“The Dead Smile” (1899)

F. Marion Crawford didn’t write even a dozen horror short stories, but they tend to be among the best from the fertile turn of the 20th century. This one features a corpse that keeps escaping from its coffin in the family mausoleum—beheaded, too, and the head self-mobile, harbinger of Crawford’s “Screaming Skull,” still to come just a few years later. “The Dead Smile” riffs on “rictus sardonicus,” a term not used in the story but an apt tag on the internet—an exaggerated involuntary grin. The condition generally comes of tetanus but can also suggest strychnine or hemlock poisoning. Ray Russell put it to good use in his 1961 story, “Sardonicus.” In this story, the unnerving grin is associated most with a bitter old man who harbors family secrets. “He smiled, stretching pale lips across discolored teeth in an expression of profound self-satisfaction, blended with the most unforgiving hatred and contempt.” What’s more, and probably the best effect here, whenever he flashes this grin everyone else in the room starts to grin the same way. It’s the source of the story’s title, with interesting multiple meanings. In the spooky family crypt most of the dead are wrapped in shrouds, except the one that climbs out of its coffin and is usually found leaning against a wall with its head rolled up at its feet. This is all great scene-setting, especially when everyone starts to grin in unison. It’s good, because the story can be unfortunately a little lame and obvious. The terrible old man with the big grin wants to forbid a marriage between his son and his niece but won’t say why (it’s not hard to guess as the story goes along). I note that the marriage of first cousins made me uneasy, but not anyone else here. “The Dead Smile” largely overcomes its flaws by its strange air and details. As it happens, the point of the story, its big revelation, doesn’t have much to do with either the escaping corpse or the rictus sardonicus. There’s also a banshee on hand (in Irish legend, a female spirit whose wailing warns of an impending death), equally beside the point and perhaps the least interesting element of the story. “The Dead Smile” may not be Crawford’s best, but it holds its own.

65 Great Spine Chillers, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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“The Upper Berth” (1885)

If you read only one story by F. Marion Crawford it should be “The Screaming Skull,” of course. But why stop there? He was one of the better horror writers of his time and this seagoing tale is one of his best. It has some of the floridly overdetailed 19th-century approach, with a somewhat unnecessary frame story, but it also has the compressed and more straightforward approach of the 20th century too. The story involves a haunted stateroom in an oceangoing vessel crossing the Atlantic between Europe and North America. The storyteller is a tough bird and veteran sailor who likes the particular ship on which he travels, or did until these ghost incidents. He likes the stateroom he’s given and doesn’t want to give it up even with everyone he meets onboard telling him, with furrowed brow, that he should. On the first night he finds he is sharing the stateroom with a man who stays in the upper berth and later commits suicide by throwing himself off the boat. That makes four suicides on the last four sailings on this ship, all by people staying in that stateroom. There’s also a bad smell, strange noises, and worst of all someone (or something, oh brrr) keeps opening the porthole cover and letting in a terrible draft, not to mention seawater when the ship pitches, a notable safety hazard. So it goes—this is a ghost story and Crawford piles on with detail. He has more facility than many others for keeping things moving along. All the detail continually makes the point that it’s unpleasant more than anything to be troubled by a ghost. It’s also physically dangerous. In some ways, the teller is almost unbelievably heroic, insisting on staying in that stateroom a total of three nights, with others begging him to move to different quarters, before finally throwing it over for a loss. Among other incidents, an actual material corpse appears in the upper berth. All sensations are engaged, including tactile and olfactory. This thing is corporeal more than phantom, a nice touch. I might throw myself off a boat too if I woke up next to that. Definitely an old school tale but redeemed by Crawford’s skill.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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"For the Blood Is the Life" (1905)

This vampire tale by F. Marion Crawford, the special effects specialist of yore and master of the florid title ("The Dead Smile," "The Screaming Skull"), starts with an interesting optical illusion, which transmutes into ghostly trappings and various impossible events, and then finally here comes mayhem the way only vampires can deliver it. The scene is an ancient tower on the Mediterranean in a section of Italy reputed to be the birthplace of Judas Iscariot. Here a couple of globe-trotting colonialists have dinner in the fresh air of the rooftop at sunset and attempt to figure out the mystery. On the side of a faraway hill which they can see from the tower there appears to be a burial mound and a body lying on top of it. It only appears in moonlight, the host notes, and when the guest obligingly hikes over to it some distance away he sees that the vision changes when you approach, and the body disappears. The host, watching from afar, sees the body take the form of mist, embracing his guest and clinging to him, though the guest is well able to make the hike back. Among other things, it sounds like a long night. Well, it's quite a phenomenon, and yes, now that guest asks, there are local stories and legends about it, and please don't mind me the host if I tell it in two parts without quotation marks. Both of these embedded stories are quite busy, about stolen treasure, legacies denied, murder most foul, a vampire creature, and inevitably ruby-red lips, blood-sucking, and a wooden stake produced and utilized. I never quite understood why Cristina here suffers such a terrible end. No proper Christian burial following her murder is probably the answer but I'm also talking about the murder itself. She already had a vaguely vampiric look even when she was alive, "more like a gipsy than any girl I ever saw about here. She had very red lips and very black eyes, she was built like a greyhound, and had the tongue of the devil ... but she was a good girl." Whatever you say, boss. She never seems to get a break here. After a while the story is full-on vampire hunting and we all know what a bloody mess that can lead to. I can't make up my mind about the strange way the story is set up. It's almost so awkward that's what I like, backing into itself with the optical illusion and long hike, followed by story hour. I also wished Crawford or the storyteller had a little more sympathy for Cristina, whose main crime appears to be only that she looks like a gipsy and was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There are plenty of good details here and it is always competent, but it dares yet does not always transcend the many ruts of the vampire tale.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
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"The Screaming Skull" (1908)

I can only guess what this F. Marion Crawford story is doing in the Vampire Tales collection because I don't actually detect any vampire elements beyond some loose interpretation of the term "undead," which is never used or even implied here. No ruby red lips, in other words. If anything it's a ghost or haunted house story—specifically, haunted bedroom. But you can see from the big roundup below that it's enormously popular even in my relatively small sample. It's often hailed for its device of the hysterical first-person narrator, though I'm not sure how it can be called an innovation when you consider Edgar Allan Poe's even more widely anthologized "Tell-Tale Heart" from 1843. "The Screaming Skull" is an improvement on that score, and often wonderfully well done, I'll give it that. But this great strength can also become the greatest weakness, in both stories. "The Screaming Skull" is a little long and can drone on implausibly. The first-person narrator is speaking to another person, or believes he is, which leads to awkward constructions just trying to hold the concept together, e.g., "You want to know whether I stayed in the house till daybreak?"

So what exactly is this one-sided Bob Newhart routine all about? As far as I'm concerned, it's the premise that makes this story more than the narrative strategy. There's a skull. And it screams. That's it. Everything else is window dressing. Here's a short passage that has it all, good and bad:

You ask me why I don't throw it into the pond—yes, but please don't call it a "confounded bugbear"—it doesn't like being called names.
There! Lord, what a shriek!

It's so simple, so audacious, so ridiculous, so impossible, so thoroughly hammered home. It's not exactly scary, or even that uncanny, though it's certainly weird. Much of it, the best of it, is almost perfectly vexing, like an I Love Lucy episode. It's closer to the kind of comedy the Evil Dead movies trafficked in. The screaming skull screams even when you talk about it in another room—even when you think about it sometimes. (Perhaps the telepathy is what wins it its vampire wings.) It definitely screams when you try to move it from the cabinet in the master bedroom, and if you leave it there it makes random grumbling noises all night and wakes you every morning at 3:17 a.m. The screaming disturbs the help and makes it impossible to keep the place adequately staffed. If you try to throw it away—you can't throw it away. It's like a booger. There's a macabre backstory driving all this divine foolishness as much as the proof of concept, like what happens when you try to get rid of it. The skull belongs to a woman who is connected to the narrator. In fact, he has inherited the mansion she and her husband once lived in. She was killed by her husband in a notably grotesque manner. My skull would be screaming for all eternity too if I were done that way. The narrator blames himself (and evidently so does the screaming skull) because he suggested the manner of murder in a lighthearted way to the couple at a dinner party. He didn't know the husband was actually going to do it!

It's fair to say "The Screaming Skull" looks forward to H.P. Lovecraft, at least insofar as it pounds the implausible until we relent and believe. It doesn't matter how unlikely it might seem at first, whether screaming skull in the bedroom cabinet (like, where are the vocal cords even?) or writhing octopus head in outer space, they strike the grim and hysterical tone and pile on the hideous detail. Crawford was a bit older and more into ghosts but he was often good with hideous detail—another famous story by him, "The Upper Berth" from 1885, is more conventional in some ways, but uniquely tactile in its effects—the ghost is aboard a ship at sea and can be touched and felt. "The Screaming Skull" may go on a little too long (also like Lovecraft and not like "The Upper Berth") but it's anthologized all over the place for multiple good reasons and counts as essential.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
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