Negotium Perambulans

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, November 1922
Collected in Visible and Invisible (1923)*
6,160 words
(First read 26/01/2012) 

In a remote and isolated Cornish fishing-village some unspeakably horrid thing has lurked for centuries, feeding on the flesh and blood of sinners.
More horror than spook story, Negotium Perambulans ('walking pestilence') suffers from the same drawback as so many EFB yarns: about a quarter of the way through he tells you what the horror is, then a bit later he gives you an example of it at work, then another, and at the end yet another ... and each time it gets just a shade more humdrum.  The only difference with the last occurrence is that our Unidentified Narrator (a retired lawyer, for a change) actually witnesses it himself.
Still, the descriptions of the village, of the narrator's childhood there and nostalgia for the old place, are rather nice.  You can read it online here. 


* The term 'visible and invisible' features in this very story, when the narrator is talking about the natives of the village, Polearn:

 [...] it is as if they had all been initiated into some ancient rite, inspired and framed by forces visible and invisible.

For more of this kind of thing see Ravens' Brood (1934).  I've often wondered if EFB genuinely believed that Cornish village-folk had some kind of mystical knowledge denied to the rest of us, or if it was all just a literary conceit.

How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery

Fiction ~ short story
Published December 1911
5,850 words
(First read 23/01/2012)

Mrs Amworth

Fiction ~ short story
Published June 1922
5,975 words
(Last read 18/01/2012)  

This story was once adapted into a short film.

Gavon's Eve

No excuse needed ...

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Illustrated London News, 13th January 1906
Collected in The Room in the Tower (1912)
4,305 words
(First read 06/01/2012) 

One of EFB's curiously 'back-to-front' supernatural stories: he tells you what to expect later in the yarn ~ then tells you it.  This one takes place in a part of Scotland I've actually been to very recently ~ in fact, purely by coincidence, I've been to the exact area of the setting, near the village of Helmsdale in Sutherland.  Anyway, it deals with a witch, a 'strapping Viking adonis' of a gillie, a mysterious death, Satanic ritual, and the ever-trusty presence of Hugh Grainger (here transmogrified for no good reason into Hugh Graham).  All in all, not bad, as long as you don't mind hoary old twaddle.  It's available online here.

The Horror-horn

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, September 1922
Collected in Visible and Invisible (1923)
5,360 words
(First read 18/12/2011) 

A horror story rather than a ghost story.  [Unidentified Narrator] is spending a holiday in Switzerland with his cousin 'Professor Ingram, the celebrated physiologist and alpine climber' ¹.  Prompted by news from the Everest expedition (which really happened, in 1922), during which, so he says, "they thought they came across the tracks of some naked human foot at a great altitude," Ingram recalls an occasion 20 years previously when he saw a 'wild man' on that mountain out there, the Ungeheuerhorn² ['Horror-horn'].  U.N.'s own encounter with this 'yeti' ~ or whatever you wish to call it: it doesn't matter ~ a few days later is far more, shall we say, hands-on.  Not a bad horror story in the Benson style, which is to say that it's all a tad repetitive, the horror takes a good while to appear and when it does is somewhat on the dull side; the chase scene is quite nicely handled, though.  It's available online here.

¹ I haven't made this up: it's actually a quote.
² This is made-up, by EFB.  The mountain described sounds rather like the Matterhorn to me, but I'm far from being an expert. 

Caterpillars

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, 1912
3,510 words
(First read 09/12/2011) 

At about half the length of one of EFB's regular spook stories, this is really more of a horror story or a ... erm ... psychomedical melodrama ...  Not sure what to call it.  Unnamed Narrator (let's call him Freddie) goes to stay with friends at their villa on the Italian Riviera.  Also living with them is a painter by the name of Arthur Inglis.  On his first night there, Freddie dreams ... is it a dream, though? ... of an infestation of hideous giant caterpillars in a particular unused bedroom.  The next day Inglis finds one of said bugs; he plans to keep it but Freddie is so horrified that he throws it into a fountain; the caterpillar survives its dunking but is eventually squished by Inglis.  Again that night Freddie dreams (¿?) of the infestation, but now it's on the move.  Well, the long and short of it is that the creepie-crawlies (if they exist) are harbingers of Inglis' death from cancer.  The story ends with the villa-owner ~ or the author ~ expressing the extraordinary belief that cancer is in some way infectious.
I'm fairly sure EFB uses the insects-as-cancer motif in something else I've read; he certainly uses the insects-as-consumption motif in Sheaves (1907).  The man himself died of throat cancer in 1940.  I'm not saying a single word about EFB having presaged his own death here.  That would be almost as daft as the story itself, whose main virtue is that it's short.  Available online here




THE CRITICS

Caterpillars […] tells of a vile dream in which millions of the insects are crawling in through keyholes and covering the floor with their writhing mess, which on waking turns out to be a presentiment of cancer. [It] is such a long way from the arch humour of Benson's English village novels that it scarcely seems credible they were written by the same man …

~ Brian Masters in The Life of E. F. Benson, 1991

Other memorable stories [from The Room in the Tower and Other Stories] include Caterpillars, with its zodiacal pun (a relentless tide of huge, writhing caterpillars with crablike pincers instead of suckers, force their way into a painter's bedroom, after which the painter contracts cancer) …

~Richard Dalby in introduction to The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson, 1992

The Gardener

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, August 1922
Collected in Visible and Invisible (1923)
5,260 words
(First read 25/11/2011) 

[EFB?] goes to spend the Christmas holiday with his friend Hugh Grainger and his wife Margaret (Hugh's wife, not EFB's, obviously).  On a stroll over to the golf club, EFB espies a

whitewashed cottage, apparently standing empty, except that he keeps thinking he sees lights in it.  It turns out from his hosts that it used to be lived in by the gardener attached to the house they're all staying in.  By a curious coincidence*, Margaret has been doing planchette of late and has only been able to produce one word: gardener.  Well, the long and the short is that Hugh and EFB ~ and even Hugh's 'man' ~ are visited by (erm) visitations; and Margaret learns the secret of the mystery over tea at a pal's house.  The End.  A very routine yarn, lacking in any real sense of dread.  Available online here.

*Or something.