the story that makes it disturbing, though that’s important. It’s also Laura’s connection with nature which seems to go well beyond the norm, into a kind of witchy-woman feel – an elemental thing, a sexless dryad made human, female and powerless. The orchard and the trees are given a consciousness and have a kind of symbiotic relationship with Laura, as if she is their guardian and they are hers, but neither with the strength to withstand male destructiveness. Julius is a strong, pitiless man and Laura’s father is weak and selfish, but they both understand the power of money as a means to possess those things they desire. But at what cost?

The trees brooded over them like jewelled birds in some ancient tapestry. They filled him with an ache of longing. He wanted to possess them, as a god might. He would possess them in her. His soul could only reach the outer fringes of hers; his voice strove to win her; his eyes burnt on hers, but she lowered her lashes and was mute. She remained aloof: but through the body he would reach her. She should have nothing of herself left, no corner of her spirit that was not his.

Very well written in a folklorish style and strongly feminist in message, all the darkest parts are left vague and undescribed, and are all the more disturbing for it. I can’t find an online version of the story on its own, but if you would like to read it it’s one of the stories in a collection called Armour Wherein He Trusted, which can be downloaded free at fadedpage.com – here’s the link. Or of course you can read it in Weird Woods.

(The porpy didn’t get scared but he got angry!)

Fretful Porpentine rating:   😮 😮 😮

Overall story rating:            😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

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