Vincent O'Sullivan (1873-1940). He's in the frame for a Wordsworth edition if the poll results are anything to go by, and it's one to look forward to. A gloomy, luckless man by the few accounts i've been able to find, homeless, starving and nursing a gammy leg, O'Sullivan died in France during the Nazi occupation and even his pauper's grave was dug up to accommodate more corpses. Perhaps fittingly, his
The Abigail Sherriff Memorial was included in Frederick Stuart Greene's ground-breaking anthology
The Grim Thirteen (Dodd Mead, 1917), a collection of horror and mystery stories previously rejected by other editors as too depressing. Probably best known to aficionados of horror & the supernatural for the big three from his
A Book of Bargains (1896), he was hardly prolific in the field and seems to have had little regard for his earlier "burlesques" from Yellow Book days, a very harsh judgement on his part. For example,
The Bargain of Rupert Orange, his obligatory pact with Satan outing, is a far livelier affair than much of what Basil Davenport saw fit to include in his centuries-spanning theme anthology,
Deals With The Devil.
The Ghost Story Press published his collected works in the genre as
Vincent O'Sullivan - Master of Fallen Years: Complete Supernatural Stories, (1995). Obviously i don't have a copy but it might be useful to list the content.
Jessica Amanda Salmonson - Introduction
Author's Preface: On the Kind of Fiction called Morbid
Short stories:
The Bargain of Rupert Orange
The Monkey and Basil Holderness
The Business of Madame Jahn
Will
When I Was Dead; or, Revenge of the Soul
My Enemy and Myself
The Interval
The Burned House
The Next Room
The Matchmaker's Curse
The Abigail Sheriff Memorial
A Saint
They
Master of Fallen Years
Verschoyle's House
Poems:
Fear At Night
Far Up In The Mystery Hills
A Cold Night
The Hour Of Ghosts
Ballad
Nocturne
The Verge
For The End
Author's Post Scriptfor those who have the patience to read fiction from a screen, you can find several of the stories online. a good place to start is the excellent
Horrormasters which has
The Burned House,
The Business of Madame Jahn,
The Interval,
Master of Fallen Years,
When I Was Dead, and
Will. For more about the author, see Jessica Amanda Salmonson's excellent online essay
A Fallen Master of the Macabre: Vincent O'Sullivan, the Friend of Oscar Wilde (possibly the introduction she provided to the GSS book?).
usual chronic synopsis interlude with more to follow.
The Business Of Madame Jahn: Events leading to the suicide by hanging of bank clerk Gustave Herbout only a week after he inherited the considerable wealth and property of his despised, pious aunt, Madame Jahn. Everyone is shocked. Gustave had been very poor at the time of her murder, having lost heavily at the racetrack, and now, with everything to look forward to, he takes his life! Perhaps it was that he was overwhelmed with grief. It's not as if
he stabbed the old biddy because she wouldn't die quickly enough for his liking, as a pair of servants are already on their way to the guillotine for that one ....
The Interval: Mrs. Wilton desperate to establish contact with her beloved and very dead soldier husband Hugh, consults yet another clairvoyant (her eleventh to date), this one an impressively rotund lady of about fifty, out back of a shop in an alley off Regent Street. Genuinely gifted, she assures Mrs. Wilton that Hugh loves her as much as she him and desperately wants to make her see him.
Mrs Wilton leaves the medium in something of a trance herself, as the next she knows, she's sat in a church pew. A soldier enters noiselessly ...
"She found, I think, that by going to places where she had once seen him--the old church, the little restaurant--she was more certain to see him again. She never saw him at home. But in the street or the park he would often walk along beside her. Once he saved her from being run over. She said she actually felt his hand grabbing her arm, suddenly, when the car was nearly upon her."
a very quiet ghost story that builds as though it's leading somewhere nasty but ends on an almost cheerful note, certainly an optimistic one (true lovers will be reunited in the afterlife, etc.)
Now this is far more like it.
Will: A man despises his wife so much he wills her to death, draining the life from her with his hatred. Before she dies, she swears that she will haunt him from beyond for what he's done, and true to her word, she is with him from that day forward, until the happy couple are reunited.
"On a night which was the last of the moon, he heard a singular scraping noise at his window, and upon throwing open the casement, he smelt the heavy odour which clings to vaults and catacombs where the dead are entombed. Then he saw that a beetle - a beetle enormous and unreal - had crept up the wall of his house from the graveyard, and was now crawling across the floor of his room ...." When I Was Dead: Alistair's theory is that if you concentrate hard enough on a drop of blood, a ghost will appear. While pursuing this exercise, he manifests a dreadful apparition of what he takes to be an eyeless old woman. The effort of will required to complete the spectre proves costly.
The Next Room: New York in the 1890's. George Manders rents an old wooden house in Brooklyn, most recently occupied by a doctor and his wife, of which one room remains locked. Sometimes Manders hears a woman's agonized groans coming from within and even once catches a glimpse of her on the back-lot, but otherwise he keeps himself to himself. Comes the night when a shadowy figure enters and unlocks the closed room. Manders awaits his moment to jump to the lady's assistance, but he's too late. Her tormentor had already done his worst before George moved in.