“Green Tea” (1869)

This long story by Sheridan Le Fanu is considered among his best, in part because it’s in his rightly much-celebrated collection, In a Glass Darkly. Many of the stories feature the German psychic investigator / occult detective Martin Hesselius. “Green Tea” is first up and thus has a few things to do, introducing Hesselius and his case study approach. It’s good when it’s on the case under examination. But it’s hampered by awkward construction, hemming and hawing and dancing around the subject a lot. It takes too long to get to the good stuff, which may or may not be that good. A minister is haunted by a malevolent monkey only he can see, which randomly appears to him even in public, staring and glowering. Understandably, it unnerves him. The result is that the minister often freezes up and/or breaks down and can’t be trusted to do Sunday church services without incident. After introducing Hesselius and his case study approach, the story spends some time on some metaphysical / philosophical business about duality and materialism and such. The proto-theosophist Emanuel Swedenborg is a recurring reference. The influence on Lovecraft and the occult detective subgenre generally is obvious but with all the setup “Green Tea” can be slow going. Once the minister finally stops being evasive and we get to the monkey, however, it’s not bad. The clinical tone works well—it just needs to be quicker getting to the point (according to my impatient modern sensibility). It reminded me in some ways of Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially the tormented minister. As a 19th-century Irishman, Le Fanu occupies an interesting place, outside of the British mainstream but not Continental or American either. Some Irish writers register strongly as Irish (J.P. Donlevy, for example, or Joyce) but I never get much of that from Le Fanu. I like his case study approach, which often feels close to detective fiction or true-crime fare, especially when it gets down to accounts. As the first of the five stories in the collection, you have to grant “Green Tea” some leeway for its setup work. Doubtless that explains a lot of the throat-clearing. The stories in the collection get better as they go—the last, “Carmilla,” is the best, an essential vampire story.

Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly
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“Dickon the Devil” (1872)

I liked this story by Sheridan Le Fanu pretty well—it’s quick and to the point and comes with surprises. ISFDB has it as part of a Martin Hesselius series by Le Fanu featuring a psychic investigator. The series includes some of Le Fanu’s best stories, such as “The Familiar” and “Mr. Justice Harbottle.” But the first-person narrator in “Dickon the Devil” is more by way of an estate lawyer and we don’t hear much from Hesselius. Apparently this is a case from his files? Two elderly sisters have hired the estate lawyer to assess and possibly sell (“make partition of”) a property that includes a house. Well, it’s a mansion, more like, which has been uninhabited for 20 years. Of course it’s haunted. What did you think? Our narrator knows it was the source of rumors in the past, but he doesn’t know or can’t remember the details, and none of the locals are talking. At one point, early in the story, the village idiot goes racing by—it’s Dickon the Devil, whose story is told along with the former owner’s and the two old ladies too. It’s a ghost story but this is a ghost with strange powers—visible from afar, recognizable as the former owner, and somehow able to blight and kill cattle. It turns out to be a dispute about the will. Apparently the two old ladies are more rapacious than we suspect at first. Or perhaps not, because the narrator doesn’t seem to see anything off in them. But the eternal fury of the ghost of the former owner must be coming from somewhere. He was well enough liked when he was alive, and good for the community too, basically. The narrator encounters the ghost in his overnight stay, on which basically the whole (incomplete) story turns. Le Fanu skillfully foreshadows and holds off on telling the backstory, making it more effective when he does. There are gaps but I like how they are just sort of left to sit there. Who, if anyone, is at fault in the dispute about the will? The former owner intended to rewrite it before he died—but why? Did the sisters know he intended to change it? Did they have something to do with his death? We never learn, and it seems to work that way, as Le Fanu distracts us with the terrible story of Dickon, who was not always as he is in the present of this story and now has been for 20 years. He was good with the cattle the sisters invested in and put there. But the former owner, as ghost, objected to this plan with the cattle for some reason. When blighting the cattle grows tiresome, he drives the hired man insane. Dickon’s insanity is better than anything like it by H.P. Lovecraft, for example, although credible insanity may be a low bar there.

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"Carmilla" (1872)

Once I decided to get to Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu it made sense to get to this long story and stone classic of vampire literature sooner rather than later, and glad I did. Mostly I've only read ghost stories by him so far. "Carmilla" feels different from other Le Fanu, even in that last collection, In a Glass Darkly, where it appears with some of his best stuff. It leans brazenly into erotic themes—"Carmilla" is not just a vampire tale but a lesbian vampire tale, circumspect yet insistently overt. I heard an interesting theory lately that interest in vampires rose in the late 19th century with the onset of embalming. The idea is that knowing corpses of loved ones were preserved in lifelike form freaked people out even more than knowing they decomposed. Certainly, predating Bram Stoker's Dracula by 25 years, "Carmilla" trucks in the uncanny spells of attraction under which people fall for these handsome and beautiful creatures who never age, according to the ancient legends. Setting aside embalming, "Carmilla" may be the place where vampire erotics as we know them start. It's typical of Le Fanu in that the writing is restrained and straightforward, and it's also typical of vampire lore in specific ways. For example, it has become almost comic to me how often in these stories a charming stranger shows up like a Jane Austen rock star and everyone is enchanted and wants to know them. But at the same time a sudden rash of unexplained diseases, wounds, and deaths erupts in the isolated rural area around them. Most of these incidents are going on offstage in "Carmilla," but it's a steady drumbeat. People are always late to understanding the obvious in horror and sometimes it makes you want to scream (you fools! wake up!), but it works that way in life too. Victims can often be the last to suspect they are victims. Le Fanu also plays the anagram game here, another notable influence on Stoker—other names used by Carmilla across her centuries-long vampiring career are Marcilla and Mircalla. In appearance she is young and vibrant, though notably "languorous," and in this story she is preying specifically on a 19-year-old innocent, our Laura, the first-person narrator and heroine. It's all so luscious with campy appeal. Serialized originally, the story's 16 chapters are short and move the busy lumbering tale along, with doppelgangers, churchyards, midnight rambles, shrieking in the night, and, yes, puncture wounds. Le Fanu assumes our understanding of vampire rules, which are notoriously slippery. Carmilla keeps late hours and sleeps until the afternoon, but appears to tolerate sunlight. She seems able to affect dreams and confuse her victims. Laura is entirely susceptible to her. The titillating erotics are a lot of outrageous fun, slyly flouting Victorian expectations, and include BDSM edges as well. "Carmilla" had obvious influences on Stoker and Dracula in terms of vampire lore—in many ways "Carmilla" is the bolder tale. It is slowed some by antiquated language and overworked structure, but mostly it is lucid and proceeds with all due speed. Carmilla shows up and takes charge of Laura, even as Laura writes. She does what she likes with Laura and makes her forget a lot of it. It relies on our own imaginations to fill in the gaps and get over and so it does, in the best ways.

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"Schalken the Painter" (1839)

With a story as old as this one by Sheridan Le Fanu there are always going to be problems of antiquated writing, but this is not bad overall—well conceived and with some very effective scenes. The original title, "Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter," has a 19th-century wordiness. But the edit (as it appears in The Dark Descent and elsewhere) brings its own distortions because Godfrey Schalken is a fairly minor character here, more of a witness for whom we have sympathies. He's not even really "the painter" in this story. That's his master Gerard Douw. Schalken is merely a student, and haplessly in love with Douw's niece. Both Douw and Schalken are actual historical figures, by the way, but there's no word about Douw's niece in the Wikipedia article. In the long perspective of this story, as in life, Schalken eventually becomes a great painter in his own right, noted for his use of candlelight. In the 17th century, when this story takes place, arranged marriages were very much the norm. Douw cannot offer much of a dowry for his niece so he hopes for a man of means for her, although Schalken with his raw talent still might have a chance if love has anything to do with it. But then the mysterious man of means shows up. He comes by night. His hat is pulled down over his face and he has a box of gold whose value is to be verified by a nearby Jew (note clonking antisemitism). He's also in a huge hurry to close this deal—it has to be tonight or never. This is not going to turn out well for Rose, obviously (yes, as happens remarkably often, the woman gets it), but aside from that the story has a lot of surprises and effective moments. The marriage takes place, in all its haste, and then bride and groom disappear entirely. It turns out the groom is not from Rotterdam, as he had said. No one there has ever heard of him. Then, one night, Rose shows up in a terrible state—bedraggled, starving, frightened out of her mind. She keeps saying things like "The dead and the living cannot be one: God has forbidden it" and "Rest to the wakeful—sleep to the sleep-walkers." Real spooky shit. It's obvious what's happening, but still ambiguous enough to leave gaps where the imagination can dwell and fester. So, right, the guy is dead all along. There's a curious detail here about how he doesn't breathe. I wonder if I would notice that about someone because I don't think I particularly notice people are breathing—hard to test that one. As a kind of ghost our dead guy is an interesting conception, a dark shape that speaks but does not breathe, is fabulously wealthy, and wants a bride. Pretty good story all around.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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"The Familiar" (1872)

This Sheridan Le Fanu story appeared over 20 years earlier in another version called "The Watcher." As the new title, "The Familiar," suggests with perhaps even more force, it's the story of a demon that attaches to and torments a single person, to the death. I've been characterizing stories structured like this one (and others by Le Fanu as well as many others) as inspired by the Sherlock Holmes model, with a rational investigator grounding and explaining fantastic events. But obviously Le Fanu predates Arthur Conan Doyle's tales by decades. This should remind us once again that it was Edgar Allan Poe, with Auguste Dupin in the 1841 story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," who basically invented the rational investigator and detective fiction, though Doyle certainly gets the credit for perfecting it in certain ways. But Le Fanu chipped in his advancements too, working out the details and systematizing many aspects of it in the horror vein. The device works well with horror—H.P. Lovecraft used it all the time—and Le Fanu uses it well. "The Familiar" has predictable problems with antiquated language, and generally is a little too long, but it is often effective (the technical term for "scary"), proceeding like a true-crime account. It starts with an experience that is common. Walking alone at night, you often think you hear footsteps besides your own, as if someone is following or approaching from behind. The next day our man has another strange experience, one of the story's high points, with an anonymous note in the morning's mail. It's in an unfamiliar hand and makes sinister reference to the experience of the night before. Mostly the story follows along from there with the haunted man's attempts to cope, his increasing agitation, and a few more tricks up its sleeve as well. At the end there is some explanation of the demon's grievance—it's not unjustified. This story has fundamental points of horror. This type of harassment by demon is as lively as ever, for example, in the 2007 movie Paranormal Activity, existing somewhere in between demonic possession and ghost or haunted house. It's closest to a ghost story, but this ghost travels with a specific person. Our haunted man eventually sees a diminutive but ferocious figure wearing red, something like the dwarf in the movie Don't Look Now. Daphne du Maurier wrote the long story that movie is based on and almost certainly she was aware of Le Fanu. She came much later, of course, but Le Fanu was fashionable in the 19th century, counting Henry James and M.R. James among his most admiring readers. Even if your name isn't James you might like it too.

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