Fashion Victims

[humgoo]

Oct 8, 2020 13:34:47 GMT The Lurker In The Shadows said:

Lynne Truss - Possunt quia posse videntur (Woman's Hour 50th Anniversary Short Story Collection, 1996)

Thanks a lot for giving us the lowdown on it! Another mystery on The James Gang list gone! I hope you will write more about these little gems!

[dem]

John Lymington – The Forger's Gloves: (The Night Spiders, 1964). Larry the master counterfeiter is murdered by rival Jack Culip, a man so parsimonious he can never throw anything away. True to form, Culip keeps the gloves he stole from Larry so as not to leave fingerprints. They prove supernaturally loyal to their late owner.

[dem]

A haunted portrait - fashion victim hybrid from the superlative Spellbound

GIRL IN THE RED DRESS

Spellbound #15, 1st January 1977

THE odd thing was. I very nearly didn't go. I'm not what you could call a sociable boy, a bit of a loner in fact. But at the last moment a friend rang up, said he had a rotten cold and offered to lend me his costume, as he really didn't feel up to a Christmas fancy dress party.
Something made me say I would. And thus l arrived at the Masked Fancy Dress Ball as — of all things — a noble of the French Court, 1780 or thereabouts I suppose.
I was late. and the huge ballroom beautifully decorated for Christmas, was already crowded. It was a beautiful house with all the settings and furnishings kept just as it used to be. right down to the deep Aubusson carpet that covered the great winding oak staircase
That. in fact. was where l first saw her. Standing halfway down the stairs. leaning over a curve in the banister, gazing down at the great throng enjoying itself below.
The girl in the red dress.
From where I was standing. it looked like one of those great hooped crinolines. I couldn't see her face, of course — not properly — because of the black velvet mask she was wearing. We all had them — they'd been handed to us at the door. Black for the ladies and brown for the men. Her hair was blonde and built high on her head in long sausage curls and hanging ringlets. I wasn't sure, but had an idea it must be a wig. No-one could have such an abundance of hair. not even these days.
She must have caught my eye, because she raised a tiny frilled fan to her cheeks, and then almost coquettishly inclined her head in my direction. She's really living her part, I thought to myself.
I went to the foot of the staircase, and she came down slowly, daintily, slim hand just touching the banister rail. Almost without conscious thought I raised her hand to my lips.
"Your servant, ma'am." I said in the manner born. "Will you dance?"
She nodded graciously, and smiled.
They were playing the Wombles version of the minuet. Very appropriate, I thought., although not so easy to dance to. But then I'm not much of a dancer at the best of times. She pretended not to notice it.
"And How is good King Louis?" she asked at a break in the dancing.
I looked at her, puzzled, until l remembered I was an illustrious member of the French Court. For tonight at least.
"He is well," I said. l couldn't help grinning.
"That is good." she replied, gravely. "My papa and I visit the French Court soon. I long to see Paris. Has it changed overmuch this past year?
I didn't need to reply because the music started up again. I was wondering just how far she was intending to carry the masquerade because French history was never my strong point. and I was beginning to have the feeling that I wanted to impress her, wanted to make a date to see her again.
After the music ended, and just as I was going to escort her back to her seat like the courtier i was supposed to be, someone stopped and asked me the time. Seconds later, I turned to follow her and saw that she was just disappearing round the bend in the staircase.
I hurried over to the foot, intending to wait for her. In this crush I had a horrible feeling that if I didn't keep my eye on her she'd vanish out of my life forever.
A quarter-of-an-hour went by and she still didn't reappear. Finally. I started up the stairs. I reached the bend, and here the lights almost petered out. just a few hanging wall brackets that cast dim shadows on the walls. I stood there a moment, peering round me. I'd never seen so many portraits in my life. They covered every inch of space. I looked closer. Portraits mostly, of all the past owners. Dull browns, and greens and blues.
Except one.
A beautifully detailed. full length portrait of a girl in a red dress. I recognised her immediately.
I bent closer. In clear-cut gold lettering at the bottom I read: ELIZABETH, SECOND DAUGHTER OF THE FOURTH DUKE, 1778. And in smaller letters, so faint I could hardly read them: BETROTHED TO THE COMTE DU PRE AND DIED OF SMALLPOX AT THE PARIS COURT. DECEMBER I778. AGED SIXTEEN YEARS.
A sudden shiver passed right through me. I turned and walked slowly back to the bend in the staircase.
Where I had first seen the girl in red.
I shouldn't see her again. I knew that with absolute certainty. She'd gone back to where she belonged.
A forgotten painting on a gallery wall. From where she had seen the arrival of her beloved French nobleman.
I caught my foot on something and stumbled. l looked down.
A black velvet mask gazed sightlessly up at me . . .

END

[dem]

Andrew Brosnatch

J. U. Giesy - The Magic of Dai Nippon: Dream Hypnotism — and the Kimono of Death. Faithful servant Yamato bides his time, patiently awaiting the perfect moment to crush the affluent white man who ruined his sister. The instrument of his vengeance — the most beautiful silk garment.

[dem]

Illustrated Police News, 28 March 1868.

L R Gustavson

Norman Matson - The Woman in Scarlet Stockings: (Mystery, Aug. 1934). An old house, a young wife, an indifferent husband, and the weird ghost-woman make this story a dramatic masterpiece of chills and creeps you will never forget! A perfect haunted-house mystery - that might actually have happened! Bunny and Eleanor Brooks move in at a lonesome country farmhouse, a mile from the high road. It's haunted by the living ghost of an old woman, Matilda Bliven, who regularly glares in through the windows, and/or attempts to gain entrance. Thirty years ago, her sister, Bertha, hung herself in and upstairs room, Matilda arriving home from the church too late to save her. She will never rest until she has.

[Swampirella]

Adam J. Marsh - Raspberry Beret - Fifth BHF Book of Horror Stories

Unnamed school-girl narrator's mother buys her the raspberry beret she's found while browsing in a second-hand store. Should cover her unfortunate baldness due to cancer treatment nicely. It turns out there's something very strange about that headgear....

[Jojo Lapin X]

May 31, 2021 18:25:28 GMT Swampirella said:

Adam J. Marsh - Raspberry Beret - Fifth BHF Book of Horror Stories

Unnamed school-girl narrator's mother buys her the raspberry beret she's found while browsing in a second-hand store. Should cover her unfortunate baldness due to cancer treatment nicely. It turns out there's something very strange about that headgear....

Did she walk in through the out door?

[weirdmonger]

Jun 4, 2018 12:30:28 GMT ramseycampbell said:

Aickman's "Ravissante" isn't primarily about togs, but it does have an inimitably strange plunge into a drawer. Mind you, "The Residence at Whitminster" gives you a good reason not to open one.

RAVISSANTE by Robert Aickman

“One trouble was that I most certainly did not want to understand everything.”

“If one goes to parties or meets many new people in any other way, one has to take protective action…”

RAvissante— upon my re-reading of it, just now — has jumped back, like the “black poodle” of the less-than-ravishing Madame A., into an erstwhile twin-souled sump as the formative religious experience it once was, now further evolved. A story imparted by the less-than-ravishing Aickman himself whereby his drag often drags? The story that will either change your life or make you abandon it altogether! It reminds me of my own thoughts about creating stories or arguably outlandish reviews of them like this one, if one equates them with RA’s ‘pictures’ in this story, viz:

“My pictures are visionary and symbolical, and, from first to last, have seemed to be painted by someone other than myself. […] I am thus entirely self-taught, or taught by that other within me. I am aware that my pictures lack serious technique(if there is a technique that can be distinguished from inspiration and invention). I should have given up painting them some time ago, were it not that a certain number of people seemed to find something remarkable in them, and have thus identified me with them, and made me feel mildly important.”

But then I address RA’s later explicit destruction in this story of my beliefs in ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ with regard to his narrator’s inner narrator’s view of paintings and painters, with this narrator uselessly seeking to know everything about each painter as a personality and a biography. So, I now flounder in finding a meaning in this work by RA without knowing more about RA himself. But I want to deal with it empirically or objectively without recourse to such biographical information. Therefore, let’s now go through the story during a new tranche of real-time…

viz.

The first narrator — having met the second narrator (whose narration of his earlier meeting with Madame A. in Belgium comprises the full final two-thirds of the story’s whole) — is made executor (alongside the second narrator’s mostly silent wife) of the second narrator’s Will. The latter’s paintings and manuscripts, mainly.

Is the remarkable painting — seen in Madame A’s house, where there is a lot of ‘golden’ things mentioned (golden being tantamount to orange) and which the second narrator believes he painted (although not remembering his painting of it!) — the same as the actual painting that the first narrator wanted to keep as sole keepsake, thus to be saved from the proposed ‘bonfire’ of paintings? (See my by-chance concurrent real-time review of ‘The Burnt Orange Heresy’ from 1971 HERE.)

The socially difficult psychology when dealing with women of both narrators is similar. A parental accident by air travel to Paris. A mother and father arguing about such a trip, then both killed by it. Why is this significant?

A painting seeming to be painted by someone else, self-taught by the extra soul within? “It is a commonplace that there is often more than one soul in a single body.” A painter called Xavier Mellery who claimed “that he painted silence.” One of many painters that the second narrator treated as “stations on a spiritual ascent.”

Reaching Madame A’s house, as if part of Aickman’s obsession with gluey Zenoism. Indeed, on ‘the very last stretch’ of this journey, he says he ceases to be anxious. Towards golden walls and golden frames. With furnishings “to spring upwards in ecstasy, to sag in melancholia…” And a life-size marble figure of a woman giving birth to a succubus.

Madame A. herself, “perfectly agile, but curiously uncouth in her movements”, later “standing dumpily”, but with golden slippers on her feet. She tells of a man who was madly in love with her whom she wouldn’t have used as pocket handkerchief for her grippe! The mediocre or self-abusing or dull painters she lists by alphabetical letters — as if her own name of A. started this list?

Much talk of Madame A’s pretty ‘adopted daughter’ Chrysothème, whom we never see but we can run our hands through her clothes. Even kiss them. One dress was “some kind of mottled orange and red.”

The aforementioned crucial painting was, I think, a cross between an angel and a clown, and I may dream later that I hang above this story like one of its readers lit up…. “… on the single golden light that hung by a golden chain from the golden ceiling of the landing…”, except the exact context subsumed this hope?

“I am trying to set down events and my feelings exactly as they were, or as nearly as possible…” — taken the words out of my mouth, as it were!

[Jojo Lapin X]

Jul 24, 2021 12:24:00 GMT weirdmonger said:

Jun 4, 2018 12:30:28 GMT ramseycampbell said:

Aickman's "Ravissante" isn't primarily about togs, but it does have an inimitably strange plunge into a drawer. Mind you, "The Residence at Whitminster" gives you a good reason not to open one.

RAVISSANTE by Robert Aickman

“One trouble was that I most certainly did not want to understand everything.”

“If one goes to parties or meets many new people in any other way, one has to take protective action…”

RAvissante— upon my re-reading of it, just now — has jumped back, like the “black poodle” of the less-than-ravishing Madame A., into an erstwhile twin-souled sump as the formative religious experience it once was, now further evolved. A story imparted by the less-than-ravishing Aickman himself whereby his drag often drags? The story that will either change your life or make you abandon it altogether! It reminds me of my own thoughts about creating stories or arguably outlandish reviews of them like this one, if one equates them with RA’s ‘pictures’ in this story, viz:

“My pictures are visionary and symbolical, and, from first to last, have seemed to be painted by someone other than myself. […] I am thus entirely self-taught, or taught by that other within me. I am aware that my pictures lack serious technique(if there is a technique that can be distinguished from inspiration and invention). I should have given up painting them some time ago, were it not that a certain number of people seemed to find something remarkable in them, and have thus identified me with them, and made me feel mildly important.”

But then I address RA’s later explicit destruction in this story of my beliefs in ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ with regard to his narrator’s inner narrator’s view of paintings and painters, with this narrator uselessly seeking to know everything about each painter as a personality and a biography. So, I now flounder in finding a meaning in this work by RA without knowing more about RA himself. But I want to deal with it empirically or objectively without recourse to such biographical information. Therefore, let’s now go through the story during a new tranche of real-time…

viz.

The first narrator — having met the second narrator (whose narration of his earlier meeting with Madame A. in Belgium comprises the full final two-thirds of the story’s whole) — is made executor (alongside the second narrator’s mostly silent wife) of the second narrator’s Will. The latter’s paintings and manuscripts, mainly.

Is the remarkable painting — seen in Madame A’s house, where there is a lot of ‘golden’ things mentioned (golden being tantamount to orange) and which the second narrator believes he painted (although not remembering his painting of it!) — the same as the actual painting that the first narrator wanted to keep as sole keepsake, thus to be saved from the proposed ‘bonfire’ of paintings? (See my by-chance concurrent real-time review of ‘The Burnt Orange Heresy’ from 1971 HERE.)

The socially difficult psychology when dealing with women of both narrators is similar. A parental accident by air travel to Paris. A mother and father arguing about such a trip, then both killed by it. Why is this significant?

A painting seeming to be painted by someone else, self-taught by the extra soul within? “It is a commonplace that there is often more than one soul in a single body.” A painter called Xavier Mellery who claimed “that he painted silence.” One of many painters that the second narrator treated as “stations on a spiritual ascent.”

Reaching Madame A’s house, as if part of Aickman’s obsession with gluey Zenoism. Indeed, on ‘the very last stretch’ of this journey, he says he ceases to be anxious. Towards golden walls and golden frames. With furnishings “to spring upwards in ecstasy, to sag in melancholia…” And a life-size marble figure of a woman giving birth to a succubus.

Madame A. herself, “perfectly agile, but curiously uncouth in her movements”, later “standing dumpily”, but with golden slippers on her feet. She tells of a man who was madly in love with her whom she wouldn’t have used as pocket handkerchief for her grippe! The mediocre or self-abusing or dull painters she lists by alphabetical names — as if her own name of A. started this list?

Much talk of Madame A’s pretty ‘adopted daughter’ Chrysothème, whom we never see but we can run our hands through her clothes. Even kiss them. One dress was “some kind of mottled orange and red.”

The aforementioned crucial painting was, I think, a cross between an angel and a clown, and I may dream later that I hang above this story like one of its readers lit up…. “… on the single golden light that hung by a golden chain from the golden ceiling of the landing…”, except the exact context subsumed this hope?

“I am trying to set down events and my feelings exactly as they were, or as nearly as possible…” — taken the words out of my mouth, as it were!

I love the last few lines of this story, and often recite them to myself.

[weirdmonger]

Jul 24, 2021 12:50:24 GMT Jojo Lapin X said:

Jul 24, 2021 12:24:00 GMT weirdmonger said:

RAVISSANTE by Robert Aickman

I love the last few lines of this story, and often recite them to myself.

I wholeheartedly agree.
I did not quote them as I thought that might have been a spoiler.

[dem]

Amos Sewell

Eugene de Rezske - The Veil of Tanit: (Strange Tales, March 1932). Even to set eyes on it is blasphemy punishable by torture porn.

Aliya Whiteley - Pack Your Coat: (Mark Morris [ed.], New Fears 2, 2018). Orange, unisex, lethal.

P. Whitehouse - A Shawl From The East: John Gawsworth [ed.], Masterpiece Of Thrills[/i], 1936. If you won't have me, I'll make damn sure no-one will want you.

[Middoth]

In the Mirror by Valery Bryusov (The Thrill of Horror ed. Hugh Lamb)

From the early the narrator, the young girl is fascinated by mirrors, the world of mysterious looking glass

public-library.uk/ebooks/49/40.pdf

[weirdmonger]

Aug 11, 2021 11:04:33 GMT Middoth said:

In the Mirror by Valery Bryusov (The Thrill of Horror ed. Hugh Lamb)

From the early the narrator, the young girl is fascinated by mirrors, the world of mysterious looking glass

I have just completed my review below and uncannily I have now found this perfect spot to post it. Strange coincidence! I wrote this review just now before seeing this post above.

=======================

NO STRONGER THAN A FLOWER by Robert Aickman

“…a woman’s appearance is what a man most cares about, yet, too often, the more she does about it the less he cares for the result and for her.”

Of its time, this story is essentially reprehensible as well as inscrutable — inscrutable unless there is a clue in the fact that Nesta’s silver candelabra are explicitly described as “writhing” — whence, later, the candlelight by which she sees herself in the monumental tall mirror at the end arguably reveals an eccentric Aickman-like version of Medusa?

Nesta had started having a mutually comfortable marriage with Curtis, until he foolhardily encourages her to do something about her comparative plainness of appearance, and she then visits by taxi a row of terraced houses, where ‘the elderly or the disappointed’ generally live, to receive some sort of makeover that she had seen in an advert. The nature of this makeover is airbrushed by Aickman, and even the taxi driver warns her against going into one of those houses but eventually leaving her there, apparently happy not to be paid by her for the journey!

Then it is the exungulation of Nesta’s fingernails that takes sharp prominence during the remaining process of entropy in her marriage to Curtis, while her face, if not always her appetising mouth, is constantly veiled…. Not to speak of the many hats she now sports at various times. Not a Medusa after all perhaps but more something that has been airbrushed into the philosopher A.J. Ayer’s drogulus? (I wouldn’t be surprised if Aickman knew Ayer.)

PS: My very short ‘The Exungulation of the Drogulus’, first published in 2012 —
dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/the-drogulus/,
written before I realised today that it might have been inspired by this Aickman story from when I first read it in the 20th century.
This Aickman story came up completely fresh for me today, but my memory is notoriously bad, and that is the reason I now review books as recorded in real-time!

[Middoth]

Is Nesta Stepford wife, like Sally?

[weirdmonger]

Aug 11, 2021 18:45:27 GMT Middoth said:

Is Nesta Stepford wife, like Sally?

good question