Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World's Ends (ed.) John Miller

9780712354424

British Library, 2022

340 pp

paperback

It's time for another book in the British Library Tales of the Weird series.   This time we're off to the remoteness of the Arctic and the Antarctic with Polar Horrors: Strange Tales From the World's Ends.  My geek self has a particular fascination with the history of polar exploration, which after a while led to a particular fascination with fiction set in these locations as well, so this book is tailor made.   With the exception of one story from 2019 that editor John Miller has chosen to include here, the remainder of the stories range from the 1830s through the 1940s, with the earliest in the section entitled  "North," reflecting, as Miller notes in his introduction, the "earlier arrival of the Arctic than the Antarctic into European and American writing."  

 Surprisingly, there were only two stories that I'd read before, leaving nine here that are new to me.  The first of these is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's well-known "Captain of the Pole Star," followed by Harriet Prescott Spofford's "The Moonstone Mass," in which a young man decides to attempt the Northwest Passage.  About that one, all I will say is that anyone should think twice before setting sail on a ship named Albatross, especially when heading into unknown territory.  My favorite stories (in order of appearance) begin with  "Skule Skerry" by John Buchan (1928), from his The Runagates Club, which I own but haven't yet read.   An island at  "61° latitude in the west of the Orkneys" is where this story is situated.  The narrator of this story is an ornithologist, Anthony Hurrell,  one of a group of men at a gentlemen's club in London who regale each other with their stories.   He had gone to the Norland Islands one year for the spring migration of certain birds, but unlike other people who "do the same," he had in mind something quite different.  Taking his cue from prior research he'd done and using the Icelandic Saga of Earl Skuli as a guide, he'd  found  a reference to a certain "Isle of the Birds," which was located "near Halsmarness ... on the west side of the Island of Una."  Further research nets a mention of "Insula Avivum... quae est ultima insula et proximao, Abysso," by a "chronicler of the place."  Intrigued, he made his way to Una, and finds exactly the place that had "been selected for attention by the saga-man," Skule Skerry.  He is told that it has an "ill name" --  that "Naebody gangs there," and that "the place wasna canny." While highly atmospheric, it's really all about the journey in this one.  Next on the list and deserving of top honors is the incredibly unsettling "The Third Interne" by Idwal Jones (1938), which appeared in Weird Tales in January of that year, listed as "A brief tale of a surgical horror in the Asiatic wastes of northern Russia."   As Miller notes about this tale, the setting "outside the established limits of civilisation" is perfect for the secretly- unfolding of "darker enterprises." In this story, a group of three science "internes" who had studied under Pavlov set their sights on working with "a far greater scientific man than he,"  a certain Dr. Melchior Pashev, "a brilliant worker in neurology."  Dr. Pashev, as "the third interne" relates, had once cut off a dog's head and managed to keep it alive for three years. It had "functioned beautifully," barking, drinking water, blinking its eyes "in affection," just like a normal dog despite the lack of a body. The three worked hard and saved the money they made in their jobs and finally borrowed enough to get them to Yarmolinsk, where Pashev was busy with his work.  Welcomed warmly, after a while their devotion grows to the point where it knows no bounds.  And that's about all I will say about this one, except that the ending turns things back on the reader, where he or she must judge between two alternatives.   This is one of the strangest and most eerie mad scientist stories I've ever encountered, and not only gave me the shivers but made me feel queasy.   Also deserving of high marks is  John Martin Leahy's "In Amundsen's Tent" from 1928, a story of an horrific series of events left behind in an account "set down" by Robert Drumgold, a member of the Sutherland expedition aiming to be the first to the south pole at the same time that Scott and Amundsen were vying for the same honor.  It begins with a question that asks

"What was it, that thing (if thing it was) which came to him, the sole survivor of the party which had reached the Southerrn Pole, thrust itself into the tent, and issuing, left but the severed head of Drumgold there?" 

Having discovered and read the journal left behind by Drumgold, the narrator of this story and his comrades had decided to suppress the parts that dealt with "the horror in Amundsen's tent," so as not to "cast doubt upon the real achievements of the Sutherland expedition."   But he's decided that it is now time to release it to the world, and thus his story of horror begins.  Don't be surprised if you find something familiar in this one.  

from Patrick Cullis Photography

Three more stories of note,  presented here in no particular order,  deserve a mention.    Although modern (2019),  Aviaq Johnson's  " Iwsinaqtutalik Pictuc: The Haunted Blizzard" is a reminder that there is more than a measure of truth in indigenous legends, which in this case, have seemed to have been forgotten by all except children and elders, with disastrous consequences. I am always  happy to see indigenous literature in any volume, so cheers to the editor.   "A Secret of the South Pole" by Hamilton Drummond (1901) begins with a visit to a former sea captain during a downpour.  The captain loved to tell stories, and on this day, what he's about to say has to do with a strange artifact he calls "the gem of my whole kit."  If any one could tell him what it is, he has offered to give that person "the whole shanty." All he knows about it is that it's "a bit o' the South Pole" and launches into a story about how it came to be in his possession. Once upon a time he  and two fellow sailors were stuck out in the ocean  in an open boat, when they encountered a derelict ship and decided to go on board.  As he tells his attentive audience, "what came after was queer, mighty queer, that I'll admit."  No Flying Dutchman lore here, just weirdness.   Mordred Weir's "Bride of the Antarctic" (1939) centers on an "ill-fated expedition" headed by "Mad Bill Howell," who had forced his wife against her will to go with him to the coast of Victoria Land.  Legend has it that Howell was a cruel man, and during his expedition all perished during the long Antarctic night except Howell and the cook, who were both saved when the ship came to pick them up.  Now another expedition has come to the same place, where strange happenings begin just as the winter darkness falls.  

from ScienceNewsExplores

And now the difficult part, where I'm left with three stories that I just did not care for, but your mileage may, of course, vary.   To be fair, they all certainly fit the bill of "Strange Tales," they are set at one of the "World's Ends," and the main characters of these stories did technically experience some sort of polar horror, each in his or her own way.  Therefore, the editor did his job.  But  as a reader of the weird and the strange, these three just left me cold and unfazed.   In my way of thinking, the opening story of an anthology should set the tone for what's to come, making  me excited about getting to the rest.  Unfortunately, that didn't happen here.  "The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon" by James Hogg started out well, but its novella length and a polar bear with the name of Nancy saving the main character's skin time after time just didn't do it for me.  Quite honestly, this isn't the story I would have led with.    "Creatures of the Night" by Sophie Wenzel Ellis and Malcolm M. Ferguson's "The Polar Vortex" are, like "The Third Interne," tales which concern themselves with rather outré science for the time, but while Jones' story had the power to seriously disturb, these two were lacking in that department.   

from my own designated British reading room

That's the thing about anthologies, though -- they truly are a mixed bag so you don't know what you're going to get.  The eight stories I did enjoy were still well worth the price of the book, so I can't complain too much.   And then there's this:  I've read and loved two other anthologies in this series edited by John Miller (Tales of the Tatttoed: An Anthology of Ink and Weird Woods: Tales From the Haunted Forests of Britain)  so if I wasn't exactly enamored with three stories  in this book, he's still provided me with hours and hours of solid reading entertainment, as has the series as a whole.  

Recommended. 

 

Unholy Tales, by Tod Robbins

9781912586189
Tartarus Press, 2020
291 pp

hardcover

I don't know what inspired the powers that be at Tartarus Press to put out this volume featuring stories written by Tod Robbins, but it was more than a great idea.  Megacheers to you.

Robbins' work may not be familiar to everyone (it certainly wasn't to me before reading Unholy Tales) but the 1932 film Freaks directed by Tod Browning, based on Robbins' short story "Spurs," is  a movie which is regarded "as a classic, or at least a cult favorite."   And speaking of movies, another Robbins story in this volume, The Unholy Three was made into two different film versions:  a silent (also directed by Browning) in 1925 and a 1930 remake which was, as Jeff Stafford notes at TCM, Lon Chaney's "talking picture debut, and ironically, what would prove to be his final film." 

After the in-depth, not-to-be-missed introduction "Tod Robbins: An Unholy Biography" by a very knowledgeable Jonny Mains,  Unholy Tales brings together  the above-mentioned "Spurs," as well as three of four stories from Robbins' 1920 collection Silent, White and Beautiful: "Silent, White and Beautiful," "Who Wants a Green Bottle?," and "Wild Wullie, The Waster."

original edition, from LW Currey

 Rounding it all off, pretty much the last half of this book is given over to The Unholy Three, published in 1917.

original 1917 edition, from Biblio.com

The Unholy Three is definitely the jewel in this crown.  It is an extraordinary piece of pulpy crime fiction with a supernatural-ish vibe.  I use the term "extraordinary," as I am huge fan of crime fiction from this era and have read (and continue to read) a wide variety of books filled with what I call sweet  pulpy goodness, but never have I come across anything like this story, which sets a new bar for me in that zone.  As with "Spurs,"  Robbins begins The Unholy Three at a circus,  where Tweedledee (in the movie described as "Twenty inches! Twenty years! Twenty pounds!") sits contemplating the day "Men would fear him! and he would read this fear in their eyes." It's his small body,

"this caricature that made him a laughing-stock for the mob to jibber at, that turned his solemnity of soul into a titbit of jest for others, his anger into merriment, his very violence into the mimicry of violence"

that keeps him from being "taken seriously."   But deep within his soul burns an "insatiable fire" that produces "scenes of violence" and visions of a "new transformed self" in which he would be feared, with an audience that would "tremble at his villainy." Along with his fellow circus friends Echo the ventriloquist and Hercules the strong man, he grabs his chance to turn his visions into a reality.  A word of advice: don't watch the movie and think you've read the book.  As much as I enjoyed both versions, neither holds a candle to the original text.

Harry Earles, from Freaks.  Earles also played Tweedledee in both versions of The Unholy Three. From IMDb.

Moving on ever so briefly (so as not to spoil)  to the short stories,  "Spurs" reminds me so much of the French contes cruels that I love.  As in Freaks, a circus love triangle is at the center of this story of revenge.  M. Jacques Courbé, a man of twenty-eight inches,  had fallen in love with Mlle. Jeanne Marie the bareback rider the first time he'd seen her act.  She, however, has eyes for the "Romeo in tights" Simon Lafleur, her partner, and views Courbé's attentions and utterances of love as a "colossal, corset-creaking joke. "  The wheels in her head begin to turn when  Jacques just happens to mention that he has been left a large estate and that he has plans to turn her into a "fine lady" if she will marry him.  Trust me on this one, she should have most definitely said no.   Not quite as grotesque as the fate of Venus in the film, but still beyond bone-chillingly horrific.   "Silent, White and Beautiful" also falls into the realm of the horrific, as an artist returns to France after a depressing attempt at a career in America, where his art fails to sell.  On his return he hits on a solution as to how to make his work as life-like as possible.  After a nonstop reading session of these two stories which open the book, I was very much ready for a wee bit of humor in  "Who Wants a Green Bottle?,"  which examines what happens to the soul of the Lockleavens after they've left this world.  I must say, this is one of the most ingenious and original wee folk stories I've ever read.  Last but definitely not least is "Wild Wullie, The Waster," which is also a story of death and the afterlife but with a twist (or two) I'd not encountered in other ghost stories.

The question that opens this book is this:

"How does an author fêted as equal in genius to Edgar Allan Poe disappear into relative obscurity?"

Unfortunately, that seems to be  very much the case with a number of writers of yesteryear whose work I admire.   Where Tod Robbins is concerned, though,  I've taken the first step onto  that "path to becoming a fervent worshipper of a deliciously twisted writer who knew how to keep his readers more than entertained" mentioned at the end of  Mains' introduction.  Two more books of Robbins work arrived yesterday, I bought and made time to watch all three films I mentioned above, and I am certainly recommending Unholy Tales to anyone who will listen.   Deliciously twisted writer indeed, and I can't get enough.

and now, for some well-earned (but really good) fluff: Strange Island Stories (ed.) Jonathan E Lewis

9781944520434
Stark House Press, 2018
342 pp

paperback



"We have come to the devil's workshop. All the horrors of the inferno are invented here."

The truth of the matter is that sometimes I just need fluff.  Fluff fluff fluff fluffity fluff. And right now, with coronavirus stress alive and well in our home, this book was just what the doctor ordered.  From the very first I was completely sucked in, able to forget about grocery store shortages and face masks for the duration (although I did clean the book with a Lysol wipe before opening).   Reading old horrorish-slash-weird pulp makes me feel good for some reason.  I've never analyzed as to why, but as long as it does the trick, who cares?

As editor Jonathan E. Lewis says in his introduction (which you can read without fear of spoilers),

"The strange island short story form, like the island novel, utilizes island locations to examine human society and human nature.  But it pushes beyond that and and takes the reader on a journey into the weird, the bizarre, the scary, and the unsettling."

All of those categories -- "the weird, the bizarre, the scary, and the unsettling" are well represented here over the course of these twenty stories.   Of course, as it is an anthology, there are some that I didn't care for but that's a matter of personal preference.  On the whole, the editor has done a fine job finding and compiling these strange tales, the majority of which I'd never read before.  The table of contents reads like a who's who of short story creepiness,  featuring stories by such greats as Edward Bulwer Lytton (here simply Edward Bulwer for authenticity's sake), MP Shiel, John Buchan, Frank Norris, Algernon Blackwood and Henry S. Whitehead (and others), and then some names that were not as well known to me including  Henry Toke Munn, Fred M. White, and George G. Toudouze, among others.  Lewis also includes one of his own stories at the end of the book as well as introducing each tale.

Of the twenty stories in this book, I've previously read four: "Monos and Daimonos," by Edward Bulwer,  "Hugenin's Wife," by MP Shiel, "The Camp of the Dog," by Algernon Blackwood, and Lovecraft's "Dagon."   Of the remaining sixteen, I'll  list only my favorites, presented in reading order.   First up is McTeague author Frank Norris' "The Ship That Saw a Ghost,"  in which a group of men sail away to complete a secret venture guaranteed to bring riches.  Their destination:

"...that region of the Great Seas where no ship goes, the silent sea of Coleridge and the Ancient One, the unplumbed, untracked, uncharted Dreadfulness, primordial, hushed,"

where they were "alone as a grain of star-dust whirling in the empty space beyond Uranus and the ken of the greater telescopes."   Of course, there's a hitch -- and serious repercussions.    "Island of Ghosts" by Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel, is next, and it is indeed a truly creepy story of a young woman who decides to go and spend some time on an island reputed to be haunted.  Hawthorne delivers a tension-ratcheting tale here with an ending I did not see coming.  When I started reading "Spirit Island" by Henry Toke Munn I was hit with a wave of "I've read this before," but I really hadn't.  The more I thought about it the more I realized that it had some of the same vibe as Dan Simmons' The Terror, at least for a while.  This was my favorite story, and it takes the form of a narrative of a man's complete and utterly terrifying adventure in the Arctic which he expects that no one will believe. However, if anyone ever does and decides to send someone to check it out in the future, he notes, don't bother asking him to go along.  All I will divulge is that when your Eskimo companions tell you that a particular island is taboo, and you go anyway, well, that's on you.  "The Purple Terror" by Fred M. White is another good one, making its debut in The Strand in September 1899.  Set in the Caribbean during the Spanish-American War, Lieutenant Will Scarlett is given a mission to carry a letter from his captain to an Admiral waiting for it across the isthmus.  The trek will involve covering some "fifty miles through practically unexplored country,"  and the trouble begins when Scarlett and his men stop for the night and decide to "join the giddy throng" of people at a bar and Scarlett just happens to notice the "purple band of flowers," the likes of which he'd never seen before, twined around a dancer's shoulders.   He also notices that they have the "perfume of a corpse."  I shall say no more except that had I seen a movie based on this story  on one of those tv shows I used to watch as a kid where they ran back to back science fiction/horror movies, I would have been beyond delighted.

from Culture Trip

The final story I count among the chilling standouts in this volume is "Three Skeleton Key" by French writer George G. Toudouze.  Although in this day and age elements of this story might come across as old hat, but published in 1937, it had to have been horrific in its day.  The action takes place in a lighthouse on a rock island out in the ocean, where a group of three men are completely happy with their isolated life there,  until one day when they see a ship heading straight toward them.  The ship, it seems, has no crew, but that does not mean that there are not passengers aboard. "Three Skeleton Key" was later adapted for radio,  with the broadcast starring none other than Vincent Price.  You can listen to one of these shows here at Journey Into, but I will warn you that the story is abridged, changed quite a bit, and doesn't quite convey the horror of the situation.  On the other hand, back before television, it must have caused quite a stir sitting in the living room at night listening.

Honorable mention to Jack London's "Good-by, Jack" a rather poignant story disguising the horror that doesn't hit until the very end, at which point I was in shock.

With the exception of "The Fiend of the Cooperage" by Conan Doyle (I just thought it was strange but I wasn't enthralled)  all of the rest of the stories (listed below)  are quite good.  Two exceptions come in the form of futuristic, scifi-ish pulpy tales, "Friend Island" and "In the Land of Tomorrow," simply because I am not particularly fond of this sort of thing as a general rule, although I'm sure they will delight true pulp fans who are.

"The Gray Wolf," by George MacDonald 

"The Isle of Voices," by Robert Louis Stevenson (this one made me laugh in parts, actually)

"Dagon" by HP Lovecraft 

"The People of Pan," by Henry S. Whitehead 

"The Sixth Gargoyle," by David Eynon (mystery writers take note: great plot possibilities here)

"The Isle of Doom" by James Francis Dwyer

and 

"An Adriatic Awakening," by Jonathan E Lewis -- a bit jarring because of moving into modern times, but still a pleasure.

Stark House is one of my very favorite indie presses and I love their crime novels; this is my first foray into the other genres they cover.  Strange Island Stories is delightful and should be a no-miss for readers who love old pulp horror or pulp weird tales;  Lewis has done a terrific job putting it together.  

taking a walk down Obscurity Lane: Leslie's Fate; and Hilda, or the Ghost of Erminstein, by Andrew Haggard

asin: M0D1002837898
British Library Historical Collection, 2010
originally published 1892
212 pp

paperback

This book comes just after three darker ones in a row, so it's labeled "fluff" in my head.  First was the book by Zelenyj  I talked about in my previous post here, followed by Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and I The Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos, both of which seriously messed with my head.  I decided I needed something on the lighter side before embarking on my next novel, presumably another head messer-upper, Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State, and voilà, here we are. 

I first read about this book in L.W. Currey's catalogue one morning, something I do now and then which I probably shouldn't since it tends to make me want to find reprints of these old tomes, which adds to the already groaning bookshelves and my husband's serious eyerolls when new books arrive at my doorstep.  He's already convinced that when the Library of Congress needs a copy of a book they'll phone here, but that's another story for later.

from LW Currey, original 1892 edition

Anyway, for fluff reading you can't beat this little volume of two short novels in one.    Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Haggard was not as well known as his brother Sir Henry Rider Haggard, and as a writer at Fine Books Magazine reveals,

"The larger part of Haggard's canon of work comprised French histories, poetry, historical fiction, and roving accounts of his military exploits and sporting excursions."

 Leslie's Fate doesn't really fall into any of these categories; for that matter, neither does  Hilda (subtitled "the Ghost of Ermenstein)."   The first of these two tales is set in the Scottish Highlands, where the Lord of Dumbarton and Duncaid falls victim to his family's curse.  It seems that anyone born in the the north wing of Castle Duncaid will

"not only have the power to view beings from another world, but be absolutely unable to avoid doing so from time to time; and no matter how painful or awful such manifestations of the hidden world might be to a sensitive mind, they will have to be endured." 

Naturally, the pregnant women of the castle have taken great pains to avoid the North Wing, but Charles Leslie's mother was looking for something there, "tripped and fell," and before she could be moved  elsewhere, went into labor, bringing young Charles into the world right then and there.  The ghosts young Charles saw as a boy were ancestral and meant no physical harm; they gave what Charles refers to as  "ghostly performances" where they were

"cutting each other's throats, or throwing each other out of the window, down the cliff, into the rushing Arrow."

Sometimes the "performances" varied and the ghosts took turns putting each other on the rack, but young Charles took it all in stride and actually took a weird sort of pride in the fact that "no one but a Leslie was ever thus honoured."   But it's not these "beings from another world" that Charles needs to worry about, as he discovers on a hike while looking for the source of a "considerable affluent" of the River Arrow, and wanders on into an area known as the Fairy Burn,  which has the reputation of being "bewitched."  However, despite the name of the place,  it's not fairies on the program for our young Lord, but something completely unexpected; all I'll say is that if ever a promise made in the past had consequences for the future, it's the one Leslie makes during his strange encounter.   Truth be told, this is one of the silliest and most bizarre tales I've ever had the pleasure to have read, but as I said, I was looking for fluff so in that sense it worked.  [If anyone else ever reads this story, was it me, or was the timeline way off here?]  The seriously pulpy vibe in this one, along with spectral encounters made it fun, and it also set off a few rounds of the giggles here and there.

from page 141, original illustration by Evelyn Stuart Hardy (my photo)

Even more spectral (and not as silly as Leslie's Fate) is Hilda; or, the Ghost of Ermenstein, which takes place in an ancient castle in the forests of Hungary.   After reading about the location, my ahhh reading sensors were put on alert, but really, outside of a wolf pack which one sort of associates with that area, it might have taken place anywhere.  "Hilda" is the story of a love triangle -- two women who love the same man -- gone very, very wrong.   The Schloss Ermenstein in 1876 is the setting for this one, the abode of the Graf von Ermenstein, whose niece, Hilda von Schrieden, is making her first visit as this story opens.  At age nineteen, she is "everybody's pet," the total opposite of her cousin Frederica von Ermenstein, another niece of the Graf.  Frederica loves "admiration," is a bit jealous of Hilda, and the man they both love is Louis de Fontach, a lieutenant in the Austrian Hussars and "protégé" of the Graf, who is also at the castle.  Louis, however, only has eyes for Hilda.  Left alone one day, while the rest of the inhabitants are all out, Hilda decides to go and do some exploring in the castle, which leads her to a particular gallery which she'd seen but had never really got a look at,  one that the old housekeeper  had only quickly led her through but had never stopped at, saying there were "better things" just beyond this gallery.  While exploring the tapestries there, Hilda sees one that catches her eye because it was something altogether different than the others on either side.  Those depicted "gloomy battle scenes" but this one was striking;

"It was a representation of the Crucifixion, with the Virgin Mother kneeling at the foot of the cross. Everything was carefully depicted, even to the blood gushing from the wound of the Saviour's side."

Curious now, she moves the tapestry only to find a locked door, but events make her forget the gallery until much later, when she mentions her find to Frederica, who reveals that the tapestry is located in the "ghost gallery," somewhere Hilda should completely avoid.  That warning, plus that of the old housekeeper only furthers her curiosity, and she goes back, Louis in tow,  which sets off a chain of unforeseen tragic events having to do with (dare I say it?) a family curse.

It's not great by any stretch, but this book is  a fun little volume for whiling away a few hours, if family curses  are your thing, since this is pretty much what ties together these two tales outside of the ghostly visitations.  While Leslie's Fate is certainly a bit giggleworthy at times because it is soooo out there (L.W. Currey's catalogue refers to it as a "mass of absurdities," a description with which I concur),  and Hilda is at its heart a tale of tragic tale of romance, both should be read by true-blue, Victorian ghost-story aficionados who might wonder what else is out there.    I didn't love it, but then again, I'm happy I read it because I  had a good time with it.  Sometimes that's all I really want from a book, especially when I'm on brain detox.  And then, of course, there's the obscurity factor, which in and of itself also brought joy.

Read at your own risk, really, but as I said, if you're a diehard fan of ghost stories, you won't want to miss it.

This is a good one: Number Seven Queer Street, by Margery Lawrence

Mycroft and Moran, 1969
236 pp
hardcover
originally published 1945, Robert Hale


"People do generally come to me as a last hope!"


There's nothing like getting to the end of a book only to discover that it's an abridged edition, which is exactly what happened to me with this one.  First panic set in, and then I got busy trying to find the remaining two stories that had come with the 1945 original.  After a little sleuthing, I found a modern edition so I could finish the book as it was intended to be read.

from the IFSDB

It's a bit confusing, actually, since in the 1945 original shown on the right (Robert Hale), there are seven stories; in the 1969 edition I have there are five, and in the Ash-Tree Press kindle version,  Ash-Tree Press Occult Detectives Volume Two: The First Casebook of Miles Pennoyer, there are six.   Luckily between the Mycroft and Moran edition and the Ash-Tree Press edition, I managed to read them all.  There is yet another edition of four later stories featuring Miles Pennoyer, Master of Shadows (1959) that to my knowledge has not been reprinted since it was published, and according to Biblio.com, there was a twelfth Pennoyer story published after the author's death.   I'm really hoping that Ash-Tree decides to publish (as promised at the end of the Kindle version of Volume 1),  The Second Casebook of Miles Pennoyer, which the blurb says "will be available soon."    Not soon enough for me -- even though these stories can definitely become a bit long winded at times, as the author starts to hone in on the actual problems solved by the "psychic doctor" and their cures, it's eyes on the page without budging an inch.

Ash-Tree Press, 2013
Kindle edition, B00H599QN6
234 pp

In the foreword which is given by Jerome Latimer, the fictional pupil, assistant, and chronicler of  the exploits of  Miles Pennoyer, we are given a clue as to the author's influences in writing this book:

"There are not many people who are fortunate enough to know these selfless and splendid people, the psychic doctors -- and there are still fewer books that record the wonders they can do and are still doing.  Algernon Blackwood's book John Silence was one of the first, and Dion Fortune's book The Secrets of Dr. Taverner is another..."

 The title of the book comes from Pennoyer's address, No. 7 Queer Street, where Pennoyer lives with his housekeeper Friedl and his dog Hans; it is a "top-floor eyrie" perfectly suited to his need to be alone, without "too close contact with the crowd."   According to Latimer, Pennoyer is  a "psychic doctor -- one who deals  in ills that beset the soul rather than the body of man;" Brian Stableford says in his entry on Margery Lawrence in St. James Guide to Horror Ghost and Gothic Writers that   Pennoyer's "ostensible purpose" is to "put an end to the supernatural disturbances by healing the experiential wounds they symbolize." (350)   Over the course of these seven stories, he arrives on the scene to try to understand what is causing someone to act the way they do, but before he can do that and effect a cure, he must get to the root of his or her psychic disturbance. Sometimes he is able to do this alone; at other times he must call on "Them," aka "the Masters" for guidance and help.

In "The Case of the Bronze Door," Pennoyer reveals to Latimer how he came to be the owner of  a certain Chinese screen, a gift from "a patient" who marriage started going very wrong once the piece was put in his study.   "The Case of the Haunted Cathedral" finds him investigating a new cathedral which is haunted by not just one, but two spirits, keeping the practitioners from wanting to worship there.  An invitation in the mail prompts Pennoyer to tell Latimer about "The Case of Ella McLeod," whose strange attachment to a stray dog and her strange knowledge of Ancient Greek gives Pennoyer his first clues as to what's going on.  And then we come to "The Case of the White Snake," which to be really honest, absolutely disturbed me at first because of the device used in this story, which honestly made me question her judgment here.  I won't go there so as not to spoil things, but even Brian Stableford notes that the symbolism was "sanitized."  Yikes.

Next is my favorite of the collection, "The Case of the Moonchild."  To bring Stableford into the discussion again, he remarks that this one was "obviously borrowed from Alistair Crowley," and it shows.  Talk about creepy! In this story, Latimer gets a call from Pennoyer to come to Exeter, where the doctor is visiting an old friend.  He asks Latimer to bring the "bogey-bag," a nickname for a bag

"filled with all sorts of oils and unguents, queer-looking metal contraptions, robes and headgear, various documents, and a book or two, packets of herbs, odd-looking amulets, all manner of things that might be needed by my colleague in his frequent battles with the Forces of the Outer Dark..."

Obviously something weird is happening where Pennoyer is, and Latimer will get his chance to discover what it is when he gets involved in the case on his arrival.

At this point, I bought the Kindle edition for the remaining two stories, "The Case of the Young Man with the Scar" and "The Case of the Leannabh Shidhe."  In the first one, Pennoyer takes on the strange case of a young fellow whose prospective father-in-law wants the boy's "trouble" to be "cleared up" before the relationship can go any further.  It seems that the young man has a strange scar that "comes and goes," one that takes on the shape of a "dull red snake curling round the arm." Possibly the most pulpish story of the seven (and to be honest, for me, the most fun because of the all of the elements involved in this tale), Pennoyer will have to depend on the word of a strange source to get to the root of the scar's random appearance.   The last story finds Pennoyer in the guise of a tutor to a child who

"had got the entire village, besides his mother and the staff of the Manor House, entirely under his thumb. They dreaded and feared without in the least knowing what they feared..."

 It seems that "if Master Patrick's crossed, and especially if he's struck, something nasty'll happen to whoever touches him," reminding me so much of the boy played by Billy Mumy in that episode of  The Twilight Zone called "It's a Good Life."   The doctor and the family have to travel to Ireland to unravel this one, as it turns out, on Halloween.

On the strength of these stories I bought Margery Lawrence's Nights of the Round Table, The Terraces of Night, and The Floating Cafe. While it may not be great literature, Number Seven Queer Street is by an author whose works have been left to drift into obscurity, and that's just a shame.  I agree with  Brian Stableford, who says that "an eclectic collection of her best supernatural short stories...is long overdue."  I'd be first in line to buy it, for sure.

Recommended highly for readers of lost or forgotten authors of dark/supernatural fiction, who also don't mind the pulpy side of horror.

HR#2 -- Pharos The Egyptian, by Guy Boothby

9780486803159
Dover, 2016
serialized in Windsor Magazine, 1898
first published 1899
376 pp

paperback

"...he is as cruel and as remorseless as Satan himself."

Some time ago I read  Richard Marsh's The Beetle, which I loved and at the time designated as the literary equivalent of comfort food. Pharos is another I'd put in that category. It also reminds me of some of the movies I'd watch as a kid -- on Saturdays I'd turn on the TV, stretch out on the sofa and watch a show called Creature Feature that ran old horror movies.Woe be to he who interrupted those few hours back then, and woe be to he who interrupts my pulpy reading time now.  Actually, I think my horror-fiction reading career began back then, and it all started with this sort of delicious pulpy goodness.

It's not by chance that I mention Marsh's The Beetle here, because there is quite a bit of similarity between the two books. While the stories are different,  read closely, both Pharos and Marsh's novel reflect the same sort of anxieties centering around the perceived threats to western (read British) civilization and values by an outside/alien/Other.  In both books, that threat stems from Egypt, which is not surprising given the context of British imperialism at the time (it's very complicated, and I won't go into it here, but feel free to explore  the web if you really want to understand what lies beneath a LOT of late Victorian pulp/horror fiction, including Bram Stoker's Dracula.)  The similarities between The Beetle and Pharos don't end there, though -- both are tales of revenge and retribution, but here Boothby gives us a worst-case scenario. It's a page turner, to be sure -- not the best of literature, but who cares?

Sir William Betford of Bampton Street, St. Mary, Dorsetshire receives a strange letter from his friend artist Cyril Forrester.  It is, as he says, "one of the saddest, and at the same time one of the most inexplicable cases ever yet recorded on paper."  Along with the letter is a manuscript which Forrester wants Betford and his friend George Trevelyan to have published, and it is the contents of this manuscript which make up the story of Pharos. 

Forrester has long had a special attraction to Egypt, which he believes he inherited from his father, "one of the greatest authorities upon the subject the world has ever known."   The story begins on a dark night as Forrester is walking toward Cleopatra's Needle, where he hears a man calling out for help.  Rushing to save the person from certain death by drowning, he realizes that there's someone else there who could have helped the man but made no effort.  In the now moonlit sky, Forrester accosts the "brute and monster" who let the man drown, but as his eyes made contact, he experienced an "indescribable feeling of nausea" like he'd never felt before.  In describing him, he notes 

"his eyes, the shape of face, the multitudinous wrinkles that lined it, and above all the extraordinary colour of his skin, that rendered his appearance so repulsive. ... you must think first of old ivory, and then endeavour to realize what the complexion of a corpse would be like after lying in an hermetically sealed tomb for many years." (28)

This was his first encounter with the person he would later come to know as Pharos the Egyptian. 

They would meet again many times, and Forrester makes the acquaintance of his young ward Valerie, a gifted musician and one of the most beautiful women Forrester has ever encountered.  After a musical evening in which Valerie gives a recital at the home of one of Forrester's acquaintances, Pharos appears at Forrester's home offering to buy a certain mummy that Forrester had inherited from his father.  The mummy, that of the magician Ptahmes, was one of Forrester's most prized possessions, and he refuses to sell.  Pharos is not happy, and the next morning, Forrester awakes to find that the mummy has been stolen. Worse yet, the police are at his door asking him questions about a murdered antiquities dealer.   When he tries to get to Pharos, he discovers he's left England for Naples along with Valerie, and thus begins a tale that will find this odd trio making their way through Egypt and then back to the continent, as a truly diabolical, evil, and nefarious plan is set into motion. 

The Dover edition I have contains the illustrations by John H. Bacon, which are exquisite; the book itself is hours of just pure, pulpy horror fun. As I said, it's not great literature -- in fact, there are some internal eyeroll causing moments, but as far as I'm concerned, it's one that really ought to be in the collection of  both horror and pulp aficionados.   Pharos is one of the most evil,vile, inhuman, conscienceless villains to make his way into a book; he is someone who will stop at nothing to ensure the success of his horrific plan.   He is "as cruel and as remorseless as Satan himself," and god help anyone in his path. 

While the mummy aspect won't remind anyone of Karloff here, the book is well worth reading and above all fun, delicious pulpy goodness.  It is also a bona fide page turner that I couldn't put down, and a sheer aahhhh read that should not be missed.

The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Volume One by Seabury Quinn (ed.) George A Vanderburgh

9781597808934
Night Shade Books, 2017
494 pp

hardcover

I find myself in complete agreement with George A. Vanderburgh and Robert Weinberg who say that the tales in this book "might not be great literature, but they don't pretend to be." They also remark that the stories found here are "good fun" which is absolutely the case.   The Horror on the Links is the first book in a proposed five-volume set, and if the remaining four installments are even half as much fun as this one, then I'm in for a seriously good time.  Let's just say that I enjoyed this series opener so much that I already have volume two, and I've pre-ordered volume three which is supposed to be out in March.  I love good old pulp fiction, I love occult-detective stories, and I love weird tales, so I'm absolutely in my element here.  Ahhhhhhh.

Vanderburg and Weinberg refer to Jules de Grandin as "the occult Hercule Poirot," and it's really difficult not to make the comparison while reading. They also say that he shares "more than a passing resemblance" to Sherlock Holmes, with a "Dr. Watson-like sidekick, Dr. Trowbridge.  As a detective who sees himself as "a scientist; no more", Grandin is not at all quick to dismiss the possibility that there may be more going on than science can explain.  As he notes in "The Poltergeist,"

"There is nothing in the world, or out of it, which is supernatural, my friend; the wisest man today can not say where the powers and possibilities of nature begin or end. We say 'Thus and so is beyond the bounds of our experience' but does that therefore but it beyond the bounds of nature? I think not. Myself, I have seen such things as no man can hear me relate without calling me a liar..."

And indeed, in the scope of the twenty-three stories included here ranging (in order of publication in Weird Tales) from 1925 to 1928, some of the answers to these puzzling tales are definitely of this world while some are to be found in the darker realm of the occult.  The real-world solutions are actually far more frightening than the supernatural ones, for example, after "The White Lady of the Orphanage" (September 1927), I had to put the book down for a while, and I posted somewhere that this was one of the most gruesome stories I'd ever encountered.  Eek and Ick.

My personal favorite is "The Isle of Missing Ships," which is a straight-up pulp fiction story with no foot in the occult world; it is also the only one that does not follow the formula/pattern by which a solution is discovered which is found in all of the other entries in this volume; and then there's "The Chapel of Mystic Horror," because who in their right mind can pass up a story about an old abbey transported from Europe to America, former home of the Knights Templar?  

"The Tenants of Broussac" as cover art, Weird Tales December 1925. From Tellers of Weird Tales

I'll reveal the table of contents below, without annotation -- to tell is to spoil and I don't want to do that. My advice: sit back, relax, and enjoy these wonderful weird tales of yesteryear  and appreciate them for what they are -- delicious pulpy goodness.  My hat is off to the team of Vanderburgh and Weinberg for making these old stories available once again -- I had the time of my life reading this book, and I can't wait to get to Volume two!

Table of Contents

"The Horror on the Links"

"The Tenants of Broussac"

"The Isle of Missing Ships"

"The Vengeance of India"

"The Dead Hand"

"The House of Horror"

"Ancient Fires"

"The Great God Pan"

"The Grinning Mummy"

"The Man Who Cast No Shadow"

"The Blood-Flower"

"The Veiled Prophetess"

"The Curse of Everard Maundy"

"Creeping Shadows"

"The White Lady of the Orphanage"

"The Poltergeist"

"The Gods of East and West"

"Mephistopheles and Company, Ltd."

"The Jewel of Seven Stones"

"The Serpent Woman"

"Body and Soul"

"The Chapel of Mystic Horror"

Lovecraft Country, by Matt Ruff

9780062292063
HarperCollins, 2016
372 pp

hardcover

"... you think you can forgive, forget, the past. You can't. You cannot.  The past is alive, a living, thing. You own, owe it."

The first clue that this is not going to be your average Lovecraftian pastiche or rehash is on the cover -- what some people may see as ghosts or white spaces between tentacles actually bears much more resemblance to the white hoods of the KKK.  In fact, if you're thinking this is going to be Lovecraft redux, you seriously have another thing coming.  While his own particular brand of racism was horrific in itself, anything that Lovecraft produced in his fiction is dwarfed here by  the real-life terror that the characters in this book experience in their daily lives in Jim Crow America of the 1950s, and that little yellow, starry-looking thing on the cover that says "America's DEMONS Exposed" certainly isn't just there to add to the cover art.

    The book begins with an army vet, Atticus Turner,   leaving Jacksonville for Chicago,  driving 450 miles the first day nonstop except for getting gas. With his copy of The Safe Negro Travel Guide in hand, Atticus spent that night in Chattanooga, where the Guide showed that there were "four hotels and a motel, all in the same part of the city." The next day, wanting to "put the South behind him," he has the diner next to his motel fill a basket with food and Cokes so that he wouldn't have to stop in Louisville, Kentucky where again according to the guide, there was a "restaurant that would serve him lunch."  An hour after crossing a "bridge named for a dead slave owner" on the Ohio River, he blew a tire, sending him on foot out to find a garage..  Just his luck -- a Confederate flag hangs over the entrance and, of course, that didn't quite work out.  Pulling out his Safe Negro Travel Guide once more, he discovers that the nearest "Negro-owned garage" was fifty miles away; with no other options, he had to wait seven hours for help to arrive. And this is all just the beginning of worse to come.

So at this point (and I'm only on page four), I'm already creeped out about the necessity of something like a  Safe Negro Travel Guide, and after a little digging, came across the story of The Negro Motorist Green Book, and now I'm really interested to see what else Matt Ruff is going to do here.  I just sort of sat flipping pages as the real horrors of the  lives of the characters unfolded in each of the interconnected stories in this book.

The way Ruff sets up this book is clever -- as he notes in an interview at The Seattle Review of Books,  his idea was to start with "classic story" ideas

"... like, somebody buys a haunted house or somebody finds themselves being chased by an animated doll"

and with that, he asks himself the questions of

"how does this happen to my protagonist and how does having a black protagonist change the nature of the story?"

 Without giving away too much of what happens here, Atticus has returned to Chicago after receiving a letter from his dad Montrose in which he reveals to his son that he's discovered "something about your mother's ... forebears," and that there's some sort of "legacy, a birthright" that's been kept from Atticus, something that "has something to do with the place that Mom's people supposedly came from." Now Montrose has gone missing, and Atticus has only the letter he was sent as a clue to finding him.   From that letter, it turns out that "Mom's people" came from Ardham, Massachusetts, in what Atticus calls "Lovecraft Country."  Atticus, his Uncle George and a friend from childhood named Letitia Dandridge set out for Ardham, and encounter the Braithwhites, who have a strange connection with the Turners through "Mom's people."  The Braithwhites are white,  rich,and powerful; they are also key figures in a strange group known as the Order of the Ancient Dawn. (I have to say that my pulp-loving heart went pitterpat here with this name.)  I won't say why, but what happens during their time with the Braithwhites at this meeting sets up all that follows in this book, during which we come to understand the phrase "Lovecraft Country", as one reader puts it, as having

 "more to do with the rampant racism in that part of the US at the time, rather than the Lovecraftian horror subgenre."  

The way that Mr. Ruff has brought out his story here is very nicely done, and the little "mini-adventures" do, as he also notes in the Seattle Review of Books interview linked above, turn out to be each character's "own weird tale." Some of these are much better than others -- I loved "Horace and the Devil Doll," for instance because it's so on point as far as old-fashioned pulpy horror is concerned -- but really,  each story added to a wider picture of  Jim Crow practices of this time, things that, as anyone sane would realize, were just horrific and inhuman.  At the same time, there's a very real sense of empowerment that comes from the characters in each story in some fashion, as they fight back as best they can, each in his or her own way.   Speaking of pulpy/horrorish tropes here,  Ruff obviously went well beyond Lovecraft in framing his tales -- HG Wells, Ray Bradbury, Robert Louis Stevenson and many more authors find their way into this book as well.

I have to say that on the whole, I liked this book, didn't love it and maybe that's not entirely the author's fault.  Not too far into it, I was reminded in a very big way of what Victor LaValle had done with his excellent  Ballad of Black Tom which uses Lovecraft's own work "The Horror at Red Hook,"  to turn Lovecraft's particularly nasty brand of racism on its own head, so (and I hate that this happens, but I can't help it), there was already a comparison at work in my head. Frankly, when it comes right down to it, LaValle's book, in my opinion, is the better of the two, since  LaValle is hands down, no question,  the better writer.  Having said that though, I don't  mean that readers won't like this one --  there are plenty of reasons to recommend Lovecraft Country to anyone, especially since it seems to be sadly pertinent to our own times.

*****

for more in-depth coverage of this book, I give you

Alex Brown, "Cthulhu Gon' Slay," at tor.com