"The Bishop of Hell" (1925)

Speaking of the conte cruel, Marjorie Bowen was one who trafficked regularly in the supernatural, when she wrote horror, but the stories I've seen always make the human comedy hurt a little too. I wrote previously about her Christmas story, "The Crown Derby Plate," which is practically a cozy, a ghost story to tell the kids in December, but even that has sharp edges. Bowen had a miserable childhood before winning success as a prolific writer of romances, mysteries, historical nonfiction, and more. I love the way the first-person narrator in "The Bishop of Hell" is so unnerved by his own story. "England, 1790," the story opens. "This is the most awful story that I know; I feel constrained to write down the facts as they ever abide with me, praying, as I do so, a merciful God to pardon my small share therein. God have mercy on us all!" Later in the story he mentions he was a lifelong nonbeliever until the events he narrates, but boy is he a believer now. He's inclined to beseech God at the virtual drop of a hat. Bowen tears into her classic horror tales ("Kecksies" and "Scoured Silk" are nearly as good) with acid details. The bishop of hell is one Hector Greatrix, louche, hedonist, and libertine, who lives only for his own pleasures. He enjoys things like borrowing money on the strength of his family name, gambling it all away, and never paying it back. I love that he is actually an ordained clergyman, as the younger son of a younger son. Mostly he is just a despicable villain. He steals the wife of a man who has helped him. They flee from London to the Continent and he keeps her only because she has an income. When that's not enough he turns her out to Italian dandies. She stays with him at first because she loves him and then only in the hope that he will do right by her. God have mercy on us all! He will never marry her because she slept with all those Italians. This cad comes to a wonderfully satisfying bad end (this is how it's done, Jane Rice!)—I mean he comes to a bad end on this plane because obviously, after taking his own life and all the assorted sins, he's going to Hell. Capitalized, a proper noun. God have mercy on us all! The spook show happens only in the very ending, as if to confirm the existence of Hell and Greatrix's consignment to it, but it's as ghastly and effective as the details we learn in the rest of the story. It's cunning of Bowen to make it all come out right morally because it is also license for her to go to town on the depravity, which she pursues almost with ferocious glee. She leaves our first-person narrator, and readers as well, wringing hands and calling to God. Grant us mercy!

Read story online.