“Remorseless Vengeance” (1902)

I like this story by Guy Boothby, though maybe not as much as the title, which is so grim it’s comical. It’s another horror story set at Christmastime that is hard to call Christmassy. Perhaps it’s more in the spirit if read aloud after dark. It has an exotic setting with a sailor’s story of being down and out in Batavia (now Jakarta), Indonesia. The juxtaposition with Christmas as we know it is much of what makes the story work (albeit in a somewhat colonialist frame). As you probably guessed from the title, it’s a story of betrayal and retribution, with lots of intrigue and shady motivations. Our first-person narrator is stranded by sickness. Now just recovering and in debt, he is approached by a Captain Berringer who is well known in the story. He wants help abducting a certain general because, as revealed later, this general executed Berringer’s brother by hanging him the year before on Christmas day. We’re not told why. Once the general has been taken and is aboard Berringer’s ship it turns out Berringer intends to hang him in revenge, also on Christmas. Our guy (the first-person narrator and stranded sailor) is part of it now and tries to talk Berringer out of the murder. But Berringer is set on it. That night the ghost of the dead brother appears to Berringer and tells him to back off—the revenge is his to take. Berringer disagrees. “I’ve passed my word, and I’ll not depart from it,” he says. “Ghost or no ghost, he hangs at sunrise.” The next morning, as preparation for the hanging goes forward, Berringer sees something that frightens him to death. Meanwhile the general has died in his bed. A witness says, “God help me—you never saw such a sight! It looked as if he were fighting with someone whom we could not see, and was being slowly strangled.” That’s pretty much the end of the story. Good night, children, sleep tight! Santa Claus comes tonight. And so forth. In fact, I’m a little surprised, now that I have figured out these things exist, that I could not find anyone reading it aloud for a youtube video. It works reasonably well, even if I prefer horror stories that feel at least a little Christmassy, if they’re going to use the holiday. I also like the untidiness of this story, with things left unexplained. Why was the brother hanged? Why wouldn’t the living brother, Captain Berringer, defer to his ghost brother? Why did Berringer die? Don’t know, don’t know—and that’s the way it should be, when you can pull it off, as I would say this story does. Balancing explanation and the lack of it is tricky business. Here it’s used to confuse us a little and throw us off just when the story, which requires a fair amount of setup, seems to be getting predictable. The ending does not feel predictable at all even though in many ways it is.

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
Story not available online.

"The Bishop" (1902)

This late story by Anton Chekhov, written two years before his death at 44, is perhaps not surprisingly full of the foreboding of death. Chekhov had been battling, as we say, tuberculosis for some time. It does not feel much self-pitying but is instead artful and quiet, with a series of great moments, like the movie Wild Strawberries. It's Holy Week and Easter on the way and the bishop is dying. At the Palm Sunday service he is surprised to see his mother—a mother of nine and grandmother of 40 by now. It feels dreamlike. He has not seen her in nine years. Her behavior toward him has become more like a parishioner's, intimidated by his stature and fearful, and he feels sad and distant from her. The memories well forth: "Why did it, that long-past time that could never return, why did it seem brighter, fuller, and more festive than it had really been?" Why indeed. This story is a stark reminder that Chekhov was still getting better. Even in the face of eternity it's little details that tell, perhaps even more so in memory. The bishop may be sad for the distance he feels from his mother, but he is brave and stoic as he faces death and ruminates over his life. It's no crisis of faith, exactly. He continues with his rituals and their meanings. His most evocative memories have little to do with death or afterlife and everything to do with life, telltale moments of existence. I like the detail of electric lights first being installed in the town in some of these scenes. The times they are a-changing. People gather around to watch and look at the lights. In many ways this story feels like all encounters of parents and grown children—awkward, affectionate, strange. Are bishops generally middle-aged like Chekhov? This one feels older. He shows courage and dignity facing death but is peevish about his routines. The diagnosis of typhus appears to be news but he doesn't seem surprised, as if it only confirms what he has suspected. He dies and is replaced. Life just goes on. In the end his mother is seen saying "that she had a son, a bishop, and this she says very timidly, afraid that she may not be believed.... And, indeed, there are some who do not believe her."

Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

"Luella Miller" (1902)

This story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is bland and sneaky-good. It's just one woman telling the story of another in a folksy kind of low-key way. The storyteller might have some animus toward Luella Miller, but it's to be expected in the circumstances. All the details don't sink in right away. The monstrousness is so diffused you almost, perhaps, have to go through a period of denial, which lingers. I mean, is it really so monstrous here? Luella Miller may be some kind of demon, or merely an extremely manipulative person ... and that might not be much difference. One of the story's strengths is that it never really labels her, only reports events as they happened. It's not even certain Luella Miller has anything directly to do with the deaths. She's a kind of princess, self-possessed in her sense of her own privilege. She expects to be cared for and looked after. She's even a bit helpless. She doesn't do much herself. Somehow others around her rally and pitch in and do the chores—scrubbing the floor and dusting, washing the laundry, cooking, and so forth. She expects it as her due and she is not unduly ungrateful. People want to help her. Then they die—generally of mysterious wasting-away episodes, which might make her a vampire. The story is mostly told by her neighbor across the way in a small village in New England, who saw Luella Miller move into the house and steal her man. She helps Luella Miller and dies like all the others. This ability of Luella Miller to manipulate is a given. We never see how she does it, only that people fall in line. It's almost not uncanny at all, but a little frustrating, the way it is to watch people who don't deserve it getting their way over and over. She feels more oblivious about exercising her will than calculating. We've known people like this. Donald Trump often looks like it. She simply expects to be served and many volunteer. She can force the issue. She is seen fussing a few times when she is inconvenienced, which reminds me that the story also passes the Bechdel test. Freeman was self-consciously a feminist writer, weaving the themes into her mainstream novels, her works for children, and her supernatural stories too. This story is effective with its litany of deaths like a steady drumbeat and Luella Miller's perverse refusal to give in to drudgery (an echo of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," which has always felt a little uncanny). Freeman manages to stay within the lanes of Puritan credibility, with a nice steady rolling tale of some kind of insidious life-sucking horror that's hard to know what to call.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.

"The Monkey's Paw" (1902)

Proceeding now to the unassailable classics, spoilers blazing, this story by W.W. Jacobs is rightly considered one of the best horror short stories. It has been widely anthologized to the point where it is generally groaned over in places like Amazon reviews as an obvious choice when it shows up in another collection. The prolific Jacobs was more of a humorist by inclination, and perhaps even more a spinner of seagoing yarns. He only wrote a dozen or two horror stories and the others I've looked at are more rote, straining for effects they can't quite muster, or that other stories by other writers did much better. In a way, that makes Jacobs an example, for me anyway, of a writer who wrote only one spectacular story.

Among other things "The Monkey's Paw" is one of the best uses of the "three wishes" device, which dates back of course at least to the Arabian Nights into antiquity out of folk fairy tales. This story, in fact, is ridiculously simple in structure. It feels 19th-century in the language and the way it is divided into chapters—indeed, it's often compared to Dickens—but it's a model of compression compared to much 19th-century horror, which often prefers to pile detail teeteringly high in monolithic paragraphs (a mode that continued with H.P. Lovecraft and continues still). In many ways the publication date of "The Monkey's Paw" in the early 20th century feels auspicious.

The story includes a familiar figure of all eras of horror, the worried man of authority, in this case a British Army veteran who served in India, where he acquired the foul object of the story's title. Sergeant-Major Morris is paying a visit to the Whites, an elderly couple with a grown son, Herbert, who still lives with them. They are a ridiculously happy and complacent family. After a few drinks the grizzled veteran tells them the story of the monkey's paw, setting off one of the most artful pieces of the story. Everyone always talks about the knocking in this story, and we'll get to that, but I think this is the really important piece of it.

"The Story in It" (1902)

Skeptics of modern or postmodern self-consciousness are likely well advised to approach this odd story with caution. It's short but packed tight with Henry James's themes and preoccupations, which seemed to be shading inevitably more and more toward a darker cynicism in these later pieces from the turn of the century. Mrs. Maud Blessingbourne, a widow, is a house guest of Mrs. Dyott. Mrs. Dyott is having an affair with Colonel Voyt, which Maud does not know—we learn of it ourselves only in a comical scene of a few compact sentences. Maud, who likes to read romance novels from France, has a crush on Colonel Voyt, who is married in addition to his dalliance with Mrs. Dyott. When we see the three together, they discuss French novels, comparing them to English or American. Colonel Voyt wants to press the point that a woman making bad decisions is actually the essence of the romance, suggesting he is talking about not just sexual experience, but availability, knowingness, volition. The innocent lamb Maud maintains there is drama and tension in the story of a woman maintaining her virtue. This is how we go with James. The language and presentation are so dense and allusive in this story you have to read it through once just to figure out the basic situation. Then you can go back to start teasing out and unpacking all these subtleties going on. In a sense, that's one thumbnail definition of postmodernism—you can't look at anything just once, yet paradoxically you have to absorb the whole thing all at once, before you can make out the intricate pieces for what they are. And this is a reasonably short story—18 pages, albeit with "chapters." As Maud defends her ideas about romance and the virtuous woman, she is acting it out in her life at the same time. As Mrs. Dyott and Colonel Voyt argue their cases for romance lying in the woman and/or both of the lovers doing wrong, they are doing the same. That makes it an argument everyone gets to win. And in turn that makes this story a very neat trick, well done.

"interlocutor" count = 1 / 18 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

The Wings of the Dove (1902)

After the miserable experience I had with The Sacred Fount, I was prepared for the worst with the last three (and generally most acclaimed) of Henry James's novels. But I should have remembered things are acclaimed for a reason, because I enjoyed The Wings of the Dove quite a bit. Yes, the sentences are long and the abstractions, not to mention the vague pronouns, piled high. It requires some patience. The most interesting character in the whole thing, and arguably the main character, Kate Croy, is also one of his best, even though she is kept mostly on the sidelines and out of sight. But she is responsible for the main plot, a complicated scheme about (what else?) marriage and money. There are points to groan over. As often with James, neither the characters nor the motivations seem quite recognizable as human, but more like fevered figments of James's hot stove brain. Yet the monstrousness of what he imagines them doing is hard to deny. It sets you back. I saw the 1997 film version when it was new, but it's little help. This is not a novel easily filmed. The dithering, smeary, precisely imprecise language is ultimately what makes it. Our narrator—clearly possessed of a sensibility, and perhaps an agenda, hiding some things from us as he reveals others—is perpetually forestalled in explicating concrete action, constantly checking himself and adjusting for nuance. James returns here, in sideways fashion, to his earliest themes, as Europeans are once again trifling with the naivete of Americans. What's maddening is how elusive the action seems, constantly raising the question of whether James has really settled on the single and best way to tell this story. It's quite arguable that he has not. So much happens offstage, for example, that could be emphasized differently or more strongly. That applies equally to the action we do see. It feels like an implicit declaration that reality is impossible to know. We have the facts of this story, a sense of intrigue among fewer than a dozen people, and a sense of how we might feel about them, but very little is certain. Almost nothing, in fact. There is so much more we could know. Yet the ending also feels satisfactory—there's a certain symmetry to the actions and all the ambiguity. James seems to be operating on a whole new level here. Is it perhaps some perspicacious new editor and/or publisher? I couldn't help noticing that the "interlocutor" level in these major novels drops off dramatically (the preferred tic for the usage largely become "companion," which I didn't count). If there is something clumsy in the insights, descriptions, and most obviously in the language, it also feels measured and careful. James seems to be doing exactly what he intends here, and there is a strong sense of clarity to the confident way it moves. In some ways, it feels like you could spend a lifetime reading it, or did.

"interlocutor" count = 4 / 608 pages (includes "interlocutress")

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)