Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  The eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson reviewed this book in The New Yorker when it first appeared in 1944, in an article called ‘A treatise on horror’. He thinks that we have a longing for mystic experience that manifests itself during periods of social confusion, and we try to soothe ourselves with imaginary horror when real horrors are too apparent (there was, of course, a war on). He’s a bit snooty about most of the stories here, preferring to tell us about an ideal anthology he would compile himself, including stories by Poe, Melville, Gogol and Kafka. In his view, the supreme horror tale is one that probes ‘psychological caverns’ and ‘disquieting obsessions’. And he doesn’t find anything frightening here: ‘I find it very hard to imagine that any of these particular tales could scare anyone over ten’.

  Well, they scared the Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda when he was twelve or thirteen, took the book out of his local library and read one or two stories after school each night. ‘Have I yet spoken the word bliss?’ he writes in 2013. He loved them all, especially the two Lovecraft stories, ‘The Rats in the Walls’ and ‘The Dunwich Horror’. The book truly lives up to its name, ‘for it contains thrilling and disquieting stories you will never forget – in one or two especially frightening cases, no matter how hard you try.’

  “I was over ten when I read this book – though only just – and I didn’t believe in anything supernatural. I still don’t”

  I was over ten when I read this book – though only just – and I didn’t believe in anything supernatural. I still don’t: I’m with the idea that once something has been shown to exist, then it’s natural. But my scepticism doesn’t run deep and my disbelief is often suspended, and not just when I’m reading a story. My mother, a very rational agnostic, believed she was psychic and had visions. She once told me in a matter-of-fact way that her brother sat on her bed and talked to her shortly after he died. I’ve never known what to make of that. My mother-in-law was a Christian who believed in spiritualism. The beliefs and experiences of these women didn’t frighten them. If anything, they were comforted.

  As I turn the pages, I feel a pleasurable anticipation and a faint twinge of fear. I’m not sure what I’m afraid of: is it that the stories will disappoint, will seem contrived and silly and old-fashioned and not a bit scary? Or is it the opposite fear, that they will reawaken my dormant childhood terrors? Especially the terror and the allure of the secret snow?

  Straight away I discover something I’ve forgotten, that the stories are divided into two parts: tales of terror and tales of the supernatural. These are not the same thing, it appears. And as I dip in and out, I find that not all of the supernatural tales are designed to frighten: there are a few that are whimsical, poignant or funny. The only one I remember is ‘Adam and Eve and Pinch Me’, by A. E. Coppard. I read it again. It’s lovely, a visionary gem about a spirit of a little boy. He isn’t dead, he just hasn’t been born yet.

  But these are the exceptions. Nearly all these stories are designed to evoke horror. So I begin to read properly, from the beginning, from the Tales of Terror. And almost at once I’m asking myself: where’s the terror? My reading raises no more than a frisson, a faint chill; sometimes a wry smile, or a snort of contempt. I always seem to know what’s coming – either because I remember the story, or because I’ve since read so many like it. What might once have been original and startling has been overtaken by a host of tired imitations. There’s a caricature action man fighting a sea of ravening insects in ‘Leiningen Versus the Ants’, by Carl Stephenson; at one point our hero has to decide whether to be eaten by ants or piranhas. There are macho hunters with guns (‘The Most Dangerous Game’, by Richard Connell; ‘Taboo’, by Geoffrey Household). There’s a batty old Southern belle living with her mummified lover (‘A Rose for Emily’ by William Faulkner). There are beings walled up alive (‘The Black Cat’, by Edgar Allan Poe; ‘La Grande Breteche’ by Honore de Balzac). There are severed heads (‘Moonlight Sonata’, by Alexander Woollcott; ‘Pollock and the Porroh Man’, by H. G. Wells, both of which I find quite a hoot). Husband poisoners, wife murderers… Ho hum. I start skimming. I found this ghost-train stuff scary? Unbelievable. I feel both sad and relieved. Well, I ask myself, what did you expect? You’re all grown-up now.

  “almost at once I’m asking myself: where’s the terror? My reading raises no more than a frisson, a faint chill; sometimes a wry smile, or a snort of contempt”

  ‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow’ is in the Terror section but I put it aside. I’m going to read it last of all.

  In the Tales of the Supernatural section, things start looking up. There are still plenty of disappointingly unscary tales, however, and the monsters are not that monstrous in the age of digital wizardry. There’s nothing here that you might not find in an average episode of that popular television show for children, Dr Who. The giant caterpillars (‘Caterpillars’ by E. F. Benson) now strike me as extremely silly, and the giant squiggly monster that once scared the bejesus out of me in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dunwich Horror’ now seems daft and overblown, and there’s far too much backwoods hillbilly-speak. But some stories I do find quite creepy and unsettling, though it’s the merest ghost of the fear I once felt. And the more creepy they are, the more I like them.

  “But some stories I do find quite creepy and unsettling, though it’s the merest ghost of the fear I once felt. And the more creepy they are, the more I like them.”

  Part of the attraction, oddly enough, is that the tales are so old. The anthology predates the Stephen King generation of horror writers, but even for 1944, it’s quite a hoary selection (Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’, a good story of its kind, sticks out like a severed thumb). Most of the authors wrote at least a century ago. Some of the side-effects of this are unfortunate: there’s a casual racism I never discerned the first time round, including two African witchdoctor curse tales where the haunting faces are deemed all the more hideous because they are black; and a slight but highly distressing tendency to regard intellectually challenged people as repellent.

  “it was Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural that left me with a lasting affection for nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century writing”

  But there are other things about the antiquity of these stories that I liked at the time, and I like them still. I remember I knew nothing about adult short stories then: I assumed it was the done thing to use such devices as the story within the story (sometimes the story within the story within the story); to pad things out with long descriptions and expositions and historic digressions and occult references and scientific explanations for weird phenomena that involve new-fangled practices such as mesmerism; to use florid, Baroque language; to refer mysteriously to Dr V— in the town of M—. These are tales of the grotesque, but also of the arabesque. They are nothing like the simple direct style of Lewis Carroll in the Alice books. Instead, there is much beating about the bush, which I found, and still sometimes find, perversely enchanting. Who today would begin a story ‘We do not remember to have seen any translated specimens of the productions of Mr de l’Aubepine’ or ‘It is, I confess, with considerable diffidence that I approach the strange narrative which I am about to relate.’?

  “There are it seems, two kinds of hauntings: one unwanted, one wanted.”

  Rather than Dickens or the Brontes, it was Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural that left me with a lasting affection for nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century writing: which in turn led to a love for the Gothic, for steampunk, and which in time led me to try my hand at writing historical fiction. The style certainly affected my own writing, with unfortunate results: at about the age of twelve I was convinced it was better to write ‘sable draperies’ than ‘black curtains’. But I was so young! Why didn’t I get impatient, skim these dense wodges of prose, these barely understood references to ‘the hideous Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhuzred in Olaus Worimus’ Latin version, as printed in Spain in the seventeenth century’? Because of
what I knew already: patience is essential. Terror needs a build-up.

  There are it seems, two kinds of hauntings: one unwanted, one wanted. The unwanted ones worked powerfully on me as a child and have some effect still. Not that I am still afraid of a cat (Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’) or a demonic monkey with red eyes (Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’) or an invisible thing that tries to strangle you (Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Horla’; Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘What Was It?’) or that clings to you with a loathsome adoration (Robert Hichens’s ‘How Love Came to Professor Guildea’) or that makes itself a twisted face out of a sheet (M. R. James’s wonderfully macabre and witty ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’). It’s not fear any more: it’s a memory, or a recognition, of fear. These stories, I realise now, are metaphors for a recurring psychological state that cannot be shaken off: fear itself, guilt, grief, anxiety, disgust, obsession, the effects of chronic physical pain, panic, despair. We talk about such feelings as creatures: the monkey on your back, the black dog. I had a happy childhood, I believe, and yet all those feelings came and went, and don’t I know them still? To think that the monkey has gone, at last, you are free, and then in the corner, a glimpse of those red eyes… This, no doubt, was what Edmund Wilson was on about in his talk of probing psychological caverns, though on the whole he thinks the probing is clumsy. But aren’t all stories of hauntings about psychology? The American writer Michael Chabon wrote an essay about ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, which he reckons is one of the best short stories ever written, and he summed up its appeal: ‘A great ghost story is all psychology: in careful and accurate detail, it presents 1) a state of perception, by no means rare in human experience, in which the impossible vies with the undeniable evidence of the senses; and 2) the range of emotions brought on by that perception.’

  “These stories, I realise now, are metaphors for a recurring psychological state that cannot be shaken off”

  The wanted hauntings are more interesting to me still. Here the build-up that is essential to terror really comes into play. I had assumed that such a build-up would be full of gloomy scenery and sinister portents, and sometimes that’s true, but often it’s quite the opposite. In the stories that worked best for me as a child, that still work for me as an adult, I’m not depressed: I’m seduced, just as the heroes of the story are seduced. I know something horrible is going to happen and that knowledge crouches in the background, but what I’m reading is often a very pleasant narrative. The hero experiences new surroundings, new sensations. It might be in a house, or a country scene, or a walled garden. It might be quite mundane but also inexplicably soothing, relaxing, full of sensual beauty. The trap is being baited.

  “In the stories that worked best for me as a child, that still work for me as an adult, I’m not depressed: I’m seduced”

  The hero is not necessarily an unwitting victim. He may be targeted for revenge. Sometimes he actively pursues his fate. (I say ‘he’ because all these fifty-two stories except two are written by men, and all except one have a male protagonist. And yes, this extreme gender imbalance disturbs me greatly now, particularly as one of the editors was a woman. But the first time round, I didn’t even notice it. I think I just assumed, as we all did then, that if there was any collecting of decent writing to be done, most if not all of it would be by men.)

  A surprising number of men in these stories seek out haunted houses in a spirit of jovial challenge, up for a lark. Others have a pride of ownership, a love of ancient buildings that may have passed down to them through the family. Others are fired by the zeal of the scientist or scholar, impelled to discover a world of the spirit that lies beyond our everyday world.

  It strikes me now that these grown men yearn for adventures with ghosts or journeys to a spirit world in just the way that as a child I used to yearn for adventures when I read Enid Blyton, or journeys to another world when I read about Narnia. The difference in these stories is crucial, however. The men don’t ever get to those worlds: instead, they deliberately or unwittingly permit creatures from those worlds to enter ours. And it’s always a terrible, terrible mistake.

  “It strikes me now that these grown men yearn for adventures with ghosts or journeys to a spirit world in just the way that as a child I used to yearn for adventures”

  So there goes my last hypothesis. Or rather, it needs qualifying. I am transported into the world of these men, a different yet natural and recognisable world of the past, and I see through their eyes; but I don’t make the next jump into the supernatural, as I did from Eustace’s house into Narnia. The otherworldly creatures come into the men’s world, and hence to me.

  Being men, they are susceptible to the charms of young women. And so the seduction becomes blatantly erotic. Several stories feature a siren, a femme fatale, who is not what she seems. I remember them well. Beatrice in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ is an innocent girl reared in a garden of deadly flowers, who has become as poisonous as they are. Helen Vaughan in Arthur Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’ is the opposite of innocent. She’s the mis-begotten child of a disastrous experiment to alter the brain to perceive the spirit world. Everyone says she is at once the most beautiful woman and the most repulsive they have ever set eyes on. Here we are back in the pagan realm of fauns and satyrs, of the piper at the gates of dawn, Prince Caspian’s dancers, or perhaps of Norman Lindsay’s roguish paintings: but whereas they are benign, Machen’s creatures are utterly demonic. He has a surprisingly effective way of conveying this: instead of telling us what they are like, his narrators protest that they can’t say, it is too horrible.

  “This isn’t supposed to work. You are not supposed to convey horror by telling your readers something is horrible.”

  This isn’t supposed to work. You are not supposed to convey horror by telling your readers something is horrible.

  This is Edmund Wilson’s main complaint against H. P. Lovecraft, in a dry comment in another essay on horror: ‘Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words – especially if you are going, at the end, to produce an invisible whistling octopus.’ He’s right; but not, perhaps, when it comes to overimaginative children.

  Again, in Machen’s tale, you don’t go to the spirit world: they come to you, and Helen is the intermediary, a glamorous socialite who surrounds herself with unsuspecting admirers, then summons her otherworldly friends. The experience drives men to suicide. ‘How can it be?’ cries one distressed man. ‘How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?’ How well I remember reading this, and my eager imagination trying to picture black suns and melting earth and ‘this thing’ that is too horrible to imagine. The results were far more disturbing than any graphic description could be. The first time I read ‘The Great God Pan’, I couldn’t sleep. It’s a bit of a mess as a story, I think now, but it’s still pretty creepy (Edmund Wilson disdains it).

  Another story with a great build-up, ‘Ancient Sorceries’ by Algernon Blackwood, has a meek little Englishman on holiday leaving a train on impulse to visit a sleepy medieval hilltop town in France. Nothing much happens at first: he stays at the inn, wanders around the town, gradually succumbs with languor and pleasure to the hushed atmosphere: ‘It was all very charming, and made him think of himself as dressed in very soft velvet somehow, and the floors seemed padded, the walls provided with cushions.’ At the same time he notices that the townspeople are pretending not to watch him, and that the innkeeper is a large woman who resembles ‘a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake… a great mouser on the watch’.

  The siren is Ilse, the innkeeper’s daughter, whom our hero first encounters by touching something in a dark corridor: ‘It was soft and warm in texture, indescribably fragrant and about the height of his shoulder; and he immediately thought of a furry, sweet-smelling kitten. The next minute he knew it was something quite different.’


  Of course he falls for the sweet demure young girl, and gradually the secret life of the town is revealed: everyone is a witch and devil worshipper, descended from a long line of such evil heretics, and he himself is one of them and they are reclaiming his soul. Alas, at the climax, when they all pop off to the black Sabbath, things collapse into absurdity: the transformed Ilse shrieks ‘Satan is there!’ as if the VIP guest has just turned up at the party. But I did enjoy the build-up – the intensely tactile seduction, the skilful use of the ambiguous qualities of the cat. It still gives me what another story describes as ‘the fun of the shudder’.

  The most seductive shuddering, however, I found in Oliver Onions’s story ‘The Beckoning Fair One’. A writer leases an old apartment to complete his novel; gradually he falls in love first with the house itself, and then with its mysterious ghost. We never find out anything about this ghost: we never see her and we cannot even be sure she exists, except in the writer’s mind, but bit by bit he is lured into her spell, and all the time he is convinced that he is the pursuer. It seems such a picture of innocent happy domesticity – a house full of white paint and sunlight and flowers – and the horrors are gentle and almost imperceptible, but so much is conveyed in the sound of a woman brushing her hair. And again, I recognise my feelings now as a slightly more muted version of those when I first read the story.