This post is brought to you by The Devil’s Defile: Weird Tales From Devil’s Gulch, edited by G. W. Thomas. The Weird West was never weirder in this shared world anthology set in a town haunted by ghosts and worse. “If Music Be the Food of Love” by M. D. Jackson gets things rolling with a man seeking a lost macabre masterpiece. “Dark Raven” by T. Neil Thomas follows hanging Judge Galbraith to a haunted house where he will win (or lose?) a bet. “The Black Lake” by Jack Mackenzie has a quest for the location of this terrible body of water. “The Ghost Gun” by G. W. Thomas is a portfolio of tales featuring Deputy Sheriff Brett Hope as he fills the Ghost Gun with monster bullets, knowing that one day he will have to face Death himself. This collection of interconnected tales features illustrations and cover by M. D. Jackson.
“The Supernatural Horror in Literature” is HPL’s great dissertation on what to read. So we are going to let Ol’ Howard Philips suggest some great audio versions of classic Horror. Lovecraft could have had a second career as a critic if he had been willing to tell others about books in a commercial location rather than in his voluminous letters. Dorothy Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917) and Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror (1921) say there was room for scholarly books on the subject. Montague Summers’ Introduction to The Supernatural Omnibus is another good source for recs.
“The House and the Brain” by Lord Bulwer-Lytton
“The House and the Brain”, which hints of Rosicrucianism and at a malign and deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV’s mysterious courtier St. Germain, yet survives as one of the best short haunted-house tales ever written.
It is also one of the most reprinted haunted house stories with one of those being Weird Tales, May 1923. This tale is also known as “The Haunter and the Haunted” and exists in two different versions. Personally, I liked the tale but mostly because I could see how it influenced later stuff like William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki.
“The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant
…Of these stories “The Horla” is generally regarded as the masterpiece. Relating the advent to France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without a peer in its particular department; notwithstanding its indebtedness to a tale by the American Fitz-James O’Brien for details in describing the actual presence of the unseen monster.
I recently did a post on this story. HPL mentions that it is linked to another, earlier invisible monster tale by Fitz-James O’Brien, “What Was It?” He’s not wrong but I always think of “The Horla” more as a modern version of a ghost story. It appeared in Modern Ghosts (1898). “The Damned Thing” by Bierce (below) strikes me as more of an imitation.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe
In the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the voyagers reach first a strange south polar land of murderous savages where nothing is white and where vast rocky ravines have the form of titanic Egyptian letters spelling terrible primal arcana of earth; and thereafter a still more mysterious realm where everything is white, and where shrouded giants and snowy-plumed birds guard a cryptic cataract of mist which empties from immeasurable celestial heights into a torrid milky sea.
Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” (Astounding Stories, February March 1936) is considered a sequel or ending for this Poe novel. Jules Verne also wrote a sequel called The Antarctic Mystery (1899). More on both of these here.
“The Damned Thing” by Ambrose Bierce
“The Damned Thing”, frequently copied in popular anthologies, chronicles the hideous devastations of an invisible entity that waddles and flounders on the hills and in the wheatfields by night and day.
Like O’Brien’s “What Was It?”, this Bierce tale takes place out in the open, but provides more answers than the older tale. For more invisible monsters, go here.
“The Upper Berth” by F. Marion Crawford
F. Marion Crawford produced several weird tales of varying quality, now collected in a volume entitled Wandering Ghosts. “For the Blood Is the Life” touches powerfully on a case of moon-cursed vampirism near an ancient tower on the rocks of the lonely South Italian sea-coast. “The Dead Smile” treats of family horrors in an old house and an ancestral vault in Ireland, and introduces the banshee with considerable force. “The Upper Berth”, however, is Crawford’s weird masterpiece; and is one of the most tremendous horror-stories in all literature. In this tale of a suicide-haunted stateroom such things as the spectral salt-water dampness, the strangely open porthole, and the nightmare struggle with the nameless object are handled with incomparable dexterity.
Most Horror fiction doesn’t actually scare me. This tale that HPL called the “most tremendous horror-stories in all literature” came close. The only others I can think of are Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks” and Michael Shea’s “The Autopsy”. This is a personal thing, of course. None of the above mentioned may have bothered you at all.
“The Shadows On the Wall” by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
Horror material of authentic force may be found in the work of the New England realist Mary E. Wilkins; whose volume of short tales, The Wind in the Rose-Bush, contains a number of noteworthy achievements. In “The Shadows on the Wall” we are shewn with consummate skill the response of a staid New England household to uncanny tragedy; and the sourceless shadow of the poisoned brother well prepares us for the climactic moment when the shadow of the secret murderer, who has killed himself in a neighbouring city, suddenly appears beside it.
HPL does mention other women writers in his book but this is the only one I selected. (I used Perkin’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and others last year.) Strangely, HPL kinda gives the story away here.
“The Yellow Sign” by Robert W. Chambers
The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is “The Yellow Sign”, in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm’s. A boy, describing a tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a certain detail. “Well, sir, it’s Gawd’s truth that when I ’it ’im ’e grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted ’is soft, mushy fist one of ’is fingers come off in me ’and.” An artist, who after seeing him has shared with another a strange dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with which the watchman accosts him. The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills the head like thick oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay. What he mumbles is merely this: “Have you found the Yellow Sign?”
A key story in the creation of the Cthulhu Mythos, this one from The King in Yellow (1895) It was probably the scariest in that volume.
“The Horror Horn” by E. F. Benson
The weird short story has fared well of late, an important contributor being the versatile E. F. Benson, whose “The Man Who Went Too Far” breathes whisperingly of a house at the edge of a dark wood, and of Pan’s hoof-mark on the breast of a dead man. Mr. Benson’s volume, Visible and Invisible, contains several stories of singular power; notably “Negotium Perambulans”, whose unfolding reveals an abnormal monster from an ancient ecclesiastical panel which performs an act of miraculous vengeance in a lonely village on the Cornish coast, and “The Horror-Horn”, through which lopes a terrible half-human survival dwelling on unvisited Alpine peaks. “The Face”, in another collection, is lethally potent in its relentless aura of doom.
A personal favorite from EFB who wrote dozens of ghost stories and successfully sold them to Pulps like Hutchinson’s Magazine. (For more on that, go here.) I like “Negotium Perambulans” too, with its giant worm monster (who wouldn’t?) but I found the set-up less convincing than “The Horror Horn”.
“The Great God Pan” by Arthur Machen
Of Mr. Machen’s horror-tales the most famous is perhaps “The Great God Pan” (1894), which tells of a singular and terrible experiment and its consequences. A young woman, through surgery of the brain-cells, is made to see the vast and monstrous deity of Nature, and becomes an idiot in consequence, dying less than a year later. Years afterward a strange, ominous, and foreign-looking child named Helen Vaughan is placed to board with a family in rural Wales, and haunts the woods in unaccountable fashion. A little boy is thrown out of his mind at sight of someone or something he spies with her, and a young girl comes to a terrible end in similar fashion. All this mystery is strangely interwoven with the Roman rural deities of the place, as sculptured in antique fragments.
I recently re-read “The Great God Pan”, thinking I knew it well, which I did not. One critic felt it influenced the structure of HPL’s “The Call of Cthulhu”, which I see now. The part I had forgotten, and is important, is that the Prologue with Dr. Raymond comes full circle at the end. Like Rudyard Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast”, this story had the reputation of being virtually obscene. Maybe in 1895, not today.
“The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood
The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood’s fiction includes both novels and shorter tales, the latter sometimes independent and sometimes arrayed in series. Foremost of all must be reckoned “The Willows”, in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.
Two by Blackwood here, because these two stories are such classics. Of the two, I prefer “The Wendigo”, probably because it is set in Canada, and moose hunting is more relatable to me than canoeing in Europe. I think the Wendigo, which is not well defined–and neither are the entities behind the Willows– form a stronger image somehow. “ Restraint in narrative” is the key here. Blackwood suggests the hell out of the monsters but never reveals completely.
“The Wendigo” by Algernon Blackwood
Another amazingly potent though less artistically finished tale is “The Wendigo”, where we are confronted by horrible evidences of a vast forest daemon about which North Woods lumbermen whisper at evening. The manner in which certain footprints tell certain unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in craftsmanship. In “An Episode in a Lodging House” we behold frightful presences summoned out of black space by a sorcerer, and “The Listener” tells of the awful psychic residuum creeping about an old house where a leper died. In the volume titled Incredible Adventures occur some of the finest tales which the author has yet produced, leading the fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, to secret and terrible aspects lurking behind stolid scenes, and to unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and pyramids of Egypt; all with a serious finesse and delicacy that convince where a cruder or lighter treatment would merely amuse. Some of these accounts are hardly stories at all, but rather studies in elusive impressions and half-remembered snatches of dream.
“Count Magnus” by M. R. James
“Count Magnus” is assuredly one of the best, forming as it does a veritable Golconda of suspense and suggestion. Mr. Wraxall is an English traveller of the middle nineteenth century, sojourning in Sweden to secure material for a book. Becoming interested in the ancient family of De la Gardie, near the village of Råbäck, he studies its records; and finds particular fascination in the builder of the existing manor-house, one Count Magnus, of whom strange and terrible things are whispered. The Count, who flourished early in the seventeenth century, was a stern landlord, and famous for his severity toward poachers and delinquent tenants…
There are many M. R. James tales to choose from but I picked “Count Magnus” because it was so influential on HPL and the Cthulhu Mythos style tale. For more on this, go here. “…a veritable Golconda of suspense and suggestion” is pretty fancy way of saying this story kicks ass. And it does. James hints and suggests until you can see in your mind’s eye the terrible priest and his more terrible familiar.
Conclusion
There are many other stories and novels mentioned in “The Supernatural Horror in Fiction”, of course, and certainly more women writers. HPL was well-read in the Horror classics (with the exception of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, for some reason.) He runs from the early Gothics like Melmoth and Frankenstein to the “modern” writers like his friend, Clark Ashton Smith. How cool would have it been if he had written a contemporary book about writers like Bloch, Smith, Kuttner, Derleth and all the other Pulpsters like Edmond Hamilton? HPL died in 1937 so that never happened, but it is fun to imagine. (Sam Moskowitz did it for him. Moskowitz opinion of HPL is that he was a Lord Dunsany clone.) HPL’s old friend, E. Hoffman Price, kinda did this with Tales From the Jade Pagoda but writing long after the fact. Phil Stong’s Other Worlds (1942) was a snapshot of that year.
You may have read all of these stories already (They are the often reprinted ones.) Still, I find listening to a good reader doing an audio version can transform the familiar into the chilling. If you haven’t read these before, here is a great way to get “caught up”. Enjoy these gems with the seal of approval from the Old Gentlemen From Providence.
Mythos Horror & Ghostbreakers at RAGE m a c h i n e
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