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).

  

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