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The Claw (first published simply as Claw in 1983, as by Jay Ramsey, for Richard Bachman-like reasons) could be said to form the middle of a thematic trilogy of early novels from Campbell, about parenthood: The Nameless (1981) is about the sheer anxiety of what, out there in the world, might prey on a child (mad cults, kidnappers and killers); The Influence (1988) is about the generational influences within a family that might prey on a child (mental illness and passed-on cycles of psychological abuse); The Claw, meanwhile, is about the physical abuse a child might suffer from their own parents. Like The Nameless, The Claw employs a zero-subtlety approach in using the supernatural to enact its theme. In the former novel, an evil cult kidnaps the main character’s child and inducts her into a life of ritualised, nihilistic murder; in The Claw, meanwhile, there’s an evil artefact (which belongs to an evil cult) that causes parents to have murderous impulses towards their child. The Claw of the title, then, is like a supernatural version of Hitchcock’s maguffin. For Hitchcock, the maguffin was the thing — the secret formula, the microfilm, whatever — that both the baddies and the goodies want and the protagonist has, which causes a lot of chasing around. Here, the Claw is the thing that unleashes in its main characters what, in some real people, doesn’t need any supernatural cause at all. The advantage of a supernatural maguffin, though, is it doesn’t require any deeper motivation for that behaviour — and, when it gets destroyed, the behaviour goes away. Not so in real life.

The story opens in rare territory for Campbell: overseas. In Nigeria to research his latest spy thriller, Alan Knight meets a British anthropologist, David Marlowe, who offers to drive him to the airport when he returns home. Once there, he asks a favour. The post from Lagos being what it was, he wants Alan to take a parcel back to England, and deliver it to the Foundation for African Studies. Alan agrees, and (he’s a bit of an idiot, considering he writes spy novels) only finds out when he’s passing through UK customs that it contains a potential weapon: a four-taloned metal claw. Fortunately, he’s let through, and that weekend, the Claw remains at the coastal Norfolk home he shares with his wife Liz and six-year-old daughter Anna. But he soon makes the trip to the Foundation in London — only to find he’s unaccountably left the thing at home. There’s worse to come, though. The Foundation’s Dr Hetherington tells him that David Marlowe has brutally, and for no apparent reason, murdered his wife and daughter — and that the Claw is an artefact belonging to a cult known as the Leopard Men, whose initiation rite requires its members to murder a young girl of their own blood. Incensed he was duped into letting such a repugnant thing into his home, Alan goes back, only to find it has been stolen. But its influence has started to take hold: suddenly unable to write, he starts getting tetchy with Anna…

The Claw’s effect isn’t only limited to the Knight family. A local man with a childlike mentality is found having killed, with his bare hands, one of the goats that graze the cliff near the Knights’ house. (Which inevitably sets up the idea of victims as scapegoats, but this doesn’t seem to have been developed.) Meanwhile in the Knight household itself, Alan’s growing hostility towards his daughter gets worse until he receives a phone call from Nigeria. Isaac Banjo, a translator at the University of Lagos who helped Marlowe in his researches into the Leopard Men, knows what’s going on, feels guilty about his part in it, and wants to help. Alan, though, has to come to Nigeria to put an end to things. This he does, but that leaves Liz alone with Anna, and Liz is also beginning to fall under the influence of the still-missing Claw.

I have to say that, though Ramsey Campbell is one of my favourite writers, this is not a book of his I’d recommend, unless (like me) you’re intent on reading all of his novels. And usually, with a writer whose work I know, I can still get something out of a lesser novel by considering it in terms of the development of their themes, or of their craft, and so on. And perhaps part of the problem is that I couldn’t do that for most of The Claw. The characters just don’t have the sort of depth Campbell usually endows them with. And this is particularly notable in a novel which deals with such a difficult central theme. Parents with violent impulses towards their children are repugnant as characters, and a lot has to be done to make it worth spending time with them. When Alan and Liz begin looking on their very young and vulnerable daughter with irritation and worse — “Liz watched her, loathing her babyishness. How could she once have loved and been proud of this child?” — they become very thin as characters, with no self-examination or awareness (necessarily so, I suppose, because of the demands of the plot). And there are too many chapters, it seems, in the middle of The Claw where we’re in the presence of Liz and Anna, and Liz is on the verge of violence towards Anna, and Anna is terrified, and nothing much else is going on. There’s one moment where I thought the novel was going to start engaging with its own themes in a more explicit way, when the hippie-ish barman, Jimmy, at one points says: “The absolute authority of parents is fascism in the home.” But this line isn’t examined any further, and that’s the last we hear of Jimmy as a character.

The strand of the story where Alan is out there in Nigeria investigating the cult — and investigations like that would normally make a novel, for me — are sketchy and unconvincing. (Campbell’s chapters set in Lagos are excellent evocations, I think — though I’ve never been there, and, it turns out, neither had Campbell. But when Alan and Isaac head into the jungle, it all starts to feel like low-budget scenery.) To top it all, the Leopard Men aren’t that interesting as a cult (certainly not as nihilistically evocative as the previous book’s Nameless). They feel a bit under-thought out, even generic, a bit obvious. Africa — Leopard Men. Marlowe — Heart of Darkness. Evil, cursed artefact from foreign shores. Even worse: “There is a legend told throughout Africa that the last Leopard Man will come from a far land and destroy the power of the claw.”

There may be a reason for this. (There are probably many — such as how difficult the subject must have been to write about.) Campbell says in his afterword (appended in 1992, when the novel was reissued under his own name) that after it was initially submitted, the manuscript went through some revisions. One of these was to add chapters from young Anna’s point of view, something he says he didn’t include in the first version. And these are the chapters where the book really comes alive. Faced with suddenly hostile, even alienating parents, Anna is the character in this novel who is allowed depth, and of course it’s a depth that’s all about sheer terror:

“She couldn’t tell anyone about mummy, it was too horrible a thing to say, so much so that it paralysed her mouth. The more she tried to say it, the less able she was… She was trapped inside herself.”

Or, my favourite line:

“The stranger who pretended to be mummy was made up of teeth and nails.”

When it came out in the US as Night of the Claw, Kirkus Reviews said it was “an overlong but steady, creepy, discomforting chiller—thanks to a subdued style, shifting viewpoints (including that of confused, terrified Anna), and richly detailed backgrounds.” Perhaps my own reaction is down to knowing Campbell could do so much better, as he does in Incarnate (where parental abuse isn’t a major theme, but is part of at least one of the characters’ stories), The Influence, and his later novel The House on Nazareth Hill. I can’t help wondering if his adding chapters from Anna’s point of view aren’t something of a breakthrough moment in his craft (even though he’d written short stories from a child’s point of view before, in Dark Companions — though that collection only came out the previous year.) Certainly, the final chapters, where Anna escapes from her increasingly hostile mother and flees across a confusing coastal landscape at night to take refuge in a house that proves to have been the scene of an even worse Claw-inspired act of parental violence, is pure Campbell: the nightmare journey, and in particular the nightmare exploration of an empty-but-not-empty house.

After the first three Books of Blood came out, both Barker and his publishers knew he needed to present the world with a novel. His initial idea was for something Sphere thought too fantasy-ish for a man they were intent on marketing as a horror writer, so he put that idea to one side (it would eventually become Weaveworld), and set about writing something more traditionally in the horror mould. Initially titled Mamoulian’s Game, it came out in 1985 as The Damnation Game.

The novel opens in war-ravaged Warsaw, in which “the thief” hears about a legendary man who never loses at cards. Seeking him out among the rubble and destruction proves tricky, but it seems this man has been waiting for him… The story then leaps forward to the present day, where Marty Strauss is serving time for robbery in Wandsworth Prison. He’s offered the chance of an early release, if he goes to work for Joseph Whitehead, the super-rich head of a worldwide pharmaceutical empire. Whitehead, it seems, is expecting trouble, and needs a bodyguard he can trust — and a man with gambling debts (which is what drove Marty to crime), is just the sort of person he needs. But when the trouble comes, it’s in the form of Mamoulian, a man possessed of supernatural power, including the ability to raise and control the dead. This is the card-player that Whitehead (“the thief”) met and played in Warsaw, in a moment that started him on the path to being the head of a massive corporate empire. But Mamoulian considers there’s a debt to be repaid, and has come to claim it.

The first thing to say about Barker’s first novel, I think, is how naturally he seems to have taken to novel-writing after the (admittedly long) short stories of the Books of Blood. Barker is focused in every scene, taking time to bring out of every character and situation some special detail, as though he’s relishing each moment like a fine wine. That said, this is a long novel, with surprisingly few characters. Perhaps an ingrained habit from short stories and plays with a limited troupe of players kept him from sprawling into the sort of large cast you’d expect in a longer book?

Whenever he’s spoken or written about The Damnation Game, Barker has made it clear what its core inspiration was: “At the heart of the novel is the story of Faust.” In particular, it seems what fascinated him was how a modern version of the Faust story, shorn of its religious underpinnings (he characterised the original Faust as being a Renaissance man punished by a Medieval world) would play out.

I have to admit, though, I’m not so sure the Faust aspect really stands out for me. There are two things you really need for a Faust story: a Devil, and a Pact. As the novel goes on, instead of, for instance, Mamoulian developing into a truly Mephistophelean figure, he gets watered down. Initially threatening and mysterious, the more we learn about him, the more merely human he’s revealed to be. He’s no Devil, just a man who has some magician’s tricks, and what’s more is a very old man, with “depleted energies”. He’s not some all-powerful archetypal Evil come to claim a soul, he’s tired and he doesn’t make it clear for a long time exactly what he wants. Because, it turns out, there’s also no real pact, either. Whatever Mamoulian has turned up to claim, it wasn’t agreed by him and Whitehead. (It certainly wasn’t signed in blood.) It turns out, in fact, more to be something Mamoulian assumed he’d be getting but didn’t, so he starts to come across as more petulant and resentful than full of the sort of Judgement of Hell you’d get in a Faust story. Barker has said his modern version of Faust is about a world in which “Every man is his own Mephistopheles”, but I don’t really see how that works with this narrative. Perhaps it’s simply because Barker would go on to create a far more effective and powerful Faustian story in The Hellbound Heart/Hellraiser.

The strongest theme in The Damnation Game, for me, was something quite different. It popped up in the first paragraph, with a sentence describing war-torn Warsaw:

“Mountains of rubble — still nurturing the dead like bulbs ready to sprout as the spring weather warmed…”

This struck me as evoking the first section of T S Eliot’s The Waste-Land, which is shot through with the contrast between plant-life reviving in the Spring, and the un-reviving dead of the Great War, most explicitly in the lines:

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”

The novel focuses on Marty, brought out of prison (a kind of death) into the new life of the outside world once more. He even thinks, at one point: “I’ve been dead, and I’m coming back to life.” But The Damnation Game is dealing not in the dead coming back to life, but a sort of false resurrection of various kinds. Marty is not fully alive again, because his job for Whitehead keeps him for the most part in Whitehead’s (luxurious, but fenced-in) estate. (Whose most telling feature, perhaps, is an abandoned dovecote: an empty space abandoned by love.) It’s made clear Marty isn’t his own man, merely a living body there for Whitehead’s use:

“You’re my property, Strauss. You concern yourself with me, or you get the Hell out of here tomorrow morning. Me! … Not yourself. Forget yourself.”

The novel is full of characters existing in states of living death. Sometimes literally, as in the case of Breer, whom Mamoulian claims from a death by suicide so as to use him as his agent in the world. Others more figuratively, as in Whitehead’s daughter Carys, with her addiction to heroin, or Whitehead himself, retreating from the world out of fear of Mamoulian, and Mamoulian as well, fastidious and nihilistic, a walking emptiness, yet too afraid of death to leave this life he seems to despise. Marty at one point finds himself infused with “unwelcome thoughts of lying face up in the ground, dead perhaps, but anticipating resurrection.” But this isn’t a resurrection type of world, not with Mamoulian and Whitehead in charge. It’s a living-death world, always holding off the first step towards a true resurrection.

Although it’s unfailing readable, I felt The Damnation Game began to lose its initial focus from the mid-point on, and I place the blame firmly with the character of Mamoulian. It’s at the halfway point the much-anticipated meeting between Whitehead and Mamoulian occurs — the moment Whitehead has been dreading, because he knows it will lead to his death. Only, it doesn’t. Mamoulian turns up, says he will come again, and leaves. Later, he comes again, kills a few secondary characters, and leaves again. The second half of the novel is a series of confrontations with Mamoulian where nothing gets resolved, and for no clear reason. And perhaps nothing gets resolved because it’s not clear for a long time just what Mamoulian wants.

Mamoulian lacks the sort of clearly-defined meaning Barker is usually so good at giving his antagonists. He’s wonderful at creating larger-than-life, loquacious monsters who expound their philosophies of excess — of experience, pain, power. (Or, as in the case of, say, Rawhead Rex, are so blatantly symbolic they don’t have to explain themselves.) Mamoulian never does this. It’s only after a while we get a glimpse of what his inner world is like, and it turns out to be a foggy world of nihilism, asceticism, and absence. It’s not even a fierce nihilism, it’s all rather tired. Mamoulian is clearly at the end of his life, fed up with it all, and doesn’t make for a very powerful figure — he just keeps lingering. Even his title — he calls himself “the Last European” — comes across more as writerly bravura on Barker’s part than having any real meaning. This makes confrontations with Mamoulian difficult — just what is it you’re confronting? What’s the ideological battle that needs to be fought while the supernatural shenanigans are going on?

I think you can find an opposite to Mamoulian in the novel, but it’s not spelled out. There’s an intensity of living, a relishing of experience, as with Marty when he’s finally let out on his own for a night from Whitehead’s estate:

“He felt real. God in Heaven, that was it. At last he was able to operate in the world again, affect it, shape it.”

The “game” of the novel’s title, perhaps, isn’t so much about the rules of what’s going on, as the feeling of being a player in the world, being part of it all, taking your chances, getting your hands dirty. (Something the fastidious Mamoulian doesn’t want to do. This, perhaps, is at the root of his ability to always win at cards — that chance-phobic ultra-control of his smacks more of anxiety than a Devil’s power.)

And the one power Marty and Carys can wield against Mamoulian, it turns out, is the connection they feel. Both Whitehead and Mamoulian are powerful figures, locked by their very power into their own solipsistic worlds, able to hold off what they fear, and so become all the more imprisoned by that fear. It’s the more human characters, with their vulnerability and need to connect, that overcome the powerful, in their own small way.

As I say, The Damnation Game remains readable, but I don’t think it has the sort of lasting meaning it might have had if Mamoulian had been a figure who really stood for something — as, say, “the Hell Priest” (whom we all know as Pinhead) does in Barker’s next piece of long-form fiction.

If you read Julia Briggs’ 1977 history of the English ghost story, Night Visitors, it’s easy to believe that the ghostly or supernatural tale had a brief, M R James-inspired flourish in the early twentieth century, before becoming moribund — nothing but, as she puts it, “a vehicle for nostalgia, a formulaic exercise content merely to recreate a Dickensian or Monty Jamesian atmosphere”. But it’s writers like John Metcalfe (1891–1965), whose output bridged the classic (M R James) with the more thoroughly modern (Robert Aickman) eras of the British weird, who give the lie to this. Judging by the sixteen stories and one novella collected in Nightmare Jack and Other Stories (Ash Tree Press, 1998), Metcalfe was no pasticheur of M R James or any other writer, and certainly no indulger in the nostalgic, as his tales were, in the main, set in modern times (his modern times), and betray clear signs not only of that modernity — references to psychoanalysis, aeroplanes, the World Wars — but perhaps also of the modernistic. (It’s true he included some time-worn, even clichéd elements, such as two early stories where the supernatural is tied to the stolen jewelled eye of a foreign idol. But nobody could accuse either “Nightmare Jack” or the so-insanely-funny-it’s-not-funny-at-all “The Smoking Leg” — which TED Klein quite wonderfully calls “jocularly bloody-minded” — of being in any other way traditional.)

But, I don’t want to make it sound as though this is something I’ve always known. I’ve only recently been prompted (thank you, Peter!) to read Metcalfe, and it’s doing so which got me thinking how little I know of the between-and-post-World-Wars British weird. It’s those same World Wars that Briggs gave as the reason the British ghost story (in its broadest sense) declined. As she says:

“The Great War had not only trivialised invented horrors… it had also catalysed changes in society which affected the ghost story less directly but no less fundamentally. Atheism and agnosticism were now more widely tolerated, and totally materialistic philosophies were far commoner than heretofore.”

But, through the lens of Metcalfe’s fiction, it’s easy to see why this explanation — that the Great War achieved a surfeit of real-world horrors thus ending the demand for them as entertainment, and that the loss of religious attitudes made the supernatural ridiculous to the general reader — are inadequate, if not about-face wrong. The very surfeit of horror, combined with an inability to channel it through traditional beliefs which might have ameliorated its force, left the writers of the World War generations (and Metcalfe served in both conflicts) with a massive psychic load to deal with, and no ready-made form with which to do so. The world had gone insane — not once, but twice — and while some people no doubt returned to their lives as though nothing had happened, some were left reeling. The ghost story as nostalgic/formalistic exercise may have been dead, but the tale of the outright weird was very much a live issue.

Nightmare Jack contains stories from across Metcalfe’s career, starting with his first collection, The Smoking Leg, which came out in 1925. The story “The Smoking Leg” shows how far we are from the air of amateur antiquarians and bachelor academics, as here we’re dealing with not one but two alcoholic doctors, plus an unfortunate Burmese boy, as main characters. The first doctor engages in what’s either a cruel prank or a desperate attempt at smuggling, using the poor boy as his unwitting surgical mule. The artefact — the inevitably cursed eye of a idol — proceeds to not only smoke, but causes ships and people to burst into flames. There’s something about the tale, a teetering on the edge between being very darkly funny and barely holding onto any semblance of sanity, that characteristically marks some of these early Metcalfe stories. I get the feeling there was a certain amount of turbulence going on beneath the surface (certainly, Metcalfe’s mental health suffered during his lifetime), of a writer riding the wave of material he just didn’t know what else to do with except craft into these barely-contained eruptions of the dark and strange.

Others from the same era defy any resolution into either a supernatural or psychological explanation, such as “The Double Admiral”, where a retired admiral is haunted by what at first seems like nothing but a distant smudge on the horizon. Resolved to confront this irrationality, he summons two friends to row out to sea and face it. The smudge, in turn, comes towards them, revealing itself to be their doubles… But then, does the admiral die, to be replaced by his double, or is he somehow restored to life and health, only changed in some way? The story, evidently, isn’t about answers, but about a sheer, haunting strangeness that has no answer.

There’s a lot of haunted individuals in these stories, most of them driven to face the source of their obsessions, only to be rewarded with oblivion. One man is haunted by the mostly missing memory of an experience he had at a certain house, which he strives to find once more; another is haunted by his attempt to escape from a prison by digging a tunnel, a moment he constantly relives; a third is haunted by the sense of evil he gets from a remote location, and which may in fact be down to his straying into an entirely different dimension.

There’s more edge-of-the-razor humour in at least one of the stories from Metcalfe’s 1931 collection, Judas. “Mr Meldrum’s Mania”, like “The Smoking Leg”, might be intended as a joke — it certainly seems to be satirising psychoanalysis, as the only explanation given for what occurs to its protagonist is a wildly over-specific memory of seeing a particular illustration on a particular page of a book as a child — but it’s so loaded with the distress of its main character, it’s hard to read as anything but horror. (It recalls, to me, Daphne du Maurier’s “The Blue Lenses”, in its depiction of the isolation caused by a horror only perceptible to one person.)

With “Mortmain”, from the same collection, it can seem at first we’re in more traditional ghost story territory, with a newly-married couple honeymooning on a boat trip around the English coast, apparently pursued by the wife’s (dead) former husband’s boat. But it’s the nature of that husband which takes the story into a very un-traditional sense of wild irrationality:

“Humphrey must plainly have been mad. He had taken to affronting everybody by getting himself up in a sort of parody of female attire—had let his hair grow long, his beard as well, and had affected a shirt-blouse and skirt.”

And it’s not just eccentricity: the man also drenched a dog in paraffin and set it on fire. Not the sort of thing you’d find in M R James.

“Mortmain” brings to the fore Metcalfe’s relish for language — particularly when evoking the repulsive:

“Something was happening, impending, in the clouds. Above a bloodshot wrack piled banks of rutilous vapour were slowly moving—wreathing and twisting into flaming whorls and spirals and strange convoluted forms. Dark, ragged clots converged upon a festered core, showing a ruddy glow. The scene had a malignant and yet tawdry splendour, a sordid glory which was that of a lost world. Swollen, faeculent masses discharged tardily into a crimson vortex. It was as if the heavens themselves were rancid and dissolved—displayed the specious beauty of corruption.”

One of my favourite tales in this collection, for sheer strangeness, is “Brenner’s Boy” (first published in 1932). It starts with an ex-navy man struggling to recall exactly what he agreed to when he bumped into an old admiral he’d previously served under. Did he really say he’d look after the man’s troublesome boy for a bit? Then the youngster turns up, though with the strange air of having done so on his own steam, and proceeds to be rude, wilful, and obnoxious to everyone, breaking things and constantly straying beyond the bounds of social acceptability. For a while, the protagonist feels too constrained by his inability to recall how much he’d agreed to, and not knowing how to deal with the social aspects of this very awkward situation. The feeling is very much like the sort of tangles of polite constraint and supernatural effrontery in Robert Aickman’s stories. In fact, I’d say, it’s having read Metcalfe that Aickman’s oddities start to make a little more sense — not in terms of resolving into sense, but from pointing to, perhaps, something of a common origin. (Quite what that origin might be, though, is another thing altogether…)

The longest story collected here (and which has recently been published on its own, by Valancourt Books, in the US) is the Turn of the Screw-esque novella, The Feasting Dead (first published in 1954). The narrator’s boy Denis starts spending time in France with distant relations, until things are suddenly broken off. The thing Denis most seems to miss about his overseas visits is an odd “friend” he made — they used to go out and “catch moles” and do other boyish things — only, this is an old man, a gardener or servant, who suddenly appears in England one day and ensconces himself in the narrator’s home. From this point, the narrator finds Denis growing more distant, and the mystery around this unprepossessing “friend” only growing deeper — the man, whose name is Raoul, comes across as so much of a nothing. Strange noises are heard from the boy’s room at night, poltergeist-like sounds (“nightly thumpings, hummings and (a new ingredient) derisive hootings”). When the narrator confronts Raoul, it turns into a struggle, and the man seems to disappear from underneath him. Denis runs away, and the narrator heads out to France, sure that’s where his boy has gone. There, he learns something of the nature of this creature that’s preying on his son:

“They called these—these preposterousnesses, or the cast of mind that fostered and engendered them, ‘sans noms’—simply that. The ‘nameless’. . . .”

Obviously some sort of vampire, it’s the very opposite of the aristocratic, darkly charismatic Count Dracula. It’s here Metcalfe’s love of language comes to the fore again, in the words his narrator struggles to find to describe this thing: “This lay-figure—this fantôche, this hollow puppet”, “this most supreme and consummate nuisance”, “this kind of molestation, or superstition of a molestation”, or best of all, this “eerie lummox” — exactly the sort of floundering for understanding caused by the “totally materialistic philosophies” that, as Briggs would have it, put paid to the ghost story. As the narrator himself admits:

“You might suppose a recent world-war would have knocked such nonsense out of [the superstitious locals] but—suddenly, and wryly, I laughed at myself—though it wasn’t at all funny. Yes, that was rich! Talk of the pot and kettle. . . .! For I was equally in thrall to a grotesque myth with any of the folk I was deriding.”

That Metcalfe’s fiction is deliberately exploring the overlap between the supernatural and the psychological is evident, here — even to his narrator, who says, “The case is fairer game I fancy for a psychical researching bloke, or a psychiatrist.” Those two being pretty much the same, as far as he’s concerned.

But perhaps the key thing here is those noises in the boy’s bedroom. Of them, the narrator says:

“Poltergeists, I had heard, were regarded as the prankish play of a surplus vital force or energy; and it was just after this force’s flow, from Denis, had been stimulated but yet deprived, temporarily, of its accustomed receptacle in Raoul that the impish manifestations, centering round my boy, were commonest.”

Poltergeists, as I said in my review of The Haunting of Alma Fielding, are that peculiarly modernistic eruption of the supernatural, a wilfully irrational upwelling of the suppressed into nonsensical violence, more like psychic grenades lobbed into the world of the living than the work of reasonable ghosts.

That poltergeist-like irrationality — even if poltergeists themselves don’t actually appear — seems like a marked characteristic of Robert Aickman’s fiction, and of Metcalfe’s, too. It’s the sense that, only a very short distance beneath daily life, there’s a bubbling away of violent, irrational, and overwhelming forces that we’ve only avoided this far through chance. A very cosmic, even Lovecraftian idea — “The Colour Out of Space” might well have been a Metcalfe tale, if written with an alcoholic haze to its prose style. Metcalfe’s tale, “The Bad Lands”, makes a close companion to Lovecraft’s. And, what do you know, Lovecraft commented on this very story in Supernatural Horror in Literature, saying it contains “graduations of horror that strongly savour of genius.”