"Seaton's Aunt" (1922)

Walter de la Mare has been something of an acquired taste for me—this story might be the place where I acquired it. It's good enough I'm going to go back and look at some of the others again. Nothing overtly supernatural happens, nor anything cruel beyond a certain cold haughtiness, yet it is charged with uncanny tension and malevolence. It feels in many ways like a dry run for Robert Aickman's later style of "strange" story. It halfway feels like a dream much of the time, the kind where you can't remember all the parts or how things changed. Arthur Seaton is a classmate of the first-person narrator, both of them in early adolescence at the beginning and for much of the story. Seaton is a sickly outcast at school, vaguely ethnic. The racial note is another point of unease. He is orphaned as well, and in line when he comes of age to acquire the mansion his aunt now inhabits (and has all her life). The narrator befriends Seaton out of pity as much as anything. When Seaton invites him home on a break from school he accepts for no apparent reason. Things like that just seem to happen in "strange" stories. Seaton's aunt is a woman of great appetite and poise, with a very large head and imperious manner. She needles everyone in her orbit, including our narrator the hapless houseguest, whose name she can never get right. It's Withers, which is provocative itself in this context, but she more often calls him Wither or Smithers. The story is often funny in a way but the aunt is also casually monstrous. She's terrible but it's never personal. She is like some greater being dwelling among us—amused by us. She might be using up and/or killing people but it's hard to say. There's no evidence, beyond her vaguely sinister manner and oversize head. People are dying, as they do, but it's not clear she has anything to do with it. It just feels like she does. Lots of poetical turns in the language and unsettling asides along the way, which is typical of de la Mare, who can be allusive almost unto vaporous, but here every sentence, every word practically, is effective and it leaves a chill.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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