Gaslit Nightmares: Stories by Robert W. Chambers, Charles Dickens, Richard Marsh, and Others

by Hugh Lamb (Editor)

Bloodcurdling tales from beyond the grave — teeming with sinister figures, grisly cargoes, and the undead — fill the pages of this chilling anthology. 16 long-neglected classics by renowned writers include "The Drunkard's Path," "An Unexpected Journey," "The Haunted Mill," "The Page-Boy's Ghost," "In the Court of the Dragon," and 11 others.


CONTENTS

Barry Pain - The Undying Thing
Lady Dilke - The Serpent’s Head
Hume Nisbet - The Phantom Model
Bernard Capes - The Black Reaper
Bernard Capes - The Accursed Cordonnier
Robert Barr - The Vengeance Of The Dead
Alice Rea - The Beckside Boggle
Charles J. Mansford - Maw-Sayah
Robert W. Chambers - In The Court Of the Dragon
Mrs. J. H. Riddell - The Old House In Vauxhall Walk
Charles Dickens - The Drunkard’s Death
Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman - Luella Miller
Richard Marsh - A Psychological Experiment
Dick Donovan - The Mystic Spell
Joel Chandler Harris - The Late Mr. Watkins Of Georgia
Harriet Beecher Stowe - The Ghost In The mill
J. A. Barry - A Derelict
Jerome K. Jerome - The Haunted Mill
J. H. Pearce - An Unexpected Journey
Mrs G. Linnaeus Banks - The Pride Of The Corbyns
The Countess Of Munster - The Page Boy’s Ghost
Wirt Gerrare - Mysterious Maisie

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Short Stories

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The final installment of my unplanned dive into reading some Victorian Horror/Supernatural fiction. As always, Lamb does a nice job balancing his choices and, as usual, there's some clunkers and at least one stand out story. As usual for me, weak to strong:

Robert Barr's "The Vengeance Of The Dead" (from his book of revenge stories aptly titled Revenge) is a breezy little tale of lost inheritance and body swapping. There's some nice humorous writing in the start but, all in all, it's a light fantasy that contrives a complicated set-up (a perfunctory imagining of the afterlife to justify the ability to swap bodies) so that it can offer a unique revenge scenario - pretty silly, really.

The Countess Of Munster (aka Wilhelmina Fitzclarence) is here with "The Page Boy's Ghost" - so prosaically told and barely fictionalized that it might as well be a routine transcript of a supposedly "true" haunting - and who needs to read more of those?

"A Psychological Experiment" by Richard Marsh is the true disappointment here. I haven't yet read Marsh's The Beetle but plan to, and am aware that he's a forebear of Robert Aickman, so I was hoping for a lot based on reputation and relation. What I got was a very goofy story about a cartoonish, large-bearded stranger buttonholing a nervous man in a club room and regaling him with the details of a current murder case, all while shedding snakes and newts and other creep-crawlies from his clothes. You can probably guess what's really going on from the title or a few paragraphs of reading - like I said, goofy (the ending features a bizarre contraption as well) but not particularly good, either.

Next come the "weak" stories - "The Haunted Mill" by Jerome K. Jerome is a trifle, of a piece with Jerome's other "humorous ghost stories" which are really not my thing. The story is prefaced by the reprinted introduction to his Told After Supper (from which "Mill" originates) which is kind of cute as he muses on why ghost stories are indelibly tied to x-mas celebrations in England. The story itself starts as a cute parody of the classic, folkloric "pointing ghost" (who is usually indicating some lost treasure) but then sputters out into tale lacking a punchline (the obvious punchline is actually mooted by the narrator but never presented as such) - so, really, just a vague, time-wasting frippery.

Also weak is Bernard Capes' "The Accursed Cordonnier". It's interesting in this (and other Lamb) collection to see the different ways Victorian writers engaged the Decadent writing movement. The Nisbet story (to be discussed further down) is set in the Decadent milieu as a backdrop but is not itself "Decadent", Lamb has reprinted actual Decadent works by R. Murray Gilchrist, and then here we get a story that only chooses to engage the Decadent worldview in an argument/discussion. In this story a classic bored, impotent and fashionably sensitive young Decadent meets a stranger at a party and they take a walk in the fog as they argue their worldviews. The stranger takes our main character back to his abode, a lavishly decorated chamber, where the young aesthete meets a beautiful and devoted woman, and where a secret is revealed and a startling transformation occurs. It's an odd story - Capes seems to be arguing against the Decadent worldview by throwing a classic Biblical figure at it (The Wandering Jew) as a critique and argument for religion. I can't tell if the overwrought and overheated prose is intended as a pastiche or parody of the Decadent style (maybe both) but in truth my favorite part was the oddly shrugged ending. I'd lay this in the "dark fantasy" camp myself, but I did learn a few new (antiquated) words while reading it!

Now we reach the "good but flawed" tales. That Hume Nesbit story I mentioned is "The Phantom Model" which gives us a nice little bit of London Bohemian Decadence capped with a supernatural femme fatale. A young, idealistic painter finds his perfect model for Dante's Beatrice in a beautiful, hard-drinking demimondaine who has committed herself to a hopeless life after being diagnosed as terminally ill. She lives from moment to moment and survives purely on alcohol. Her passing, on completion of his painting, does not loosen her hold on the young painter, however... pretty good, as far as "warning stories" go.

Written in Lake District dialect (like Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Golden Friars"' stories) is "The Beckside Boggle" by Alice Rea, in which a wife in an isolated cottage entertains an elderly female traveler while her husband is away from home. Framed like a classic fable (with the title, I was expecting a regional faerie, a "boggle") instead this is a straight up tale of potential brigandary and preemptive murder (with a perfunctory frame at the end to use the events to explain the legend of a haunting). But it's a pretty damn grim tale, very "real-world" in its telling, even with bizarre details like a cross-dressing thief and murder by pouring hot fat down a sleeping man's throat - horrific and original!.

A supremely odd tale is Wirt Gerrare's "Mysterious Maisie". It starts in a fairly typical "woman's Gothic" manner as a young girl of indisposed means takes a lonely position as companion for an elderly lady with poor eyesight. It continues, in some sense typically, as dark secrets are uncovered and evil threatens our heroine. But the details are both goofy (a four foot long crocodile roams the kitchen area) and sinister (there's a mortuary on the grounds, the old lady is a practicing occultist/spiritualist who hosts gatherings of the like-minded, also attended by a hideous, gibbering, veiled creature). Our heroine, late in the game, is befriended by the titular character who seems to barely exist in the real world (the reason being...). This is a not unenjoyable, if broad, romp through blood and thunder excess, almost a horror comic book version of a Gothic tale. The epistolary framing of the story is kind of odd, though...

Robert W. Chambers's weird fiction tone and vaguely Decadent sensibilities merge in his tale "In The Court Of The Dragon", another story of The King In Yellow. A young man, convinced that the organist at his local Catholic Church wishes him particularly malignant ill-will (with all this, as usual, framed with the young man having recently read that scandalous, madness inducing play) makes his way home... The ending is a bit problematic... it works, but works more strongly when the story is read in conjunction with the other tales of this horror-inducing text. So, when excerpted, it seems to end with an abrupt eruption of a weird fictional world into the "real" - and perhaps that was the intention - but without the complimentary texts this "alternate reality" seems to emerge from left field. Interesting, nonetheless.

The Good solid stories would be: the book's *start with a bang!* shocker - "The Undying Thing" by Barry Pain which, amazingly, lives up to its name. It's all Hammer Horror as a member of the landed gentry has the punishment of his sinful ways fall on his wife who births some monstrous, unspeakable deformity that he abandons to the lonely caves on his land. Fast forward a few generations to the current landholder, Sir Edric - who, legend has it, may see the return of the monstrous child of his forefathers, a sight that will herald the death of his family's name...

I mean, really, how can you top an opener like that? Well, how about - the Legend proves true! And it's a fun read and surprisingly short, given the buildup. This, in part, is because Pain knows that no mere description could match the impression he's built up (all *gasps* and turned heads) at the thing's birth, so he doesn't even try. And it works (or worked for me) - you could really feel scullery maids scaring each other reading this around some wood-burning stove on a cold winter's night. Extra points for the brief discursion into the theory that Nature evens all imbalances out - which the story itself either proves or disproves!

Then there's Emilia Francis Strong Dilke (that's "Lady Dilke", to you!) "The Serpent's Head" - a very Gothic but very good story of a mother and daughter who live alone in a seaside castle, a family curse, and a young man that comes betwixt them. "For the story of the house was a fable to her" - despite the real scars upon the mother! Very nicely done - a Gothic fable about generational insanity and post-partum depression, maybe? (I picked up almost a proto-Angela Carter vibe from this one) Nice choice to place immediately after the Pain story, as they're flip sides of each other.

Then there's Charlotte Riddell's (that's "Mrs. J.H. Riddell", to you!) "The Old House In Vauxhall Walk". A young man, thrown out of his family home after an argument with his father, finds overnight lodging in the rooms an acquaintance is vacating (because they're haunted, natch). His sleep is disturbed by a dream-vision of an elderly, female miser. This all may sound familiar, and it is, but I enjoyed reading this nonetheless. The plot may move as expected (there are some further mysteries to be solved) but three qualities enhanced the tale for me. One is the focus on poverty and wealth/class/station as an overall theme, deftly sketched (from lived experience if we believe the introduction). Two was the the studied use of general atmospherics that went hand-in-hand with the theme - the setting is a large, lonely, empty group of cold, dark rooms with a presence that adds spookiness while resonating with the air of penury. Finally the "moral lessons learned" ending, understandably seen as trite by some, worked for me, with its clipped execution resolving the tale into a circular ending. Nice.

An early sketch by Charles Dickens, "A Drunkard's Death" is also all squalor and poverty of Victorian London, the awful conditions exacerbated by the destructive specter of alcoholism. Not really a horror story so much as a moral object lesson (it all ends at the bottom of the Thames!). As might be expected, nice sketches of forbidding, lonely city streets after dark, and the desperate lives of the destitute.

"A Derelict" by John Arthur Barry (that's... well J.A. Barry, which is understandable, to you!) offers more proof of editor Hugh Lamb's opening up of the range of stories to include prosaic, well told tales of awful real life (as with "Drunkard's"). So here you get a very straightforward but nonetheless effectively creepy tale of the discovery of a large derelict ship on the open seas. After a sudden squall traps the boarding party on the anomaly, they uncover the ship's dark history. Well done, atmospheric tale with that extra resonance that comes with the basic naturalistic sense of it.

A man leaves a play, hails a cab, and then finds himself on a short, strange journey through his own life in "An Unexpected Journey" by John Henry Pearce (*mumble* J.H. Pearce to you *mumble*). Yes, it's *exactly* what you think it is, but nicely poetic in execution.

Finally, the real topper here is the always hard to beat "Luella Miller" by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman - a tale of psychic vampirism, for lack of a better term. It's the characterization and psychological dynamics that make this tale stand out – there's an infantilized woman (ala “The Yellow Wallpaper”), and a powerful lack of awareness on the part of the perpetrator as to what is actually occurring, not to mention the almost obsessive complicity on the part of the victims, all of which add up to a disturbing read. A truly great story!

And that's it - time to return from the Victorian era to the modern through story submissions, Thomas Ligotti and ... oh, who knows what else?

[Shawn]

Cleaning up the last few stories from the latter half of my "W" short story read list, before continuing on into the "W-a's", here's one from a book I have in digital form and will eventually read in it's entirety, but provides a place for a review to settle:

In "The Pig Skin Belt" by Edward Lucas White, a far-traveled man returns to his home town, after being gone for years, with wealth but also with some peculiarities. He camps out in an open field until his home is prepared to his liking, he refuses to visit anyone (and yet is charismatic and charming enough to host parties at his new abode), he collects hundred of local stray dogs and keeps them at a nearby farm, and he seems perpetually wary of familiar individuals, seemingly expecting a threat that may arise from anywhere (even as he slowly woos the daughter of a prominent man). This is an interesting little thing. Those of modern sensibilities will balk (understandably so, but then this was written in 1907) at the few instance of overwritten, insulting "black servant" patois - but these are minor in the overall scheme. What is interesting is that the story is all about setting up the curious scenario, then dropping hints as to what is going on, then delivering an eerie climax (well done, I must say), without every really amping up any of the "spookery" - just dryly telling the story. I liked it.

[Emmett Hoops · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most enjoyable collections of supernatural stories of the 19th Century available today. Many of the stories are quite impossible to find elsewhere. Hugh Lamb did the literary world a great service in providing introductions to the stories, authors, and authors' works; these help immeasurably in the enjoyment of the collection as a whole.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun book with lots of interesting stories.

[Kenneth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A superb collection of ghost and supernatural stories from the Victorian era.

[Hilde Helseth]

'An Anthology'

[Bill Borre]

The Vanishing House is also printed in the Big Book of the Masters of Horror