"Luella Miller" (1902)

This story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is bland and sneaky-good. It's just one woman telling the story of another in a folksy kind of low-key way. The storyteller might have some animus toward Luella Miller, but it's to be expected in the circumstances. All the details don't sink in right away. The monstrousness is so diffused you almost, perhaps, have to go through a period of denial, which lingers. I mean, is it really so monstrous here? Luella Miller may be some kind of demon, or merely an extremely manipulative person ... and that might not be much difference. One of the story's strengths is that it never really labels her, only reports events as they happened. It's not even certain Luella Miller has anything directly to do with the deaths. She's a kind of princess, self-possessed in her sense of her own privilege. She expects to be cared for and looked after. She's even a bit helpless. She doesn't do much herself. Somehow others around her rally and pitch in and do the chores—scrubbing the floor and dusting, washing the laundry, cooking, and so forth. She expects it as her due and she is not unduly ungrateful. People want to help her. Then they die—generally of mysterious wasting-away episodes, which might make her a vampire. The story is mostly told by her neighbor across the way in a small village in New England, who saw Luella Miller move into the house and steal her man. She helps Luella Miller and dies like all the others. This ability of Luella Miller to manipulate is a given. We never see how she does it, only that people fall in line. It's almost not uncanny at all, but a little frustrating, the way it is to watch people who don't deserve it getting their way over and over. She feels more oblivious about exercising her will than calculating. We've known people like this. Donald Trump often looks like it. She simply expects to be served and many volunteer. She can force the issue. She is seen fussing a few times when she is inconvenienced, which reminds me that the story also passes the Bechdel test. Freeman was self-consciously a feminist writer, weaving the themes into her mainstream novels, her works for children, and her supernatural stories too. This story is effective with its litany of deaths like a steady drumbeat and Luella Miller's perverse refusal to give in to drudgery (an echo of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," which has always felt a little uncanny). Freeman manages to stay within the lanes of Puritan credibility, with a nice steady rolling tale of some kind of insidious life-sucking horror that's hard to know what to call.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.