“Egnaro” (1981)

Another story I know by M. John Harrison takes off on Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” title and all, and makes a reasonably good job of it, in the same quiet, understated way as this story from The Weird. These stories operate on the peripheries, which almost are not weird or scary at all. You kind of have to talk yourself into it. Yet later, something may nag or gnaw at you a little. Egnaro in this story is a mythical unknown land. No one knows how to get to it, and most have never heard of it or don’t believe it exists. The first-person narrator is an accountant who keeps the books for Lucas, a low-level merchant in printed matter, rare books, porn (the revenue mainstay), memorabilia, comic books, etc. It’s a shoestring business. Teens come and hang out to read the comic books. Surreptitious businessmen in suits show up in the lunch hour to buy the porn. The narrator comes in once a month to do the books and he’s paid with cash and a meal. Lucas is obsessed with Egnaro. Over dinner, he talks about it and shares passages from rare books. There may be references to Egnaro in them, but if so they are oblique and barely detectable. Eventually things catch up with Lucas, his business always a little on the shady side. He goes bankrupt and disappears. The narrator, and this may be where the thread of the story strays beyond everyday norms, assumes Lucas has found Egnaro and moved there. The obsession is contagious, as the narrator finds himself caught up in it now. One of the best effects in the story is its dependency on scraps of overheard conversation, taken as full of portent and secret knowledge of Egnaro. To me they seem mostly like meaningless scraps of overheard conversation. But: “It is in conversations not your own (so I learnt from Lucas) that you first hear of Egnaro.” Example: “Egnaro, where the long sunlit esplanades lift from a wine-dark sea.” It's true that snatch of conversation (“by the time you have turned your head the woman is speaking of tomatoes and hot-house flowers”) sounds to the hearer as if it contained the word “Egnaro,” but that is an ambiguous sound, likely easily confused with others. Then the language seems stilted and artificial for conversation—Egnaro, where the long sunlit esplanades lift from a wine-dark sea—perhaps as intended, with its reference to both Homer and Robert Aickman. I like this story because the lives of its two principals are interesting, and I like the obsessiveness and the way it plays out in printed matter and overheard conversation.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.