Time to finish this one off:
Ambrose Bierce - The Damned Thing. It's big! It's invisible! It gets you really really bruised & kills you! It's the Damned Thing! And that's all the story tells you!
Edith Wharton - Afterward. A pretty weak story to finish the volume with I thought. A revenge piece with not a lot of atmosphere and some turgid paragraphs mean I'm not driven to look up any more of Miss Wharton's work.
I can't say I enjoyed this book as much as volume 6 or 7, mainly because the Dunsany was rubbish, the Beerbohm a bit pointless, and a couple of the other stories more ordinary that I was expecting, especially the last.
I like Afterwards somewhat more than John, although I do have some reservations. Since I've been pressed for time lately , and happened to recall an old discussion on the defulct yahoo group "haunted_bookshelf", I'll take the liberty of pasting in some thoughts that, in best Blue peter <yuk> fashion, "I prepared earlier". I'll be going a little OT as for some reason I decided to involve Ramsey Campbell into the discussion at that time
Afterwards (but actually somewhat previously):
>Ok, I'll blink first and break the silence by posting something about
Edith Wharton's Afterwards".
I reread this one about a month back, but as I read it aloud and not
specifically for this list I didn't make any notes, so apologies for
not remembering characters' names etc. Not content with this lapse in
scholarly integrity, I decided (as I made my way to work this
morning) to compare the EW story to another fine story which I
haven't read for some time, and whose subtler details such as names,
major plot points etc will also elude me. At this point even a poor
scholar would hit the books again with a notepad, but I've come to
realise that, for me at least, the old proverb should be rewritten :
"If a thing is worth doing it's worth doing _now_ : if you put it off
until you have the time to do it properly, then you'll never get
around to
it".
& so on wing and a curse.
Afterwards.
Another great choice by Robbo, but then there are a number of other
equally good ghost stories by EW. Before getting on to what I
liked most about Afterwards, I'll bring up what perplexed me most
(though perhaps a little less on this reading).
As Mrs <Narrator> goes over the events of the day which lead up to
her husbands disappearance she completely forgets about the
mysterious stranger whom she directed to the study. It is not until
later that she recalls this incident. This has in the past annoyed me
as it seems so unlikely that she should overlook such a memorable
incident leading up to her husband vanishing. However, it now
occurs to me that this could be perhaps part of the whole
"Afterwards" theme. According to the legend (such as it is) the
ghost(s) of
the house is only recognisable as such afterwards; but perhaps the
actual _meeting_ with the ghost itself is also forgotten about and
only remember afterwards ? This recollection is subsequently followed
by the realisation that the stranger was a ghost (?). Try
replacing the word "later" in the 2nd sentence of this paragraph with
"afterwards"; still unconvinced ? Ok, maybe I'm not entirely
convinced either, but there must be some reason why the narrator
fails to recall this pivotal incident, otherwise there is a slight
credibility gap in the plot.
What I liked best. The most powerful part of the story is the
overwhelming sense of helplessness experienced by the narrator in the
face of her husbands disappearance, increased by her frustration at
the apparent determination of the servants not to help. This builds
up to a tremendous sense of loss, in more than one sense as I'll get
to below. It is this section of the story which strongly reminds me
of another excellent tale : Ramsey Campbell's "End of a Summer's
Day". In RC's story, the female newly wed narrator visits a cave
with her husband as part of a tour group whilst on honeymoon. In the
darkness she loses and then apparently finds her husbands
hand. But on emerging into the light she has the hand of a blind
bearded stranger with no resemblance to the man she (thought) she
had married. Again in this story the woman experiences a terrible
sense of loss compounded by the failure of the other people around
her to help her. Indeed the other members of the tour party resent
the fuss she makes.
Having pointed out the similarity in theme, it is perhaps interesting
(well, it is to me) to contrast the 2 stories.
RC: newly wed woman loses husband who is replaced by a stranger, thus
effectively loosing her future. This can be read as tale of
(very) early onset disillusionment with her husband/marriage. Her
husband was probably not the man she thought, having always been
the bearded blind man; she was herself blind to her husbands true
self in the first flush of love. On first encountering her real
husband,
she fails to accept the truth and goes looking for the man she (as I
said above, thought) she married. On complaining to the other tour
members that the blind bearded stranger isn't the man she married,
they in effect reply "you've made your bed, now lie in it", an old
fashioned society view of marriage. Perhaps I'm stretching a point
here as this attitude would perhaps be dated even when RC wrote
the story (early 1970s, I think ?). Anyway, in this tale the young
female narrator looses her illusions about her new husband and is
thereby robbed of her *future*.
EW: narrator, long happily married, middle aged, not only loses her
husband in a literal sense, she is also looses her ideal of her
husband as she is disabused of long held illusions about him. This
woman is effectively robbed of her *past*, as all the old happy
memories are placed in a new context with the realisation that her
loving husband has driven another man to suicide and brought his
family to the brink of ruin. As I mentioned above the ghost in this
tale is only revealed to be so Afterwards: perhaps the real ghost is
not after all the mysterious stranger, but the old ideal of her
husband which the narrator had held to be true for so any years that
is
now shown to have been all along a phantom ?
I'll close with this question: is it worse to be robbed of your
future or your past ?<
- Chris
