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 Dance

Rupert Grint (not relevant)

Fiction ~ short story
First published in the collection More Spook Stories, April 1934
5,290 words
(First read 26/11/2012) 

The Dance shows EFB at his most gleefully sadistic and (I have to add) morally censorious.  The 'hero' of the piece is Philip Hope; his description is worth quoting in full:

In person he was notably small and slight, narrow-chested, with spindle arms and legs.  He leaned on a stick as he walked, for one of his knees was permanently stiff, but he was quick and nimble in spite of his limping gait.  His clothes were fantastic; he wore a bright mustard-coloured suit, a green silk tie, a pink silk shirt, with a low collar, above which rose a rather long neck supporting his very small sharp-chinned face, quite hairless and looking as if no razor had ever plied across it.  His eyes were steel grey, and had no lashes on either lid: whether they looked up or down, they gave the impression of a mocking and amused vigilance.  They saw much and derived much entertainment.  He was hatless, and the thick crop of auburn hair that covered his head could deceive nobody, nor indeed did he intend that it should.

(The only elements missing from this rundown are his goatlike laugh and prominent ears.)  And he is, dear reader, a sadist ~ there's no other word for it.  At his clifftop house near Cromer (Norfolk) his wife [Benson Heroine Type A] who's less than half his age and who married him out of pity, and his secretary [Benson Hero Type A] have just fallen in love and for a week or so Philip delights in tormenting them at every available opportunity.  Then one day he and

Cromer lighthouse (has small part)

the sec, Julian, go for a walk along the cliff and, just after Phil's told him to sling his hook, the inevitable ~ okay, the predictable ~ happens and over he goes.  A year passes; Julian and the young widow are now married; they come to stay at the Norfolk house ...  You can pretty much guess the rest.
Now admittedly Philip is the great star of the show, and when he dies the story does sag a little ~ but his return is well worth the wait.  Of course The Dance is utterly daft, and EFB's habit of punishing all those who commit adultery or even think about it*, regardless of how loathsome the intended cuckold, rather sticks in the craw these days ~ but it's fun, it's not too long, and the bit just before the climax is actually rather good.  It's available online here. 

The Dance is a condensed version of EFB's own novel Paul (1906).

* See also Christopher Comes Back (1929).

 

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?"

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.

 

Spinach

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Hutchinson's Magazine, May 1924
Collected in Spook Stories (1928)
6,570 words
(First read 17/08/2012) 

So-called automatic writing

Spinach is one of EFB's rare comic spook stories¹.  Or rather, it starts off promisingly as a comic story, degenerates into a humdrum spook story, and only comes alive again in the last paragraph.
Brother and sister Ludovic and Sylvia Byron are a couple of phoney mediums ... oh don't listen to me, here's Fred's opening paragraph, the best in the story:

Ludovic Byron and his sister Sylvia had adopted these pretty, though quite incredible, names because those for which their injudicious parents and godparents were responsible were not so suitable, though quite as incredible.  They rightly felt that there was a lack of spiritual suggestiveness in Thomas and Caroline Carrot which would be a decided handicap in their psychical careers, and would cool rather than kindle the faith of those inquirers who were so eager to have séances with the Byrons.

Spinach (not actually relevant)

EFB has great fun describing their methods and results, as he always does when poking fun at fake spiritists.  Anyway, one of their top customers, Mrs Sapson ('a large, emphatic widow'), arranges for them to go and spend a holiday at her recently vacated cottage near Rye².  There they discover that they have genuine mediumistic powers and are actually able to photograph the extremely 'fresh' ghost that besieges them, though one suspects he would have manifested himself to pretty much anyone who happened to be available.  I'll not give away the climax ~ just say that I found it only mildly amusing.
So: starts well, long saggy middle section, ends well.  It's available online here.

¹ For the others click on the 'comic spook' tag.
² Yes, actually named as such, for once.

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.

Mr Tilly's Séance

Fiction ~ short story
First published December 1922¹
Collected in Visible and Invisible (1923)
5,875 words
(First read 20/07/2012) 

Mr Tilly's Séance, which is firmly in the comic vein, stands out among the massed ranks of E. F. Benson's spook stories in being² the only one that tells a tale from the point-of-view of the ghost.  Mr Teddy Tilly is a gentleman of indeterminate age, obviously a seasoned bachelor, a tad prissy and tetchy.  On the way to a séance one day he slips under an oncoming steamroller and is comprehensively killed.  Having (as it were) gained his bearings 'on the other side' he decides to go ahead and attend the séance, which is

presided over by his favourite medium, a lady pleased to go by the preposterous name of Mrs Cumberbatch³.  Like all EFB's other mediums, Mrs C isn't just a fraud: she's a fraud who turns out genuinely to have 'the gift'⁴.  He makes contact ~ or whatever it's called ~ but finds to his horror that her mind is something like a swimming-pool full of mud: any message he may want to pass on has to be filtered through her ... and comes out sounding like all her usual fraudulent mediumistic guff.
I'm sure Fred set out to make mock of mediums ... but couldn't quite bring himself to go all the way.  Still, it's a fun story.  It's available online here.


¹ I'm not sure where this first saw the light of day ~ possibly in the American Munsey's Magazine.
² As far as I can remember / As far as I know.
³ Really you couldn't make names like this up, could you?
⁴ Because, in the immortal words of whoever-it-was-who-said-it, Benson wanted to believe.

The Cat

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Illustrated London News, 27th November 1905
Collected in The Room in the Tower (1912)
5,510 words
(First read 14/06/2012) 

More a psychopathological mystery than a spook story ~ in fact there aren't any spooks at all in it.  Jack Dick Alington Alingham, a portrait-painting toff, is on the rebound from Lady 'Society Hag' Madingley, who jilted him for someone with more dosh, as Bensonian society hags have a habit of doing.  Nevertheless, observes his doctor pal Merwick, he's made a miraculous recovery from the trauma ~ to hear them talk you'd think Dick had witnessed the machete-massacre of his entire family rather than merely being dumped by a worthless cow.  Anyway, Dr Merwick reckons he's in a (kind of) physiopsychiatrical state of shock (or something) and is bound to come a cropper sooner or later.  Confident that he's fully and permanently recovered, our Dick agrees to complete a portrait of the said witch; everything's going fine until ... a cat appears ...
This one has to be read to be believed: apart from 'the shock thing', which probably wasn't new even in 1905, it's entirely devoid of sensible, coherent or even interesting ideas; the 'climax' is laughable; the pace is sluglike, and it is absurdly over-long.
Well, you may think differently: it's available online here.


THE CRITICS

The same criticism ['an uncustomary failure in artistic judgement'] applies to the third story [in The Terror by Night and Other Stories (1999)], The Cat. As a lover of both women and cats, I'm somewhat out of sympathy with the Fred who can write: 'She was one of those blonde, lithe, silken girls who, happily for the peace of men's minds, are rather rare, and who remind one of some humanised yet celestial and bestial cat.' Here again, a sensitive artistic chap is laid low by powerful natural urges, most often sexual, if always fatally repressed . . . Readers may still enjoy the skilful writing and the predictably ghastly conclusion, provided they can accept the general misogyny and lads-togetherness for what they are—all-too-sadly widespread Edwardian attitudes. Such attitudes were by no means exclusive to Fred Benson, though in his case—life and writings—they often quite openly erupted despite himself, whether quasi-hysterically or in the more controlled guise of satire.

~Alexis Lykiard. Quoted from his review of Ash-Tree Press' The Terror by Night, first published in All Hallows magazine, 02/1999

 

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 ~"

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. 

Boxing Night

Fiction ~ short story
Published in The Tatler, 30th November 1923
Approx. 5,700 words
(First read 27/12/1994) 

In this one it's Hugh Grainger who gets to tell the story, which is of two sisters living in an isolated farmhouse in Romney Marsh who both dream the same premonitory dream, which comes to pass ... kind of.   You couldn't really call this a 'ghost story' because there aren't any actual ghosts in it, just premonitions.  As Hughie says:

Ghosts, clairvoyant visions, true presentiments, and dreams are all glimpses of the unseen [...]  Such messages and messengers come from we know not where, and we know not how they come, but certainly they do come.  Often the very act of communication appears difficult: those beyond the ken of our normal perceptions find it hard to get into touch with us, and often the messages get distorted or bungled in transit.

Boxing Night deals with one such distorted message.  Not a bad story at all.  Available in The Technique of the Ghost Story (1993) and in Fine Feathers and Other Stories (1994), but sadly not available online at present. 


THE CRITICS

[…] No. 12, The Top Landing, and Boxing Night are short, sharp and gruesome. They ring the changes on some favourite Bensonian themes of suicide and premonition, paranoia and nightmare, fitting in fine with the more familiar tales included [in the collection].

~Alexis Lykiard. Quoted from his review of Ash-Tree Press' Mrs Amworth, first published in All Hallows magazine, 10/2001