Salvaged from old board, revamped but slightly ....
Hugh Lamb (ed.) - Best Tales Of Terror Of Erckmann-Chatrian (Millington, 1981)
The Crab Spider
The Murderer's Violin
The Invisible Eye
The Child Stealer
My Inheritance
The Mysterious Sketch
The Owl's Ear
The Three Souls
The Wild Huntsman (aka The Forest House)
The Man Wolf
M. R. James rated them. Lovecraft once said of
The Invisible Eye "Few short tales contain greater horror", and Hans Heinz Ewers liked it so much that he rewrote it, nastied up, as
The Spider. Truly horrible, certainly shocking for it's time,
The Child-Stealer anticipates the crimes of Fritz 'The Hanover Vampire' Haarmann, and, if you've ever endured Clive Barker's
Dread, try
The Three Souls for its Victorian equivalent.
The dictates of the time insisted upon a happy ending, but the narrators certainly went through a Hellish time getting there.
Includes:
The Crab Spider: This is a beauty, although it would have benefited from a different title. The hot springs at Spinbronn are popular with gout sufferers until one day they flood and a heap of animal skeletons are washed out of a nearby cave, and with them that of a little girl who died five years earlier. What is responsible? All is revealed when Sir Thomas Haverchurch decides to have a swift skinny dip ...
The Child Stealer: Christine Evig, A bedraggled old madwoman, ever wandering the streets of Mayence, "Deubche! Deubche! Where are you?" her plaintive cry. Her daughter is two-years missing! Other than spare her the indignity of having her locked up in a lunatic asylum, the Police are unhelpful. But now matters are about to change. Count Diderich has also lost a child, his three year old son, abducted from the steps of the Cathedral. Christine witnessed the incident and reported it to Schwartz the provost, but he sent her on her way, convinced she was merely having one of her turns. When he learns of this, the Count nigh on spontaneously combusts: "You are a scoundrel! If I do not recover my child, I'll kill you like a dog!" The Count trails the madwoman to a filthy hovel in the shadows of St. Ignatius from which a debauched mother and daughter team ply their hideous trade ....
True, the gore is understated by today's standards, but there's more than enough to let imagination fill in the blanks. Very
nasty.
The Murderer's Violin: Young Karl is a technically accomplished musician but he can't compose for toffee. His tutor's advice is to lose weight, so he waddles off on a walking tour of Switzerland where he takes a room in a hovel with an old man and an idiot girl. The man bears an uncanny resemblance to the violinist Melchier, hung in chains for the murder of an innkeeper. That night as Karl lies abed, a skeleton treats him to a ghastly recital on the fiddle.
********************blackmonkI found a downloadable copy of
The Crab Spider at the rather fine Horror Masters site – (http://www.horrormasters.com - for those who aren't aware of it, the site contains absolutely hundreds of vintage ghost and horror stories in pdf format!) though here the title is
The Spider of Guyana. When compared to Hugh Lamb's version not only are the titles different but so are the dimensional descriptions of the actual spider. In
Guyana we read:
‘ “And the spider. Is it a big one?”
“O Master, never, never, have I seen such a big one. Neither on the banks of the Mocaris, nor in the swamps of Konanama. It is as large as my body.”and in the Millington edition as shown above we read:
‘ “And the spider. Is it big?”
‘ “Oh! Master, never… never have I seen one so huge, neither on the banks of the Mocaris nor in the lowlands of Konanama… It is as big as my head!” this may be a pedantic observation but I can’t help but wonder how big Erckmann-Chatrian’s spider really is before translators and editors manipulated the original text.
********************demonikI certainly prefer it being "as large as my body."
I think the version used on horrormasters is the translation published in
The Strand magazine as
The Spider Of Guyana circa 1899/ 1900 (it had recently appeared in the posthumous, french language Erckmann-Chatrian collection
Contes Fantastiques in 1899).
Eithne Fearnley-Whittingstall went back to the original french version and provided Hugh with her translation, and that is the one he uses.
I managed to pick up a french copy of their
Hugues Le-Loup (Casterman, 1980) which is no use to me at all, beyond showing that they're still popular.
********************blackmonkI certainly prefer it being "as large as my body."I thought that, too- but... Agatha's appearance is described as
"an awesome creature, with a short squat nose, lips as big as your fist, her head covered in a triple row of scarves in garish colours." Fist-sized lips? This would suggest a head of enormous proportions (note also that it requires
three scarves to cover it!) - perhaps Agatha is a sufferer of extreme hydrocephaly! So maybe her stating that the spider
"is as big as my head" is misleading to the reader but terrifying those present - moreso than had she described it as being
"as large as my body"!! :
********************demonikYeah, I can see the problem. What we needed was a witness with a normal-sized head to describe it, not some chick with a weather balloon on top of her shoulders.
It's a brilliant spider though, isn't it? All those skeletons flying out of the cave!
Its true that several of the titles have undergone some changes in translation, but I think horrormasters have dug up some E-C stories that Hugh overlooked. There's another
The Black And The White, which Peter Haining used in the
M. R. James Book Of The Supernatural, James being one of their fans.
********************CalentureI found a downloadable copy of The Crab Spider at the rather fine Horror Masters site – (www.horrormasters.com - for those who aren't aware of it, the site contains absolutely hundreds of vintage ghost and horror stories in pdf format!) Many thanks for this, BM. As I said on the Hugh Lamb - Taste of Fear thread, I'd really like to read some of these, and incredibly have
none of that writer's stories in my collection.
So many books and stories everywhere... only three lives to read them all.
I've just been looking at
this page at Horror Masters , and noticed that Erckmann-Chatrian was actually a pseudonym used by two writers, (Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian).
I imagine you knew this and just overlooked it, or maybe my page search wasn't working right...
