“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
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

"In the Slaughteryard" (1890)

When I talked about horror lying within an intersection of true-crime, this very strange story with its overwrought title is not actually what I had in mind. It's from Mary Danby's Realms of Darkness collection, but it's not much like any horror story I know, certainly of the era. I'm sure it found a much better home in the collection whose cover is pictured above. Yet in its way the story speaks to the intersection very well—as tawdry, unseemly, lurid, with raw hints of derangement and sadism, as if serial murder itself might be a kind of plague contagion, for victims and killers alike, leading to general bloodlust and society quivering on the verge of the breakdown of all norms. See also The Purge (or "The Lottery," which is altogether more elegant than either). The whole point of this story appears to be to make itself as extremely unpleasant as possible for genteel 1890.

Jack the Ripper, of course, who'd finished his work and disappeared a scant two years before this story appeared, deserves all credit for establishing the serial killer as demented media celebrity, writing taunting letters to police and newspapers, sending along irrefutable proof as the whim moves, and generally conducting entire metropolitan areas into waves of panic and revulsion. He was the first, before Zodiac or Manson or Son of Sam, and in a certain perverse view he might still be the best ever—the Babe Ruth of serial killers. He invented it, aided by the media ecosystem in London. Jack the Ripper's irrefutable proof by mail, for example, was a sample of a victim's kidney. But why go into detail.

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890)

Read story by Ambrose Bierce online.

This Civil War tale by Ambrose Bierce is not just his single most anthologized piece, but indeed is one of the most frequently collected of all short stories. It's a war story, but with spooky otherworldly effects, and grimly imagined. The story is short, around eight pages, but formally divided into three sections labeled with Roman numerals. It takes place in the South, where the Union army has captured, tried, and sentenced a man to death. We know this Southern man is guilty at least of plotting sabotage—his blunder was unknowingly asking a Union soldier the wrong questions. The story is not about the crime but about the punishment, a hanging that takes place at the bridge in the title. There's a meticulous detailing of how the hanging will proceed. And then there is the hanging itself and what follows, which is twisty and tricky. Bierce's language is all focused on the physical and the concrete. The narrator is omniscient but mostly stays with the condemned man. The story is not specifically antiwar, but it's aware of the follies of war. Neither side is sympathetic—neither the conniving would-be saboteur, nor the clinically precise machinations of the army putting him to death. He may be guilty, but it's transparently a kangaroo court. In case you've never encountered this story in all those anthologies, or seen the Twilight Zone episode based on it that won a Cannes award, or any of the other productions, I won't give away what are plainly intended as surprises. Bierce's tone is so restrained it's practically numb, but you come to realize it's a reflection of how intensely he has magined the incident. He is particularly good with the way ropes feel on the neck and wrists. I almost get the feeling some of this might have been drawn from separate exercises, working out intense anxieties. It's powerful stuff. Bierce is an heir of Edgar Allen Poe, and a forerunner of strains of 20th-century horror, partly by his famously bad attitude (he was known in his time as "Bitter Bierce") but more formally by his embrace of the surprise ending. That's on display in his best-known short story, which Kurt Vonnegut, for one, considered the greatest American story ever written. I think it's pretty good too.

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce (Library of America)

The Tragic Muse (1890)

Henry James was in his early 40s when he wrote The Tragic Muse, which is also when he seriously made an attempt at a career in theater, producing and writing plays. Those two factors may help explain the overarching theme of this long and shaggy novel, which appears to be about making the commitment to the bohemian lifestyle, as an artist. The two main narrative threads concern one character who can't decide between a career as a politician or as a painter—portrait painter, to be specific—and a young actress who may or may not be preternaturally talented, but is definitely taking the London theater world by storm. Round and round they go in their frolicsome agonies. This being Henry James, most of the action comes cloaked in a mantle of the novel of manners, by which I mean the main concern here, above anything else, is who is going to end up married to whom. He didn't seem to have the imagination to conceive his stories any other way, for better or worse. It's strange (and something of a loss) because the issues around the career decisions James raises here are real and consequential—obviously for himself as much as any reader, though not often involving the privileged classes quite this way, I suspect. Or, if they do, I don't care, because I don't particularly care whether someone in line for an ambassadorship would hurt himself by taking an actress as a wife. Even if James was genuinely a student of theater, as I'm sure he was, he always cared very much about the upper classes, so here we are. From our remove of more than a century it's hard for me to take much of this as believable. Particularly when it is continually stuffed back into the box of how will the marriages sort out. That said, I was often entertained and mostly satisfied by the stories of who ended up together—for the most part they were neatly done. And, on an even more abstract level, I often find reading James a kind of comfort, even with his rambling overdeveloped sentences and lack of human insight in many areas. It's not like he's completely without insight. And his dedication to the craft, even when it goes somewhat off the rails, as here, is always worthy of esteem, as he might say. In terms of the plot points, however, there's even more than usual for James a lot of magic wand waving for overstated purposes. At one point a character here gets on a boat in Central America and travels weeks and months to arrive just as the curtain is going up on a new show. Really, he had it timed so precisely? But you forgive these ridiculous conceits because you're glad he could make the show, and that means you care about the characters, so no matter what else, on some level, James has done his job.

"interlocutor" count = 9 / 812 pages

In case it's not at the library.