by Matt Cardin
A Suspicious Scuttling Sound . . .
In “The Beast with Five Fingers,” Eustace has had a box delivered to him, containing what he thinks is some kind of small animal. It escapes in the library of the “gloomy Georgian mansion” (Harvey 1919, 32) where he lives. He pursues the scuttling sound to the top of the library’s iron corkscrew stairs and receives a shock:
Quickly he stole on tiptoe in the dim moonshine in the direction of the noise, feeling as he went for one of the switches. His fingers touched the metal knob at last. He turned on the electric light.
About ten yards in front of him, crawling along the floor, was a man’s hand. Eustace stared at it in utter astonishment. It was moving quickly, in the manner of a geometer caterpillar, the fingers humped up one moment, flattened out the next; the thumb appeared to give a crab-like motion to the whole. While he was looking, too surprised to stir, the hand disappeared round the corner. (42–43)
Matt Cardin
Source: Harvey, W. F. 1919. “The Beast with Five Fingers.” In The New Decameron, 29–71. New York: Robert M. McBride & Co.
Although anthologized in the interim, “The Beast with Five Fingers” was not collected until 1928, when it became the title story of Harvey’s second collection, The Beast with Five Fingers and Other Stories. For this collection, according to Richard Dalby in his introduction to The Double Eye, Harvey foundationally changed and rewrote the story’s first two pages, while deleting some text from the story’s latter half. It is this revised version that tends to be reprinted and that has appeared many times in anthologies of terror and horror. It appears, for example, with one of Harvey’s other notable stories, “August Heat,” in Alexander Laing’s classic anthology The Haunted Omnibus (1937), and it was even included by Sayers in her Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, Second Series (1931).
The story’s prologue concerns the eccentric and wealthy Adrian Borlsover, whose ancestors were “generous patrons of odd sciences, founders of querulous sects, [and] trustworthy guides to the bypath meadows of erudition” (Harvey 2004, 310). Toward the end of his life, Borlsover lost his sight. However, he developed “powers of touch that seemed almost uncanny” (311). For reasons only hinted at, but never made clear, Borlsover’s hand develops autonomous sentience, and on its master’s death has itself delivered to Borlsover’s nephew, Eustace, whom it proceeds to torment. Harvey’s storytelling is engaging and the narrative is tightly paced, and both qualities have doubtless contributed to the story’s ongoing popularity.
“The Beast with Five Fingers” is perhaps the best-known story in the severed-yet-animated hand subgenre, not to be confused with disembodied hands of a more ghostly and less corporeal taxonomy, such as Arthur Quiller-Couch’s “A Pair of Hands” (1898). One of the earlier literary examples of this subgenre is J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand” (1861). Another key example is Maurice Renard’s influential 1920 horror novel The Hands of Orlac. More recently Clive Barker, notable for his grisly explorations of the subgenre known as “body horror,” explored similar territory in his story “The Body Politic” (1984). The hands in these stories invariably represent the fragmented self, composed of separate, autonomous, intelligent personalities, often in rebellion, with an ability to scuttle and scheme against the identity of the body as a whole.
There is also no shortage of severed-yet-animated hands in film and television, as seen in Orlacs Hände (1924), The Addams Family (1964–1966), The Hand (1981), and Evil Dead 2 (1987). The most notable case of Harvey’s influence in this subgenre is the loose cinematic adaptation of The Beast with Five Fingers released in 1946, directed by Robert Florey and starring Robert Alda and Peter Lorre, with a script by Curt Siodmak, who is best known for his work on Universal Studios’ The Wolf Man (1941). While Siodmak’s adaptation of Harvey’s story is highly enjoyable, it substantially departs from Harvey’s original narrative, changing the setting to an Italian village, adding a number of characters, and making the character of Adrian Borlsover, renamed Francis Ingram in the film, a master pianist (a nod, perhaps, to Orlac, whose eponymous protagonist was likewise a pianist).
Brian J. Showers
See also: Barker, Clive; Body Horror; Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; The Hands of Orlac; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan.
Further Reading
Dalby, Richard. 2009. Introduction to The Double Eye, by W. F. Harvey, v–xvi. Carlton-in-Coverdale: Tartarus Press.
Forrest, Richard W. 2014. “Body Parts.” In The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 55–58. London and New York: Routledge.
Harvey, W. F. [1919] 2004. “The Beast with Five Fingers.” In The Wordsworth Book of Horror Stories, 310–329. Ware, Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions.
Rowe, Katherine. 1999. “The Beast with Five Fingers: Gothic Labor Relations in Victorian Ghost Stories.” In Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
BEAUMONT, CHARLES (1929–1967)
Charles Beaumont, born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago on January 2, 1929, was an American author of horror and science fiction who is probably best known for his classic Twilight Zone teleplays from the late 1950s and early 1960s.
His parents, Charles and Letty, were working-class; his father was employed in the railroad industry. Charles was a sickly youngster, and the relationship between mother and son was not always an easy one; he would later write about this period with great detachment and insight, especially his uneasy bond with his mother, in stories such as the acclaimed “Miss Gentilbelle.” As a youth, Charles L. Nutt was restricted to a year’s bed rest to convalesce from spinal meningitis. He missed a great deal of school, but it was during the recovery from this difficult period that he discovered the world within books. He also took up drawing in earnest, for which he had already displayed a natural aptitude.
As a young man, Nutt, now called Charles Beaumont by his own choosing due to dissatisfaction with his surname (a change that he made legal as an adult), married Helen Broun after leaving the military, and they eventually had four children after striking out on their own for Los Angeles, California.
Once in Southern California, Beaumont was at last able to meet others of similar disposition and was to form deep, lasting friendships with Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan, George Clayton Johnson (Ocean’s 11, 1959), John Tomerlin (Challenge the Wind, 1967), Chad Oliver (The Winds of Time, 1957), and several others in a loose alliance that came to be known as the “Southern California Writing School.” As their careers progressed, they would each find success as writers of short stories, scripts for television (including The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents), film, and novels. Beaumont was the nucleus of this group with his frenetic, sparking energy.
Beaumont’s fiction and his television scripts are often marked by exceptional strokes of imaginative whimsy, tinged with a subtextual bent toward social justice, as evinced in works as varied as the 1960 story “The Howling Man” (later adapted by Beaumont into a memorable 1960 Twilight Zone episode) and his unfinished novel excerpt, “My Grandmother’s Japonicas.” His single greatest tale is likely the remarkable “Black Country” from 1954, which explores the societal role of African Americans by describing the posthumous influence of a (fictional) black jazz musician. It was the first work of fiction ever published in Playboy.
As a stylist, Beaumont is second only to early Bradbury, his mentor. With regard to themes, he worked a large canvas; from genre works in horror and science fiction to straight literary fiction and even comedy, his talent was immense, seemingly unlimited. He usually painted vivid portraits of conflicted, realistic characters in unusual dilemmas of a moral nature and always did so with sensitivity, insight, and intelligence. As was the norm within his peer group of writers, his stories typically featured only one minor element of supernaturalism, or some aspect of progress gone awry (a frequent supernatural stand
-in).
While on the set of his greatest artistic triumph, director Roger Corman’s 1962 cinematic adaptation of The Intruder from Beaumont’s eponymous literary novel, about integrating the Jim Crow South, Beaumont began to exhibit symptoms of neural damage. It was initially believed to be the effects of stress, and he was sent to a variety of experts before finally being diagnosed with an incurable, terminal neurological condition. He succumbed after a four-year struggle, at age 38, on February 21, 1967.
Beaumont was singular in his sphere of influence, in that he could inspire others to do things they would never do on their own. This inspirational aspect of his persona was key to his creative influence and to the way he was able to position himself in the modern mass media. Given that his output was restricted to roughly thirteen short years, he was remarkably prolific and consistent, and he remains one of the key, albeit overlooked, figures in genre literature of the latter half of the twentieth century.
Jason V Brock
See also: Bradbury, Ray; Matheson, Richard; Nolan, William F.
Further Reading
French, Lawrence. 2010. “Richard Matheson Remembers His Good Friend Charles Beaumont.” Cinefantastique Online, March 24. http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2010/03/richard-matheson-remembers-his-good-friend-charles-beaumont.
Grams, Martin, Jr. 2008. The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing.
Prosser, Lee. 2010. Running from the Hunter: The Life and Works of Charles Beaumont. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
Zicree, Marc Scott. 1992. The Twilight Zone Companion. 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: Silman-James Press.
BELOVED
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved was published by Knopf in 1987. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1987. In 2006 the New York Times named Beloved the best work of American fiction of the previous twenty-five years.
While editing The Black Book (1974), Morrison read about a slave, Margaret Garner, who, in 1856, escaped from a northern Kentucky plantation with her family into Cincinnati, Ohio. During their recapture, Garner killed one of her children with the intent of killing all four and herself in order to prevent them from returning to the violence of slavery. This horror became the inspiration for Beloved, though Morrison has noted that she wished to explore imaginatively the themes that Garner’s predicament provokes rather than writing strictly historical fiction. She decided to write a ghost story: “The terrain, slavery, was formidable and pathless. To invite readers (and myself) into the repellant landscape (hidden, but not completely; deliberately buried, but not forgotten) was to pitch a tent in a cemetery of ghosts” (Morrison 2004, xvii).
In Beloved, Sethe runs from Sweet Home in Kentucky to her mother-in-law’s home near Cincinnati. When slave catchers find the family, Sethe attempts to kill her children and herself, but she only is able to kill her two-year-old girl. Beloved has a circular structure as characters try to avoid their pasts. Sethe deliberately works to forget repetitive traumatic memories of her past, or “rememories” as she calls them. Rememories are so vividly horrific that she believes they can hurt her daughter Denver, who is ignorant of her mother’s past. Sethe’s loss of her mother when she was a child, her sexual and physical torture at Sweet Home, and her infanticide cannot be repressed, and they return in the form of a spectral presence named Beloved.
Beloved is set in a haunted house where the lost child’s ghost initially manifests as a poltergeist and then arrives as a lost young woman named Beloved. Most critics agree that Beloved is the ghost of the lost child, the eruption of the past in the present. Through her supernatural knowledge and abilities, Beloved forces Sethe to relive her past and share her pain with others. To represent this violent history, Morrison uses the conventions of supernatural literature to illustrate how the trauma of slavery haunts the present and leaves its mark on later generations. A movie adaptation of Beloved directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Oprah Winfrey was released in 1998.
Melanie R. Anderson
See also: The Haunted House or Castle; Morrison, Toni; Psychological Horror.
Further Reading
Anderson, Melanie R. 2013. Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Brogan, Kathleen. 1998. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Denard, Carolyn C., ed. 2008. Toni Morrison: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Morrison, Toni. [1987] 2004. Beloved. New York: Vintage.
BENSON, E. F. (1867–1940)
Edward Frederic Benson was an English writer of novels, short stories, dramas, biographies, and reminiscences. He was the fifth child of Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson (1829–1896), the man who, on January 12, 1895, gave Henry James the idea for The Turn of the Screw. His brothers Arthur Christopher and Robert Hugh were also writers.
In 1891, E. F. Benson received a first-class honors degree from King’s College, Cambridge, then worked on the staff of the British School of Archaeology in Athens and as a member of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. But in 1893, inspired and perhaps assisted by Henry James, Benson published Dodo, whose success inspired him to continue writing. From 1895 until his death Benson was a full-time professional writer, and horrific fiction is but a small portion of his output: nine novels and eleven collections of short stories were published during his lifetime.
Among Benson’s novels, The Luck of the Vails (1901) is supernatural, the ironically named Luck bringing misfortune to generations of the Vail family, but the plot is that of a traditional mystery, complete with unexpected denouement. The Image in the Sand (1905) makes use of Benson’s Egyptian background to describe an amulet that restrains the evil Set-nekht; when it is broken, Set-nekht possesses young Ida Jervis, who is in turn used by the evil Henderson. The Angel of Pain (1905) has as its central theme the idea of communing with nature and discovering the nature god Pan; after some successes, Tom Merivale meets his unhappy fate beneath Pan’s crushing hooves. The novel reuses the central ideas from Benson’s earlier short story “The Man Who Went Too Far” (1904), but both pieces appear indebted to the works of Algernon Blackwood, whose fiction often used variations of this theme. (The two seem never to have met, but Blackwood was a student in Wellington College, established by Edward White Benson prior to his becoming archbishop.) Benson’s The Inheritor (1930) reuses Pan on both a literal and a metaphoric level. Steven Gervase inherits the curse that leaves him a spiritual Pan: soulless, unable to love or bond with others; when his child is born a literal Pan, he rather unconvincingly commits suicide. The enormously overlong Colin (1923) and Colin II (1925) describe the results of an ancestral bargain with the devil; the present Colin Stanier is self-consciously wicked but his son’s refusal to embrace evil leads at last to Colin’s repentance. Benson’s last fantastic novel is Raven’s Brood (1934), an atypical work in that it uses lower- and middle-class characters along with folkloric and paganistic elements reminiscent of those used by Arthur Machen. (Again, the two do not seem to have met.)
E. F. Benson’s “Caterpillars”: A Cryptic Nightmare
E. F. Benson’s widely anthologized short story “Caterpillars” was first published in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories. It is told in flashback, with the nameless narrator describing his stay at the Villa Cascana on the Italian Riviera, where he was once the guest of the Stanleys. He recounts how the villa was beautiful but somehow a place where something was fundamentally wrong. Unable to sleep, he witnessed an unoccupied bedroom swarming with enormous yellowish-grey caterpillars with mouths that opened sideways and pincers rather than legs. It might have been a dream, but the next day fellow guest Arthur Inglis has found such a caterpillar; it survives being thrown into a fountain, and when Inglis and the narrator encounter it again, the caterpillar crawls onto Inglis before it is killed. That night, the narra
tor glimpses the monstrous caterpillars crawling into Inglis’s room. An epilogue occurring six months later, in England, has Mrs. Stanley explaining that Inglis has terminal cancer, that he seems to have developed it at the Villa Cascana, and that there had been a fatal case earlier in the unoccupied bedroom.
The subtext of “Caterpillars” is remarkably muddled. It is unclear if, for example, Benson is implying that certain horrible diseases have malign existences and physical manifestations. Or he may mean to convey that the caterpillars are a metaphor for something else. Though one doubts this was Benson’s intention, the story might be seen as an attack on Italy, fair on the outside and corrupt within, and its corruption and destruction of the innocent English. It could likewise be argued that the horrible caterpillars might represent a repressed and emergent sexuality, or the inescapability of destructive fate, or really any number of themes. The story remains a puzzle, presenting situations and images without a resolution.
Richard Bleiler
Benson’s short horror stories are fairly conventional and were collected and published in four books during his lifetime: The Room in the Tower (1912), Visible and Invisible (1923), Spook Stories (1928), and More Spook Stories (1934). At the same time, while Benson often used animals as horrific elements—apes and monkeys figure in “The Ape” and “Monkeys,” respectively; cats and cat-gods in “The Cat” and “Bagnell Terrace”; giant caterpillars in “Caterpillars”; leeches and slugs in “Negotium Perambulans . . .” and “‘And No Bird Sings’”—his most horrible and memorable characters are, interestingly, always women. Lady Sybil Rorke in “Inscrutable Degrees” and Nellie Mostyn in “Christopher Came Back” are murderers and sadists; Mrs. Stone in “The Room in the Tower” and Mrs. Amworth in “Mrs. Amworth” are vampires and monsters; Mrs. Ray in “The Sanctuary,” Mrs. Andrews in “Mrs. Andrews’ Control,” and Mrs. Cumberbatch in “Mr. Tilly’s Séance” are active Satanists and idiotic spiritualists; and the otherwise amiable Mrs. Acres of “The Outcast” is the reincarnation of Judas. In “The Face” horrors are visited on harmless Hester Ward: she is haunted by dreams of ruins and an abandoned grave, then taken by a maligned and misshapen being, never to be seen again.
