MAN-SIZE IN MARBLE by Edith Nesbit
“…stricken by lightening and the vengeance of Heaven.” Sic - lightening
The big house, thus stricken, once built upon which land the cottage now sits wherein the lovey-dovey, arty couple, Laura and and the narrator who called her Pussy, have found to live near an atmospheric but superstitious village and its lonely church. The playing out, in chilling inevitability, of a legend within marble that we all now know about from this famous story from an equally famous horror writer who also wrote, incidentally, children’s books. This couple never bore children thus lightened.
This story its own memorial to monumental catharsis.
“…a horror indefinable and indescribable—an overwhelming certainty of supreme and accomplished calamity.”
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HOW LOVE CAME TO PROFESSOR GUILDEA by Robert Hichens
“‘That’s just it,’ he said, ‘now we come to it. I’m not imaginative, as you know.’
‘You certainly are not.’”
Every time I read this classic horror story over the years, I actually find it even more disturbing than upon the previous reading! It is as if it cajoles me cloyingly to soak in more and more of its meaning each time I leave, perhaps foolhardily, my door open to it…. the story of a parallel dichotomy or negative symbiosis or even attempted synergy … between a priest and a sceptic professor, both celibate, and the human qualities you would normally associate with each of them, of dichotomies such as friendship and coldness, faith and realism, pragmatic life and an imagination that becomes the ‘thing’ in the first story, a force potentially switching their roles, as metaphorised in a ‘love affair’ channelled by an imitative parrot, a channelling of the amorphous, idiotic, fawning, arguably feminine spirit that cross-fertilises the two men, Pitting them against each other as well as blending them? The shape on the bench in the park and its manners as seen across from where the door is left open is the most Aickman-like monument or memorial of this story’s haunting. And seeing that the next story is by my favourite author, I can now only now try to recall, based on memory, her story The Parrot and, although quite different, its now dawning on me of another possible theme of obsessive attempts at symbiosis?
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THE DEMON LOVER by Elizabeth Bowen
“You have no time to run from a face you do not expect.”
Another story, many times read, where I always seem to expect something but always get something else, something ever or even more frightening than I remember it possibly being. Today was no exception. Following this woman, as she returns to her bomb damaged London home, age 44, her life lived, husband, children, and a prior sinister troth to a lover who never returned in 1916 … until, as promised, today. Sleeping till today in some waiting room or gallery of vendettas, I sense, and I somehow find myself acting as her taxi driver for the night. All of this couched in Bowen’s immaculately fractured style of unexpected words and rich covert threat. Tempting the reader to become so involved that words are added that she did not intend but somehow simply knew, if not expected, would be delivered one day. Today.
A mysterious core that only rare great stories such as this one can harbour. “To smoke with dark”, the smoke of 25 years, those “creeks of London silence.”
My long-term website for this author:
elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/========================
A. V. LAIDER by Sir Max Beerbohm
“Our mutual aloofness was a positive bond between us.”
An engaging and truly ingenious story of two men (one of them AVL and the other the narrator) — reminding me of the combined dichotomy / synergy in the two men in the Guildea story above — men who spend their time, often staying in the same hotel as a convalescence after influenza. Involving a letter on the hotel’s letter board where the letters are gartered till their recipient finds them there, letters that imagination makes converse with each other about how long they have been gartered there, some letters new, some old, and this particular letter — reminding me of the preternaturally fated letter in the Bowen story above — is from the narrator to AVL, and the repercussions are that they overcome their aloofness again and tap each other’s IMAGINATION as Conan Doyle’s real THINGS above, thus deploying their DUPLICITY, the contradictions of FATE and FREE WILL, and whether murder is murder or a weakness …. a train journey, a discussion on PALMISTRY and on various hands’ lifelines and the hole in one particular hand’s lifeline, and other such paradoxes of truth, making me wonder which one of these two men had died of influenza, even though I had no evidence to believe that either of them was still alive! Or now dead!
“I suppose you would say it was written in my hand that I should be a believer in free will.”
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THURNLEY ABBEY by Perceval Landon
“‘My own idea,’ said he, ‘is that if a ghost ever does come in one’s way, one ought to speak to it.’”
Instead he tries to disassemble it!
A rather convoluted introduction about British colonial men abroad, and who is telling which story to whom! But when we finally get to the core story, it is genuinely horrific, its horror seemingly for horror’s sake, without rhyme, reason or moral. Fair enough. I always enjoy it on that level.
The man telling this story to a relative stranger on a sea voyage, however, seems to suspect a horrific hoax within his own story, but perhaps in truth his story itself — like Jorkens’ earlier tall story in this book (he mentions ‘Jorrocks’ here in the ironic Aickman-like context of meeting a lady who has discussed “modern fiction” with him and the need, she felt, for “melancholy” in all good literature!) — was the real hoax, in order to rationalise or excuse or hide the concupiscent impulse of his otherwise strange request to the listener to share the listener’s cabin even though the storyteller had a cabin of his own on the ship!
“…and we talked of partridges past, partridges present, and pheasants to come.”
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I was long ago inspired by the next author’s The Smoking Leg and The Feasting Dead, regarding both of which works I now feel the need to revisit, but I can’t remember reading his Nightmare Jack before, although I probably did and have forgotten or made myself forget…
NIGHTMARE JACK by John Metcalfe
“Only in his little wicked eyes did the old, evil light yet creep and flicker, and the succulent sin seem still to well and ooze.”
“You of all men, you Nurse, you mother’s plague, you man-stealer!”
“It was something like vaccination, and ‘took’ better with some than others.”
This otherwise old-fashioned seeming Limehouse tale can only be read properly today in the light of recent events — a tale of evil and retribution and greed creeping and flickering back along with Chambers’ Yellow Sign of a seeping God (now stigmata on crooked cheeks and crazed by recurrent finger pointing) with East London smells and stretching stuckness of the headily atmospheric river, sheathed claws, crooks and neerdowells, their cursed rubies stolen from Burmah. And its importance as a prophetic work is now assured. Welcome or unwelcome as a catharsis, you must decide for yourself. The eponymous dying frizzled man behind the “locked door” and we grizzlers who crowd and listen to his eluded or elided words. The dreams that outlast covividly their own dreams’ dreams; Pongo the cat to symbolise ironically a yearned for loss of smell, the most evil of the evil men also ironically christened — by the eponymous natterjack or Nark — with the name Nurse. For God’s sake, don’t look behind you! This story points at you!, as you recall “windows drummed like blood against the brain.” That dry, brown face haunted and haunting, ‘giggling like a girl.’ This work surely outdoes even the insidious book of King in Yellow with, now, an otherwise inscrutable “mythos of the Web and Loaf, and the faded terror of the Triple Scum.” The rubies’ juice, those blood clots, making you describe your nightmares parrot fashion or like a schoolboy in rote.
“Save me; save me from their bloody Nark . . . The man ’oo speaks like a girl an’ smells like a goat . . . the cat ‘as . . .”
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My full review of the 2nd Fontana Book here:
dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/03/25/the-2nd-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories/
