'And the Dead Spake ...'

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Hutchinson's magazine, October 1922
Collected in Visible and Invisible (1923)
7,560 words
(Last read 01/03/2012) 





THE CRITICS

Equally bizarre or ghastly are the fates met by these doomed, cruel, dismaying creatures, for Benson metes out fictional retribution with something close to relish. Thus females, even if not always villains, sadists - or mutant hags, as in The Horror-Horn - tend to be victims or suicides. In this collection alone they must be buried, impaled, hanged, incinerated, drowned, strangled, hacked with a skate, etc. […] Par too, for Benson's gruesome course, is 'And The Dead Spake...', whose murderess after a fit suffers a broken skull and then has her brain dissected. Serve the vile beast right Fred seems to say with something approaching glee, in this unusually H. G.Wellsian tale. But while some science-fictional aspects of this story may be Wellsian, its other recurrent themes, such as the misogyny and throatcutting, are not. (And there's more of the latter, by the way, in The Gardener.)

~Alexis Lykiard. Quoted from his review of Ash-Tree Press' Mrs Amworth, first published in All Hallows magazine, 10/2001