“The Harbor-Master” (1899)

I’m still not sure at all about Robert W. Chambers as a writer of horror (and/or fantasy and/or science fiction). He didn’t do much of it, more inclined to writing bestselling romances that are all but forgotten nowadays. But his speculative stories have an ardent and enduring fan base, which includes Nic Pizzolatto, co-creator of the True Detective franchise. The Chambers gold is found in the first half of his 1895 collection of stories, The King in Yellow, specifically in the first handful or so of stories. The rest are romances, and cheesy. I’m even meh on the ones with all the reputation, such as “The Repairer of Reputations,” and not at all interested in the romances, which I thought took up the rest of his career. And mostly they did, but it turns out he returned to the weird now and then, as with this one. It also exists as the first five chapters of his 1904 novel In Search of the Unknown, the story of a cryptozoologist pursuing monsters and romance. Gutenberg has the novel online and the story is also featured in a 2021 Hippocampus collection of Chambers stories edited by S.T. Joshi, The Harbor-Master: Best Weird Stories of Robert W. Chambers. It makes sense to give this story the honors of the collection title because it’s the best story I’ve read by Chambers yet. It seems likely that H.P. Lovecraft was influenced by it for his so-called “Deep Ones” (off the coast, in the water) in the “Innsmouth” story. It seems likely the creators of the 1954 movie The Creature From the Black Lagoon knew this story too. Lovecraft’s amphibians interbreed with humans, but this “harbor-master,” the nickname the villagers have for it, is more of a brute animal with perhaps a taste for human flesh. He’s certainly a danger. I must say it impressed me, nicely paced, always interesting. The harbor-master is intriguing and scary too—the image of him seen from a distance is powerful. The story is also somewhat oddly funny in places. The cryptozoologist narrator is visiting the remote area at the invitation of a man who claims to have a pair of extinct birds, great auks ... and something more, if there is any interest. Our guy works for the Bronx Zoo, a detail I love. It makes sense given Chambers’s origins in New York City. Halyard, with the auks, is an invalid in a wheelchair who has a “pretty nurse” working for him. Our guy and the pretty nurse take up with one another, described comically as on all fours on the floor looking for a thimble the pretty nurse has dropped. The romance(s?) begin (in the novel)! I count this story as a good one from Chambers. Maybe I’m ready to give him another chance. He is a tough nut!

The Harbor-Master: Best Weird Stories of Robert W. Chambers, ed. S.T. Joshi

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"The Repairer of Reputations" (1895)

This long confusing story by Robert W. Chambers is much loved and respected, it appears, showing up in anthologies and treatments of horror as a landmark. I've seen arguments for it as the first or at least an early appearance of the unreliable narrator device. Maybe—it has a lot of things going on. There's a science-fiction premise of a near-future New York City (which in this story means 1920). The US is a military power and has won a war with Germany, at least part of it fought in North America. It has legalized suicide, outlawed immigration, expelled all Jews, and relocated African-Americans to reservations, among other interesting and unexplained radical changes, on which the story feels suspiciously neutral. Our main character is Hildred, who is reading a banned play, The King in Yellow. The play also shows up in other stories in a kind of cycle, although many other stories in the original 1895 collection—which as it happens is also called The King in Yellow—are more like romances. Chambers never really wrote horror again. It's all concentrated in a handful of stories within The King in Yellow collection, which often make reference to a banned play called The King in Yellow. I hope you start to see what I mean by confusing. For further confusion, see the first season of the True Detective TV show, which name-checks random details from this story, like the place called Carcosa, which Chambers himself was name-checking from Ambrose Bierce (and H.P. Lovecraft later name-checked too, as I recall). O what tangled webs. Wikipedia discusses this story as an "anti-story," a classification of experimental literature I'm not sure I know well. Given how much I like stories, I'm not sure how much I want to know, certainly if this is the example. It just seemed like so much random nonsense. "The Repairer of Reputations" might be good for reading groups or even classrooms, all studded with bizarre detail begging to be unpacked. Both times I've ground through it I kept stupidly looking for narrative momentum because I forgot again, even when I knew better—also, the first section is energetic and enticing. But there is no momentum here by design. It's meant to confront readers and keep them off balance. And I haven't had the patience to do the unpacking. Let's consider the title. It's the job title for Mr. Wilde (which in the context of the 1890s brings Oscar to my mind, I don't know about you or Chambers) and it's not really clear what is involved in repairing a reputation, but appears to be related to organized crime, some kind of protection racket. Actually, Mr. Wilde seems like a minor character. The story ends with a note that Hildred has died in an asylum for the criminally insane, and basically that is where the trouble with the unreliable narrator business starts, assuming Hildred is the author. Yet why should we assume that? Next question for the weekly reading group. It's going to take a few months to get through this one. I can't wait to see the whiteboard.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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