Name: Terror by Gaslight: More Victorian Tales of Terror
Rating: 3.95 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9780800875596

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February 3, 2024

And on through some more Victorian-era horror fiction - "Terror" in the title, so not everything is supernatural here. I've read half of these stories before, but re-read them for the review. And, as usual, least to best, and here we go:

Rhoda Broughton's "Nothing But The Truth" is a very matter-of-fact story about moving into a reputedly haunted house. The epistolary form (which, in fiction I feel is something like an accidental fore-runner of the cinematic "found footage" approach/conceit - another precursor would be H. Russell Wakefield's "Ghost Hunt") really makes this (thin) story work to its best effect by front-loading a lot of prosaic detail (the boring lives of maids/servants), there's the same sense of "realistic immediacy" (the missives are short and concise) and limitation (length, and the lack of first person perspective in this case - giving everything a removed, journalistic feel), and then showing the "haunting" in a distanced/removed form of only its after-effects. Essentially, it's like a Hans Holzer/Eliot O'Donnell "true life ghost" story but with solid "effects" that don't disappoint with vagueness/anticlimax.

"The Haunted House Of Paddington" by Charles Ollier is a fairly traditional tale of guilt catching up with a man in the form of an invisible being that treads round his deathbed. Really only notable in that a precursor spirit, presumably the dead woman and child he wronged earlier in life, appear to warn him to repent. Nothing much else, though.

There's nothing much supernatural in Edwin Lester Arnold's "A Dreadful Night", as a hunter in the Colorado mountains accidentally falls into a naturally formed underground charnel pit of animal corpses. As it turns out, this natural trap has other occupants - some mangy wolves (who befriend our hero!) and, even more unlikely, an enormous python. It's an adventure or survival story (coincidentally similar to an episode we did recently of Pseudopod called "Top Of The Heap"). The ending is not unexpected - although the narrators gracious attitudes to his fellow prisoners is perhaps a bit... unlikely.

With a framework perhaps inspired by Washington Irving's Tales of a Traveller: Volume I (from which comes his famous story "The Adventure of the German Student"), Andrew Lang gives us "The House Of Strange Stories", which is a series of vignettes about hauntings from a number of different attitudes and perspectives, all told in a spooky house. 'The Squires Story' is standard fare, in which a residential specter directs someone to a hidden document, the destruction of which frees it from its earthly chains. The last piece, 'The Bachelor of Arts Story' is the classic prophetic vision/dream of a silent horse drawn hearse - seemingly liked so much by E.F. Benson that he lifted it entire for his more famous story "The Bus Conductor" (see also various episodes of TWILIGHT ZONE and a segment of BURNT OFFERINGS). Slightly more interesting are 'Miss Girton's Story' - about *not* seeing a ghost but being the cause of someone else seeing one - and 'Aunt Judy's Story' - about sensing a malignant presence (in this case, someone trying to get in through a window) without actually *seeing* any ghost. This last one, in partiuclar, feels almost like the germ of something that would eventually bloom into full flower in the works of M.R. James - but in all, this was an odd collection of Victorian "flash fiction".

Grant Allen's "The Beckoning Hand" is strong, but undermined by a central aspect which requires some comment. It's one of the first fictional tales that I'm aware of to directly involve the voodoo religion (here: Vaudoux), described as "the hideous African cannibalistic witchcraft of the relapsing half-heathen Haitian negroes" - and that might give you a foretaste of what's to come in this interesting but severely flawed story. In a nutshell - a proper Englishman marries an exotic half-Haitian beauty and then discovers she follows the vaudoux religion - as noted, presented as a cannibalistic, quasi-satanic religion (interesting that she's half-Catholic through her Scots father, exotic enough already for her staid, Anglican husband). There are things to like in "The Beckoning Hand" - it's clearly written, has a forward plot thrust and little meandering, opens in an exciting way (a fire at a crowded theater precipitates the meeting of the couple) and is even oddly powerful in describing the emotional turmoil the narrator feels between wedding his betrothed and the strange allure of the beuatiful, exotic and haughty Haitian woman. But - and now we touch on a complicated topic not really cut out for a review of a single story in an anthology, and that topic is race. That the main conception of story is racist (the main character's repugnance at his wife's religious practices tied to her racial origins) is not so problematic - it's essentially the passive racism generated by fear and ignorance at the time, racism that one can offhandedly find in almost any popular writing predating the mid-20th Century (and, sadly, post-dating it to lesser degree) - regrettable but expected and placeable in a historic context.

But the racist aspect of the story is, in itself, inherently fascinating, being that this is one of the first fictional representation of the vodoun religion in genre literature. In essence, what you're seeing is religious commitment being used as a mask for racial intolerance - the story makes the point that the narrator can accept his wife as a strange and exotic Catholic, but not as a cannibalistic voodoo practitioner, as this inescapably underscores her "African-ness". This is mirrored in an earlier segment in which our main character wrestles over his attraction/repulsion to his eventual bride's racial status (it is implied that he is understandably repulsed by her initially, but then becomes fascinated by her exotic manner - or is it "black" magic as well?), acknowledging that as a presumed "quadroon" she is thus "close" to black blood (and is there a subtle English slur on the Scots to be teased out by her "white" blood coming from her Scottish father?), "thinned" as it may be. He is able to make his peace with this but that peace is shattered on observing her decrepit Haitian grandmother and then being unable to dismiss her undeniable "African-ness". And what's interesting about all this is that the story is written completely forth-wrightly by Allen - as an honest, unfiltered depiction of the characters reactions and the author's feelings. The whole story then, is a thoroughly honest, if unconscious, record of the scaffold of cultural and psychological fear underlying and justifying racism, without seeming to be consciously aware of that fact. And for that, it's an interesting story - even if it's actually not a very *good* story (despite some good writing) as it's failed by a deus ex machina ending in which sudden illness solves the moral and religious (not to mention racial) dilemmas of the main character.

"The Wondersmith" is a long story by Fitz James O'Brien and seems very much his ode to the European Fantastique, as it features scurrilous gypsy immigrants (who thirst to spill the blood of Christian children) working satanic black magic to unleash a set of murderous little dolls into the world. Pitted against them is a good-natured, bookselling hunchback and the gypsy sorcerer's "adopted" (you know the ignorant stereotypes about those gypsies!) daughter. It was interesting to read a story with such a racist and denigrating attitude towards the Romany - I was aware of how they were ranked, alongside the Jews, as being untrustworthy by European society of the times (and still today, to a lesser degree) but beyond the usual traveling con men (who "gyp" you) or child-stealers stereotypes found in the Brothers Grimm, I haven't actually read much Gypsy animosity. As I said, this seems O'Brien's tribute to the fantastique (the children's automata coming from E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Nutcracker and the hunchback bookseller and gypsy girl from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) and so is written in an overly Romantic style. The climax is both spectacularly visual (death by virulent poison administered by a swarm of diminutive, sword-wielding mannikins) but also kind of weak (our heroes merely observe the climax, as victory is obtained through accidental means related to the gypsies "baser", drunken natures).

Sabine Baring-Gould's "A Dead Man's Teeth" is a cute, short little humorous ghost story about the troublesome dreams that follow an old folk remedy to cure a toothache - dreams of living the life of another (less-Christian, less tea-totaling, less politically committed) man.

There are a few nautical ghost stories in this volume as well. "The Doomed Man" by Dick Donovan features a sea captain plagued by a vision of a friend whose death he (justifiably, as the man was a complete scoundrel) enabled. It's an example of that "rational narrator becomes enmeshed is supernatural occurrence" story type of the time, in which much is made of the narrator's unwillingness to accept the ghostly explanation and yet at the end he briefly shares the captain's haunted vision. Solid, with some nice then current nautical-life detail, but pretty typical as well (one does have to wonder at the complete unfairness of the vengeful haunting - which implies a far more complicated view of cosmic justice than the story wants to engage).

"The Weird Woman" by that famous author Anonymous (so prolific!) is a very blood-and-thunder Gothic chiller, all surface (as Lamb notes) and more like a familiar fable. Adopted brothers return to a Scottish estate to gain their inheritance, clash over a fair young lass, and things go bad. Most notable is the fantastic story element - the titular figure is a dead-eyed female wraith who rides the winds and only appears to warn the family of disaster, so something like a Scottish banshee, then, as a folkloric, ill-omen figure.

Of the undeniably solid, "good" stories - Robert Barr's "Purification" is interesting to read as a pastiche of Decadent characters not written by an actual Decadent (they all drink absinthe and wonder why their wives cannot accept their artistic temperament's need for mistresses) - funny, near parody in a way. Then it's off to a fiery conclusion of revenge.

The writing duo Erckmann-Chatrian's "The Invisible Eye" is an entertaining example of clear, dry storytelling, the plot resonating with Hanns Heinz Ewers's later "The Spider" (and a bit of Cornell Woolrich's Rear Window) as well). A painter in a German town, who's loft room gives him a vast perspective over the world below while remaining unseen himself, begins to realize that a series of suicides at the local hotel are being caused by an evil old hag who lives directly across from it. He spies on her going about various unsavory plans and eventually chooses to intervene. It's a fun and interesting story.

Jonas Lie's work in the supernatural were fable like excursions into dark folklore and "The Earth Draws" is a good example of same. An industrious young man stumbles upon a troll's treasure storehouse (a very ingenious conception - a magic ring that when worn gives a vision of slots in the hillside - when the ring is inserted and turned into one of these slots, a drawer in the earth pulls out!) and ends up, as young men in these tales often do, under the amorous sway of a female troll. It's down hill from there (for him!). I particularly liked the extended aspect of the doomed scenario as he resists for years and eventually succumbs. Well done.

"Kentucky's Host" by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps is the other nautical tale here - and a fine one. A married sailor takes pity on a young stowaway (some very nice character writing here). The violence and sadism visited on stowaways, and the grueling work and conditions are effectively sketched (another nice touch - our hard-bitten sailing man has a penchant for the occasional poetic & imaginative turn of descriptive phrase - which the other old salts dub "Jake's poetry") and this eventually leads to the death of the boy when pushed too hard in bad weather. A good tale of ghostly revenge.

Best for last is "The Basilisk" by R. Murray Gilchrist, an exemplary piece of Decadent fantasy - here we get a short yet ornately embroidered and darkly embossed tale of a sensitive (aren't they all?) young man's romantic obsession with a sorcerous young woman who is seemingly beholden to a terrible troth with the titular beast. It's all darkling fey and decadently overwrought, with a nicely ambiguous and yet blunt closing line. Short like a good fable.

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Terror by Gaslight: More Victorian Tales of Terror

Hugh Lamb (Editor, Foreword), Robert Barr (Contributor), Jonas Lie (Contributor)

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Hugh Lamb

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