“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
Listen to story online.