“The Old Portrait” (1890)

I thought it was unusual to find this Hume Nisbet story in the Vampire Tales anthology for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the second Nisbet story in the volume. Not many other writers here—which includes most of the public domain greats—get that treatment, and it is a large volume. Then, even though both stories are dated incorrectly—both as 1900, whereas ISFDB has both as 1890—they are separated by other stories. I know this anthology was put together by a person or people taking advantage of the ease of scraping online public domain material, and probably doing it in a hurry, but generally they seem to know what they’re doing. Just so, both “The Old Portrait” and “The Vampire Maid” are pretty good. “The Old Portrait” is Nisbet’s first published story, per ISFDB, and the better of the two. Nisbet (not to be confused with E. Nesbit) may be worth seeking out further. “The Old Portrait” is very short, with a somewhat strained yet intriguing premise. Our first-person narrator has a hobby and keen interest in picture frames and framing, which is how we get to “the old portrait” he has acquired for the frame on a December day. Picture and frame are so dirty none of the details of the image or woodwork can be made out. On Christmas Eve, our guy goes to work gently with soap and hot water and eventually finds an image that “asserted its awful crudeness, vile drawing, and intense vulgarity.” Good thing he bought it just for the frame! But hark, it turns out the vile portrait of some publican and his jewelry was actually painted over something else, which in turn our guy goes to work industriously removing. After midnight, he finds the image of a woman, and then the image begins to hypnotize him. He describes the woman in increasing detail, in effusive and poetic terms. We can see even through this that she looks like a corpse. Well, after all, I suppose this is why we find it in an anthology called Vampire Tales (to be fair, it could also fit in Christmas-themed anthologies). These stories often involve things more accurately described as wannabe vampires. It gets to be part of their charm, and you have to classify this story as one such. The vampire lives inside the painting under a coat of paint and another of dirt. Even the ever-loving frame is now revealed as corrupt: “what had before looked like scrollwork of flowers and fruit were loathsome snake-like worms twined amongst charnel-house bones.” More developments: “I thought the frame was still on the easel with the canvas, but the woman had stepped from them and was approaching me with a floating motion.” This is another vampire story where (spoiler) the victim somehow lives to tell the tale. I like the way it takes on its vampire via the medium of painting and manages to pull it off.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
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“The Tarn” (1923)

What I liked best about this story by Hugh Walpole were the descriptive passages and especially the way he used color: “October is a wonderful month in the English Lakes, golden, rich, and perfumed, slow suns moving through apricot-tinted skies to ruby evening glories; the shadows lie then thick about that beautiful country, in dark purple patches of silver gauze, in thick splotches of amber and grey.” I also like the theme of professional jealousy between two writers, or at least by our first-person narrator here for his friend of 20 years. While understandable on one level—the successful one is also shallow and obtuse—it’s bitchy and petty. But it makes the story more entertaining. I had already checked with the kindle dictionary but eventually the story gets around to telling us what a tarn is: “... a miniature lake, a pool of water lying in the lap of the hill. Very quiet, lovely, silent. Some of them are immensely deep.” I found this story in The Weird, where we can see that editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer are drawn to the most elemental aspects of reality crumbling into irrational unknowability (Jeff VanderMeer also wrote the source novel for the movie Annihilation). Hey, who can’t get on board with that? The one excerpt that appears in the anthology, from Alfred Kubin’s 1908 novel The Other Side, holds visions of breakdown in biological systems and even at the level of molecular structure. Here it’s just water. Push a guy into the tarn to kill him (he can’t swim, it’s late, and the water is cold), then wait and see what happens in your dreams: “He sat up higher in bed, and then saw that down the wallpaper beneath the window water was undoubtedly trickling. He could see it lurch to the projecting wood of the sill, pause, and then slip, slither down the incline.” Water with malevolent agency, defying gravity—not bad! And supported nicely by Walpole’s effusive language. It’s just, alas, not at all believable. The story veers about from crystalline description to backbiting resentments and murder and into the soggy nightmare which may or may not have “really happened.” It’s hard to say and I feel a little whipsawed by it all. Walpole has some reputation but nothing of his has really knocked me out yet. In the end, this story is a little too fanciful for my taste, but it has its points. Maybe he’s got some better stuff somewhere.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
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The World of Apu (1959)

Apur Sansar, India, 105 minutes
Director: Satyajit Ray

Writers: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray

Photography: Subrata Mitra

Music: Ravi Shankar

Editor: Dulal Dutta

Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Alok Chakravarty, Swapan Mukherjee, Dhiresh, Majumdar, Sefalika Devi, Dhiren Ghosh

The first two movies in director and cowriter Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, Pather Panchali and Aparajito, were made consecutively in two years—Ray’s very first movies. Three years and a couple of other movies intervened before Ray finished this trilogy with The World of Apu. In that time Ray’s stature as a filmmaker grew, enabling more funding, perhaps attracting better players, and certainly simply getting better at making movies. All the Apu movies are based on autobiographical novels by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, but Ray had absorbed even more of his Western influences by 1959. The World of Apu, the best of them, thus has affinities with and even stands as equal to such monumental landmarks as Fellini’s La Strada or Truffaut’s 400 Blows, rich with life and wisdom. Where Ray may have leaned somewhat mechanically into Freudian conceits in Aparajito, in The World of Apu it is Shakespeare that he turns to, much more skillfully, for its greatest resonance.

Apu has lost all his family in the first two movies of the trilogy—older sister, father, and mother—and he is alone in the world now in The World of Apu. Poverty is all he has ever known, but whereas, in Aparajito, he pursues more practical studies in science and engineering as a way out, at the beginning of The World of Apu he is unable to finish his education because he has run out of money. His interests have shifted too, from engineering to more of the literary pursuits of his father. And he appears to be good—we see, as he is leaving school, an instructor encourage him to continue writing, and we also see that a story of his has been accepted for publication. His best friend Pulu (Swapan Mukherjee) believes in him too. But Apu is among the most luckless of all movie or literary characters and the worst is yet to come—but not until after the best.

The Creator (2023)

With artificial intelligence (AI) all the rage in popular culture at the moment, here’s a war movie, robots versus human beings, that has surprisingly little of interest to say about it. AI is basically the Nazis and commies of yore in this movie, “the enemy” enough to warrant the big guns. But is AI really evil? is basically as far as it goes in the big idea department. More to the point, there’s a lot of ordnance going off here. And for the feels, there’s a story about a fiercely loving military family torn apart by the requirements of duty and humanity. But the basic deal is the robots have created a super-weapon which the humans must destroy, unless the robots can destroy the humans’ super-weapon first. For once I’m leery of spoilers—I mean, it’s still a relatively new movie—so I’m not going to get much into plot details. Instead, I have to marvel at the way director and cowriter Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, the 2014 Godzilla) basically dodges any complexities of AI, reducing his tale mostly to standard warfare battles, explosions, and high tech. Kapow! Take that! Pew-pew-pew! It has a bit of a tricksy plot, but more in the spy story vein, as it’s not always easy to discern everyone’s motivations and loyalties (let alone what is going on from scene to scene). The plot does throw up some twists and turns but not in ways that seemed very interesting to me. I wanted to know more about this AI beyond simple domination and/or survival, the basic binaries we get in movies like The Creator. It’s skillfully enough done—looks good, blows up good, has some interesting ideas about what future warfare will look like. I’ve just never been very interested in war movies—well, I did like some of the nuance in the Vietnam War movies before they hardened into cliches. But once 9/11 and the “war on terror” was part of the national experience, I really haven’t been into them, acknowledging that the cinematic innovations of, say, The Hurt Locker, offer up some exception to the general rule that war movies are a lot of tedium. The Creator, for all its pretensions to vague religiosity and heavy science fiction “evolutionary” sophistication, is too basically a war movie. If you’re into it for that, it’s not bad?

“About Barbers” (1871)

This short piece by Mark Twain is another one that seems strange to call a short story or an essay. Humor piece will do, I guess, as implied by Twain’s title. I imagined it would be about overly talkative and/or obnoxious barbers, or perhaps some antics from patrons. It has some of those things, but more goes off in a sitcom direction. Our guy is there for a shave, maybe a haircut. The barbershop has three barbers. By coincidence, by the chance of letting someone else into the shop first as they arrive, he sees the worst of the three barbers will be his. He tries to switch this up by leaving for a 15-minute stroll, but alas, when he returns he sees that this worst barber will still be his. It’s a short piece, but Twain elaborates these scenes with a good deal of detail that verges on tedious. He also details the reading choices available to him as he waits. Finally he’s called to the chair and of course it’s the barber he was trying to avoid. Things go like this: “Then he lathered one side of my face thoroughly, and was about to lather the other, when a dog-fight attracted his attention, and he ran to the window and stayed and saw it out, losing two shillings on the result in bets with the other barbers, a thing which gave me great satisfaction.” As far as essay forms go, I like the ones that are “About” something specific or general or mundane or whatever. It suggests a meditative approach, but of course we have nothing like that here. Twain is merely riffing up anecdotes that happen to involve a barber or barbers. I mean, that’s OK too. Another essay form that I like is the much more difficult humor piece. I have laughed very hard at humor pieces by Woody Allen and Ian Frazier, and then been baffled by them on later rereading—or vice versa, puzzled the first time. I include Twain as someone worth trying on humor pieces. He has the instincts and sense of timing, and his stuff has worked for me / not worked for me that way. He’s worth a try. You never know. But you should be at least a little inclined to like it before you start, or don’t even bother.

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches
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Modern Times (2006)

All songs on this long, thoughtful, and satisfying Bob Dylan album are credited as written by Bob Dylan even though the titles include “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” and “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” which, you know—they’ve been done. But in some alchemical process I see starting with his early-‘90s cover albums, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, continuing (and peaking) with “Love and Theft”, and arguably finishing up here (or maybe Together Through Life, Tempest, or Rough and Rowdy Ways, none of which I know as well because they haven’t impressed me enough to go beyond a few casual listens), it feels less like some kind of plagiarism and much more like an artist who has entirely absorbed his sources and is capable of spitting them back out in new forms—these songs feel old and new all at once. Wikipedia scholars have been hard at work identifying those sources and pulling them out of the wonderful stew of Modern Times. Muddy Waters of course for “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” Bing Crosby for “When the Deal Goes Down,” Sleepy John Estes, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Muddy Waters again for “Someday Baby” (not to mention his own “Maggie’s Farm”), and ... Ovid?! ... for specific lines of the lyrics. I wanted to say Dylan wrote his own words for the various blues / country standards, which justifies his authorship, but with Ovid now in the picture all bets are off, public domain or no. Amazingly, none of this gets in the way in terms of the pleasures of these 10 long songs. I’m not exactly sure how Dylan gets away with his thievery but he does and that’s a fact. Indeed, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” and “The Levee’s Gonna Break” are high points of a very good set. Much is result of a band nearly as well-versed in the standards and with whom he had been playing on tour for the year previous. A lot of what’s great here is this sympathetic, well-rehearsed band that is so clearly in synch with him. But Dylan remains the sun around which these planets whirl. Rock critic dean Robert Christgau gave the album a rare A+, which he also applied to “Love and Theft”. I’m still more a partisan for that one, along with Time Out of Mind, operating in another sphere entirely. But Modern Times is like your favorite easy chair. You can sit in its lap every day, often hearing new things and, even when you don’t, it’s practically pure comfort. Put it on and pull up a seat.

Aparajito (1956)

India, 110 minutes

Director: Satyajit Ray

Writers: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, Kanailal Basu

Photography: Subrata Mitra

Music: Ravi Shankar

Editor: Dulal Dutta

Cast: Pinaki Sengupta, Karuna Bannerjee, Kanu Bannerjee, Smaran Ghosal, Ramani Sengupta

It has been nearly 10 years since I last revisited Pather Panchali, the first movie in director and cowriter Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, but I see that the second, Aparajito, picks up within days if not hours of Pather Panchali. The Apu trilogy is a long continuous story—it begins on the day of Apu’s birth and continues into his adulthood in the third and final installment, The World of Apu. Aparajito sees the greatest changes in Apu, necessitating two actors as he grows from a boy into an adolescent and then young man. After the death of Apu’s sister in Pather Panchali, the family, now only three, leaves their home village for the big city of Varanasi (called Benares in the movie). Apu’s father cobbles together income as he can. His ambition is to be a literary writer, creating plays, poetry, and fiction, but he also serves as a community priest and picks up agricultural work as he can. In Varanasi, earning money has become the first order of business to get his family back on its feet. Even providing adequate food is becoming a problem. Sometimes he must travel and be away from his family for significant parts of a year.

While making Pather Panchali, Ray reportedly had no idea of extending the story beyond that movie. But it proved so popular he was able to get funding within a year to make Aparajito. Both are based on popular autobiographical novels by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. For Aparajito, however, Ray took artistic liberties with the source story that proved unpopular in India even though these two movies in many ways established Ray’s stature internationally. I don’t know the novels and basically admire both movies equally, as well as The World of Apu. According to the critical survey at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Aparajito has the lowest regard—no matter how movie trilogies may be structured, it does seem like the second is often judged the weakest, perhaps because it is a kind of bridge piece.

“A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second” (1840)

This very short story by Charles Dickens is also found under a shorter title—"The Mother’s Eyes”—but the long title works better, I think, because it’s less a story and more what the title tells us, a confession, written on the eve of an execution. It seems to be Dickens trying to imagine his way into the homicidal mindset, with a scene a bit like Edgar Allan Poe’s in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a story that came three years after this one. Not sure whether Poe knew this piece. This narrator is no raving lunatic, save perhaps when the bloodhounds show up and give his game away. But he is coldly fixated on his victim, his nephew, a young child. He does not get along with his brother, who has been more the fair-haired popular one in his family, but the two of them married sisters. He did not get along well with his sister-in-law either, who seemed to be deeply mistrustful of him. Both the brother and his wife die, however, and the surviving son comes to live with the narrator and his wife, at which point the narrator’s fixation worsens considerably. This is basically where the shorter title comes from, as reference is made to the resemblance between mother and son and the way the narrator may have caught either of them staring at him mistrustfully. Then he describes the murder, which is fully premeditated yet just as fully unexplained. I must say Dickens is quick and skillful injecting various horror elements and putting them to work. He has his part in inventing horror perhaps as much as anyone, as here we see a version of Jim Thompson’s Killer Inside Me. It’s even more believable because it’s not jokey. This killer also knows the difference between right and wrong. He’s just driven to do it. His explanations make no sense—some kind of past rift with the mother, the sister-in-law? What kind of rift? He has nothing to do with her death. But the lack of explanation only serves to make it more unsettling. Knowing when not to explain is no simple or easy skill. At the same time, in many ways in 1840 the short story itself was still being invented. So there’s also a sense that Dickens is just getting up a head of steam and trying stuff. I like the spirit of it. A confession found in a prison—it’s a great idea. I like the anonymity of the document too. The writer of this note knows he is going to his death the next day—knows it well. Accepts it. Doesn’t appear to have particular regrets, and still never explains why he did the crime. Very nice!

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Pavement’s Wowee Zowee (2010)

I realized again as I was reading this semi-memoirish 33-1/3 volume by novelist Bryan Charles that I’m not exactly a natural Pavement (and/or Stephen Malkmus) fan. I saw Pavement live around the time Wowee Zowee came out, in the mid-‘90s, and they were excellent—a great show. I hoped that would clarify the albums, which I had never connected with, but alas no. In memory Wowee Zowee was the one I finally got, but whatever I heard then was no longer there on more recent listening. Though his path to Wowee Zowee is somewhat convoluted and weird, Charles was a fan of Pavement from approximately Slanted and Enchanted on. If anything, Brighten the Corners (from 1997) is the one he has had the most intense infatuation with. Charles just assumes you get it or don’t, which I appreciated in a way because he’s really never trying to sell anyone on the band. He addresses the “slacker” image that has dogged Pavement and Malkmus since 1992. The truth is they were/are very hard-working. Great live shows like I saw do not happen by accident. Yet, at the same time, there is definitely something unkempt and underachieving about the surface of Pavement. “Slacker” actually captures the aesthetic perfectly for me, but I’m on the outside looking in here. I liked Charles’s eccentric and novelistic approach to this. He relies on his memories and impressions of his experience with the music and also on interviews with a dozen band, label, and other principals involved with the album (including the cover artist). All these conversations involve natural fans of Pavement, including individual band members. They all understand Pavement, often declare the music life-changing, and discuss it in ways that make it clear how much they love it. I learned some things I didn’t know—David Berman went way back with Malkmus, for one. I liked Charles’s style enough I may want to check out his novel (Grab on to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way, 2006) or memoir (There’s a Road Everywhere Except Where You Came From, 2010), wordy titles and all. For all his subdued, dare I say slacker, tone here, Charles obviously loves a long title. This treatment of Wowee Zowee is basically for Pavement fans only.

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

The Headless Woman (2008)

La mujer sin cabeza, Argentina / France / Italy / Spain, 87 minutes

Director/writer: Lucrecia Martel

Photography: Barbara Alvarez

Music: Roberta Ainstein

Editor: Miguel Schverdfinger

Cast: Maria Onetto, Claudia Cantero, Ines Efron, Cesar Bordon, Daniel Genoud, Guillermo Arengo, Maria Vaner

According to internet sources such as Google Translate, the original Spanish title for this movie, La mujer sin cabeza, does indeed appear to translate directly to “the headless woman,” although results suspiciously include links to information about showings of this movie, which made me think the phrase may be specifically idiomatic in some way. My very first thought was that it might be some kind of pun on the part of the translator for “the heedless woman,” as that is an obvious quality of the woman in question at the center of this picture, Vero (Maria Onetto). She is bourgeois, a professional dentist, middle-aged, well-coiffed, married with children and a lover, and appears to have a busy, somewhat empty social life. She appears to be numb, in short.

Early in the movie, on her way home from an elegant afternoon gathering, Vero’s cell phone rings in the car, she is momentarily distracted, and she runs over something. She sits in her car gathering herself, obviously shaken by the incident. But she never gets out of the car to investigate, does not really look at anything, not even in her rearview mirror. She only composes herself, taking deep breaths, and then drives on, jaw clenched basically for the rest of the movie. As she leaves the scene, we see the corpse of a dog on the road. But she has not seen it. And now, for the rest of the movie, she quietly falls apart in a self-controlled way that makes it very difficult to see she is falling apart at all, except for a worsening case of disaffection, which could simply be the modern condition, yes? She seems to me to be more exactly heedless than someone who has lost her head, momentarily or otherwise, because of a crisis. In her deeply controlled panic she is still rational enough to act as if the rules don’t apply to her if she can get away with it

Signs of a Psychopath (s1-6, 2020-2023)

Here’s a continuing series that seriously deserves all its content warnings because it can pack quite a punch. It’s a bit of a variation on the ubiquitous youtube true-crime videos based on police interrogation tapes. Usually those often very long episodes are focused on police interrogation techniques, to valorize or condemn them according to the video-maker’s own bent along with what’s on the tape. Signs of a Psychopath instead offers up 21-minute blasts of apprehended murderers who are variously still high on their work as they talk to police and the show describes their crimes. It is very chilling stuff and thus often gratifying to learn of their current status, usually incarcerated, sometimes dead of state execution or suicide. The show also includes a handful or more of long-faced forensic psychologists and such explaining the ins and outs of psychopathy. A few episodes are twice as long and tediously preachy about how to detect and stop psychopaths at large in the world (spoiler alert, it’s not easy). They’re not all the same, these miscreants. Some are cocky and jokey, others are dead-voiced (“so then I killed him too”). I don’t know what’s worse. They’re all quite disturbing. But once I found the show I streamed quickly through the rather short seasons, maybe six to 10 of these 21-minute bursts. Yes, it’s a freak show, I admit. They are the geeks and I am the gawker. And I get what I’m looking for—shock, followed by queasy outrage and ultimately despair. Good times! The crimes are heinous. Many fit the mold of classic serial killers—multiple murders, often with sexualized overtones. Others are more unusual, such as a nurse at a nursing home who killed a handful under her care for misbehaving in her judgment. One aspect of the show that sort of tells on what it’s trying to do is its disproportionate representation of women in this realm, which is overwhelmingly populated by men. —Still, ya know, gotta say, it’s pretty freaky, what these women do. And the men, of course. I think, actually, now that I think about it, it’s the cocky, jokey killers that seem worst to me. They dole out crumbs of teasing information to investigators trying to close cold cases, just for the attention, just for the lulz. One, giving the details on one of his crimes, makes a point of saying he knows more than he will ever tell about other murders, and shortly after that kills himself. Feel the despair.

Kim (1901)

I had a hard time with this Rudyard Kipling novel, considered by many to be his best work. The fact is I came to it already with problems about Kipling. He’s a colonialist by reputation and pretty much in fact. I’ve read a few of his ghost stories, which mostly strike me as stiff and ineffective. And his penchant for inserting poetry, his own and that of others, does not impress me. I’ve seen collections by him that pair stories with poems—an interesting idea in the abstract, perhaps, but generally it does not work for me. I was hoping at least for an engaging adventure story in Kim but alas not even that was working for me. I needed more context, which I might have sought ahead of time from Wikipedia or something. I recommend that for anyone approaching this novel. You can thank me later. It might have helped, for example, knowing what “the Great Game” means, a rivalry between the 19th-century British and Russian empires over influence in Central Asia, particularly Afghanistan. Another problem is the impression I got that Kipling did not understand the region well—roughly India, Pakistan (not yet a state in 1901), and Afghanistan. Nor did he (or very many Westerners, to be fair) seem to understand at all the array of religions and sects in the region, which included broad branches of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. It reminded me of Paul Bowles’s ignorance of Arabs in The Sheltering Sky, which at least is a much better novel. I admit my biases against Kipling, author of the poem “The White Man’s Burden.” But I was still open to the adventure story possibilities. But apparently not open enough because it turned out to be pretty much a forced-march hate read. Fortunately for me it’s a short novel. Our main guy, Kim, is an orphan loose in this part of the world. His impoverished Irish parents are dead. I read him as a mixed offspring, Irish soldier father and native mother, but no, per Wikipedia. He’s all white. He hooks up with a holy man—Buddhist, I think—in search of a holy river. Various adventures ensue. My bad attitude may have partially blinded me to the novel’s better qualities, but I never felt involved with the story or cared about anything going on. As I say, it probably would have helped if I had brushed up ahead of time on this “Great Game,” but I will also say it would have helped if Kipling knew more about what he was writing about in the region—the cultures, the religions, the conflicts. It’s surprising to me that this is considered a classic, let alone one appropriate for kids. I don’t think so!

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

“Green Tea” (1869)

This long story by Sheridan Le Fanu is considered among his best, in part because it’s in his rightly much-celebrated collection, In a Glass Darkly. Many of the stories feature the German psychic investigator / occult detective Martin Hesselius. “Green Tea” is first up and thus has a few things to do, introducing Hesselius and his case study approach. It’s good when it’s on the case under examination. But it’s hampered by awkward construction, hemming and hawing and dancing around the subject a lot. It takes too long to get to the good stuff, which may or may not be that good. A minister is haunted by a malevolent monkey only he can see, which randomly appears to him even in public, staring and glowering. Understandably, it unnerves him. The result is that the minister often freezes up and/or breaks down and can’t be trusted to do Sunday church services without incident. After introducing Hesselius and his case study approach, the story spends some time on some metaphysical / philosophical business about duality and materialism and such. The proto-theosophist Emanuel Swedenborg is a recurring reference. The influence on Lovecraft and the occult detective subgenre generally is obvious but with all the setup “Green Tea” can be slow going. Once the minister finally stops being evasive and we get to the monkey, however, it’s not bad. The clinical tone works well—it just needs to be quicker getting to the point (according to my impatient modern sensibility). It reminded me in some ways of Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially the tormented minister. As a 19th-century Irishman, Le Fanu occupies an interesting place, outside of the British mainstream but not Continental or American either. Some Irish writers register strongly as Irish (J.P. Donlevy, for example, or Joyce) but I never get much of that from Le Fanu. I like his case study approach, which often feels close to detective fiction or true-crime fare, especially when it gets down to accounts. As the first of the five stories in the collection, you have to grant “Green Tea” some leeway for its setup work. Doubtless that explains a lot of the throat-clearing. The stories in the collection get better as they go—the last, “Carmilla,” is the best, an essential vampire story.

Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly
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