Between the Lights

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, 1912
4,745 words
(First read 28/03/2012) 

In this reviewer's estimation Between the Lights¹ is not at all a bad horror story.  Like the later The Face (1924), it differs from the average EFB spook story in that the whole thing isn't neatly sewn up at the end².  It also differs from the routine in another major way: the story is told at one remove ~ our Unnamed Narrator merely sits back and lets his pal Everard Chandler tell it to him and his fellow house-guests on a snowy Christmas Eve.  (Definite shades of Mr M. R. James here.)  Benson handles this ploy extremely well: you can almost hear the background silence, the crackling of the logs on the fire, etc.  Well, the bare bones of it is that exactly a year previously, on an unseasonably warm Christmas Eve, while watching a game of croquet, Chandler had a vision ~ a really quite unsettling vision, doubly so because it has no apparent meaning ~ our hero is a completely run-of-the-mill toff, doing nothing in particular.  Later in the year, while he's on holiday deer-stalking in Scotland (Sutherland³), the vision 'became real' ~ I won't give any more away.  As I say, though, the 'power' of it is its randomness, its lack of explanation, its mystery.

¹ Please don't ask me to explain the title ~ I have no idea.
² A tentative theory is briefly put forward, but it doesn't really make any sense.
³ See also Gavon's Eve (1906) ~ the two stories are set in pretty much the same place.

The story is available online here.


THE CRITICS

EF Benson was a protégé of James, and it shows in his ghost stories, though Benson also brings much of his own style to the telling; a sense of fun and sly self-deprecation that never blunts the chill. Between the Lights may not be his best tale, as the teller in the story warns, “It has no apparatus about it at all. You will probably all say that it was nothing, and wonder why I was frightened.” But what it does have is a perfect Christmas Eve ghost story setting. A group of friends gather in a darkened room around a blazing fire to compete “with each other in blood, bones, skeletons, armour and shrieks.” If Between the Lights merely whets your appetite for more of Benson’s delightful “spook stories,” I recommend following it up with one of my favourites, How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery.

~Orrin Grey in 'Four eerie olde holiday ghost stories', in The Malay Mail Online, 24/12/2015