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Baleful Beasts: Great Supernatural Stories of the Animal Kingdom
Baleful beasts;: Great supernatural stories of the animal kingdom
- GenresShort StoriesHorror
222 pages, Unknown Binding
Published January 1, 1974
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 24, 2020
I got this book from Inter-Library loan to read the Hugh Walpole story (the last available Walpole on my "to read" list!), then discovered it contained another story on my "to read" list ("Sealskin Trousers"), as well as three stories I'd already reviewed and three stories I should reread to provide a review. So here you go - ostensibly this is a YA anthology of weird stories themed around animals - and not a bad one at that.
Of what I read, there was only one weak story - Ambrose Bierce's perennial "The Man And The Snake." I've never been a big fan of this story (in which a man reading in bed and scoffing at old folk beliefs that snakes can mesmerize their prey finds himself face to face with a deadly serpent) but I took the few moments to reread it (to its credit, its very short). In a way, it's a "twist" story and, thus, suffers the problem that all such stories have - why reread? In this case, the mature me was able to enjoy the decidedly psychological aspect Bierce gives this tale, focusing on the build of fear and the internal struggle over relenting to it or fighting it. Still, once read...
Better were: "The Boy Who Drew Cats" by Lafcadio Hearn, one of Hearn's Japanese folk sketches, here involving an artistic boy who is thrown out as a priest's acolyte because he has a compulsion to sketch cats, and what happens when he shelters in an abandoned temple inhabited by a goblin. A light and easy sketch, like much Hearn. Meanwhile, I've written before (in my review of Irish Tales of Terror) about my conflicted relationship with William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki (and about my conflicted relationship with the figure of the occult detective in general. Unfortunately, the same problem I had with the story in IRISH TALES OF TERROR reappears here. Carnacki is a Sherlock Holmes of the occult, investigating and defusing reports of hauntings using his vast knowledge of occult lore, inventions of his own (like the marvelous electric pentagram!) and a detective's eye for rational clues and details. In "The Horse of the Invisible" Carnacki tells us (these stories always follow a modified Holmesian formula where our narrator visits the famed occult detective - the better to inform us with effusive praise about how great he is - and then Carnacki narrates to him his current adventure) about a particularly nasty haunting at an ancestral home (he's pretty beat up when we meet him) involving a family curse on the first born female, who has always been killed/trampled by a gigantic ghostly horse before she can marry. Carnacki is an odd character to read. There's things I like about him - he's fallible (and thus not pompous) and he doesn't bloviate endlessly (or at least, not too often) on the author's pet theories of supernatural phenomena - in fact, Carnacki will, just as likely, refer to or institute some spell and not explain anything about it. He even occasionally has flashes of character (Hodgson has a nice stylistic touch of having Carnacki ask rhetorical questions of the narrator/reader to underline a point) but, in truth, he's generally flat and colorless - his assured knowledge (even though he may be wrong about particulars) unfortunately never allows the threats to become too personal. There's a bigger problem, though, which I will explain in a spoiler: Which is a shame, because in specific, the scenes and descriptions of the titanic, barreling, invisible equine are powerful and upsetting - Hodgson really captures the sense of a malignant, physical threat that can't be seen, and how genuinely frightening that would be. So, a mixed tale.
"Kerfol" by Edith Wharton - A woman visits the titular, long-shuttered mansion in the remote Brittany countryside and later reads the accounts of a 17th Century murder trial related to the home, where the Lord was found dead and his wife tried for the crime, yet the records of the wife's statements paint a picture of her extreme loneliness and later emotional abuse at the hands of the jealous, brooding Lord (who felt that her pet dogs symbolized her presumed - but not actual - infidelity and so killed them all by hand). This story, which I've bumped up a slot on the reread (having previously read it during my "pretentious" period and having graded it accordingly then) is curiously constructed - the "ghostly" part occurs at the start, before we know any background, and while the setting is atmospheric, the actual manifestations are seen (and written) as ordinary. And yet this is not really a "'what you saw were GHOSTS!' after-the-fact" type story, so much as an examination of a gentle woman's sad life and the appearance of supernatural vengeance. Not bad, but oddly constructed. In "Sealskin Trousers" by Eric Linklater a woman (newly engaged to be married) meets an enigmatic young man on a cliff near the ocean, who she recognizes from college. But after he shows surprising skill at diving, she becomes afraid as she perceives his true nature... This is a odd variant of the "selkie" myth, here focusing on the strange allure of fantastic, and those left behind if one shrugs off their humanity for the promise of a fantastically different life. Interesting. Finally, in Hugh Walpole's "The Tiger," a mild-mannered British businessman enjoys his trip to New York City so much that he returns for a full summer, but begins to find himself drifting into a nightmarish frame of mind, obsessed with the vision that wild animals prowl around through secret tunnels under the city, waiting to strike. This is a supremely odd story - not in its overall plot progression (which pretty much goes as you'd expect) but in its basic concept and incidental details. It could be read a number of ways - most specifically that our main character, visiting a foreign city, somehow processes the idea that "the city is dangerous" into an obsessive delusion, but the forms that takes are....well, it's just odd - some are passively racist (musing on a black man he meets on the street as being "animalistic" in his calm suavity), some possibly repressed sexuality (his reaction to a "scandalous" play he takes in), and some (like a momentary musing of what might happen if all the cars in the city team up with the underground wild animals to herd people to their death) are just strange. Almost felt like reading a Shirley Jackson story at times...
One solidly "Good" story here is "The Terror Of Blue John Gap" by Arthur Conan Doyle. A doctor recounts his exploration of an old Roman mine (purported by locals to house a monster) and how, lost in the darkness following an accidental dousing in an underground river, he faced off against something dangerous and barely escaped with his life. But now... what to do? I reread this and (having long ago passed out of that aforementioned "pretentious" phase) moved it up two notches in the rating, as it's a solidly good suspense/monster story and I give Doyle credit for not just making it a "and the monster was REAL!" story, but actually delving into what happens if you know something to be true - something dangerous to others - but trying to convince people of its reality will likely land you in the madhouse? If you'd enjoy it, here's a reading from Podcastle.
The best thing here is "The Storyteller" by Saki. A man trapped in a train carriage with three bored children and their Governess offers to tell them a story to keep them quiet - but his tale has a unexpected climax unfamiliar to the sheltered children, a climax they relish... This is, like a lot of Saki, a barbed little tale with a blackly humorous sting. Quite enjoyable.
Of what I read, there was only one weak story - Ambrose Bierce's perennial "The Man And The Snake." I've never been a big fan of this story (in which a man reading in bed and scoffing at old folk beliefs that snakes can mesmerize their prey finds himself face to face with a deadly serpent) but I took the few moments to reread it (to its credit, its very short). In a way, it's a "twist" story and, thus, suffers the problem that all such stories have - why reread? In this case, the mature me was able to enjoy the decidedly psychological aspect Bierce gives this tale, focusing on the build of fear and the internal struggle over relenting to it or fighting it. Still, once read...
Better were: "The Boy Who Drew Cats" by Lafcadio Hearn, one of Hearn's Japanese folk sketches, here involving an artistic boy who is thrown out as a priest's acolyte because he has a compulsion to sketch cats, and what happens when he shelters in an abandoned temple inhabited by a goblin. A light and easy sketch, like much Hearn. Meanwhile, I've written before (in my review of Irish Tales of Terror) about my conflicted relationship with William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki (and about my conflicted relationship with the figure of the occult detective in general. Unfortunately, the same problem I had with the story in IRISH TALES OF TERROR reappears here. Carnacki is a Sherlock Holmes of the occult, investigating and defusing reports of hauntings using his vast knowledge of occult lore, inventions of his own (like the marvelous electric pentagram!) and a detective's eye for rational clues and details. In "The Horse of the Invisible" Carnacki tells us (these stories always follow a modified Holmesian formula where our narrator visits the famed occult detective - the better to inform us with effusive praise about how great he is - and then Carnacki narrates to him his current adventure) about a particularly nasty haunting at an ancestral home (he's pretty beat up when we meet him) involving a family curse on the first born female, who has always been killed/trampled by a gigantic ghostly horse before she can marry. Carnacki is an odd character to read. There's things I like about him - he's fallible (and thus not pompous) and he doesn't bloviate endlessly (or at least, not too often) on the author's pet theories of supernatural phenomena - in fact, Carnacki will, just as likely, refer to or institute some spell and not explain anything about it. He even occasionally has flashes of character (Hodgson has a nice stylistic touch of having Carnacki ask rhetorical questions of the narrator/reader to underline a point) but, in truth, he's generally flat and colorless - his assured knowledge (even though he may be wrong about particulars) unfortunately never allows the threats to become too personal. There's a bigger problem, though, which I will explain in a spoiler: Which is a shame, because in specific, the scenes and descriptions of the titanic, barreling, invisible equine are powerful and upsetting - Hodgson really captures the sense of a malignant, physical threat that can't be seen, and how genuinely frightening that would be. So, a mixed tale.
"Kerfol" by Edith Wharton - A woman visits the titular, long-shuttered mansion in the remote Brittany countryside and later reads the accounts of a 17th Century murder trial related to the home, where the Lord was found dead and his wife tried for the crime, yet the records of the wife's statements paint a picture of her extreme loneliness and later emotional abuse at the hands of the jealous, brooding Lord (who felt that her pet dogs symbolized her presumed - but not actual - infidelity and so killed them all by hand). This story, which I've bumped up a slot on the reread (having previously read it during my "pretentious" period and having graded it accordingly then) is curiously constructed - the "ghostly" part occurs at the start, before we know any background, and while the setting is atmospheric, the actual manifestations are seen (and written) as ordinary. And yet this is not really a "'what you saw were GHOSTS!' after-the-fact" type story, so much as an examination of a gentle woman's sad life and the appearance of supernatural vengeance. Not bad, but oddly constructed. In "Sealskin Trousers" by Eric Linklater a woman (newly engaged to be married) meets an enigmatic young man on a cliff near the ocean, who she recognizes from college. But after he shows surprising skill at diving, she becomes afraid as she perceives his true nature... This is a odd variant of the "selkie" myth, here focusing on the strange allure of fantastic, and those left behind if one shrugs off their humanity for the promise of a fantastically different life. Interesting. Finally, in Hugh Walpole's "The Tiger," a mild-mannered British businessman enjoys his trip to New York City so much that he returns for a full summer, but begins to find himself drifting into a nightmarish frame of mind, obsessed with the vision that wild animals prowl around through secret tunnels under the city, waiting to strike. This is a supremely odd story - not in its overall plot progression (which pretty much goes as you'd expect) but in its basic concept and incidental details. It could be read a number of ways - most specifically that our main character, visiting a foreign city, somehow processes the idea that "the city is dangerous" into an obsessive delusion, but the forms that takes are....well, it's just odd - some are passively racist (musing on a black man he meets on the street as being "animalistic" in his calm suavity), some possibly repressed sexuality (his reaction to a "scandalous" play he takes in), and some (like a momentary musing of what might happen if all the cars in the city team up with the underground wild animals to herd people to their death) are just strange. Almost felt like reading a Shirley Jackson story at times...
One solidly "Good" story here is "The Terror Of Blue John Gap" by Arthur Conan Doyle. A doctor recounts his exploration of an old Roman mine (purported by locals to house a monster) and how, lost in the darkness following an accidental dousing in an underground river, he faced off against something dangerous and barely escaped with his life. But now... what to do? I reread this and (having long ago passed out of that aforementioned "pretentious" phase) moved it up two notches in the rating, as it's a solidly good suspense/monster story and I give Doyle credit for not just making it a "and the monster was REAL!" story, but actually delving into what happens if you know something to be true - something dangerous to others - but trying to convince people of its reality will likely land you in the madhouse? If you'd enjoy it, here's a reading from Podcastle.
The best thing here is "The Storyteller" by Saki. A man trapped in a train carriage with three bored children and their Governess offers to tell them a story to keep them quiet - but his tale has a unexpected climax unfamiliar to the sheltered children, a climax they relish... This is, like a lot of Saki, a barbed little tale with a blackly humorous sting. Quite enjoyable.
January 3, 2020
This book was a little different than I thought it would be...
Most of these beasts sound like mental hallucinations, rather than ghosts or monsters...
The cover is cool. I like "The Boy Who Drew Cats". "The Horse of the Invisible" & "Change of Heart" were creepy... "The Terror of Blue John Gap" was good, the most hair-raising story in the book, and featuring a real monster... "The Story-Teller" was very amusing...
I found the other stories to be rather boring, unfortunately. So I give this book 3 stars... It's worth reading at least once.
Most of these beasts sound like mental hallucinations, rather than ghosts or monsters...
The cover is cool. I like "The Boy Who Drew Cats". "The Horse of the Invisible" & "Change of Heart" were creepy... "The Terror of Blue John Gap" was good, the most hair-raising story in the book, and featuring a real monster... "The Story-Teller" was very amusing...
I found the other stories to be rather boring, unfortunately. So I give this book 3 stars... It's worth reading at least once.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews