The Temple

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Hutchinson's Magazine, November 1924
Collected in Spook Stories (1928)
6,655 words
(First read 30/10/2012) 

A distinctly long, leisurely, rambling journey into the wilds of northern Cornwall, not far at all from Ravens' Brood and The Inheritor country.  Unnamed Narrator, who's a writer, and his chum Frank Ingleton, who's an archaeologist, tip up in the village of St Caradoc's for one of those work-cum-golf-cum-piquet holidays of which U.N. was such a fan, provided he could find the right chap to accompany him.  Anyway, they eventually stumble across a vacant cottage; they rent it so as to avoid the hotel crowds; they discover it stands in the centre of a prehistoric stone circle (the temple of the title), and that it and the house come with one of those barmy curses Benson specialized in.  Still, it all ends happily.
Though the idea at the heart of The Temple is singularly gruesome (the yarn is more 'horror' than 'spook'), the story itself sadly contains about as much tension as a pan of spaghetti you've accidentally left on the boil for an hour and three quarters.
It's available online here.



QUOTABLES
There is, I feel, a certain air of unseemly relish in U.N.'s description of the temple's sacrificial stone:

It was on that stone that young boys and maidens, torn from their mother's arms and bound hand and foot, were laid, while the priest, with one hand over the victim's eyes, plunged the flint knife into the smooth, white throat, sawing through the tissue till the blood spurted from the severed artery ... 

"Does it come with chips?"

Corstophine

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, September 1924
(Collected in Spook Stories, 1928)
5,315 words
(First read 07/10/2012) 

EFB makes one of his exceedingly rare forays into the world of the North of England ~ Yorkshire, to be precise.  His Yorkshire has towns with names like 'Corstophine' and 'Helyat', but is otherwise more or less fairly authentic-ish.  Our Unnamed Narrator's pal Fred Bennet tells the tale of a vision he had of himself stranded for an hour between trains in a backwoodsy Northern town: the place is totally without any sign of life (other than the station porter) but he goes for a stroll which ends in a cemetery at a certain recent grave.  I'll not give the plot away, though it's pretty guessable for anyone who's ever read one of EFB's vision yarns.
On the plus side: the description of the 'netherworld' Yorkshire town is very nicely done.  On the other side: the story is far too long ~ there's really only enough material for a story half this length; too much of it is repetition; the plot is 'corseted' into the idea rather than flowing out of it; and the final 'sewing-up' robs it of all its power, as well as being a tad on the incoherent side.  Verdict: good stab, wide miss.
It's available online here.  TIP: read as far as "He paused, and I supposed the story was over" then stop.   Nah, just kidding.

QUOTABLE:

What is the use of communications between this world and some other world inaccessible to the ordinary perceptions of mankind if these communications contain nothing that is of value or interest?

P.S. Fans of the Titanic might enjoy EFB's references to that ship in Corstophine.

 

The Tale of an Empty House

Fiction ~ short story [AKA: A Tale of an Empty House]
Published in Hutchinson's Magazine, June 1925
Collected in Spook Stories (1928)
5,170 words
(First read 23/08/2012) 

Hohum.
On his way to a golfing holiday with his pal Hugh Grainger, here bearing the very thin Bensonian disguise 'Jack Granger', our Unnamed Narrator stumbles across what sounds to me like an utterly ghastly place on the Norfolk coast.  He thinks it's wonderful, though, so invites Hugh-I-mean-Jack to come and join him there.  On a desolate spit of land stands an empty house, where our duo of chums are forced to shelter from a storm, and wherein Jack has an extremely close encounter with an invisible ghost-with-a-limp.  Apart from the climax, which is over in 18 lines, the whole thing is pretty yawny and, as happens all too often, the final sewing-up left me simply reeling with boredom.
It's available online here. 


THE CRITICS

A Tale of an Empty House concerns the unsuitable ambitions of the despicable 'day-labourer' Alfred Maldon, whose fate is to inherit the story’s abandoned and unwanted property as a clause of his damnation.

~James Mooney at “Tychy”, 25/07/2011. Quoted from here.

 

The Face

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Hutchinson's Magazine, February 1924; collected in Spook Stories (1928)
5,510 words
(First read 12/08/2012) 

The Face differs from the vast bulk of EFB's spook stories in two respects.  Firstly, the protagonist is a woman and, scarcely credible though it may seem, she's a perfectly ordinary, normal, level-headed, even admirable young woman.  Secondly, the story is left very much hanging at the end: if you put your mind to it, you could sit and puzzle over the mystery for a good three quarters of an hour.
Hester Ward seemingly has everything: good looks, dosh, excellent health, adorable husband and kiddies.  The only nasty black speck in the cold cream of her existence is that she's been having the one recurring and terrifying premonitory nightmare since she was a child and not only are the occurrences growing more frequent, the dream itself is becoming more threatening.  In her dream she encounters a hideous face on a lonely stretch of coast she's never visited in real life.

All Saints, Dunwich, Suffolk*

Her doctor, seconded by her husband, tells her she's overwrought and needs a break.  So they send her off ... to a lonely stretch of the East coast she's never visited before.  The rest is (0bviously) guessable.  At the end Hester proves to have spunk as well as all her other qualities ... but alas! it's too late.  I can pretty much guarantee that the ending will have you scratching your head and going, "Eh? huh? what? but how? ... who? ... why?" etc.
So ... so the main reason The Face stands out from the crowd is for what it doesn't contain rather than what it does.  It features no middle-aged betweeded, whisky-and-soda-supping, picquet-playing gents in search of ghosties; nor does the mystery end up gift-wrapped in a neat little box with a pink bow ~ it ends, instead, in unfathomable oblivion.  But, as so often, it's at least twice as long as it needed to be, and the dénouement can be seen standing out on the horizon from the middle of page 2.
It's available online here.

* Benson may well have been thinking of this church when he wrote The Face.  The last bits of All Saints, Dunwich fell into the sea in 1919 or 1922, depending on who you ask.
For a 'pre-visit' to Dunwich see The Dust-cloud (1906).

  

Reconciliation

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Hutchinson's Magazine, July 1924
Collected in Spook Stories (1928)
5,590 words
(First read 08/08/2012) 

Reconciliation is EFB's hommage to his favourite novel, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.  Luckily for us he doesn't set it in the wastes of Northern England¹ but in an unspecified location in the South, possibly Hampshire or Dorset, though it could equally well be Cornwall or Kent.
Hugh Verrall's family have owned Garth Place since the time of Queen Anne², when his ancestor and namesake took it in payment of gambling debts from the previous owner, a wastrel named Francis Garth.  The latter died in penury shortly thereafter and proceeded to haunt the place for some time but, at the time our story happens, the hauntings have been in abeyance for some while³.  Now then, when our Unnamed Narrator comes to stay, the ghost makes a reappearance and hangs around right up until the time⁴ when, for unrelated reasons, Hugh is forced to sell the house ... and sells it to a direct descendant of the original Francis Garth.  Obviously the ending is a happy one.
Verdict: Far more interesting as a take on Wuthering Heights than as a ghost story ~ U.N. (as lily-livered as ever) seems to be the only person actually afraid of the spook, which does nothing more significant than ... well, hang around a lot ~, Reconciliation is a pleasant if somewhat long-winded read.  It's available online here.


¹ Unlike, for example, Corstophine (also 1924). 
² Which is to say circa 1700.
³ For some mysterious reason Benson, usually the stickler for precise time periods, is very reticent on the numbers here.
⁴ Sorry, I'm making a gash of this but the time frame is a pain to describe: U.N. starts in the present, recalls his first visit to Garth Place, during which he was told the Garth/Verrall story that happened 200 years previously, then returns to the visit, and finally back to the present.

Spook Stories

Fiction ~ collection of short stories
Published April 1928

The collection comprises twelve stories:

Reconciliation
The Face
Spinach
Bagnell Terrace
A Tale of an Empty House
Naboth's Vineyard
Expiation
Home, Sweet Home
"And No Bird Sings ..."
The Corner House
Corstophine
The Temple

For reviews of the individual stories, click on the links above.  For reviews of the book as a whole, see below.
The whole book is available online here.



THE CRITICS

[Next to G K Chesterton] Mr E. F. Benson is perhaps the amateur who has had most success in devising thrillers. Mr Benson's forte is the short mystery story. His new book of these, Spook Stories […], is an amateur detective series rather than a collection of ghost shockers. The setting is usually a picturesque little cottage where murder has been done, the villain in the piece a house agent, who entices thither two aged gentlemen on holiday bent, and thrills and light relief are provided by their encounters with ghosts when they would much rather have been enjoying a quite game of solitaire.

 

~Aberdeen Press and Journal, 05/04/1928

One does not take seriously a book entitled Spook Stories […]. For one reason the use of the term 'spook' suggests humour rather than horror. Not even E. F. Benson's name as author can impart any significance or gravity to the fantastic tales here assembled. The first of these involves an amazing coincidence which links the young owner of a haunted mansion with prospective tenants whose forebears had figured in a sordid tragedy enacted within its walls. In another story, entitled The Face, a happy young wife is tortured by nightmare visions of an evil-looking man who threatens to compel her to come with him. In the end the hapless woman disappears, her footprints being traced to a graveyard in which a landslide has exposed the body of the man who had haunted her dreams. This finale is robbed of any tragic stress by the patent artificiality which makes known the final experience of the victim. The woman disappeared; how then could her last movements be detailed?

~The Courier and Advertiser [Dundee], 19/04/1928

Spook Stories (1928) is perhaps the least distinguished volume of Benson’s ghostly tales (which were typically first published individually in literary monthlies), but it is richest in the glamour and enchantments of an English country garden. Curiously, the novelist Joan Aiken's faintly aggravating Forward to the 1992 edition of Benson’s Collected Ghost Stories (which boasts that she was an affirmed fan of Benson by the age of six) immediately singles out Spook Stories for attention, slagging it off for being “tamer” than M. R. James' tales, before admitting that “there was something very likable about the collection,” namely its evocation of “a comfortable, definite, and instantly recognisable world.” Yet this model of England as a fund of holiday destinations may strike one as being highly idealised rather than “instantly recognisable.”

[…] but Spook Stories could almost make one lose their heart to England. […] There is little politics to this. Benson does not cling to the nation because it provides a spurious sense of certainty and belonging, but he is instead a connoisseur of the English character, its manners and traditions, and the towns and shires from which it emerged. His is an England so pure that anybody would find themselves exiled from it. […] Benson had keenly observed the England which he dreamed about: he had dined with the burghers of his home town of Rye, rifled its antique shops, and disappeared to the nearby coast to peep at the local birdlife through his binoculars.

The English countryside could not be realistically portrayed as idyllic when millions of modern workers had lately fled to the cities, but there are no happy peasants in Benson’s England, merely a distant, dusty world of tradesmen and servants. We are left to survey a genial suburban Camelot of knightly bachelors, the sort of men who would regard a lawyer or a doctor as a servant.

[…] Benson was happy to have his stories collected in volumes. The careful arrangement of Spook Stories particularly draws attention to the sameness of the contributions, and suggests that the sum may be more interesting than its parts. We are invited to observe the destiny of a social class rather than merely those of the indistinguishable, forgettable [Hugh] Gra(i)ngers who happen to belong to it. The sole exception is provided by the penultimate story Corstophine.

[…] The thematic unity of Spook Stories partly arises from its founding , whose name is evoked in both Bagnell Terrace and Naboth’s Vineyard.

[…] the bourgeois desire for pleasant houses [...] recurs throughout Spook Stories.

 

~James Mooney at “Tychy”, 25/07/2011. Abridged. For the full review see here, and the individual stories