The Tarn

by Hugh Walpole

A story of two friends with quite different temperaments, in which one hates the other, though keeps it very well hidden. The story ends badly for both though it is how the final death happens which makes this a suitably weird story.

Genres: Horror

36 pages, Paperback

Published March 7, 2019

About the author

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole was an English novelist. A prolific writer, he published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His skill at scene-setting, his vivid plots, his high profile as a lecturer and his driving ambition brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. A best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, his works have been neglected since his death.

Reviews

[Janete on hiatus due health issues · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 round up. A very succinct and rather well written short story.

Summary: "The Tarn is one of the most grisly horror stories ever conceived. Giles Foster goes to visit his old acquaintance, Fenweick, in his remote cottage in the Lake District. He has heard that Fenwick bears him some grudge, and he is keen to put things right between them.

But Fenwick is in no mood to make peace with Foster. His secret fantasies are all about slowly squeezing Foster's scrawny neck...and now here is Foster in person. What will he do?"
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Tarn-A...

[Christian Molenaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essentially The Tell-Tale Heart but made subliminally horny and gay, all holding hands and caressing knees and gripping throats as it tells the story of two writers' unspoken rivalry taken too far. It's great!

[Skylar Phelps · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this one and I’m surprised that so few people on GR have read it. Good short fiction with a touch of weird.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walpole is a master at setting a scene. A very well written story told in a Poesque style of grotesque.

[Edward · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Tarn” was THE short story that drew me to author Hugh Walpole. I first read this short story in an Alfred Hitchcock anthology, and was just as transfixed in my rereading of it when included in another anthology, The Weird.

John Knowles’ A Separate Peace meets Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” in this psychologically haunting tale of professional envy gone out of control. Fenwick blames successful author and “friend” Foster for his own lack of literary success, and so he literally takes matter into his own hands when opportunity knocks.

What I find so compelling about this short story is less so about the external events that happen, but rather the internal workings of Fenwick’s envy and rage that author Walpole so vividly and astutely describes. From the start, with the very first paragraph, the reader is immediately brought into Fenwick’s inner world:

As Foster moved unconsciously across the room, bent towards the bookcase, and stood leaning forward a little, choosing now one book, now another with his eye, his host, seeing the muscles of the back of his thin, scraggy neck stand out above his low flannel collar, thought of the ease with which he could squeeze that throat and the pleasure, the triumphant, lustful pleasure, that such an action would give him.

5 very solid stars for a very in-depth glimpse into the inner world of envy and the psychological turmoil that happens when this emotion is acted upon.

[Joseph lambert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listen to this short story every year around Halloween. I love the story and it reminds me of fall in the American south were there are many lakes. I sometimes wonder if times I am as bitter as(not evil as) Fenwick on his unsuccessful career or could I be as positive as Foster.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

The water scene at the end. The descriptions and horror in which the main character suffers at end was so beautifully creepy!