The Hill of Dreams (1907)

I’m probably way out of line to compare Arthur Machen’s short, semiautobiographical novel to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both come from outer precincts of Britain. Machen was about 20 years older. I have no idea where Joyce was on genre writing. Certainly his Portrait is more naturalistic than Machen’s Hill of Dreams. Machen is trying to ground the events he recounts here even though, as a mystic, he can’t seem to help some indulgence of the weird. His young man / artist, Lucian Taylor, is in his early to mid-20s here, raised in rural Wales and eventually moving to London as he begins more seriously to write. In Wales, he is always distracted by the deep woods and by the Roman architecture. He’s drawn to an old Roman fort, in a clearing in the woods, and something happens there. Machen supplies few specific details. It involves Lucian taking off all his clothes and falling into a deep sleep with strange dreams. I have an idea what happened here—masturbation, possibly for the first time. That’s likely more crude and bound to this plane than Machen intends, but there is plainly something sexual about it. Machen wrote this in the 1890s but it was not published until 1907. Surely the rules of the time regarding sexual propriety applied—in short, don’t ever talk about it. So Machen may have felt he had to be coy. Full disclosure, I’m not sure what happens in much of this novel, although it is usually interesting to see Lucian grow and change. In Wales, he writes a first novel. When he submits it for publication it is stolen by another author and published as by him. Incredibly, Lucian doesn’t seem to mind that much. He’s already at work on another. He moves to London to work on it. The woods and nature of his homeland worried and discomposed him but he misses them keenly in the big city. The Hill of Dreams, according to Wikipedia, is “Generally considered Machen’s masterpiece.” That’s news to me—I hear a lot more about “The Great God Pan” (or “The White People,” which is actually his masterpiece). I would not suggest starting on Machen with The Hill of Dreams. But it’s one to get to sooner rather than later if you’re into him.

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

“The Voice in the Night” (1907)

[spoilers] I like this story by William Hope Hodgson pretty well—certainly my favorite of his many seagoing stories I’ve read. It may be more squarely in the traditions of “weird” than horror but it’s still creepy and unsettling. In a way it’s kind of a “lost world” story. But what a horrible lost world. More than anything it’s a seagoing tale, specifically within that a “fog” or “doldrums” story, a Hodgson staple. There’s a ship, and it is stuck in still waters and haze, with no wind. In the night, after some time there, a voice is heard calling out of the darkness, begging for food. The man calling refuses to let himself be seen. It’s annoying behavior that makes it hard to hand off food. But they manage. Some time later, the next night or maybe a few more, the voice returns to explain himself and his partner. The story involves shipwreck and struggling to survive on an island infested with a gray fungus and nothing to eat. The story is just well done. I had a bad feeling about that fungus from the first it’s seen, but it’s mostly innocuous for quite a while. Then it’s a nuisance and finally a fearsome force. It’s all over everything and if you scrub it away it returns the next day. Then it starts infecting the castaways themselves, with the gray fungus appearing on patches of their skin. As food stores dwindle, however, they find that not only is the fungus edible but it’s also quite tasty, though it hastens the infection. Late in the story a humanoid shape is seen in the fungus, moving like a living person. Details like this reminded me of the movie Annihilation and were particularly effective. For once one of these old-fashioned framing devices works. There’s a fair amount of setup but the payoff is this amazing story related by a voice calling out of the darkness. Hodgson gives us a glimpse of the terror near the end, the lumbering humanoid mass of gray fungus, but otherwise keeps a light hand. It’s also a good idea to make the voice a married man. He and his wife are alone together in this, trying to keep each other alive. So it’s also an affecting love story. I don’t know that you can call this gray fungus supernatural—it’s plausible enough, in 1907, that such things could exist. It may be a stretch to make it delicious, and also that it may have psychic powers of attraction, but I’m even willing to accept those things here. Hodgson makes it all work.

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The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Pity poor Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams. Trapped in 19th-century egalitarian society, burdened by his ancestry, pursuing an immoderately modest career as a historian and teacher. His autobiography (far more heavy than mere memoir) is considered one of the greatest in American literature. Yet it never mentions that he was married (let alone the tragedy of it)—I spent a lot of the book idly wondering if he were gay. Though it tells many details of his life it is more on the order of a think piece on history and historical patterns. His ideas about the Virgin Mary representing the primary motivating force of the 12th century (yes, the 12th, it's all explained), and the electric dynamo that of the 20th century, get a lot of gloomy oxygen here. He worries a lot about science, fully aware of Darwin and evolution. The reason I say we should pity him is in how he was just a little early for the things that would really get to him. If the trend in human affairs is alarmingly away from order and toward chaos, then relativity and especially quantum mechanics would have unnerved him badly. Though he considered himself a failure as historian and teacher, no one else did, and his sweeping historical perspective is often impressive. His approach is allusive and indirect—he expects you to know as much as him, though likely very few do, then or now. And not me—sometimes, especially toward the end when he tries to pull together all the pieces into a unified field theory of history, I glazed over, I must admit. Adams is at once deeply American and yet deeply elitist. His one reference to Mark Twain is mocking, he admires Henry James but brother William James more, and his best friends were even more accomplished than he was. He was in London as a young man for the duration of the Civil War, working with his father who was the ambassador to Britain. That's probably the best part in terms of history, event, and detail, with a wonderful view of Britain and the European powers during the time. But this morning I keep coming back to the fact that I had to go to Wikipedia to find out not only that he was married, but that his wife was mentally ill and killed herself. Talk about compartmentalization. That's some strange stuff to leave out of an autobiography. It certainly fits with the constant of Adams's doleful tone, etched with small sparks of venom. I don't come away from it feeling I know that much about Henry Adams except as something like the brooding spirit of American history. It's a stiff jolt of American character, not always recognizably human, perhaps the intent.

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

"The Listener" (1907)

I tend to think of Algernon Blackwood more as savant of the ineffably extra-dimensional beyond our ken (see "The Willows," see "The Winnebago Wendigo," etc.), but this story and many others demonstrate how good he could be even at the ghost story, that root basic unit of horror. "The Listener" takes on the form of diary entries, a classic not to say overplayed device, and then in many ways proceeds as vividly as Hanns Heinz Ewers's "The Spider." Blackwood's anonymous urban creature is more of a Londoner, as opposed to Ewers's Parisian. He's a freelance writer who finds rooms that are dirt-cheap and close to the newspaper offices where he pitches stories. You can guess the reason those rooms are cheap, though Blackwood's typical light touch slips it by. He's remarkably good at working variations on the conventions. It's always a ghost that's bothering our freelancer, though the one clumsy element of the story is a visit our man pays to a lecture about death that basically explains fine points of the story's conceit, a good old ghost bit that runs from Sheridan Le Fanu's "The Familiar" to the Paranormal Activity movie franchise, with a ghost attaching itself to an individual. The way the plot point is inserted via the public lecture is what's clumsy, not the concept or the language: Suicides, he learns, "cannot shirk their responsibilities so easily. They must return to take up life exactly where they laid it so violently down, but with the added pain and punishment of their weakness. Many of them wander the earth in unspeakable misery till they can reclothe themselves in the body of someone else—generally a lunatic, or weak-minded person, who cannot resist the hideous obsession. This is their only means of escape."

A freelance writer is clearly an example of a lunatic or weak-minded person, so we quickly grasp the sense of his danger. He also mentions in his diary that he has had problems with sleepwalking in the past—not good! He is obviously ripe for a reclothing exercise on the part of some suicide still residing in the Phantom Zone of his rooms. Blackwood inserts passing examples of our man's mind being preyed on even as he is writing out his diary entries in real-time, such as one where he is talking about his exasperation with the housemaid who cleans his rooms and misplaces his things: "Sometimes I feel inclined to throw the inkstand at her, just to bring an expression into her watery eyes and a squeak from those colorless lips. Dear me! What violent expressions I am making use of! How very foolish of me!" One obvious point in such stream of (double) consciousness foreshadowing is how much H.P. Lovecraft was influenced by Blackwood, whose best is better than anything Lovecraft touched for all his considerable influence himself. Even the misplaced things is done insidiously well here—it could be the help, it could be the addled freelancer, or it could be the ghost, which systematically works on him on different sensual levels: sounds and smells long before sight of anything, and at one point he feels the arm of another person in a dark room. "Like small doses of morphine often repeated," he writes, "she has finally a cumulative effect." But we know it's not the housemaid.

When the ghost is finally named, as "the Listener," it brings sharp focus to the strange events and perceptions swirling around our man and/or merely in his mind. He is plainly haunted now, by something that feels more and more predatory: "Last night I was again troubled by most oppressive dreams. Someone seemed to be moving in the night up and down my room, sometimes passing into the front room, and then returning to stand beside the bed and stare intently down upon me. I was being watched by this person all night long. I never actually awoke, though I was often very near it." The lines between annoyance and dread and danger are passed successively in order but almost imperceptibly. Blackwood always works well at his peak operatic moments. Part of his skill is the way he raises the temperature so high even as we barely notice. Suddenly things are dire and how did we get here? The final payoff and explanations are a bit pat and a lot antiquated and insensitive, but certainly grotesque so (on one level) why not? The least you can say about Blackwood is that he's a certifiable master of horror.

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

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"The Moonlit Road" (1907)

I've been finding out Ambrose Bierce was a much better and more influential horror story writer than I knew. His stories are versatile and always succinct and somehow find surprising ways to get in the path of 20th-century currents. This story, for example—which comes to function, if you think about it enough, like the view of infinity seen sidewise in opposing mirrors—ultimately provided the source for the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon. The movie is technically based on the story "In a Grove" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (incidentally revered as the father of the Japanese short story). It also includes some details from another Akutagawa story of the same name as the movie, "Rashomon." But "In a Grove" is the story that uses a single incident to probe at truth and perception from different points of view. Akutagawa was directly inspired by "The Moonlit Road," lifting its approach, structure, and key details nearly whole from this provocative and weirdly unyielding Bierce story.

Like much 19th-century horror, "The Moonlit Road" is largely built out of documentary texts, in this case more or less legal depositions. But these documents don't jibe, they differ in small critical ways and don't illuminate so much as confuse the open issues further. A man disappears whose wife has been murdered. It's not clear whether the murder is ever solved. It's not even clear they're talking about the same case. The story is short, divided into three sections, each one a separate individual's statement. The incidents they recount harmonize in some ways but diverge in others. It seems like the same case yet the parts don't fit. The first statement comes from Joel Hetman Jr., the son of the man who disappeared and woman who was murdered, and it's about as straightforward as this story gets, laying out the basic elements of the incident, with nary a ghost or mention of dreaming in sight. The second statement, disjointed and defiant, is from "Caspar Grattan" (he says the name is an alias), a man about to be executed for the murder of his wife. His case sounds just like Hetman's in the details, with shifts in perception arising out of the suggestion of shifts in motive. Yet even as he finishes his account Grattan begins to talk about it as if it were all only a dream he had. As if it never really happened, even though he has described it vividly.

The third section has the most obvious tie to the Kurosawa movie, with a statement from the woman who was murdered obtained by way of a spiritual medium. I always took this part of the movie to be reflecting something unique to Japan's past, allowing this type of testimony in a legal proceeding, and here it turns out to be something dreamed up by a writer in San Francisco, California! The medium, by the way, is identified as "Bayrolles," who also appears as the medium obtaining information in at least one more story by Bierce, "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" (along the way inventing Carcosa, a lost ancient city that would later figure in the work of Robert W. Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, and many others).

So who killed this poor woman and why? An intruder who escaped in the night or her jealous husband enraged to discover her infidelity (or appearance of infidelity)? And why did the husband run away—because seeing her ghost on a moonlit road filled him with unbearable guilt? And what does Caspar Grattan have to do with it? Alas, we never learn. Each account affirms some elements from the others, but each also has perfectly unexplained elements too. The woman didn't see her killer and can't say with certainty who it was. "The sum of what we knew at death is the measure of what we know afterward," is the way she explains her lack of afterlife omniscience. There are certain eerie parallels in this story with Bierce's life too. He divorced his wife in 1904 after discovering her infidelity. And he famously disappeared himself in 1913 and no one knows what became of him, though he's presumed murdered. Perhaps the way Kurosawa's Rashomon is most faithful to Bierce's "Moonlit Road" is that there appears to be no getting to the bottom of it, no matter how many layers you peel back.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
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"The Willows" (1907)

Algernon Blackwood's beloved classic is a long story that feels a bit like a cross between Jack London and H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, Lovecraft was deeply influenced by it, citing it as his single favorite story. "The Willows" is set in a section of the Danube River that is less like a ballroom waltz and more like a Louisiana bayou, ambling through sandy marshes and swampy shallows. The first-person narrator and his companion, identified as "the Swede," are traveling by canoe, on some intrepid type of camping vacation apparently. They are trawling down the river in a high waters time, which means small sandy islands can wash away and boats lose track of the over-flooding channel and even become trapped in backwaters. Blackwood is good at wilderness and physical description though perhaps not as good as some others, such as London. Blackwood is often equally focused on his genre considerations, distracted from the natural by the supernatural threads in his stories which can be conventional.

Still it's the brooding things of wilderness that ultimately carry this one. Those willows, most obviously, swaying and bending in the high winds, an image returned to again and again. Filmmaker David Lynch has used a similar effect many times, notably in his Twin Peaks episodes, with the camera simply sitting and looking at trees in the wind. The high winds themselves are unsettling—windstorms, especially at night, are the most disturbing storms of all. Ultimately, of course, what we have here is a serious case of Ineffable Evil. But what's great about this story is not its interest in the evil but rather how perfectly strange that evil is. My grasp of it, though the story was written well before commercial radio, is as the sense of something peering back from behind the static between stations. It does not surprise me in a way that Lovecraft honored this piece above all others, as it is both an impressive enough feat of world-building and also such a solid slab of id-sourced weird. The point is that we can't understand it, whatever it is, though we know to our core it's awful. From Blackwood's description, this isolated section of the Danube is a place where two parallel dimensions are scraping against one another and the membrane has grown thin, heralded by the high winds and an ominous sound that recurs only inside the mind. The two men are in great danger. It is like an encounter of a bobcat and a squirrel and they are the squirrel. The hunting style of these superior beings appears to be like the feline style of playing with prey. The landscape is blurred between the physical and the mental. Much of the peril is an implicit threat of madness, literally losing their minds.

"The Willows" is considered Blackwood's best by a good margin though many also note how prolific he was at high levels. There's indeed something open and inviting about his work—I've enjoyed the handful or so stories I've read and intend to read more, but I'd put him closer to my idea of an adventure story writer rather than horror. Probably my own favorite Blackwood so far is the only very short story I've read by him yet, "Ancient Lights," about a man who can't find his way through a small patch of woods. "The Wendigo" appears to be Blackwood's consensus #2 best, but its North American setting wasn't at all convincing to me and I kept thinking of James Fenimore Cooper, not a favorite. "Glamour in the Snow" had an unconvincing supernatural story but was very good on snow and frigid conditions. I can see how "The Willows" is a notch above. The setting is inspired and the turn to an unknowable weird almost aggressive. It's not conventional supernatural, that's for sure.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
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The Secret Agent (1907)

For some time now I've been poking at the 1998 Modern Library list of the 100 Best 20th-Century Novels (see the Novels tab). I have a number of complaints about it, as I have about practically every institutionalized attempt at such honorifics, from the Baseball Hall of Fame to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to the Oscars, Grammys, and Miss America pageant. It's a flawed list, in short. I have felt free to go picking and choosing—I will never read Finnegans Wake (#77), I can say with some certainty. As further tonic, I paired it with Larry McCaffery's list of the 20th Century's Greatest Hits, another pack of 100 novels, with approximately 30% overlap. McCaffery's list leans more toward currents of the second half of the century. I will probably read even fewer of them in the long run, as it includes not only Finnegans Wake (at #10) but also Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans (at #7) and other such phonebook-sized blasts of dense non-narrative language. I like the cheek of McCaffery to make his #1 not Ulysses but Pale Fire—inspired choice. Then he makes Ulysses his #2. I guess some things you just can't get away from (not that I'm carping about something I don't know—I'm looking forward to finally getting to it). Gravity's Rainbow is #3, and so forth.

I've made my peace with the Modern Library list, even for all its flaws, as I keep finding books I love on it. I've already been aware of most of them, but not all, and some of the finds have been very fine indeed. But Joseph Conrad happens to be an example of one of the list's greatest flaws, so a ritual airing of grievances must now briefly proceed. My main problem with the list may be expressed as a bad case of Usual-Suspectivitis, combined with a kind of willful blindness toward such writers as Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and many others. To make matters worse, the one problem exacerbates the other. The list is the result of polling the 10 members of the Modern Library editorial board at the time (names I know include A.S. Byatt, Shelby Foote, William Styron, and Gore Vidal), which is a fairly small and doubtless insular sample in the first place. It would be interesting to see the titles that fell 101-200, because then we might get a sense of how the list would change if the simple limitation of one title per author were imposed. Not that I'm necessarily in favor of it—I know it's arbitrary and precludes a certain perspective of how relatively dominating single figures might be—but I'm really not in favor of the clustered-up redundancies in the final list either.

"The Ransom of Red Chief" (1907)

Read story by O. Henry online.

O. Henry's comical kidnapping story has less of a twist ending and more of a punchline to a joke and there should probably be a rimshot too, with a sad horn. In that way it's not as typical for Henry as, say, "The Gift of the Magi." But it seems typical enough for its time, reminiscent of the wry American work of Mark Twain or Booth Tarkington. It features two would-be professional criminals: Sam, the first-person narrator, and Bill, his sidekick, who is more or less the straight man. They are in Alabama and decide to kidnap a boy to raise some quick and easy money. The story predates by decades the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby, which took a lot of the fun out of such crimes. It's also way ahead of the kind of legendary desperate outlaws who showed up in the Depression years, hunted by the FBI, although Jesse James and other cowboy bandits were in Henry's recent past then. It's marked by a kind of slangy criminal lingo that Damon Runyon and, even later, Nelson Algren would use just as extensively. I read this in junior high or maybe even grade school, and it surprises me a little that anyone thought kids that age would get something out of it. Maybe because it features a boy of about that age? Anyway, Sam and Bill can't control him—Bill especially is regularly made a victim by the boy. Let's say it doesn't seem very realistic and leave it at that, especially in this era of elaborate ultraviolence. I guess you could say it's an antecedent to the Home Alone movies. I actually found it charming and comical, opting for conscious suspension of disbelief. It's funny what the kid gets away with and the repetitions with Bill as the eternal victim are pretty good too, some very neat ba-da-bings. In my childhood travels with O. Henry it seemed like guessing the twist was all part of the fun and the challenge. But what surprised me most about this story is how well it's done, a frothy little delight with no regrets, and all elements played well.

By the way, I found this story in a top 10 list of most popular Library of America Story of the Week selections, which came in an email newsletter. Story of the Week has been a worthy project of five years or more now. I decided to add all 10 to the stories from the three anthologies that are providing the bulk of my long short story project. Then I felt like even more needed to be added—no Chekhov anywhere? that didn't seem right for a look at short stories—so I sprinkled in a few more (many cherry-picked from the upper realms of this great list of most-anthologized stories), to get to a grand total of 125. This might not seem like a particularly round number but it's actually a very good one: five cubed, which means it produces most satisfying numbers when I go to measure my progress. For example, with this story, I am now exactly 41.6% through this project. Only 58.4% to go!

Library of America Story of the Week (Library of America)