E. F. Benson - More Spook Stories

[dem]

E. F. Benson - More Spook Stories (Hutchinson, 1934)

The Step
The Bed By The Window
James Lamp
The Dance
The Hanging Of Alfred Wadham
Pirates
The Wishing Well
The Bath Chair
Monkeys
Christopher Comes Back
The Sanctuary
Thursday Evening
The Psychical Mallards

Fourth and final ghost story collection published in Benson's lifetime. More tales of love, sadism and supernatural revenge, a vivisectionist haunted by a cute little monkey while excavating a mummy's tomb, and a spectre with a face like a hairy boiled egg. He still had the knack!

The Step: (The Windsor Magazine, Dec. 1926). Alexandria, Egypt. John Cresswell, ruthless Real Estate speculator, callously evicts a family from their home, the strain of which proves too much for the father. Cursed for this infamous act by the haggard widow, the heartless money man is plagued by the sound of phantom footsteps trailing him wherever he goes. On Christmas morning, having overdone the Brandy, Cresswell defies "Mr. Nothing-At-All" to show himself. The spectre (one of Benson's weirdest) duly obliges. Cresswell escapes to a church and tells all to a kindly monk .....

Christopher Comes Back (Hutchinson’s Magazine, May 1929). One thing I've learnt from E. F. Benson: don't fall in love. The course never runs sweetly and invariably ends in someone coming back from the grave to dispense gory death. Or maybe EFB just didn't get his leg over so often and felt the need to take it out on the rest of us.

While Nellie watches husband Christopher slowly dying, she falls in love with his physician, Dr. Bernard. Christopher has been hovering on the brink for days when she finally performs a mercy killing for personal gain, sending him on his way by means of an overdose. The Doctor covers for her. Christopher refuses to take his death lying down and is not content until he's hounded his wife to follow his example ...

The Dance: The warped Philip derives immense pleasure from manipulating his wife, Sybil, and secretary Julian, with whom she has fallen in love. While walking along the cliff, Philip loses his footing. Julian, who has just been sacked by him, hesitates ... and Philip plunges to his doom.

A year on, and the lovers are married, but there is an unseen presence about the place, and when Julian hears Philip's gloating voice over the telephone we are all set for a satisfyingly nasty finale. A truly miserable experience.

The Bath Chair: The ghost that haunts Edmund Farraday is that of his father who's seemingly been willed from the grave by his daughter, Alice. Alice's hatred of Edmund is now matched by the dead man, and Edmund, having first experienced the agony of being half-crippled like his father had been, is killed by the vengeful spectre. Mainly remarkable for it's lack of a single sympathetic character.

To be continued ....

[lobolover]

Id love if more of this was PD.

[dem]

The good news is, you can download a number of his finest stories for free from Horror Masters

At Abdul Ali’s Grave
Between the Lights
The Bus-Conductor
The Cat
Caterpillars
The China Bowl
The Confession of Charles Linkworth
The Dust-Cloud
The Horror-Horn
The House with the Brick-Kiln
How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery
The Gardener
Gavon’s Eve
In the Tube
Mrs. Amworth
Mr. Tilly’s Séance
Negotium Perambulans
The Other Bed
The Outcast
Outside the Door
The Passenger
The Shootings Of Achnaleish
The Terror by Night
The Thing in the Hall

.... and when you've finished there, you'll find more at [url=http://www.munseys.com/detail/mode/author/e_f_benson
]Munseys[/url]!

[lobolover]

Any of those you metnion in the last two threads,except the realy famous ones?

Now,which should I go first at,The House with the Brick-Kiln or
How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery?

Also,on "the dust cloud"-its.............sub-par.Oh sure the description of a churchyard is nice,but its mostly a gospel about how a car works, with talking about a GHOSTLY CAR-I mean,this kinda stuff never realy works.

[dem]

The Wishing-Well: (Hutchinson’s Magazine, Feb 1929 Weird Tales, July 1929). Judith reaches her fortieth birthday a spinster, with no experience of the world beyond the creeper-covered vicarage at Gervaise, Cornwall, where she lives with her father. The Rev. Lionel Eusters is recognised as "the foremost authority in England as a writer on folk-lore," and, from typing his manuscripts, Judith she absorbed much about the black arts, though, more attuned to village gossip than her father, she is certain that Mrs. Penarth knows more. The wife of a wealthy landowner, Mrs. Penarth is the only person in the neighbourhood who held no fear of the village witch, the late Sally Trenair, a malicious old crone who'd curse you as soon as look at you. When her father begins a paper on the local 'wishing well', Judith visits Mrs. Penarth who proves very knowledgeable on the subject and tells of how men would consult with a witch-woman to have the name of their enemy "hidden in the well", whereupon said enemy would die a lingering and terrible death.

Young Steven Penarth returns home from America. Judith decides on the spot that this handsome specimen is the man she will marry, though she has a rival, Nance Pascoe, half her age and pretty as a picture. At first Judith dismisses Nance as a serious contender, but when she learns that her increasingly desperate attempts to catch Stevens eye are a source of constant amusement to his mother, fiancée and the lad himself, her love turns to hate. As she slips a paper bearing Steven's name inside the well, the ghost of Old Sally arrives to lend support.

Judith shares a lingering kiss with the rotting corpse.

Steven falls desperately ill ....

Hugh Lamb included this in his seminal A Wave Of Fear, proving, once again, that he is an anthologist of rare taste and discernment.

For his part, Roald Dahl favoured The Hanging of Alfred Wadham (Britannia, Dec 21st 1928/ Weird Tales, Aug. 1929), which, elsewhere, I seem to have confused with The Confession Of Charles Linkworth.

"You told me no decent man would consort with me. So it struck me, quite suddenly, only today, that it would be pleasant to see you in the most awful hole. I daresay I've got Sadic tastes, too, and they are being wonderfully indulged. You're in torment, you know: you would choose any physical agony rather to be in such a torture-chamber of the soul. it's entrancing: I adore it. Thank you very much. Denys."

When Gerald Selfe, "a man of loose life" ("GOLF" and "NEWSPAPERS", I 'll wager) is murdered, suspicion naturally falls on his servant, young Alfred Wadham, who was known to be blackmailing him. Wadham is duly tried, convicted and sentenced to death. Wadham is a Catholic and his priest, Father Denys Hanbury, urges him, for his soul's sake, to confess to his crime, but Alfred maintains that he's been fitted up. On the eve of the execution, Horace Kennion (more 'G & N', no question about it), a nasty piece of work with a grudge against his former friend, the priest, blithely admits to the murder in the confessional box. Father Deny's is delighted. All Kennion need do is give himself up to the police and an innocent man will be spared the gallows! " What a quaint notion. There's nothing further from my thoughts."

What is the Holy man to do?

[mcannon]

Demonik:

>>When Gerald Selfe, "a man of loose life" ("GOLF" and "NEWSPAPERS", I 'll wager) is murdered [/quote]>>

Normally I'd expect Benson to approve of any chap who favoured such pursuits, but perhaps the caddish Selfe was a man of such low morals that he read the penny press - the gutter rags of that Lord Northcliffe, no doubt - and indulged in *shudder* mini-golf. If so, the scoundrel deserved everything he got!

I was a little taken aback by the story's strong concern with religious custom -the execution of an innocent man seems of much less concern than the priest's struggle with his conscience over the sanctity of confession. It probably wouldn't be as unusual if it had came from the pen of brother Robert, but offhand I can't think of another story by Fred with that particular focus.

MarkC

[dem]

Feb 28, 2013 8:10:36 GMT mcannon said:

I was a little taken aback by the story's strong concern with religious custom -the execution of an innocent man seems of much less concern than the priest's struggle with his conscience over the sanctity of confession. It probably wouldn't be as unusual if it had came from the pen of brother Robert, but offhand I can't think of another story by Fred with that particular focus.

MarkC

He packs a lot in to twenty or so pages, doesn't he?

The Confession of Charles Linkworth is vaguely similar, but, for what little it's worth, I think EFB has got everything right. In terms of the RC point of view, the miscarriage of justice is another example of God working in mysterious ways. Wadham has confessed to, and shown sincere repentance for, those sins that can be laid at his door, one of them very serious indeed, so to go to the gallows in a state of grace for a crime he did not commit, gives him every chance of Eternal Life. As a Catholic, he appreciates that the Jury have given him the luckiest break in his short, most likely miserable life. In fact, if Kennion was half the supreme sadist he fancies himself, he'd realise that the most crushing blow he could deliver Wadham was to turn himself in and have the innocent party reprieved at the last minute. Wadham would be destroyed. He may have lost his best shot at Heaven.

As to the sanctity of the confessional box, it has to override everything, even the Kennion's who would exploit it for their own sick ends, otherwise every priest would be on the payroll of the Police and News International. The Bishop knows he has to let events take their course as God wills it, write Wadham off as (disgusting term) collateral damage for the greater good, safe in the knowledge that, once the rope has done its work, he'll be rewarded in Paradise.

It really is quite a cheerful story!

The Bed by the Window: (Hutchinson’s Story Magazine, July 1929/ Weird Tales, Nov. 1929). With a publishers' deadline to meet, Benson quits London to take up lodgings at Farningham, a quiet Norfolk coastal village, on the recommendation of friends who tell him it's the most boring place on earth. This proves inaccurate. Benson realises from the first that the landlord, Hopkins, despises his wife, and vice versa. The author's recurring dreams add up to a premonition of bloodshed, and he's not the least surprise when, a week after his return to the capital, the newspapers are full of a brutal murder.

[dem]

E. F. B.'s two Weird Tales originals. He made six appearances in the 'unique magazine' but the other stories - Hanging of Alfred Wadham, The Shuttered Room, The Witch-Ball, and The Bed By The Window were reprints. Evidently, Farnsworth-Wright laid it on thick that Weird Tales was up for blood-thirsty material ...

Spoiler warning

Hugh Rankin

James Lamp: (Weird Tales, June 1930). Murder and retribution on the fogbound Romney marshes. Not quite as strikingly horrible as The Wishing Well, but a minor gem nonetheless. Benson is spending the month at Trench on the Kent-Sussex border as a guest of Storely. Storeley's manservant, James Lamp, recently discovered his far younger wife in a clinch with a builder, whom he dismissed on the spot. Mrs. Lamp has since vanished, presumed shacked up with her lover in Hastings, though he claims not to have seen her since returning home. A mystery woman is glimpsed watching the house. Lamp grows increasingly edgy and Benson is at hand when she eventually comes looking for the man who shot her and dumped her weighted body into the River Inglis.

Artist uncredited, Weird Tales, Dec. 1933.

Monkeys: (Weird Tales, Dec 1933). What we have here is a strong contender for Benson's most violent story. First read it at the tale end of the 'eighties in one of the first books I bought, a second-hand copy of Brian Netherwood's brilliant Uncanny anthology, loved it then, love it now. Enthusiastic vivisectionist Dr. Hugh Morris scoffs at any notion of an afterlife, so no terrifying Egyptian curse is going to stand between him and the bones of A-Pen-Ara, which offer evidence that an unknown operator in the ninth dynasty completed a surgical procedure even he finds beyond his capabilities. "You're a superstitious Goth and an anti-educational Vandal, he chides his archaeologist friend, Jack Madden, who is circumspect in returning the mummies to their tombs after examination. On his voyage home from Luxor, Dr. Morris has cause to regret his grave-robbing exploits when, first he's haunted by monkeys before the Guardian of the tomb comes for him in his cabin ....

[dem]

The Psychical Mallards: (Pears Annual, Christmas 1921) "Now, I beg of you, Tim," he said, "not to argue like that. You can control those tricks perfectly well if you like. Dr. Farmer told me that they were of hysterico-ideo-exteriorizative origin—"

"What?" said Tim.

"The same as fidgets," said his father. "Occupy your mind with something else when you feel them coming on. You won't find yourself popular either with your teachers or your companions if you behave queerly. Queer! That's the word I wanted instead of Dr. Farmer's definition. There's nothing which wholesome English boys dislike so much as queerness. Get over your queerness, my dear, and do credit to the great middle class from which you come. I can let you enjoy an excellent education, and mix on equal terms with your superiors — never mind that —but you'll have to make your way in the world, and there's nothing that so goes against a man as queerness— "

Another of the comedy stories which, like How Fear Departed From The Long Gallery and Mr. Tilly's Seance, includes at least one surprisingly bloodthirsty episode. It seems to have been a favourite device. Timmy Mallard is born with extraordinary psychic abilities: by the time he reaches school age, his impressive repertoire includes levitation, thought reading 'teleo-kenesis' and 'ideo-plasticism'. Father packs him off to Eton with a warning about his future conduct , but Timmy can't help himself, and the old man would have been better advised to listen to his son's gloomy premonitions before investing every penny in Khamshot Oil shares. After the ensuing tragedy, Timmy falls in love with London's other prominent medium, the very beautiful Miriam Starlight, and the pair marry after the briefest romance. Will their strange talents compliment one other? What will their child be like?

Incidentally, there's nothing golf and newspapers about Timmy. The phenomenally gifted child psychic is a keen footballer and bats for Eton.

[dem]

The Sanctuary: On the death of his mysterious uncle, Francis Elton inherits a country house on the outskirts of Wedderburn, and a sizeable income from which he must pay Horace Elton's friend, Rev. Owen Barton, an generous annual stipend. Naturally, Francis invites Fred down to Hampshire to help him settle in. Also along for the ride, Francis' widowed sister, Sybil and her 11 year old son, Dickie, a sickly child who it's hoped, will benefit from the clean air.

Barton is soon busy ingratiating himself with Francis, and he certainly takes a shine to the little boy. He's no longer a practising priest, but his interests still lie in that direction. Francis has vague childhood memories of some very peculiar antics involving Uncle Horace, Barton, two women, a copy of Huysman's La-Bas, and swimming lessons which seemingly culminated in an Edwardian Vicars & Tarts party.

Francis learns that Horace met a terrible end - he was choked to death by a swarm of flies. A crafty peek through Dickie's diary confirms that the Rev. Barton is a satanist intent on initiating the child at the next Sabat. An investigation of the upper floor reveals a concealed room and within, a very strikingly decorated Satanic temple ....

One of Benson's longer stories, The Sanctuary would have made for a neat Hammer horror costume drama.

Pirates: (Hutchinson’s Magazine, Oct. 1928). Recently diagnosed with a heart murmur, fifty year old Peter Graham, chairman of the British Tin Syndicate, returns to his Cornish roots to inspect the reopened mines near Truro. Peter is alone in the world and, although saddened by his wife's death, realises he's better suited to bachelorhood. He's likewise indifferent to the loss of his family, or so he thinks. Back in Truro, he catches fleeting glimpses of a little girl and a youth in a striped jersey, the doubles of his sister Sybil and himself on the occasion of his tenth birthday party. Any doubts as to what he's seen are dismissed when, making his way to The Red Lion, he passes a happy family of seven picnicking on the river.

Finding his childhood home on the market at a ridiculously low price, Peter visits the estate agent who grudgingly concedes that 'Lescop' has proved a hard sell on account of its reputation - previous tenants have complained that it's haunted by children. He moves in at the start of December, hoping beyond hope that the ghosts of his happy childhood invite him to join them.

Cynthia Reavell, introducing The Tale Of An Empty House, Black Swan, 1986, writes: "My own favourite is Pirates, Benson's most moving ghost story. This is quite unlike any of the others, and its poignancy lies in its background setting which is so closely and feelingly based on Benson's old childhood and the family's happy years at Lis Escop - now Copeland Court - near Truro in Cornwall." -

[dem]

Finally for More Spook Stories, a comic ghost story, Thursday Evening: With the death, in 1920, of Mrs. Georgina Wallace, mid-Victorian art loses its most vociferous champion. No more the famous weekly soirée's, where the frail eighty year old would lionize the marvels of The Lost Chord, Robert Montgomery's Satan (in the opinion of her late husband, the finest poem to appear since Paradise Lost) and George Eliot's controversial Adam Bebe. No more the impassioned lectures on the evils of contemporary "rubbish." Who now to save us from "that dreadful Mr. Wagner"?

The Wallace's accumulated treasures are auctioned for a pittance (among Benson purchases, "two pink vases, the hideousness of which was absolutely irresistible") and the London house purchased by Mr. Humphrey Lodge, who really should have known better. Mr. Lodge is a celebrated avant-garde composer and his wife, Julia, a famous Cubist portrait painter. Nothing, not even the combined works of Dickens, Swinbourne, Debussy, and the entire Pre-Raphaelite movement, could cause more offence to Mrs. Wallace, whose ghost takes little time in making the Lodge's lives a misery.

Am very pleased to have revisited More Spook Stories, appreciated it far more second time around and wouldn't like to choose between this and Visible And Invisible as his finest collection. Hope it's the same with Spook Stories, because, although The Face is my all-time EFB favourite, the collection struck me as very patchy on first acquaintance.

[dem]

MORE SPOOK STORIES. By E. F. Benson. 7s. 6d. net. London: Hutchinson.
Mr Benson's title is perhaps not very apt in that there is little of the traditional chain-clanking, hollow-groaning, midnight-apparition business about any of his stories. His is the more subtle method — the mysterious footfall in "The Step," and the changing date-recorder in "The Bed by the Window" although he reveals his ability to produce the more thoroughgoing occult manifestations, as the unseen dancing horror in "The Dance," and the elusive figure and window tapping and fog-filled rooms in "James Lamp:" Of a different character is "Pirates", a story, swathed in tender sentiment, of a lonely but successful businessman who returns to the house of his boyhood to rejoin his dead playmates.

But the author is at his best in lighter vein, and his tale of the young Etonian, who, by the aid of his telekinetic gift, scored a century in the Eton-Harrow cricket match, and, by: judicious mind-reading, won a scholarship: at King's College, Cambridge, is most amusing. As a nightcap the book has its disadvantages, but, read in the comparative security of shadowless light, it will produce the thrills without the heart-clutching and the hair-raising.

— The Scotsman, 12 April 1934

"MORE SPOOK STORIES." By E. F. Benson (Hutchinson, 7s. 6d.).
I was particularly interested in Mr. Benson's latest book because last week I spent an hour or so — around the bewitching time of midnight — in a house which was supposed to be haunted. The tenants had fled some days before because of mysterious "goings-on" — midnight whisperings, baby fingers reaching out of the dark to caress unwilling throats, and a strange apparition of a young man (popularly supposed to be the victim of an unrequited love affair who killed himself in his attic bedroom rather than remain unrequited).

None of these ghostly phenomena manifested itself during my stay in the house, although it was dismally draughty and full of the queer creakings of old timbers, but I am unfeignedly glad that I did not take Mr. Benson's book with me. Even in this incredulous age it is a book for strong tastes, and even the unimaginative and unimpressionable may be forgiven a twinge of fear and an occasional fearful backward glance if they read his stories to the obligato of a high screeching wind and a dying fire.

— Burton Observer, 26 April 1934