Monkeys

Fiction ~ short story
First published* in Weird Tales, December 1933
Collected in More Spook Stories (1934)
6,240 words
(First read 23/12/2012)

Monkeys/apes, an ancient Egyptian mummy and the curse that inevitably goes with it, a London surgeon who experiments on live animals (among them, obviously, monkeys) ~ all the ingredients for ... well, a routine Benson spook/horror story in which the author cannot resist the temptation to tell you, around the halfway point, what's going to happen in the end, making it not worth your while to read to the end.
It's available online here.  

*Apparently. 

The Step

Fiction ~ short story
Published in the Windsor Magazine, December 1926
Collected in More Spook Stories (1934)
5,505 words
(First read 04/11/2012) 

The Step is unusual for being set in Egypt (Alexandria), and for leaving the reader on the edge of his seat, literally staring into the face of an unspeakable and inexplicable horror.  It also contains a very large well-baked red herring, not something EFB generally went in for much.  These make it, in my opinion, a decidedly superior spook offering¹.
The moment we learn that the protagonist John Cresswell is 'a big plethoric man' we suspect things won't end well for him; when Benson goes on to tell us he practises that absolute-bottom-rung-of-the-ladder profession of money-lending², we know he's doomed.  Anyway, the plot: After a particularly profitable bit of usury, the result of which is his being cursed by the victim's crone of a mother, our 'hero' Cresswell finds himself being followed through the dark streets of the city.  Given that the story has a genuinely surprise twist (for once), I'll say no more about it.
It's available online here.

¹ Mind you, that's not to say it doesn't suffer from the usual defects: it's overlong, the pace is too leisurely, and it's a tad repetitive.
² See also The Money Market (1898). 

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?"

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.

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