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.
Still want to get back to the Bram Stoker original. Never felt more relevant. Vampires live off the vitality of your blood, like the GQP's central myth about demonic Hollywood Democrats and George Soros Jews cannibalizing the life energies of innocent children. And vampires seduce you, nice beasts, before killing you, like the way liberals promise equality and prosperity for all but really just want to trap you in their communistic freedom-killing rules & regulations Kumbaya-hippy microchip concentration camps. The paranoid style on the right hasn't been this hysterical since the Dr. Strangelove peak of the Cold War.
ReplyDeleteI just finished reading The Feasting Dead, and was a bit mystified by what took place in the harrowing scene on the train at the end of the story. The question is probably unanswerable though.
ReplyDeleteA minor correction: the French widower, M. Vaignon, with whom Denis's widower father, Col. Habgood, strikes up a friendship, does indeed have two children, but one is a boy (Marcel) and the other is a girl (Augustine); this is stated in the fourth paragraph of the first chapter ("a father with his young son and daughter"). The two children are younger than Denis, as is implied a few pages later ("Denis was thirteen. ... Marcel and Augustine ... could largely amuse each other, but Denis had no one of his own age to play with"). But those are minor points; the two children have very little presence in the story.
It's true that it is devoid of overt sexual implications, but the vampiric relationship between Denis and Raoul seems to come perilously close to it: Col. Habgood says that Denis is "infatuated," "spellbound," and "enchanted" with Raoul, and refers to Raoul as Denis's "paramour" and "mate"! M. Vaignon describes Raoul as "amorous and ... rapacious," and calls him a "molestation." In one scene that M. Vaignon comes upon suddenly between Denis and Raoul, Denis is "crouching, hunched forward in an odd stiff posture" with a "queer locked attitude" that "utterly dismayed and sickened" Col. Habgood; he says that Denis's "face, in its ecstasy ... wore a look that was a travesty of boyhood." He sees Raoul running away, and Denis "in a half-swoon." Very ripe language indeed!
Oops. In a comment that I just posted, I wrote that "M. Vaignon" had suddenly come upon a scene between Denis and Raoul; I meant that Denis's father, Col. Habgood, had done so. Mea culpa!
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