Paws and Rooms

I've lately found myself often in coffee shops or parks between jobs so I've had plenty of time to read. Mainly still from H.P. Lovecraft Selects and I've recently read two more stories from the compilation; "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells and "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs. The latter is of course the more famous story but I also consider it to be much more effective, as much as I did like "The Red Room".

"The Red Room" is another example, like "The Dead Valley", of accomplishing a lot with very little, of creating the sensation of horror from a few subtle suggestions. A man agrees to stay in a haunted room and his courage is shaken by minor but truly inexplicable occurrences. Simply the mental image conjured by a "red room" accomplishes a lot. I found myself thinking of the interiors from Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers.

I don't think I'd ever read "The Monkey's Paw". Though it's quite possible I did but forgot. Sometimes when I look through my blog entries from fifteen years ago I discover even good movies or stories I'd forgotten all about having seen or read. In any case, I was certainly familiar with the concept even before the first airing of The Simpsons episode that parodied it in 1991. I was pleased by the actual story's psychological subtlety, the tormenting ambiguity about the guilt the main character bears for the death that resulted from his use of the paw--and the more fascinatingly murky subject of whether it was a good idea to resurrect the dead man.

The old man turned and regarded her, and his voice shook. "He has been dead ten days, and besides he - I would not tell you else, but - I could only recognize him by his clothing. If he was too terrible for you to see then, how now?"

The knocking at the door at the end of the story reminded me a bit of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "The Body" which concludes with Buffy's sister nearly resurrecting their dead mother. The end of "The Monkey's Paw" is better, though, because it's not as clear that the resurrected person is a zombie or just plain and simply alive again. The man and wife in the story, assuming the wife doesn't get her hands on the paw, will always have that wedge between them because one expected a zombie and the other expected their normal, happy, living son. There will always be the unanswered question and the husband will always have to stand by a position that can never be proved. That's one sinister paw.

A Wrong Route

Horror exists in the feelings inspired by strange and threatening things, something H.P. Lovecraft demonstrated well in many stories where the precise threat remained ambiguously defined. "The Dead Valley", a story by the architect Ralph Adams Cram, is commended by Lovecraft in his essay on horror fiction in which he says Cram "achieves a memorably potent degree of vague regional horror through subtleties of atmosphere and description." An effective tale about a place in the forest that inexplicably saps the life out of anything that enters it, it's hard to imagine it wasn't an influence on "The Colour Out of Space".

The story has a great contrast in tone. The beginning is almost disconcertingly innocent, a description of two affectionate friends who go together to buy a puppy because the thing is irresistibly cute.

He was a round, woolly puppy, so funny that Nils and I sat down on the ground and laughed at him, until he came and played with us in so jolly a way that we felt that there was only one really desirable thing in life, and that was the little dog of the old man from across the hills. But alas! we had not half money enough wherewith to buy him . . .

When the two have the money to pay for the animal, the narrator describes idly looking at their journey as a dangerous adventure despite the destination not being especially distant. This adds the impression of cruelty and excessive punishment for youthful folly when something starts to go wrong and no-one can say why. Here's a kind of terribly beautiful paragraph:

And the air was stagnant,—dead. The atmosphere seemed to lie upon the body like the weight of sea on a diver who has ventured too far into its awful depths. What we usually call silence seems so only in relation to the din of ordinary experience. This was silence in the absolute, and it crushed the mind while it intensified the senses, bringing down the awful weight of inextinguishable fear

The sense of awesome death pervades the strange encounter and it's not hard to believe the story was written by a man who designed gothic revival architecture.

Twitter Sonnet #1290

A verdict held beneath a desert sun.
A gold reflective watch recounts the time.
The racing dust begins a daily run.
The furtive wind commenced a morning rhyme.
Reluctant teas inform the tongue of taste.
Aspired hats assemble bands and brims.
Wasabi comes in tubes of mushy paste.
The flashy car had wheels with glowing rims.
An elf is pressed to lee of bluer moons.
A sailing cup appeared beyond the flow.
A desp'rate word traversed the pallid dunes.
In time the tired men could only row.
Distracted clocks misplace a hand or two.
A silver second swipes a golden clue.

Above painting by Caspar David Friedrich

That Confounded Mummy

It's hard to overstate the inconvenience of a neighbour who resurrects an ancient mummy to commit serial murders. This is the predicament in which the protagonist of Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lot No. 249" finds himself, another story from H.P. Lovecraft Selects. Longer than most of the other stories in the collection, it's a comfortable read with characters who are a little more amusing and idiosyncratic than anyone might expect who's familiar with Arthur Conan Doyle's work only through Sherlock Holmes. "Lot No. 249" is not the first story about a reanimated mummy but it is apparently the first one about such a mummy killing people.

The protagonist of "Lot No. 249", Ambercrombie Smith, is in some ways like Holmes, a bachelor described as having remarkable intelligence and insight, though described as not quite a genius.

Though a freshman at Oxford, the student was not so in medicine, for he had worked for four years at Glasgow and at Berlin, and this coming examination would place him finally as a member of his profession. With his firm mouth, broad forehead, and clear-cut, somewhat hard-featured face, he was a man who, if he had no brilliant talent, was yet so dogged, so patient, and so strong that he might in the end overtop a more showy genius.

Like Conan Doyle, he's a medical man, a man with some rough, edifying field experience under his belt before he went to college to get a degree to make his talents official in the eyes of the rest of the world. He has a Watson of sorts named Hasties and it's a pleasure seeing Conan Doyle indulge in some colloquial college boy lingo in conversations between the two.

"Have some whisky," said Abercrombie Smith at last between two cloudbursts. "Scotch in the jug and Irish in the bottle."

"No, thanks. I'm in for the sculls. I don't liquor when I'm training. How about you?"

"I'm reading hard. I think it best to leave it alone."

Hastie nodded, and they relapsed into a contented silence.

"By the way, Smith," asked Hastie, presently, "have you made the acquaintance of either of the fellows on your stair yet?"

"Just a nod when we pass. Nothing more."

"Hum! I should be inclined to let it stand at that. I know something of them both. Not much, but as much as I want. I don't think I should take them to my bosom if I were you. Not that there's much amiss with Monkhouse Lee."

"Meaning the thin one?"

The trouble starts when Smith is compelled to rush downstairs to aid his unconscious neighbour on the storey beneath his own flat. There's a mummy in the room but its ability to walk about on its own isn't revealed yet. Conan Doyle nicely chooses to reveal it slowly, primarily through the deductions of Smith instead of any description of the mummy in action that couldn't conceivably be interpreted as something else by an observer. So a lot of the story compels the reader's imagination to work out surrogate illumination. It works very well.

The Woods of Blood and Words

In his essay on horror fiction, H.P. Lovecraft devotes many words to Ambrose Bierce. One of those words are to call him "uneven" but mostly Lovecraft heaps praise on Bierce. The Ambrose Bierce story included in H.P. Lovecraft Selects is "The Death of Halpin Frayser", another story which seems to bleed out from the edges of its simple premise. "Bleed" definitely being the operative word for this fascinating, gory, dreamlike tale.

The Halpin Frayser of the title is a young man from Tennessee who moves to California, a weird point of identification for me because I was born in Tennessee and moved to California as a child. Halpin moved as an adult, though, after a youth spent with a mother with whom he shared a peculiar attachment.

In these two romantic natures was manifest in a signal way that neglected phenomenon, the dominance of the sexual element in all the relations of life, strengthening, softening, and beautifying even those of consanguinity. The two were nearly inseparable, and by strangers observing their manners were not infrequently mistaken for lovers.

But the story begins with Halpin wandering in the woods of Napa, beholding terrible and strange visions of blood that culminate in a walking corpse.

It was now long after nightfall, yet the interminable forest through which he journeyed was lit with a wan glimmer having no point of diffusion, for in its mysterious lumination nothing cast a shadow. A shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old wheel rut, as from a recent rain, met his eye with a crimson gleam. He stooped and plunged his hand into it. It stained his fingers; it was blood! Blood, he then observed, was about him everywhere.

All this actually ties into a murder mystery but Bierce avoids any attempt at contriving a plot, instead intriguingly leaving us with significant points, arranged seemingly at random but with a really great sense of dreamlike significance. It's a fascinating and disturbing tale and it's impossible for the reader not to compulsively allow his or her imagination to wander through disturbing paths in scrutinising it.

Twitter Sonnet #1297

Committed sports combine to make a box.
A timer clicked to one before the twelve.
A siding shed informs as manner talks.
In deeper grapes the seedless slowly delve.
An endless row of boards create the track.
As keys became the nails to hold the dirt.
A slowly drifting car was coming back.
Completed trains again redress the hurt.
A crispy bag contained forgotten salt.
Desired space approached the drying moon.
As water pulled the thick and soupy malt.
As travel took the driver further soon.
A dirty table holds the only drink.
The hope of scones began to sink.

Chasing the Werewolf

The second of two stories called "The Were-Wolf" in H.P. Lovecraft Selects is by Clemence Housman from 1896. Housman uses the werewolf as a very natural and effective inspiration for a story about identity.

In his essay on horror fiction, from whence the collection of stories is drawn, Lovecraft wrote, "Clemence Housman, in the brief novelette “The Were-wolf”, attains a high degree of gruesome tension and achieves to some extent the atmosphere of authentic folklore." This last part is certainly true from the beginning which is the description of a community by fireside from the point of view of a child. Already the tale provides an example of a human behaving as an animal when the boy is described as preferring to crawl on all fours. But the story doesn't centre on him, instead focusing on a pair of mighty brothers--Sweyn, whose prowess in almost everything is unsurpassed, and Christian, who alone can run faster than Sweyn.

The werewolf is a woman in white fur who charms everyone but Christian. I was surprised how similar this wolf woman was to the one in Marryatt's story--another very beautiful woman in white fur.

The woman being taken as a benevolent wonder by everyone else in the community is mirrored by growing distrust in Christian on the part of his brother. If the name "Christian" makes you think the story's going in the direction of a fairly obvious Christian allegory, I'm afraid you'd be right. But before Housman gets to that point she describes a fascinating chase scene when the woman, White Fell, tests Christian's famous speed. They seem to run through snow and woods for several nights and Christian starts to get delirious;

He grew bewildered, uncertain of his own identity, doubting of his own true form. He could not be really a man, no more than that running Thing was really a woman; his real form was only hidden under embodiment of a man, but what it was he did not know. And Sweyn's real form he did not know. Sweyn lay fallen at his feet, where he had struck him down—his own brother—he: he stumbled over him, and had to overleap him and race harder because she who had kissed Sweyn leapt so fast. "Sweyn, Sweyn, O Sweyn!"

This does have the flavour of folklore though with maybe too much of an analytic edge. And with descriptions of crushed limbs and blood it's about as gruesome as Lovecraft said, too.