Aaron Worth [ed] - Out of the Past

[dem]

Aaron Worth [ed] - Out of the Past: Tales of Haunting History (British Library, 21 April 2024)

Sandra Gómez

Aaron Worth - Introduction
A Note from the Publisher

Marjorie Bowen - Pride
Vernon Lee - A Wedding Chest
M. P. Shiel - Dark Lot of One Saul
Vincent O'Sullivan - Verschoyle's House
Bernard Capes - The Black Reaper
Frederick Cowles - The Witch-finder
Marjorie Bowen - The Confession of Beau Sekforde
Frederick Cowles - The Pink Columbine
Aaron Worth - The Translation of Aqbar
Sheila Hodgson - Come, Follow!
Aaron Worth - The Theatre of Ovid

Blurb:

"Come inside, my bonny witch-finder. Here is shelter for thee..."

A tale of callous murder and deranged revenge rings out from fifteenth-century Italy. A witch-finder's great triumph is also the herald of his own doom in Civil War Britain. A prisoner's fate at the hands of the Inquisition in sixteenth-century Mexico leads to an encounter with the bestial and bizarre beneath the waves.
Summoning eleven stories chosen for their uncanny portrayals of weird history, this collection presents a dark timeline of grim visions harking from plague-racked England to revolutionary France and culminating in the last gasps of the nineteenth century.
Including stories by the greatest writers of history-turned-horrifying such as Marjorie Bowen, Frederick Cowles, Vernon Lee and the lost genius Vincent O'Sullivan, this volume is capped by two of Aaron Worth's own tales of Victorian macabre alongside a chiller evoking M. R. James by Sheila Hodgson, the adapter of his stories for radio.

AARON WORTH is a professor at Boston University, a celebrated editor and a short story writer. He has edited the Tales of the Weird collections Randall's Round and The Night Wire, as well as anthologies by Vernon Lee and Arthur Machen for Oxford University Press.

Phyllis Vere Campbell

Marjorie Bowen - Pride: (Pall Mall, Dec. 1913). Paris, 1520. Queen Isabeau's infidelity with a penniless young law student enrages his predecessor in her bed, the fiery Duke Francois, effectively ruler of France during the terminal incapacitation of King Charles the Mad. On discovering that the secret lovers are practising necromantic rituals in the graveyard of the Couvent des Innocent, the Duke hatches a plot to humiliate his Queen before local peasants. Her pride dictates that she would rather be hacked down by the mob than allow him satisfaction.

Bernard Capes - The Black Reaper: (At a Winter's Fire, 1899: Hugh Lamb [ed.] Gaslit Nightmares, 1988). Anathoth, a village in the English countryside, 1665. The community take unkindly to a mysterious preacher and throw him down a well which is then sealed with stones. With his dying breath, the stranger curses all, save the children. Soon afterward, a reaper rises out of the earth and sets to scything the wheat field. With each sheaf cut, another villager is stricken with plague.

Frederick Cowles - The Pink Columbine: (The Horror of Abbot's Grange and Other Stories, 1936). Reign of Terror. Jacques Poisson, the newly elected Commissioner, has never forgiven the Marquise de Chantal-Claire for calling him dog and striking out with her whip. How the tables have turned! Tonight, at the costume ball in honour of their first wedding anniversary, he will arrest she and her husband arrested as traitors! One word from him, and her head will decorate the basket beneath Madame Guillotine! Of course, if she would only be nice to him ...

[dem]

Vernon Lee - A Wedding Chest: (Pope Jacynthe and Other Stories, 1904). Peguria, 15th century. On the eve of her wedding, Monna Maddelena is abducted by masked men in the pay of Troilo Baglioni, her long time stalker, against whose family no man dare lift a sword (they are too rich and powerful). A year later, Master Desiderio, Monna's distraught fiancée, receives a very belated "wedding gift" from Messer Troilo ... Found the style hard-going, but story worth persevering with for those of us who like our horrors properly callous.

Frederick Cowles - The Witch-finder: (The Night Wind Howls, 1938: Michel Parry [ed.], 2nd Mayflower Book Of Black Magic Stories, 1974). East Anglia during the Civil War. Caught in a storm while riding home to Cambridge, Hugh Murray, Justice of Peace and merciless self-appointed witch-finder, seeks shelter for the night at a lonesome cottage on Madingley Hill, until recently home to two of his victims. Six pages of dogged Georgian torture porn.

Aaron Worth - The Translation of Aqbar: (Richard Chizmar [ed] Cemetery Dance, #76, 2017). Victorian London. The Pike family hire master illusionist Ugolini to perform a special private adult performance in the parlour of their Islington home. Concealed in the shadows, 14-year-old Harry and younger brother, Willy, witness the show from under a table. The highlight of a killer routine is when the maestro puts his cowering Indian assistant through a series of hideous transformations ...

Had a good feeling about this collection when it was first announced. Six stories in, it's not let me down yet.

[humgoo]

Apr 24, 2024 10:54:43 GMT dem said:

Aaron Worth - The Translation of Aqbar: (Richard Chizmar [ed] Cemetery Dance, #76, 2017).

Would probably have given this antho a miss had it not been for your notes, so thank you! This one is a little cracker. Perhaps written with "The Great God Pan" in mind?

[dem]

Apr 26, 2024 8:11:25 GMT humgoo said:

Apr 24, 2024 10:54:43 GMT dem said:

Aaron Worth - The Translation of Aqbar: (Richard Chizmar [ed] Cemetery Dance, #76, 2017).

Would probably have given this antho a miss had it not been for your notes, so thank you! This one is a little cracker. Perhaps written with "The Great God Pan" in mind?

That hadn't occurred to me at all, but I think you're right!

Up til now, I've laid off buying a Tales of the Weird volume until we've had confirmation of the TOC. Think this was the first I pre-ordered on the strength of theme alone. Result!

M. P. Shiel - Dark Lot of One Saul: (The Grand Magazine, Feb. 1912). "My God! My God! Why hast Thou created me?" Testimony of James Dowdy Saul, the son of a Bideford farmer, born shortly before Elizabeth I became Queen, who ran away to sea, looting Spanish galleons and slave-trading under Francis Drake, before taking a wife and beginning afresh in Mexico. Saul enjoys two years peace before agents of the Inquisition make off with him in a ship bound for (presumably) Spain to be put to the question. When The San Matteo is caught in a hurricane, it is decided the "heretic" is a Jonah. Saul is nailed inside a barrel and thrown overboard. On the verge of drowning, Saul instead finds himself sucked inside a cave on the sea bed, a freak air pocket where, thrown free of his prison, he survives for years in an undersea lost world on a diet of trunk fish, oysters — and mescal. Eventually, a close encounter with a skull-headed sea monster decides him to build a raft and take to the waves. A touch of Journey to the Centre of the Earth about this one, or so it seems to me. As with The Wedding Chest, found the "archaic" prose a struggle.

Best do Vincent O'Sullivan next as his novella accounts for a third of the book.

[dem]

Vincent O'Sullivan - Verschoyle's House: (Human Affairs, 1907). "And she realized that there were things in life more fearful and unnerving than death; the dead, after all, might hope to lie untroubled in their desolate places. But if That came loverly to her bedside?"

Demonic possession from beyond the grave in the aftermath of the English Civil War. Paola, miserably married to Verschoyle, the aged Black Magician and Nigromancer, loves their gallant young neighbour, Sir Edward Morvan, a dutiful soldier in the King's Army whose heart, nonetheless, sympathizes with the Parliamentarians. Wise to his wife's adultery, the ruthless Verschoyle successfully connives to ruin his rival by having denounced a traitor. Sir Edward, disgraced and destitute, his ancestral home burned to the ground, switches allegiance, distinguishing himself at Naseby in June 1645.

The Monarchy fallen, Morvan leads a raid on Verschoyle's House, where his nemesis goads him to murder before a morose Paola. The lovers are free at last! Or so it seems.

Despite their much improved circumstances under Sir Edward, the peasants do not take to their new master, nor will they forgive Paola her infidelity. Haunted by guilt, Morvan takes to spending whole days brooding at the grave of the adversary he buried beneath a dead tree in unconsecrated ground. The tree horribly blossoms. The sorcerer's ring somehow finds its way around Sir Edward's finger and won't be shifted. Each day, Morvan grows to resemble the haggard, white-bearded Verschoyle he cut down, until Paola despairs of ever escaping the dead despot. The corpse stirs beneath the soil ...

A proper doom-laden Gothic supernatural horror saga, albeit one that takes a while to get going. Temptation was to bail out around the thirty-page mark — it probably took me longer to read the first third than it did the rest — but perseverance again rewarded once author picked up the pace.

[dem]

Marjorie Bowen - The Confession of Beau Sekforde: (Crimes of Old London, 1919; The Bishop of Hell, 1949; both as "The Housekeeper"). Holborn, 1710. A dissolute cardsharp, bankrupt and facing destitution or debtors prison, is tormented by the ghost of the wife he murdered to marry a rich Countess, only for Wife Mk II to prove as self-serving, treacherous and skint as himself. He should never have done it. Say what you will about Jane, she was a fastidious housekeeper who baked a delicious goblin scone. Of late, Sekforde marvels how the place stays spotless in the absence of any domestics. "If I had not seen her fastened down in her coffin I should have sworn that Jane was in this house."

Sheila Hodgson - Come, Follow!: (Ro Pardoe [ed], Ghosts & Scholars #4, 1982). Suggested by the 'two undergraduates spending Christmas in a country house fall foul of sinister Roman priest' plot idea sketched out in MR James' Stories I have Tried To Write (with more than a passing nod to Casting the Runes). Setting is West Farthing, a village on the Sussex Downs, where young Paul Berneys has unexpectedly come into his late grandfather's fortune. Nicholas, the only son, was disinherited on account of some dubious relationships, including that with the Reverend Alaric Halsey, who has since given him a roof at the rectory. Paul finds his uncle a bag of nerves and difficult company, though he's greatly relieved the poor fellow holds no grudge. The same cannot be said of Halsey, who raises a formless black entity to destroy him. Read this as a reminder against grabbing the wrong macintosh before dashing out into a storm.

Aaron Worth - The Theatre of Ovid: (Matt Cardin & Jon Padgett [eds.], Vastarien, Spring 2018). Roumania, 1898. Told in a series of letters from honeymooning 'madhouse doctor' John, to a male confidante. John has wed Charlotte, his seventeen-year-old patient at the Thornton House asylum, an obsessive defacer of classical texts, her bizarre annotations providing an alternative and bloody history of a Roman playhouse. Ignored by his bride, a despondent John belatedly realises that Charlotte's insistence on Constanza for their wedding trip was so she might locate the ruins of this mythical theatre. It's pointless my attempting a synopsis — I'm sure literary allusions flew over my head without my even realising they were there. Even so, I still enjoyed the story (though not so much as The Translation of Aqbar) and it's only fitting that Out of the Past should end on a bloodthirsty note.

[humgoo]

May 5, 2024 18:39:07 GMT dem said:

Aaron Worth - The Theatre of Ovid: (Matt Cardin & Jon Padgett [eds.], Vastarien, Spring 2018). Roumania, 1898. Told in a series of letters from honeymooning 'madhouse doctor' John, to a male confidante. John has wed Charlotte, his seventeen-year-old patient at the Thornton House asylum, an obsessive defacer of classical texts, her bizarre annotations providing an alternative and bloody history of a Roman playhouse. Ignored by his bride, a despondent John belatedly realises that Charlotte's insistence on Constanza for their wedding trip was so she might locate the ruins of this mythical theatre. It's pointless my attempting a synopsis — I'm sure literary allusions flew over my head without my even realising they were there. Even so, I still enjoyed the story (though not so much as The Translation of Aqbar) and it's only fitting that Out of the Past should end on a bloodthirsty note.

I was wondering how you would synopsize this story the other day. To me, filed firmly under "don't know what I'd been reading but enjoyed it tremendously".