"The Feasting Dead" (1954)

John Metcalfe's long story is squarely in the H.P. Lovecraft tradition of horror, no doubt a chief consideration for August Derleth in publishing it as an Arkham House novel as well as in the 1963 When Evil Wakes anthology Derleth edited. The novel has also been published more recently by Valancourt Books. I don't have any copy of the novel and it's hard to tell whether Metcalfe expanded the 50-page story for it or it's just a short novel. It has a title fit for an Italian giallo movie and Ramsey Campbell, circa 1987, named it as one of the most important works in postwar horror. It's basically a vampire variation, or incubus story maybe, or "familiar" type of ghost, set in the UK and the Auvergne region of France. A widower, an Englishman (and the first-person narrator), strikes up a friendship with a Frenchman who also turns out to be a widower, with two sons. The narrator's son Denis is their age and they become friends. M. Vaignon, in an unusually generous gesture, invites the narrator to send his son to live with them in summertime and other school holidays, apparently to broaden his education and because all the boys get along. Or for more sinister reasons. Denis soon begins behaving strangely. Then the mysterious M. Vaignon cuts off the arrangement suddenly, writing a letter to the narrator: "I am the victim, it appears, of a fantastic persecution or visitation." Next, Denis wants a friend he met in Auvergne—Raoul, an older groundskeeper—to come and live with them in England. Next, Raoul shows up. His features are somehow hard to make out and no one can ever remember what he looks like when they're asked. So it goes. Like much of Lovecraft it takes a long time to get to very little. It's a slog of a read and yet the uneasy mood stayed with me the first time and lasted. It brought me back a few years on. The second read was still hard. Once under the spell of Raoul, Denis spends all his days with him, unavailable. They can't be found. Raoul looks like a scarecrow and Denis begins wasting away. No mention of puncture wounds. In the "changing times" column it's interesting to see how slow people in this story are to even consider child abuse, when it's practically our first thought these days. Somehow this story is entirely empty of sexual implications, but the silence is deafening and may be intentional. To me the story feels repressed to a certain point of suffocation. Maybe that works too for the long-term impact. Denis is sympathetic but it's evident he is being lost to whatever Raoul is—there are further clues. Vampire does not seem unlikely although 1954 for that somehow does, slightly (Metcalfe was 63 when he wrote this story so maybe that explains it). Raoul is probably the best point, underplayed just right, an unnerving, insidious presence gnawing away at us. Always taps at the windows instead of knocking on the door. He seems to get his way in most things, and everyone seems resigned to it. Nice beast.

When Evil Wakes, ed. August Derleth (out of print)
Story not available online.