“The Private Life” (1892)

This long Henry James story, as much bantering comedy as ghost tale, almost counts as classic weird in a way, with a pair of cerebral concepts that are a bit didactic and somehow a bit rational too, which undercuts. James never was comfortable with the irrational, which is one reason his ghost stories tend not to be that good. It’s also from the period in his career when James was becoming ever more prolix and abstruse by the year (partly related to dictating his drafts and fussing with the typescripts). On the one hand, here, we have a genial upper-class nobleman, who is a model of poise and charming manners, the popular man who attracts everyone. Then there is the novelist, who maintains two identities: the one facing his friends and the public, and the one facing the blank page. In this story the nobleman disappears when no one is with him, in his solitude, like the unheard tree falling in the woods. And there are two novelists: one who chats it up with everyone, and the other laboring at his manuscript in the dark. I like that detail about working in the dark. Still, overall, the story feels more awkward and heavy-handed than anything. The high concept is not delivered with a lot of clarity and it takes a while to get there. James mocks those at ease in the world as vacuous, hollow, empty, and he lionizes the brooding novelist. No self-interest there (let alone self-pity). So, while taken literally, both apparitions may qualify as weird and also uncanny and maybe other adjectives (strange, mysterious, etc.), they are not really meant to be taken literally. It’s poetic and metaphorical about society and art and stuff like that. If James really wanted to make it weird, really wanted to write a ghost story, he would have had to take out a certain amount of verbiage. It’s about 40 pages as it stands—can you get it down to 15, H.J.? I read somewhere that James was envious of Sheridan Le Fanu and tried to write his ghost stories on approximately that model. Le Fanu could go on and on himself, but the main distinction is that James can’t commit in the clinch to something he obviously feels is ridiculous and beneath him. I like some of his ideas, like the ones here. I just wish James had liked them more.

“interlocutor” count = 1 / 40 pages (“interlocutress”)

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Past Lives (2023)

Past Lives offers a bittersweet love story that’s hard to categorize. Call it a romance. It starts with a pair of 12-year-olds growing up in Korea. Hae Sung (Leem Seung-min, then Teo Yoo as the grownup) and Na Young (Moon Seung-ah, then Greta Lee as the grownup, called Nora) are 12-year-old childhood sweethearts. Na Young’s mother arranges and chaperones their one date. She says it’s so Na Young will have happy memories, knowing the family has plans to emigrate to Canada. Nora is ambitious. As a 12-year-old she wants to win a Nobel Prize in literature. As a 24-year-old—with the picture transitioning toward the present—she is a playwright and wants to win a Pulitzer. The second part of Past Lives, when Hae Sung and Nora are 24, presents a classic aching long-distant internet relationship. They communicate by phone and computer and have long talks at all hours of the day and night. They are plainly in love. But Hae Sung can’t travel to New York City, where Nora has settled, for another year, and Nora can’t make it to Seoul for a year and a half. At that point Nora looks at the futility and calls a timeout. Hae Sung is heartbroken and left feeling abandoned again. Almost immediately, Nora meets the man she will marry and we get word Hae Sung has a girlfriend. For the third part of the movie, another 12 years has elapsed and Hae Sung is traveling to New York to see Nora for the first time in more than 20 years. Past Lives has many of the beats of a romantic comedy but it’s much more poignant than funny. Nora has a real marriage, with fights and passion and connections (they are both writers), and she has a career, living in a small apartment in the East Village. Hae Sung has become an engineer with an office job, but he still lives at home with his parents. In many ways he feels uncomfortably like an incel. They have grown far apart because they have been raised in different families. But they still feel a connection. The picture starts out pretty well and gets better as it goes. The last section is full of tender and awkward moments as Nora and her husband and Hae Sung go out for a last night on the town. The final parting is agonizingly slow, making us feel all the complex welter of emotions set in motion. Past Lives is often beautiful—one to see for sure.

“Small World” (1957)

Among other things, this story by William F. Nolan is a good example of the blurring between horror and science fiction that was going on in the 1950s. It’s really a science fiction story—the premise involves an attack on Earth by aliens from outer space. It’s also very much in the realm of O. Henry or Maupassant with a calculated twist at the end custom-designed for shock, handwringing, and/or sad wisdom. Nolan is another prolific and well-decorated genre writer I don’t know that well. He wrote a lot of stories, but this one appears to be minor in the larger scheme of his work, which is perhaps capped by the 1967 novel Logan’s Run, a collaboration with George Clayton Johnson. This story may bear some similarities to that novel in that it features a character who is hiding and running around a lot, avoiding certain menace. Because its intention is to surprise, SPOILER warning now, as I’m about to give it away. The aliens killed everyone over the age of 6 and departed. This story takes place a few years after that. What our hero Lewis Stillman has spent the story avoiding is feral children. It’s not entirely original—Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life” has some of it and I suspect there are other examples. Are there 19th-century dystopias with feral children abroad on the land? Maybe. But it feels more to me like a midcentury science fiction natural. The setting is an abandoned Los Angeles, which suggests the scope nicely, even if the story gets a little too cluttered with street names. It takes a big bomb (or big alien technology in this case) to wreck a giant city like Los Angeles. Nolan is a pretty good writer, and the story works pretty well as suspense, but I have my nits. I thought the devotion of Lewis to Ernest Hemingway does not age this story well. Also: the original title was “The Small World of Lewis Stillman,” which I think by far the better title. The edited version is punchy, sure, but it always leads me to expect it’s going to be a story about coincidences. But, overall, really not bad. How did it get into an anthology so full of crap?

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
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Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003)

Bu san, Taiwan, 82 minutes

Director: Ming-liang Tsai

Writers: Sung Hsi, Ming-liang Tsai

Photography: Pen-Jung Liao

Music: Yao Lee

Editor: Sheng-Chang Chen

Cast: Kiyonobu Mitamura, Shiang-chyi Chen, Kang-sheng Lee, Kuei-Mei Yang, Chao-jung Chen

In the Sight & Sound poll conducted every 10 years to ascertain a ranking, according to various cineaste pooh-bahs, of the greatest films ever made, Taiwanese director and cowriter Ming-liang Tsai has some reputation for voting for his own Goodbye, Dragon Inn, along with such usual suspects as Sunrise, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and The Night of the Hunter. In the latest results of the survey from last year, enough others followed suit to push this exemplar of “slow cinema” into a six-way tie for #108 (with Bringing Up Baby, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Touch of Evil, Wild Strawberries, and The Wizard of Oz). Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a weird one by anyone’s standard, practically guaranteed to test patience even at a relatively tidy 82 minutes. With some eight total lines of dialogue, it may be the longest 82 minutes of your life. It is exasperating, frustrating, and confusing, but also mesmerizing, and not without rewards. I often realize later that slow cinema has burned the images into my retina.

The premise is that a theater in Taipei is closing down and showing the 1967 martial arts picture Dragon Inn as its last show. At the beginning of Goodbye, it seems to be a fairly full house. But during the movie the theater is more often close to empty, sparsely populated by sentimental original players from the 1967 movie on the one hand, and people who seem to be cruising for sex on the other. By the end of what feels like a typical night for everyone involved, I start to wonder if this was really the last screening at that theater forever, or just the last screening of the night. There’s little sense of finality—more like just another slow night in a theater that admittedly doesn’t seem destined, in the fullness of time, to make it as a business enterprise.

The Tin Can Tree (1965)

Anne Tyler’s second novel was published when she was 23 or 24, so my expectations were not that high. It’s set in North Carolina, where she grew up and went to college before moving to Baltimore literally and figuratively. It features a family named Pike, a new experience for me after only Captain Christopher Pike on the original Star Trek series. Tyler is still obviously learning her craft, but her sense of character building is already there and not bad. She bravely takes on a story of a family who have lost a 6-year-old to an accidental death, a pretty good premise which she makes even better by noticing the child was not the favored one of the parents. It’s poignant on its own terms. Tyler kind of misfires by making the parents seem older than they probably are. The surviving older brother is not even 10 yet. Mr. and Mrs. Pike, so-called, are thus probably not even 40 but they feel like they are pushing 60. Some of that can be chalked up to the pain and grief of the loss, maybe. Mrs. Pike is practically catatonic, which feels like an exaggeration. The Pikes live in a peculiar building that also houses two other sets of tenants. They all share a porch and the building goes two stories, isolated in the country outside a small town. I had a hard time imagining it, let alone believing it. They are a bunch of quirky kooks, which is the most recognizably Tyler aspect of The Tin Can Tree. One set of tenants is a pair of older women, sisters or cousins. The other is a pair of brothers, one taking care of the other, who suffers from complications of anemia and is annoying. I thought the novel worked better than some of her other early ones—there’s a good deal of complexity to all these characters—but she’s still on the novel-writing learning curve here, as amazing as it is for a second novel by someone so young. I like the basic premise but I’m not sure Tyler had the lived experience yet to do it justice. A lot of things about The Tin Can Tree just feel made up. The families are fractured but, in the case of the brothers, they feel undeveloped even though they turn out to be an important (if late-arriving) plot point. Someone on Goodreads compared it to Steinbeck and that seems fair enough, although my edition has an interview with Tyler from many years later. She is critical of certain shortcomings in this novel but never mentions any influences. It’s kind of a rough one in many ways but completists may be relieved to find that overall it’s not bad.

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

English Settlement (1982)

XTC’s fifth album is another that unfortunately presents versioning problems. Released originally in the UK as a double LP (the band’s first), it was bowdlerized for the US and elsewhere into a single album, removing five songs and reordering the sequence. I came to it late, never knew it well in its time, so for this exercise I stuck with the original, which I assume is closer to what XTC and not the marketing arm of the label intended. English Settlement clocks in over 70 minutes, barely fitting onto a single CD. But it was the beginning of XTC stretching out for longer sets. Lost in the intricate patterns of studio construction, hobbled in a way by the worsening stage-fright incidents of principal Andy Partridge, on English Settlement XTC seems to be finding its way with songcraft developed to the furthest abstracted reaches. Sometimes the hooks are so mechanical they are more like barbs caught uncomfortably in the lip, as with “Melt the Guns,” which feels robotic even with its pro-humanist theme, or the caterwauling “Leisure.” The album has a kind of learning curve for me if I’ve been away from it too long. Just so, I had to play it through a few times before I caught on to its pleasures again. Even then I noticed I was only good for maybe seven songs at a time before I started to flag a little and zone out. I tried it on shuffle, which produced the same effect but at least convinced me it wasn’t just the first seven songs that are good. “It’s Nearly Africa,” “Knuckle Down,” “Down in the Cockpit,” and “Snowman” all improved a good deal under this system of listening. You can’t hold it against an album if there are too many songs to easily assimilate. Who listens to double-LP albums all together in one big gulp anyway? Wikipedia says English Settlement “marked a turn towards the more pastoral pop songs that would dominate later XTC releases.” That sounds right. “Senses Working Overtime” reminded me of Drums and Wires songs but considerably toned down in terms of the attack—slower tempo, milder assault, almost introspective. “Ball and Chain” even has interludes that remind me of the Genesis double-LP The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, antithetical in a way to the larger punk-rock / new wave project on which XTC was launched. It would not be a far step from here to the cartoonish psychedelics they would begin entertaining with Skylarking (perhaps their most popular album), Oranges & Lemons, and the Dukes of Stratosphear. It took me a while to get into English Settlement again, but I’m not sure I’m done with it yet—it’s sticky.

Three Colors: Red (1994)

Trois couleurs: Rouge, France / Switzerland / Poland, 99 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Edward Klosinski, Marcin Latallo

Photography: Piotr Sobocinski

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Jacques Witta

Cast: Irene Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Pierre Lorit, Frederique Feder

Based on the French flag colors of the “blue, white, and red,” Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy wraps up with Red and a story of fraternity (as opposed to the liberty themes of Blue and equality themes of White). Although Red was the first of the trilogy I saw when it was new, and my favorite, it feels now more like a winding-down, even pale feel-good exercise, with some air of mystery, a kinda sorta heartening redemption story, and ham-handed cameos from the first two movies. Human bonds are forged, here as in life, via family ties, sometimes. But more often by random chance. Who can account for why we have made the friends we have?

In a way Red has Kieslowski’s biggest star yet in Jean-Louis Trintignant, who died just last year. He’s an art film hero and veteran whose roles date back to 1955 and include My Night at Maud’s, The Conformist, and, much later, Amour (not to mention the spaghetti western The Great Silence). In Red he plays a retired judge who spies on people and feels embittered and alone. Irene Jacob previously appeared in Kieslowski’s 1992 movie The Double Life of Veronique and once again, as Valentine here, is a kindly, wide-eyed soul of goodness. In a moment of distracted driving she runs over the judge’s German Shepherd dog Rita, who is pregnant. No dogs are harmed in the making of this film but they do have their trials in the narrative. Rita, who has the face of a saint, is injured only with scrapes and bruises. She recovers, but the judge doesn’t care.

“The Great God Pan” (1894)

Arthur Machen’s long story involves more or less, or maybe not really, the mythical Greek half-goat “god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, rustic music and impromptus, and companion of the nymphs” (Wikipedia). Among other things it set off a trend in horror stories that lasted 20 or 30 years and still recurs today, the gods among us, and nasty. It is thoroughly rooted in a 19th-century literary style I think of as “furniture-moving,” also seen in numerous H.P. Lovecraft stories, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and arguably even William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. In the furniture-moving narrative, most of the themes occur at the edges of the action, with large blocks of narrative devoted to developing them indirectly (“showing”), one at a time. The narrative hangs back a little too much for me here, nibbling at the edges instead of going to the heart. It starts in the first of eight sections with an experiment that drives a woman named Mary mad and results in her pregnancy by the randy ancient god. Mary—a bold choice of name. Each section details some further aspect of the presence of this god on Earth with a cast of rotating peripheral characters and various mysteries and bizarre events associated with them. They tend to be worried men of science and/or authorities attempting to piece together the clues of some enormous and unspeakable horror™. It’s a little confusing, we don’t learn key details until late and are left to surmise a lot of the direct action from the wreckage left behind. At one point, for example, various pleasure-loving aristocrats begin committing suicide in a notably gruesome way. For all of Machen’s pains to keep it subtle the reveal at the end finally spells out the horror specifically. The ever-intriguing mystic and Welsh writer Arthur Machen was attacked as vulgar, verging on blasphemous, to put sex with a god so blatantly into this story. In many ways it’s not that different from vampire stories as the specific miscreant here—known variously (and confusingly) as Helen Vaughan, Mrs. Herbert, and Mrs. Beaumont—basically rampages British society terrifying people and killing them by fear. The objection, in late Victorian terms, was that Pan, even with his Greek origins predating Christianity, is somehow a pagan functionary of the biblical Satan, who has his own goat connections in European medievalism. I associate Pan more with libertines and healthy lustful sexuality, but apparently (and not at all surprisingly) healthy lustful sexuality was considered sinful and evil in 1894. So, for the most part, I’m a little indifferent to the lengthy verbose horror exercises in Machen’s tale. He would get much better by my lights—see “The White People” from 10 years later. But he may be best known for “Pan.” H.P. Lovecraft notably loved this story and in some ways it can produce the same mysterious effect on me as Lovecraft’s stories—often boring as I read, requiring patience I don’t always have, but then penetrating this apathy somehow to produce a sense of unease, sometimes long after reading. I might not be as willing to call “The Great God Pan” essential, as some others do, but yeah, maybe you should get to it—and Machen—sooner rather than later.

Foundations of Fear, ed. David G. Hartwell
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Lynch/Oz (2022)

Fans of filmmaker David Lynch and/or the most famous movie of all time are likely to get a kick out of this documentary project by director and writer Alexandre O. Philippe. He approached a half dozen or so other filmmakers and critics for their meditations on the connections between Lynch and The Wizard of Oz. In turn, Philippe has cut together montages of scenes from Oz and all of Lynch’s movies to accompany, highlight, emphasize, and make the ideas more concrete as they are discussed in voiceovers. The result is a series of fascinating video essay vignettes. The titles of these segments may give some sense of their flavors: Wind, Membranes, Kindred, Multitudes, Judy, Dig. The most famous of these contributors may be filmmaker John Waters (whose pencil mustache, remember, is an homage to Little Richard). Waters’s Kindred treats Lynch as a friend and peer, with warm memories. Not so famous, perhaps, is Rodney Ascher (Membranes), director and writer of the 2012 documentary Room 237, which throws a similar intense focus on the Stanley Kubrick movie The Shining. My favorite segment of Lynch/Oz was the first, Wind, “hosted” by film critic Amy Nicholson. One thing that’s not clear is who wrote these speaking parts. Because they seem uniquely personal, and more essay-like than the result of interviews, I assumed while I was watching that the person speaking wrote the words. But Philippe is the only writer given credit on IMDb, and the speakers are credited as hosts, whatever that means. Filmmakers David Lowery and, to a lesser extent, Karyn Kusama, speak of their own films specifically and the influences of both Lynch and Oz. I have often viewed Lynch through the lens of The Wizard of Oz myself, most notably Blue Velvet, which has always seemed to me very much a version of the journey down the yellow brick road. But one thing Lynch/Oz does, probably not by coincidence, is suggest how widely and deeply The Wizard of Oz has influenced so many movies, from Steven Spielberg to Kubrick and beyond, hardly just David Lynch. I happen to love people sitting around talking about movies, even more so when direct film clips are involved. I’m thinking of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema or Martin Scorsese’s Personal Journey Through American Movies. And I’m also thinking of Room 237. Lynch/Oz is probably closer to the latter—slightly insular, maybe not for everyone. But they are all along the same spectrum of film studies. If any of the constituent elements are your cup of tea, then I’d say go for it.

The Blunderer (1954)

Patricia Highsmith’s third novel made it into the Library of America Women Crime Writers series, but a lot of reviewers find it flawed. I do too. In some ways Highsmith’s dim view of humanity makes it work anyway. No character in this novel is likable, but there’s something about that perversely that I like. The main problem is an insanely unlikely story involving the similar deaths of two characters who are otherwise unlinked. They take place several weeks apart. Our title character is Walter Stackhouse. Highsmith never used the term “henpecked” to describe his marriage, but I will. His wife Clara bosses him around a lot and is never happy with anything he does. Walter is kind of a fool, but he doesn’t really deserve the treatment. He loves her in spite of it but, as the story begins, he’s finally getting to the end of his rope. Any discussion of separation, however, leads to his wife making suicide attempts. So it’s a pretty harrowing predicament. The form that the two murders take is the wife is traveling alone by bus, the husband follows until the bus makes a rest stop, and then he leads his wife away and kills her. We see the first one, committed by a Melchior Kimmel, at the start of the novel. The death of Walter’s wife is more ambiguous. It’s probably a suicide, a fall from a cliff. That’s certainly all Highsmith gives us, but Walter followed the bus and a witness saw him at the rest stop. I’m pretty sure Highsmith intended him to be not guilty. But his strange—and unlikely—interest in the Kimmel case makes him look suspicious. Highsmith never makes any of this very convincing, which is ultimately fatal to it as a “suspense” novel, the way Library of America is selling it. I have to say it’s no page-turner. In fact, the labor to connect these plot points ends up making it practically the opposite of a page-turner and it turns toward the sloggy in the last third. What works for me here is Walter’s marriage, which is over at the halfway point. But it is a wonderfully sardonic view of marriage until then. Highsmith is not exactly adroit about showing the dynamics, but she makes it clear Walter loves her until he is finally driven away. His wife Clara is never satisfied with him even when he does exactly what she asks. In fact, a weak point here is that, for the sake of the plot, Highsmith tries to make the marriage fail in the space of the narrative. Walter seems more like the kind of guy who would stick it out no matter what. I think The Blunderer would have been a better novel if it had skipped all the noir, with murders, cops, and even blackmail, and instead made it a portrait of a bad marriage. But maybe it wouldn’t have been commercial that way? Approach with caution.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Three Colors: White (1994)

Trois couleurs: Blanc, Switzerland / France / Poland, 92 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Edward Klosinski, Marcin Latallo

Photography: Edward Klosinski

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Urszula Lesiak

Cast: Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy, Janusz Gajos, Jerzy Stuhr

Director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski positively seems to love the dense, evocative, confounding narratives he constructs based on abstractions and ironical moral precepts. His best movie—if you want to call a 10-hour TV miniseries a movie, and I do—was Dekalog, which worked with the biblical 10 Commandments, one at a time, with a double handful of masterpieces. His breakthrough Three Colors trilogy, the last movies he made—he died in 1996 at the age of 54—is similarly focused on the colors of the French flag, the “blue, white, and red,” typically radicalizing their meanings of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” (respectively). We have already seen the radical liberty, in Three Colors: Blue, of a woman who has lost everything. Now we encounter the radical equality of a bitter failing marriage in Paris between a Polish immigrant, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), and a French woman, Dominique (Julie Delpy).

Dominique is divorcing Karol because he has never been able to consummate the marriage, as she announces in open court, one more way she can humiliate him. It’s something of a preoccupation of hers. She has a cruel streak a mile deep—her name hammers that point home (while his has intimations of femininity and submission). Karol tries to explain himself at the hearing but the divorce is granted, which ruins him. He is homeless, penniless, begging on the street. Eventually he befriends a Polish national in Paris who helps him find his way back home by wedging him into a suitcase for the flight.

Drums and Wires (1979)

I played this certified stone classic by XTC for the first time in possibly decades and wondered what I’d been doing with my life all this time. Maybe it’s the nostalgia talking now because among other things it instantly put me in the place where it is so gratifying to play albums all day. It occurred to me that Drums and Wires might be the greatest new wave album ever recorded (after only perhaps Singles Going Steady). Not talking about Iron Maiden and that new wave, but the safe-for-kids offshoot of punk-rock. New wave—the land of fast-tempo’d hooks and earworms and pleasures unexpected, keyboards, dancy rhythms, electric guitars, and posers that make posing fun again. I was so smitten with the habit of Drums and Wires it took me a while to notice that “Life Begins at the Hop” not only did not kick it off, the way I remembered, but did not even appear to be on the album at all, which instead led with “Making Plans for Nigel”—a great song, warm, poignant, bouncy-bright primary colored and saucer-eyed. Because, yes, it turns out Drums and Wires is one more story of competing UK and US versions, which I thought was a thing of the past in 1979, except apparently the problem of marketing punk-rock and even the more arty commercial new wave brought the practice back again for a redux. All butcher-shop metaphors apply. In fact, Drums and Wires nearly stands up to comparison even to the Beatles’ mighty Rubber Soul, by the unique circumstances of the parallel versioning problem, and more generally the songwriting too. The US version opens with a song not on the UK, and the UK version returns the favor. (In the case of Rubber Soul, it’s “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” the correct opener, and “Drive My Car,” a delightful song but alas no. The comparison doesn’t entirely hold, because “Making Plans for Nigel” is on both versions of the XTC album, but you see my point.) Having left Napster because of its chronic stability problems (and worrisome new crypto ownership) I resorted to youtube, where that version of Drums and Wires includes “Hop” as an extra and hence jogged my memory. Drums and Wires is remarkable because it sounded fabulous from the first time I returned to it—sometimes, these days, it can take a try or three before these older favorites kick back in—and it has tended to sound better every time I play it. I believe every song on it now has appeared as an earworm these past days and weeks, pleasant enough to relive. I think I made this point somewhere else recently, but I don’t take earworms in and of themselves as unwanted. It depends on the song. “When You’re Near Me I Have Difficulty,” yes. “1-877 Kars4Kids,” no. Fortunately, every song here is a great song and welcome when they drift into my head unbidden. Get the completest package of Drums and Wires you can (or resort to youtube). This was a good period for XTC.

“The Witch’s Bone” (1963)

William Croft Dickinson, born in 1897, was a Scottish historian who wrote ghost stories on the side. This one, a tidy if somewhat predictable tale with a dash of voodoo, was written when he was in his 60s. He certainly had the craft down. “The Witch’s Bone” feels old-fashioned somehow, riffing on scientific sources in anthropology and expeditions abroad to mysterious destinations. Michael Elliott, a doctor and man of many credentials (“MA, LLD, FSA,” etc.), has something called a witch’s bone which can be used to throw curses on others in a somewhat elaborate and somewhat inconsistent ritual involving a doll created from sealing wax that is mistreated, pierced with pins. It’s a lot like voodoo dolls even though the word “voodoo” is never used. Elliott was presenting his witch’s bone and discussing it in a meeting of an Antiquarian Society. But another member—Mackenzie Grant, a self-appointed foe of Elliott—stands up and interrupts and ridicules him. It’s not the first time Grant has embarrassed Elliott this way, although, in fairness, Grant has not necessarily singled out Elliott. He’s just that way and does it a lot, not only with Elliott. Foolish mortal, questioning beyond his ken. Elliott is fed up with it. He goes home and, in a pique, throws a curse. Within 24 hours Grant has died a horrible death, an auto accident in which “practically every bone in his body was broken.” Now Elliott feels guilty and fearful of the power. Meanwhile, a museum has requested the loan of the witch’s bone for an exhibition it is putting together on “Folk Beliefs and Customs.” The witch’s bone is from another county in Scotland. Elliott fears what could happen but has no rational reason to decline, and so another terrible death is ultimately in the offing. The story is predictable, but brutally imagined and coldly worked out, with a power to cast a chill that obscures its various faults. Dickinson evokes the horrors well. There’s a good detail about how the bone gives up a death rattle when the person of interest has died their horrible death, sort of like a cell phone on vibrate going off. It’s all a bit mechanical, sure, but also nicely thought through and it reads more like something from the 1930s than the 1960s, a virtue in its way, at least in this case.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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