“Afterward” (1910)

[spoilers] My first Edith Wharton horror story is in The Dark Descent and for once I don’t think editor David G. Hartwell was trying too hard to pump up the volume on literary credibility. Wharton is obviously good at this—far better than her mentor Henry James, who could rarely get out of his own way when it came to horror. I still need to take another look at “The Turn of the Screw.” At any rate, Wharton’s story does involve Americans living in Europe, or anyway England. Our young American couple rents a house in the English countryside that is reputed to be haunted. They joke about wanting to meet a ghost, but there’s an unusual twist to this one. It’s only later (“afterward”) that you understand the ghost or haunting. This is a strange, almost arch concept, not easily grasped, but the payoff is quite good. The couple seems like an ideal of American innocents, but shade soon begins to fall on the husband. We see he is worried about something and hiding it from his wife. We know we need to keep an eye on that. But mostly the Jamesian air holds sway of light banter, blue skies, and easy good fortune. Then Wharton springs a big surprise when the husband suddenly disappears and is never heard from again. She knocks us off balance as we are not prepared for the unexplained disappearance of a main character. The events of the day are detailed up to the point where peak annoyance has begun to turn to anxiety. The next section starts two weeks later, with a police investigation underway and the wife with a bad feeling. As the weeks and months elapse, she begins to remember things that are a little ghostly and only become more so as she gradually adds up clues and learns what her husband was involved in that enabled them to move to England and pursue their easy, carefree way of life. I’ve given away the main surprise of this story, but the surprise is not the point of it. Wharton is careful from the start to make her characters vividly felt, as normal or bland and humdrum as they may seem. While many things are explained, the ghost story aspect is not. It exists at the center of the story as a mystery that can’t be understood or penetrated even. And like all the folks in this story say, you only really get it afterward, as the inescapable futility of explanation becomes apparent. Very nicely done.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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"The Whistling Room" (1910)

I liked this story by William Hope Hodgson pretty well, though it wears its mystery story formula on its sleeve. It's part of a series featuring a psychic investigator named Carnacki (not to be confused with Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent). Carnacki is a rational man of science but more willing than Sherlock Holmes to credit the supernatural. He's also not nearly as erudite as H.P. Lovecraft's various library-bound bookworms. Once it gets down to business "The Whistling Room" is full of good effects plus one that goes ridiculously over the top. Without a doubt this is a story about the supernatural. Specifically, a haunted room in a castle, which emits unnerving and sometimes very loud whistling tones at night, "an extraordinary, grotesque parody of human whistling, too gigantic to be human—as if something gargantuan and monstrous made the sounds softly." Carnacki does resort to peppering his pursuit of a solution with Lovecraft-type nonsense syllable words (I suspect a linguist would trace the mumbo-jumbo of both Hodgson and Lovecraft unerringly to English, as they have with Christian "speaking in tongues" episodes), e.g., "the Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual" (dig those crazy extra As). "The Whistling Room" is a decent ghost story but actually even more skillful as a mystery. At one point midway a red herring makes it appear it might somehow be natural phenomena after all. The weird stuff is weird and gets systematically weirder, though it's decidedly cerebral. Helpful explanations are sprinkled in along the way. I like how parts of it are knowable and other parts are not. Too much is knowable, unfortunately, but it preserves some element of the unknown even as Carnacki is a show-offy know-it-all like Sherlock Holmes, with elementary my dear sir explanations for many things. I love the climaxing image (spoiler)—the room itself is whistling, the wood planking floor animated into lips—but it's also fairly silly in the larger haunted house scheme of things. Still, all's well that ends well for Carnacki and his little band of followers hanging on every word. It is tidy business indeed with the satisfaction of a mystery laid to rest, packed full of incident, moves at good tempo, and manages some nice scares too.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
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Howards End (1910)

I responded to E.M.Forster's Howards End the way I do to novels of manners in the vein of Jane Austen—certainly our heroine here, Margaret Wilcox (nee Schlegel), is a Jane Austen type, and not just because Emma Thomson plays her in the Merchant-Ivory movie from 1992. But there's a good deal more here about class, feminism, and even, broadly, relations between Britain and Germany. Margaret and her husband Henry—she is at least his second wife and considerably younger than him—are both middle-class, but he is closer to a wealthy tycoon. Margaret, and her younger brother and sister, turn in the other direction, toward bohemianism. They read copiously, attend musical events, and belong to issue-themed discussion societies. Two more critical characters, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bast, are more properly representative of the working class. So the elements are all in place for social realism, though the mode of action tends toward manners, focused on holding, maintaining, and passing along property, and most importantly on making marriage decisions. Yet it's the background social tensions that give Howards End much of its impressive power. Forster is often paying attention to a divide between Britain and Germany. The Wilcoxes are English. The Schlegels' father was a German national who moved to England. But there's an implication the Schlegels are German by nature. The distinction is that the English are cool, restrained, and a little heartless—capitalists—whereas the Germans are emotional and romantic—artists. It doesn't go unnoticed that both are imperialists, in more ways alike than different, but that's a little underplayed. Still, I was often mindful of the context of the story, set and written only a few years before the giant meltdown explosion of World War I, the pandemic that followed, and all the changes they brought. No one here, not even Forster, was aware of what was to come, though the simmering just under is easily perceived now. Class, quickly followed by feminism, are the issues most top of mind for these characters. But, again, the biggest change and greatest interest for me remained the marriage of Henry and Margaret and all the tensions that attend it. The heart of the novel—and of Forster too, I think—is in the conventional bourgeois ideal of marriage as the ultimate source of comfort and sustenance. Every rat here gets his comeuppance, and everyone with a moral compass set to decency gets her reward too, so it's also altogether highly satisfying too. That may be what reminds me of Jane Austen. This is a very good one.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"August Heat" (1910)

Because it's convenient for things to have a starting point, and because it makes a good story that way, I'm assigning the beginning of modern horror fiction as we understand it to 1816, when E.T.A. Hoffmann published "The Sand-Man" and when the Shelleys, Mary and Percy Bysshe, gathered in Geneva with Lord Byron and his doctor, John William Polidori, and had a friendly competition to write ghost stories. The result was Frankenstein and "The Vampyre." Nearly a hundred years later, W.F. Harvey's very short story about the dog days of summer depends to a certain degree on familiarity with horror fiction conventions as they had developed. It's more along the lines of a knowing joke, and the punchline is "uncanny." It's not as witty as Saki but has an undertone that dares you to laugh, and then dares you not to laugh. It tells us things that don't make sense as if they do. It captures a little of the insanity that happens when it's still sweltering hot even at night in August. It's not the heat, it's the humidity.

On one of those very hot days an illustrator (who is also the first-person narrator) is seized in the morning with an impulse to sketch a man at trial just as he is sentenced. He thinks the picture is pretty good, if he says so himself. "The feeling that his expression conveyed was not so much one of horror as of utter, absolute collapse." Then the illustrator walks aimlessly for several hours. He finds himself at the shop of a stonemason. On an impulse he enters it. It's the man in his sketch! And he's working on a gravestone. And on that gravestone is the name of the narrator, with his birthdate and today's date (August 20th, 190–),already chiseled in. This work is the result of an impulse on the mason's part. The two don't know one another, have never met, and soon agree it's a strange and dangerous situation. They decide to stay together the rest of that day for mutual safety. Of course this story is short and moves quickly because it's so ridiculously impossible. At the end of the day, between 11 p.m. and midnight, the narrator is recording his account in the mason's workshop while the mason tidies up. The story ends:

The air seems charged with thunder. I am writing this at a shaky table before the open window.
The leg is cracked, and [the mason], who seems a handy man with his tools, is going to mend it as soon as he has finished putting an edge on his chisel.
It is after 11 now. I shall be gone in less than an hour.
But the heat is stifling.
It is enough to send a man mad.

Harvey couldn't resist the broad wink of "I shall be gone in less than an hour," but it is actually hard for me to imagine this complacent scene turning into frenzy and murder within the hour. And maybe it doesn't! We're never told. But that's the idea. The improbability, and the uncertainty, thus keep it more in the realm of merely cerebral, a macabre joke predicated on reader expectations. But it's sparkly and swift and maybe even uncanny if you turn it around in your head enough. It's been done on radio plus in the early '70s DC Comics adapted it for one of their horror titles. Night Gallery should have done it too. That show always did like to make people sweat.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
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"Sredni Vashtar" (1910)

Read story by Saki online.

Saki was a Scottish writer, also known as H.H. Munro, who died in battle at the age of 45 in World War I. His literary specialty involved very short stories, usually involving children and animals. They might be classed as horror, because they were often macabre, with surprising cruelties, and many had supernatural elements as well. "Sredni Vashtar" is one of his best known and most widely collected, though perhaps a little short on the entirely fantastic. Conradin is the main character, a boy of 10 with a fatal disease who will die within five years. He is in the legal care of Mrs. De Ropp, his cousin. No word on the whereabouts of his parents (abandoned children are another recurring feature of Saki's stories). Conradin is lonely with only Mrs. De Ropp hovering over him. Consigned to the garden in the backyard, he finds a neglected toolshed in a far corner, and in that shed a hen and a caged polecat-ferret. He dubs the mammal hybrid "Sredni Vashtar" and worships it as a god. The hen he treats as a pet, and loves. Eventually Mrs. De Ropp investigates the toolshed. She misses the polecat-ferret but removes the hen, "sold and taken away overnight." Conradin's sadness is so profound we feel it ourselves. He knows now it's just a matter of time before she gets to the other animal. This is strange stuff, but normal for Saki. Mrs. De Ropp is not wantonly punishing—she may be insensitive but she feels a responsibility for the boy's care. Meanwhile the worship of Sredni Vashtar is only vaguely plausible but wholly typical of Saki. The feverishness of it (along with the brevity of the story) helps make us believe too, if only for as long as we read. Conradin's supplications take a new and darker tone after the hen is gone. "Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar," is his repeated prayer. "The thing was not specified," Saki writes as an aside. "As Sredni Vashtar was a god he must be supposed to know." And so it comes to pass that one day Mrs. De Ropp investigates the toolshed further. I'm sure you can guess the twist ending—once you've read enough Saki they're not hard to guess. The real surprise is that he did this stuff at all, thought of crazy monstrous ways to end his stories, and then actually did them. On one level, it's unbelievable cheek—so it's a joke? Yes and no. The ending also speaks unmistakably to Conradin's rage, at the loss of his hen, at the imminent loss of his life, at the emptiness of his life awaiting death. The story is highly implausible like a joke, but the character plight is real and carries all the portent and gravity of this remarkable story.

Sredni Vashtar and Other Stories by Saki