"The Book" (1930)

Margaret Irwin was primarily a historical novelist but also wrote a couple of fantasy novels and a handful of spooky stories. This is less of a ghost story, as it's usually classified, and more along the lines of demonic possession, with some surprising and effective details. The Corbetts, the featured family—father and mother, two daughters, son, and dog—are like something from a Noel Coward setup. They banter wittily with one another, even the young children, at their ease over breakfast. They are a family of readers. They have a bookcase downstairs jammed with a motley assortment, including some ancient volumes inherited from an uncle. One of them becomes an object of fascination to the head of the household, Mr. Corbett, after a bout of insomnia. The book is written in Latin—hand-printed, in fact, in a precise hand. Mr. Corbett fortifies with his young boy's Latin dictionary and dives in. Groping translation fragments meaning but the text seems to be about matters such as the "trial of a German midwife in 1620 for the murder and dissection of 783 children"—a very large number! As his studies proceed Mr. Corbett, by profession a lawyer, grows aloof and distant from his family. When he notices new text being added to the blank pages at the end of the book, we can see much better than Mr. Corbett that it has taken control of him somehow. Dark thoughts begin to cloud his mind. He finds his children inadequate and dismisses them coldly. He detests his colleagues, relishing the investment tips yielded by the book that suddenly make him rich and successful beyond them. Then the book begins to make strange requests of him, "of a meaningless, childish, yet revolting character, such as might be invented by a decadent imbecile." He soon learns that not doing them, not following these instructions, leads alarmingly quickly to sickening downturns in his fortunes. So he does them. Soon enough it wants him to kill the dog, which has not been reacting well to him lately anyway. Then it wants him to kill one of his children. Obviously, this is not going to end well.

My favorite details here are subtle points, such as the way Mr. Corbett's thinking and attitude shift in small but steady ways, from boisterous and cracking jokes to something darker and more foul. Making a book the haunted object, or possessed by a demon, has many antecedents elsewhere. Lovecraft was working much the same territory at this time with his various holy and unholy texts. It's seen vividly in the Evil Dead movies where the Necronomicon (an invention itself of Lovecraft's) has a rubbery disquieting life all its own. Throw it on the fire! Certain other hallmarks of demonic possession appear in this story too. I've seen them elsewhere but mainly in stories. It's a certain kind of forcing against the will, particularly with text involving religious matters. In this story, for example, when Mr. Corbett attempts to pray, he finds the words coming out in reverse order and he's unable to say them right. In W.F. Harvey's 1928 story "The Beast With Five Fingers," we see a man whose writing hand is capable of recording notes and instructions from the demon for others. In perhaps the most formal version I've seen, Ramsey Campbell's 1976 story "The Words That Count," the first-person narrator makes the first word in every paragraph the Lord's Prayer in reverse word order, starting the story on "Amen to that." It's gimmickry, a pure stunt, and not surprisingly much of it is strained. But seeing the words so arranged, seeing the owner of the hand unmindful of its busy activities, and seeing Mr. Corbett struggle to say his prayers right—somehow it's quite effective.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer