The House with the Brick-kiln

Fiction ~ short story
Published in London Magazine, November or December 1908
Collected in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (1912)
4,450 words
(First read 25/04/2012) 

The ingredients of an E. F. Benson spook story:
(1) Two gents in an old rented house in the English countryside
(2) The house is haunted, obviously
(3) The two gents get haunted ...
(4) ... the narrator is a bit of a wuss; his pal is made of sterner stuff
(5) The haunting gets so bad they flee the house
(6) They find out the ghost was of a former tenant, who murdered someone ~
And there you have The House with the Brick-kiln ... and a whole host of other yarns.  Utterly formulaic; entirely predictable; crashingly dull.
Still, don't let me put you off [!]: you can read it online here.

For an alternative version of the EFB Spook Story Formula see here.

The Other Bed

Fiction ~ short story
Published April 1908
4,305 words
(First read 16/04/2012)

The Room in the Tower

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Pall Mall Magazine, January 1912
Collected in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (1912)
5,290 words
(First read 09/04/2012)

Our Unnamed Narrator has had a recurring dream for 15 years or so.  In it he goes to stay at the country home* of a former schoolmate he barely knew, is shown out into the garden where the family are assembled for tea, then to his room in the tower, where he encounters an unseen horror.  Obviously this premonitory dream eventually comes true.

For me the most interesting aspect of this yarn was the nature of the dream itself: as the years go by in U.N.'s waking world, so too do they pass in his dream ~ members of the family age or get married and disappear from the 'stage', new details emerge, but always the 'punchline' remains unchanged.  The climax is nicely handled, reminiscent of the ending of The Dance (1934) in that the attacker is invisible.  Sadly, though, as with so many of EFB's spook stories, the sewing-up of the story somewhat flattens the effect.
It's available online here. 

*In 'the Ashdown Forest district of [East] Sussex'. 

The Terror by Night

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, 1912
2,880 words
(First read 06/04/2012) 

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
Somewhat unusually EFB starts this spook story with a bit of background 'theory' on what he calls the transference of emotions:

[...] to take the analogy of wireless telegraphy, we are all of us probably 'receivers' to some extent, and catch now and then a message or part of a message that the eternal waves of emotion are ceaselessly shouting aloud to those who have ears to hear, and materialising themselves for those who have eyes to see.

Jack Lorimer, a friend of our Unnamed Narrator's, has been forced to pack his new wife Daisy off to Davos to recover from consumption in the pure Swiss air.  Obviously as soon as EFB/UN says "She's making a spectacular recovery" we know the poor lass is doomed.  Meanwhile, back in London, Jack and UN, now living together at the latter's house for convenience's sake, start to feel exactly the same sensation of dread ~ of what they don't know ~ at the same time.  In a bid to shake off this inexplicable fear the two pals invite a third (Philip) to come to the theatre¹.  That evening, as they're getting ready to go out, Daisy expires in Switzerland, but not before 'manifesting herself' to no fewer than four people: our three friends and (perhaps a shade incongruously) UN's 'man'.
For some unknown reason I've always been partial to stories about moment-of-death revenants, and this is a good example of the genre.  It also has the advantage that it's only about half the length of the average EFB spook and so seems to go at a decent clip, for once.
It's available online here. 

¹ To see The Man from Blankley's, by F. Anstey, another favourite author of mine.

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

 

'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

The Man Who Went Too Far

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Pall Mall Magazine, June 1904
Collected in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (1912)
8,385 words
(First read 15/02/2012) 

The Man Who Went Too Far is quite a comical tale, though it's not meant to be.  U.N. tells the story of his pal Darcy¹ going to visit his pal Frank Halton.  Darcy, 37, is recovering from a bout of typhoid; Halton, 35, lives in an obscure corner of the New Forest (Hampshire); both men are successful painters.

Frank embodies that philosophy or mode of living which recurs fairly often in the work of E. F. Benson, which might loosely be called paganism, or more precisely Pan-worship, or in more modern terms Back-to-Nature-ism.  He's long since given up painting and, buried in his rural backwater, has devoted the last six years to the business of

communing with nature so much and so deeply that, according to his theory, he will ~ inevitably and very soon ~ become one with it, be absorbed into it ... that kind of thing, y'know.  Frank's theory is generally more or less soundish ~ he even manages somehow to work 'God' into it, though obviously it's not the same one who suffered on the Cross and regularly took tea with the Archbishop of Canterbury².  Its main defect, which Darcy eventually hits on, is this:

The radical unsoundness of your idea [...] is this: "All nature from highest to lowest is full, crammed full of suffering, every living organism in Nature preys on another, yet in your aim to get close to, to be one with Nature, you leave suffering altogether out; you run away from it, you refuse to recognise it.

According to the Darcian hypothesis, when Frank's 'final revelation' comes

it will be the revelation of horror, suffering, death, pain in all its hideous forms.

"So be it," says Frank.  And it is.

Uncharmed moorhen

The Man Who Went Too Far is really only interesting³ in that it contains a full exposition of EFB's theories about Man's relationship with Nature, a theme he was always keen to explore.  But Benson, no matter how much he might have yearned for a closer connexion with Mother Nature, was ever the worldling: this is reflected (probably unintentionally) in the fact that Frank Halton ~ he who sleeps outside in a hammock in all weathers, who swims in freezing-cold streams, who can charm squirrels⁴, and so on ~ nonetheless keeps a young manservant, who glides in and out of shot, undignified even by a name, whenever his master needs a very heavy towel bringing to him or someone fancies a whisky and soda.
Apart from the 'climax', which is pathetic, the story's main fault is its absolutely inordinate length: it goes on forever.  It's available online here.

 

¹ This is the only name he appears to have. 

² I'm sure EFB's dad would've been appalled by this story.  To say that the presence of God in Halton's theory is something of an afterthought would be an understatement.  At one point he goes so far as to drop this bombshell, in response to Darcy's criticism that his ideas are unchristian:

"I can't accept [Christianity].  I can't believe in any creed of which the central doctrine is that God who is Joy should have had to suffer.  Perhaps it was so; in some inscrutable way I believe it may have been so, but I don't understand how it was possible.  So I leave it alone; my affair is joy.

I reckon these are very close to Benson's own feelings on the subject.
³ As a spook or horror story it's a complete flop: it's so slow and gabby that when the climax finally arrives, the modern reader can only be stupefied with boredom. 
⁴ It's actually a moorhen we see him charming, but I'm sure he could charm squirrels if they were available.  Baffled? ~ see under The Inheritor (1930). 

QUOTABLES

I forgot to mention that one of the side-effects, so to speak, of Halton's renaturing is that it rejuvenates him, allowing EFB once more to go into homoerotic overdrive to describe him:

He was of medium height and rather slender in build, but the supple ease and grace of his movements gave the impression of great physical strength: even his descent from the hammock was not an awkward performance.  His face and hands were of very dark complexion, either from constant exposure to wind and sun, or, as his black hair and dark eyes tended to show, from some strain of southern blood.  His head was small, his face of an exquisite beauty of modelling, while the smoothness of its contour would have led you to believe that he was a beardless lad still in his teens.  But something, some look which living and experience alone can give, seemed to contradict that, and finding yourself completely puzzled as to his age, you would next moment probably cease to think about that, and only look at this glorious specimen of young manhood with wondering satisfaction.

The E. F. Benson Credo ~ again.  Frank speaking:

Think what youth means!  It is the capacity for growth, mind, body, spirit, all grow, all get stronger, all have a fuller, firmer life every day.

Piggyback sensualists (gratuitous)

Another E. F. Benson Credo ~ again.  Darcy is the first to speak here:

"Ah, but what makes birds and animals happy?" he asked.  "Food, food and mating."

Frank laughed gently in the stillness.

"Do not think I became a sensualist," [Frank] said.  "I did not make that mistake.  For the sensualist carries his miseries pick-a-back, and round his feet is wound the shroud that shall soon enwrap him.  I may be mad, it is true, but I am not so stupid anyhow as to have tried that."

Frank finds his pal unable to sleep and, sitting on the edge of his bed, speaks to him this lullaby ~ which works so instantaneously that he doesn't even need to finish it:

"The birds are sleeping in the brake," said Frank softly, "and the winds are asleep.  The sea sleeps, and the tides are but the heaving of its breast.  The stars swing low, rocked in the great cradle of the Heavens, and ~"