“The Hoard of the Gibbelins” (1911)

Here’s another good one from Lord Dunsany, also very short. Most of his stories are short, though he also wrote novels. It is typically biting in its mordant humor, opening with, “The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man.” Their hoard consists of jewels and gold in vast amounts, a great temptation to humans living nearby. People are forever trying to rob them and forever failing. I’m giving nothing away when I say this is the story of another failure. But the knight making this attempt, Alderic, certainly gets the A for effort, among other things enlisting a dragon and getting himself past the Unpassable Forest. Something about the “Lord” in Dunsany’s name—he was authentically heir to an ancient Irish peerage—chips in to the work for me: he’s cynical and sophisticated in ways recognizably of the rich. Perhaps the title evokes some reflexive class deference. His stories are silly yet fun to read. Dunsany is better than the more uneven Saki, for example, because his stories are so well done, a light touch with the humor and always a straight face. “Cheeky” might be the operative term, but the violence can be abrupt and bracing. In my internet travels on Dunsany and his work I found an interesting forum called The Weird Tradition, with a weekly reading and discussion group called The Deep Ones. They chew over stories at about the rate of one per week. Dunsany is a regular focus of attention and I’ve learned some interesting things about him. He worked on his books and stories with illustrators, notably Sidney Sime, who created the image above and seemed to function as a sort of Jack Kirby to Dunsany’s Stan Lee. That is, many specific stories proceeded from Sime’s illustrations, which came first. The Deep Ones is very good about including these illustrations in their discussions. They illuminate the stories in interesting ways. The stories on their own, as I’ve seen with kindle products, lose a little something without the pictures. At the same time, Lord Dunsany is one of those writers who get better with more reading—you have to kind of tune into his world with a little practice. Thus, in this case, we can be pretty sure Alderic never has a chance. But he has an elaborate plan, and it’s working, and then: “... there were the Gibbelins waist-deep in the water, with torches in their hands! And, without saying a word, or even smiling, they neatly hanged him on the outer wall—and the tale is one of those that have not a happy ending.” THE END. Beautiful.

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“Casting the Runes” (1911)

This story by M.R. James is tagged in The Weird, the massive and essential anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, as James’s most famous. Indeed, one scene involving a slip of paper with runic symbols printed on it, a sudden wind, and a fire in a fireplace rang a few bells for me. Later I realized the story is the basis of the movie by director Jacques Tourneur, Night of the Demon (later edited and rereleased as Curse of the Demon), the source of my déjà vu. In a general way I have to admit I have some problems with the way James tells stories, drawing on semifictional documentary sources and slowly, slowly circling his points. Some themes work like time-release medicines. They hit you later. You’re generally required to do a lot of unpacking yourself, and later rereads are not a bad idea. In “Casting the Runes” we see the text of letters along with secondhand and even thirdhand details by way of conversation. It can be maddeningly indirect yet that is large part of the unease his tales can cause you. Most characters tend to deny the validity of the weird and ghostly stuff but at the same time are unnaturally interested in it. There’s a lot of busy business here—people urgently going from here to there to investigate. But it’s not hard to see what’s going on. A man with supernatural skills is hunting people for reasons of petty vengeance. The rules are complicated and a little mechanical, veering close to the unbelievable. The slip of paper, for example: you have to get someone to accept it freely as handed to them. These rules here are spelled out more clearly in the movie. If the paper is then consumed in flame it seals the curse. If, however, the person with the slip of paper can pass it to someone else, preferably the one who gave it to them in the first place, then that person is off the hook. Busy, busy—and perhaps too rational. But M.R. James establishes a reasonably good air of mystery and dread. The details here can be fleeting but they stick, living inside you in a way that insidiously provokes anxiety. A very strange advertisement in a bus, for example, has made me look at bus cards in whole new ways ever since.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
M.R. James, Complete Ghost Stories
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“How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery” (1911)

This ghost story by E.F. Benson is somewhat unusual in that it ends on a happy note—uplifting even. At first, I admit I was a little disappointed somehow—E.F. is one of my favorites of his time—and I was certainly surprised. Benson is very good at ghost effects, and in a way this story is a clinic. It starts on a whimsical note with a mansion overrun by mostly friendly ghosts, all past relations of the Peveril family: the Blue Lady (Aunt Barbara), Master Anthony, Great-Great-Grandmamma Bridget. Their stories are briefly given, along with a profile of the family, which is a happy one, comfortable with their ghosts, and prone to playing pranks on guests. “But there is one ghost,” Benson writes, “at which the family never laughs.” And so to the horrendous 17th-century story of a fight for an inheritance, when brother killed brother and then burned a pair of 5-year-old twins alive in a fireplace in the long gallery of the mansion. Shortly after, a servant saw their ghosts and died 24 hours later in a horrible way. It’s like the video in the movie The Ring. If you see these ghosts of the twins, you die, often horribly. Sometimes it takes a while. Examples follow. Benson is just one of the best I’ve seen at this. One cruel relation, Mrs. Canning, a free-thinker, nonbeliever, and friend of Voltaire (excellent detail), makes a point of going to the long gallery at night until she sees them. As it happens, it’s safe while the sun is up. Then “she thought it good, poor wretch, to mock at them, telling them it was time to get back in the fire.” Her death is suitably awful. Benson is also really good at setting a pace—it’s not a fast one, generally, but it’s steady. He spends about two-thirds of this story setting up the scene promised in the title, which naturally takes place in December during the Christmas season. If it all errs too much on the side of cute—I don’t think so myself—it’s properly a gem with unstinted ghoulish details by the time we get to the story of the twins. Then it becomes a story about a guest who accidentally oversleeps her afternoon nap in the long gallery. Ruh-roh, as they say. But it all comes to a lovely ending. Kudos to everyone involved except the bad folks here, who get their just deserts.

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Zuleika Dobson (1911)

British caricaturist and drama critic Max Beerbohm's only novel might be the weirdest title on the whole Modern Library list. It's farce—only farce—yet capable of a certain high pitch of inspiration. I laughed out loud in one place and chuckled often remembering it later, let's put it that way. There is Zuleika Dobson, an orphan, now grown up into her early 20s. She has willed herself into celebrity, "though not strictly beautiful," and makes her living as a somewhat mediocre stage magician—the revelation of her abject lack of talent is where I LOL'd. Having achieved celebrity, she travels to Oxford to meet her grandfather, who accepts her now that she is famous as opposed to an unfortunate orphan. Then there is the Duke of Dorset, a young man attending Oxford. He falls in love with her instantly, as do all undergraduates everywhere. At first Zuleika loves the Duke. Then she doesn't. The Duke remains constant and they seesaw away like this. But the stakes are high. The Duke says he will kill himself if she won't have him, and when she won't have him she insists he keep his promise. He does so, as a murky matter of honor, along with hundreds of other undergraduates in emulation and sympathy, drowning themselves in the river at some kind of boating regatta. I see I've given it all away but I suspect it doesn't matter. If you ever read it I suspect you will see it all coming too, though I was surprised that the mass suicides actually went off. But then they had to, by the logic of the story. All this fin de siècle business feels like ancient history now, because it is. Still, it was a period that in many ways invented the modern celebrity and all its media-saturated features so it bears interest. Beerbohm is also an entertaining writer. Zuleika Dobson is more entertaining than insightful, but it certainly has many things right about celebrity, and incidentally how aristocracy gets muddled into it too. Modern reprisals of a kind may be found in Max Shulman novels and the movie Damsels in Distress. But Zuleika Dobson was intended mostly, I think, to be a slightly snobbish parody of romance literature. That's fair enough—all genre literature arguably deserves the sending up. In a way Beerbohm may have lucked into his prescience—I'm not sure the element of celebrity wasn't intended more simply as a convenient farcical plot element. But he makes good use of it. Worth a peek, maybe. It's definitely odd.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men" (1911)

Here we find Lord Dunsany in more typical form: a long ambiguous title, a very short story, and lots of made-up words and proper nouns: the Dubious Land (a dark forest), a creature called a mipt, an evidently dangerous geographic feature referred to as "the crack in the World," and high levels of unexpected danger everywhere. It's whimsical like Tolkien and lots of fantasy, but not Polyannaish but rather bitingly sardonic. The three literary men—Slith, the only thief with experience, with Sippy and Slorg—are intent on stealing a golden box from a powerful being in a faraway land because they believe it is filled with poetry (obviously my favorite point in this story). The writer notes that "it is lonely to sit around the camp-fire by night with no new songs." The "probable" is in the title because the adventurers never returned, having presumably failed, probably the way the story tells it. The story is from Lord Dunsany's collection The Book of Wonder, which features illustrations by his usual collaborator, Sidney Sime. In the case of this collection, however, they switched things up. Sime prepared illustrations first and then the Irish nobleman dreamed up explanations for them. The result was some of Lord Dunsany's best stories. The image above is the one Sime created for this story. Knowing the process, it's apparent the writer often labors to make things fit. You can almost feel the surge when he lands on something he thinks is working. That's most obvious in the prize, won at last (though not really), which is absurdly detailed (because, as always, everything here is merely probable):

What was their joy, even at that perilous moment, as they lurked between the guardian and the abyss, to find that the box contained fifteen peerless odes in the alcaic form, five sonnets that were by far the most beautiful in the world, nine ballads in the manner of Provence that had no equal in the treasuries of man, a poem addressed to a moth in twenty-eight perfect stanzas, a piece of blank verse of over a hundred lines on a level not yet known to have been attained by man, as well as fifteen lyrics on which no merchant would dare to set a price.

Really. You have to ask yourself.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
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"The Open Window" (1911)

Saki is like a cross between Oscar Wilde and O. Henry—mechanical, perhaps, in the way his stories unfold, but the mechanics are self-aware and there in the service of wit. He wrote short (even short-short) stories that often deliver perverse twists at the end, predicated on our own unconscious expectations. Most intriguingly, his stories are also steeped in a familiarity with horror fiction, counting on the reader's own familiarity with it. As he put it himself in "The Music on the Hill," a story about the great god Pan, "It was all nonsense, of course, but ... nonsense [that] seemed able to rear a bastard brood of uneasiness." "The Open Window" involves an unnamed 15-year-old girl and a man with a bad case of nerves, Framton Nuttel. Nuttel is in the country for a rest cure, bearing letters of introduction and paying a visit on his new neighbors, the Sappletons. He has obviously read horror fiction, because when the girl, a niece of the Sappletons, starts up with what is either a ghost story or a tale of deranged family grief to explain why the window in the room is open in October, he believes every word. For that matter, so do we. Because why shouldn't we? Horror fiction makes us gullible and open to manipulation. Formally, "The Open Window" works much like a ghost story, complete with a strange and seemingly unnecessary frame, and there's even a little thrill when we think we see ghosts. Judging the whole effect, it's a good example of how subtle Saki can be, using misdirection. Things are not what they seem, but it's not the open window that's the problem, it's the girl. Yet even as she tells her fantastic story about the open window we're lulled into it quite easily. It makes perfect sense as a ghost story. Mrs. Sappleton's niece is one of Saki's most delicious creations. "The Open Window" ends on her spinning a whole new story to explain Nuttel's abrupt departure: "'I expect it was the spaniel,' said the niece calmly; 'he told me he had a horror of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just above him.'" In a way, she's covering for Nuttel. "Romance at short notice was her specialty," Saki concludes about this girl.

In case it's not at the library. (Read story online.)