horror, page 60 of 66

I didn’t read any horror fiction till I was about 16 or 17. The reason for this was simple. I’d had enough of nightmares.

In a sense, we’re all consumers of horror fiction, if only of the nocturnal, self-invented kind. And in an odd reversal of BBFC guidelines, we usually get the strongest dose in our youngest years. Never mind the sight of blood, violence, torture or mutilation, nothing compares to the experience of being alone in the dark with the weird creations of your own head, all perfectly tailored to terrorise you and only you. That’s 18-certificate stuff, but nature doles it out at 18 months, not 18 years. I still remember quite vividly nightmares I had when I was four, five or six, even though I now have difficulty remembering what it was I was dreaming when I woke up this morning.

When I was about five, we lived in part of a large house (now demolished, and turned, Nazareth Hill-style, into flats). The bedroom I shared with Garen at that time would have once been the servants’ quarters. It was on the first floor, but had its own staircase, with a rope bannister (which you could burn your hand on if you ran down too fast), and was isolated from all the other rooms on the first floor. I had repeated nightmares about that staircase, about being dragged up it, or down it, (whichever way the dream set up as being away from my mother and brother), by a host of ghouls, ghosts and goblins. Meanwhile, the bedroom itself had a cupboard which never closed, and from whose dark night-time interior I was sure a vampire was waiting to emerge. Each morning, with the dawn, a face appeared in the pattern of the curtain, which I always told myself was caused by a tree pressing close to the window outside, something I later realised was impossible for the tree that was actually there, because it was too far away. We only lived a short while in that house, but I came away from it with a host of remembered nightmares, and a number of fears, including such venerable classics as fear of the dark, but also some new, rather specific ones, such as fear of being upstairs on my own.

All excellent reasons, then, for not scaring myself silly reading horror fiction. I was, even without the nightmares, quite capable of scaring myself silly on my own. I remember, having once caught a glimpse of a trailer for a TV adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, with its Nosferatu-like vampire, using that face to scare myself whenever I was in the house alone. For instance, I’d need to go to the bathroom, but as I was on my way there, I’d suddenly think: what if I opened the bathroom door and saw that vampire face on the other side? As I approached the bathroom, it started to seem all too possible. More than once I decided to wait till someone else came home before I went to the loo!

The odd thing was that, at the same time, I was lapping up Doctor Who, which was going through its most horror-inspired phase, with the likes of The Brain of Morbius, The Pyramids of Mars, and The Horror of Fang Rock. (All favourites still.)

I didn’t read any horror fiction until the latter part of my teens, when I started lapping it up. But that’s for another post. One thing about those early nightmares which has always struck me as odd, though: the monsters which infested them were all so cartoony. Ghosts that looked like white blobs of sheeting with black O’s for eyes; tiny little fellows more like garden gnomes than evil goblins; and muppets. Yes, muppets. I distinctly remember a dream in which I was terrified by muppets.

It went like this. We’d been on a school trip that day, to a ruined castle (which turned out to be nothing but a few fragments of walls). Somehow, in the dream, I found myself left behind, still at the site of the castle, with night coming on. As it got dark, I became aware of a light coming from a door in the ground. Thinking it was better to find some light than stay outside in the ruins all night, I opened the door and went down some steps into an underground chamber. It was a banquet hall, with a long table laden with food. Sitting at the table were muppets. Not Kermit and Miss Piggy, but the big, shaggy ones you always knew weren’t proper puppets but men in suits. As soon as I saw them, they all stopped eating and turned to look at me. They had a very hungry look.

And then, as they say, I woke up.

“Alice at R’lyeh” moves into another dimension with the addition of an audio version, courtesy of MorganScorpion!

I was thrilled when MorganScorpion, who has produced a number of readings of H P Lovecraft’s stories and novels (which you can hear, for free, over at the Internet Archive), contacted me at the weekend offering to do a reading. I was even more thrilled when the finished reading turned up first thing Monday morning!

It’s now up and listenable. You can hear it via the “Alice” audio page, or download/listen to it at the Internet Archive.

My lunchtime reading of late has been The Horror Horn, a collection of ghost stories by E F Benson, published in 1974 by Panther, with a typically excellent cover by Bruce Pennington. In the 70s, Panther seemed to be engaged in a project to bring back into print, or package into new collections, every writer mentioned even in passing by Lovecraft in his essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”. A worthy pursuit.

Lovecraft called Benson “versatile”, and “an important contributor” to the weird short story. But approaching E F Benson (the initials are essential in differentiating E F from his brothers A C and R H, both of whom dabbled in weird fiction) by way of Lovecraft can lead to a certain disappointment. Much of the supernatural element in E F Benson’s short fiction, as typified by the thirteen stories in this book, is conventional. All too often we have the ghosts of murderers, or suicides, or generally evil people, returning to menace the protagonist out of revenge, or mere wickedness. When Benson departs from the ghostly for the more demonic, he has a tendency to want to explain his (usually slug-like) entities away using the spiritualist terminology of his day, taking pains to identify them as “Elementals”, as if that goes, in any way, towards explaining them. (In fact, to me, it only deflates their mystery and menace. The whole point of supernatural horrors is that they are beyond understanding, not easily classifiable or quantifiable.) Most important of all, once the “Elementals” in question are defeated (in one case by the use of a shotgun), or have had their specific revenge, they depart, and all is once again right with the world. This is in stark contrast to the Lovecraftian approach, where the demon entity is only ever a signifier of far worse — a glimpse of a dark, alien order to the universe quite at odds with mankind’s self-satisfied, self-regarding unquestioned beliefs (as Lovecraft would have it). In E F Benson’s fiction, the fact that his ghosts and Elementals exist comes with no frisson of itself, no wider cosmic significance. As a result, his supernatural horrors, though horrifying to the individuals facing them while they are facing them, leave no residue of deeper, background horror in the reader’s mind, which is an essential part of the “poetry” of weird fiction.

To enjoy E F Benson’s ghost stories, then, you have to look for some other quality than inventiveness in his use of the supernatural.

Because of this, the first few stories in The Horror Horn, aside from their interest as part of the wider tapestry of the history of weird fiction, didn’t really interest me as fiction. But something happened about halfway through the book, with the start of one of Benson’s more well-known weird shorts, “Negotium Perambulans”:

The casual tourist in West Cornwall may just possibly have noticed, as he bowled along over the bare high plateau between Penzance and the Land’s End, a dilapidated signpost pointing down a steep lane and bearing on its battered finger the faded inscription ‘Polearn 2 miles’, but probably very few have had the curiosity to traverse those two miles in order to see a place to which their guide-books award so cursory a notice.

Contrast this to the start of “The House with the Brick-Kiln”, which appears earlier in The Horror Horn. The comparison is illuminating because both stories start by painting a picture of a location:

The hamlet of Trevor Major lies very lonely and sequestered in a hollow below the north side of the south downs that stretch westward from Lewes, and run parallel with the coast. It is a hamlet of some three or four dozen inconsiderable houses and cottages much girt about with trees, but the big Norman church and the manor house which stands a little outside the village are evidence of a more conspicuous past. This latter, except for a tenancy of rather less than three weeks, now four years ago, has stood unoccupied since the summer of 1896, and though it could be taken at a rent almost comically small, it is highly improbable that either of its last tenants, even if times were very bad, would think of passing a night in it again.

Although the above passage ends with a fittingly ghostly hook, it’s the start of “Negotium Perambulans” that’s by far the more intriguing. Both passages are trying to create an air of mystery around the locations they’re describing, but the “Perambulans” one succeeds while the “Brick-Kiln” one doesn’t. Why?

First I should say that this change isn’t just present in “Negotium Perambulans”, but, to a lesser or greater extent, is in most of the stories following it. A quick check on the copyright page provides an explanation. “The House with the Brick-Kiln” and the rest of the first five stories in The Horror Horn were published in Benson’s early collection, The Room in the Tower, in 1912. (Issued by Mills & Boon, in their pre-specialisation days.) “Negotium Perambulans”, however, comes from Visible and Invisible, a collection from 1923. It seems that something happened to E F Benson, as a writer, between those two dates.

The “Brick-Kiln” opening suggests an attempt to create a spooky atmosphere about the hamlet of Trevor Major — it is “very lonely and sequestered”, and the particular house in question has, since the events to be related, “stood unoccupied” — but these are a classic case of the writer telling rather than showing. That “very” in “very lonely and sequestered” in particular seems like a writer begging his readers to appreciate the effect he’s trying to create.

Polearn, in “Negotium Perambulans”, is a similarly fitting location for a ghostly (or in this case Elemental) encounter, but we’re introduced to it in quite a different way. Benson turns what was mere description in “The House with the Brick-Kiln” into mystery and story. Instead of just describing his location, he starts by saying, effectively, “Imagine you’re a traveller in West Cornwall, and you see this broken-down, half-unreadable sign pointing to some nowhere village on the coast. You might easily miss it — most do…” Nowhere does he use the words “lonely” or “sequestered”, but you know instantly that’s exactly what it is. In addition, you want to know why, whereas you don’t with “Brick-Kiln”‘s Trevor Major.

Again, why? Because Trevor Major seems a cliché, a stock setting for a gothic story, straining for an effect. Polearn is much more like a real village, if an odd one — its oddity, in fact, makes it seem more real, as well as serving the needs of the story. Benson goes on to describe Polearn, always emphasising its lonely oddity, without stating explicitly that this is what it has. We learn, for instance, of the peculiar arrangements the Post Office has to deliver mail to this remote village, and how the village’s remoteness has produced an isolation in its individual inhabitants as well — and all this before there’s even a hint of the supernatural the story is building up to. Yet I kept reading — and enjoyed doing so — because the setting seemed so very much alive. It had a definite character, yet seemed so oddly individual that it had to be real. It has, in fact, remained in my imagination, where Trevor Major hasn’t.

It seems that, between The Room in the Tower in 1912 and Visible and Invisible in 1923, Benson learned to relax into his writer’s role, and to work realities, rather than conventionalities, into his stories. He learned to stop straining to tell ghost stories, and instead to tell what were simply stories — interesting stories, some of which simply happened to be ghostly.