Sheridan Le Fanu

Non-fiction ~ article
Published in The Spectator, 21st February 1931*
1,075 words
(First read 16/03/2014)

An appreciation ~ thoroughly justified, IMHO ~ of the great Irish writer of ghost stories (1814-73).  As well as explaining to us what makes Le Fanu's stories so good, EFB also has a pop at less successful authors in the genre, including his old pal Henry James, and a certain Charles Dickens.  Oh but if only the man himself could have learnt something from his Victorian predecessor!  Available online here.

*The article was collected in Sea Mist: Collected Spook Stories Volume 5 (2005).

Thursday Evenings

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Pears's Annual, 23rd November 1920
Collected in More Spook Stories, 1934
4,385 words
(First read 14/01/2013) 

Frith's Derby Day (1856-58), featured in this story

Mrs Wallace has been holding her artistic salons (her Thursday evenings) since the height of the Victorian era.  When she dies in her eighties in 1920, the last link between that world and the modern is broken.  Her flat, including the piano at which she used to sing her favourite song "in a faint far-away voice which sounded as if it came from the next house but one", is sold to a pair of consummately modern artists, Mr Humphrey Lodge (composer of symphonies featuring 'siren whistles, pieces of emery-paper rubbed together, watchman's rattles, and penny whistles') and his wife Julia (painter of Cubist portraits whose faces looked like 'a series of planes separated from each other by coloured lines').  It's only natural that the recently departed spirit of Mrs W should be disgusted with all this tomfoolery.
Thursday Evenings is a fun spook story: EFB derives as much pleasure from satirizing the two artistic sensibilities ~ the worst excesses of High Victorianism, in particular the song The Lost Chord, and the idiotic garbled pretentions of the modern ~ as he does from describing the antics of La Wallace's 'Poltergeist' ~ his word.  So, very definitely designed to amuse ~ which it does ~ rather than appal ~ which it doesn't. 
The story's available online here. 

Home, Sweet Home

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Woman, June 1927
Collected in Spook Stories, 1928
5,605 words
(First read 23/09/2012) 

Really the only interesting thing about this story is that the unnamed narrator actually turns out to have a name ~ he's called Ted.  He goes to visit his sister Margery and her husband Walter¹ at their rented house on an isolated stretch of coast in Sussex².  Walter is convalescing after a near nervous breakdown.  There are ghostly things going on in their music room, and a fishy gardener.  In the end the mystery is solved neatly, to this reader's infinite boredom.
The story's available online here.


¹ Absolutely no relation to the hero and heroine of Juggernaut (1911).  See my forthcoming essay* "Hi Jack, this is Jack, how's little Jack and your wife Jack?": On the Curious Lack of Imagination in E. F. Benson's Character Names.
² Well, one assumes it's Sussex ~ the nearest town is 'Hastings' ~ though I find it difficult to imagine any part of that coast being isolated, even in 1927.

*Not reeely.

Naboth's Vineyard

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine,  December 1923
Collected in Spook Stories, 1928
5,935 words
(First read 02/09/2012) 

Seven years after failing to acquit a client of embezzlement, solicitor Ralph Hatchard retires to Scarling*.  He hankers after a particular house there but the female occupant isn't interested in selling, or even talking to anyone.  Shortly afterwards her husband returns from 'India'; Hatchard goes to see if he'd be willing to sell up; discovers that the old chap is none other than his embittered embezzler newly released from prison; and extorts the house out of him; the old chap drops dead of a heart attack the same day and Hatchard promptly moves into his new home ...
If you can't guess what happens next, you've obviously never read a ghost story by E F Benson.  This is humdrum beyond your wildest imaginings, and the whole thing could've been told in 2,000 words max, and been the better for it.
It's available online here. 


*I've absolutely no idea where this place is based on ~ it could be pretty much any coastal town in the south of England.

P.S. The title relates to an Old Testament story which appears to have been something of a favourite with EFB as I've come across it several times in his writings.  I should warn you, though ~ as Bible stories go, it's pretty dull.

The Outcast

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, April 1922
Collected in Visible and Invisible (1923)
6,625 words
(First read 11/07/2012) 

Tony and Madge are a comfortable middle-aged couple living in the town of Tarleton¹.  Into the house next-door to them moves a youngish widow named Bertha Chase, who comes with a bit of 'history' to her: her late husband was a fortune-hunter who committed suicide.  The house next-door is reputedly haunted, but it turns out the ghosts are merely of red herrings.  Where was I?  Ah yes, so Madge does her neighbourly duty and finds Mrs Chase 'charming and witty and good-looking and friendly' but with a very large but attached:

But behind all her agreeableness and charm and good looks I suddenly felt there was something else which I detested and dreaded. [...] I felt a horror ~ nothing vivid, nothing close [...] but somewhere in the background.

Anyway, the long and the short of it: with the expert diagnosis of Lord Charles Alington (Madge's brother), Mrs C is revealed to be Benson Type 3, all charm and wonderfulness on the outside, but on the inside irredeemably and irremediably evil.  There ensues a lot of ridiculous hokum which I won't bother to describe, but it all turns out fine in the end.
A story which manages to be both very daft and very dull (it's massively overlong) at the same time.  It's available online here.

¹ It's extremely unlike EFB to set a story in an actual place, least of all one in Lancashire, so I'm assuming he didn't bother to check on this occasion.  Besides, EFB's 'Tarleton' is on the coast; the real one isn't.

The Thing in the Hall

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, 1912
4,685 words
(First read 05/07/2012) 

I'm rather in two minds about The Thing in the Hall.  In one way it's very routine Benson London spook: two gentlemanfriends live next door to one another; one is a maverick who conjures up an 'elemental' in his living-cum-dining-room ~ the 'hall' of the title; the elemental ends up killing him; the friend (who's a hypnotherapist and the narrator of the piece) looks on first with skepticism, then with horror.  Then again, for a change there isn't masses of signposting of what's going to happen in the end, though we know from early on that things are going to end nastily ~ especially when the maverick casually invokes the name of Satan.  But then again when the critter does reveal itself the effect is rather like one of those $200M CGI-laden Hollywood epics that ends in yet another humdrum fistfight between the white hat and the black: it turns out to be pretty much a carbon copy of the one in 'And No Bird Sings ...' (1926), kind of a cross between an overgrown slug and a walrus, with no plan other than to vampirize folk.
So, it sort of works.  It's available online here.




QUESTION

I'd appreciate it if anyone could enlighten me as to what this bolded part might mean.  This comes at a point where our two chaps, having (as it were) lost touch with their spook, have called in a professional medium to see if he can 'find' it.  The pro is successful but ends up being attacked by the creature; afterwards

There on the floor lay the medium, Louis [that's the maverick] was kneeling by him with a face of wet paper, but there was nothing else there.

Does it just mean he's turned white? or does it mean he's been crying?
You'll not be surprised to hear that though the medium survives the attack

I never saw him again.  A week after that he died of blood-poisoning.

Such are the dangers of being a minor ~ or even a major ~ character in an E. F. Benson yarn.

Outside the Door

Fiction ~ short story
First published in London Magazine, January 1910
Collected in The Room in the Tower (1912)
3,055 words
(First read 03/07/2012) 

Outside the Door is more interesting for containing a clear(ish) exposition of a favourite 'spook' idea of EFB's than as an actual ghost story.  The idea is that just as violent human emotions ~ most notably fear ~ can affect the body, so too can they affect the physical fabric of surrounding objects, so that the objects become somehow permanently 'imbued' with those emotions: hence a lot of ghostly manifestations are merely 'echoes' of past events.  (Well, something like that, anyway.)  Benson then goes on to illustrate his theory with a woefully humdrum haunting which wouldn't so much as disconcert a highly-strung nun.
You can judge for yourself by reading it online here.

Inscrutable Decrees

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, April 1923
Collected in Visible and Invisible (Winter 1923)
5,780 words
(First read 22/06/2012) 

The tale reveals, in a curiously disjointed way, why Lord Archie Rorke didn't marry his cousin's widow Sybil as planned and expected.  It turns out Sybil was Benson Female Type 3a: charming beauty and queen of society ... but one with a psycho lurking in the recesses of her soul ~ the type who gets a kick out of watching little girls drown in sluices.  And do you know how Archie finds this out? ~ Sybil (who just happens to be a medium too ~ did I mention that?) calls up the kiddie's ghost at one of her own séances, the dozy bint.  Unfortunately, Unidentified Narrator has by then thwacked us poor readers in the face with so many richly-painted signposts on his jumbled way to the Big Reveal at the end ... that the revelation comes as no revelation at all.
Something of a dog's breakfast, IMHO.  You can read it online here.

Bagnell Terrace

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, July 1925
Collected in Spook Stories (1928)
5,000 words
(First read 19/06/2012)

One of EFB's London spook stories.  Unidentified Narrator lives in Bagnell Terrace, a place so tranquil that ...

even the cats [...] have caught something of its discretion and tranquillity, for they do not hail each other with long-drawn yells of mortal agony like their cousins in less well-conducted places, but sit and have quiet little parties like the owners of the houses in which they condescend to be lodged and boarded. [this is the high point of the story]

U.N. lusts after the end-terrace house, which is occupied by a mysterious recluse, a man neither young nor old but, in the words of neighbour and intimate friend Hugh Grainger*, 'timeless'.  Well anyway, the long and the short is that after a purely coincidental trip to Egypt, U.N. takes ownership of the house, which, almost forgot to mention, has a 'garden room' exactly like EFB's in Rye, and the place turns out to be haunted ... or possessed ... by the previous owner ... or EFB's Egyptian cat souvenir ... or something.  As usual good old Hughie comes to the rescue and exorcises the place merely by invoking God's name once or twice.
I can't imagine it took Benson more than about 35 minutes to write this garbled twaddle.  Hardly his finest hour.
You can read it online here.


* Renamed Hugh Abbot for this particular outing. 

THE CRITICS

In several of [Benson's spook] stories, the lust to possess a particular house forms the fulcrum of the plot (as in Bagnell Terrace) and the unassuaged anger and revengefulness of the dispossessed owner is often what creates the haunt. Reconciliation and Naboth's Vineyard are two of his most successful stories, especially the latter, which has a really blood-curdling climax.

~Joan Aiken in foreword to The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson 1992

The thematic unity of Spook Stories partly arises from its founding myth of Naboth, whose name is evoked in both Bagnell Terrace and Naboth’s Vineyard. Naboth, it should be remembered, would not sell his vineyard to King Ahab because it was his birthright. Ahab was persuaded to procure the land by using some rather underhand means, only to incite a prophet’s curse and the death of his own son. Ahab had violated the mystical connection between land and blood, and, even though he was a king, he should have accepted his allotted place.

Whilst Ahab was cursed for coveting the land of a lowly and powerless neighbour, Benson was altogether happier to imagine covetous social inferiors. If M. R. James’ ghosts penalised the “curious,” Benson imagines the spiritual world as revolving around the need to check human ambitions for the redistribution of property. The Naboth myth is overturned completely in Bagnell Terrace, in which the narrator reclaims a delightful suburban residence from a foreigner who does not justly belong there. The narrator nicknames the foreigner “Naboth” only because he personally “coveted” this fellow’s house, but Naboth will sell his house as a trap, unleashing a curse which the narrator will have to defeat. Yet the inferior Naboth is sent packing, allowing the virtuous king to enjoy his new vineyard.
[…] Unlike the uniquely Gothic disaster of The Face, the subsequent contributions [to Spook Stories] “And No Bird Sings” (which features an estate rather than a house), Bagnell Terrace, and The Temple are jolly frontier tales in which the bourgeoisie successfully impose their suburban will on to a place which is still haunted by ancient forces.

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

 

Christopher Comes Back

Actually William Dean Howells, another favourite author of mine

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, May 1929
Collected in More Spook Stories (1934)
4,385 words
(First read 18/06/2012) 

This spook story has the same basic premise as the novel Alan (1924): the young and youthful wife of an elderly writer is rotting her life away serving as his amanuensis.  The writer (Christopher) in fact:

was not yet fifty [but] appeared an old man; his mouth had a senile droop, his eyes an unfocused watery vagueness, his hands were creased with wrinkled skin.  Fresh from her April thoughts, Nellie suddenly shuddered with a qualm of horror and repulsion at the sight of him ...

Having finished his magnum opus, Christopher promptly falls seriously ill and, rather than face a lifetime of dreary nursing, Nellie helps him on his way to the other side ... where, obviously, he doesn't want to go: he determinedly comes back to wreck his widow's life in toto.  Her lover (Chris' ex-doctor) dumps her, so she tops herself, 'ironically' by exactly the same method she used to bump off her better half.  The End.
A very daft story.  The message ~ if we can call it that ~ is: "Even wives who deserve to be free don't deserve to be free."  It can be read online here.

James Lamp

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Weird Tales (USA), June 1930
Collected in More Spook Stories (1934)
5,560 words
(First read 17/06/2012) 

In this one our intrepid Unidentified Narrator goes to stay with his retired doctor pal in Rye¹.  The wife of the pal's manservant (James Lamp) has just disappeared; it's known that she was having an affair with a chap from Hastings and that Lamp wasn't best pleased about it.  Pal and U.N. have a few sightings of a mysterious woman; Lamp is jittery.  One night our two gents awake to find the house full of fog and the manservant being coerced out by his revenant old lady.  The twist ~ if you can call it that ~ in this one is that Mrs Lamp's ghost doesn't come back merely to point the finger at the hubby who bumped her off: she comes back to take him with her to t'other side ~ their bodies are found in a sluice the following morning.
A very characteristic EFB spook story in that (1) it's entirely predictable, and (2) the tension level remains firmly at zero throughout.
The one novel thing ~ a house which has uncannily filled with fog ~ is under-exploited.  In fact, it's not exploited at all: it's made to seem positively routine.  HoHum.
It's available online here.



¹ Renamed Trench for this particular occasion.

The House with the Brick-kiln

Fiction ~ short story
Published in London Magazine, November or December 1908
Collected in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (1912)
4,450 words
(First read 25/04/2012) 

The ingredients of an E. F. Benson spook story:
(1) Two gents in an old rented house in the English countryside
(2) The house is haunted, obviously
(3) The two gents get haunted ...
(4) ... the narrator is a bit of a wuss; his pal is made of sterner stuff
(5) The haunting gets so bad they flee the house
(6) They find out the ghost was of a former tenant, who murdered someone ~
And there you have The House with the Brick-kiln ... and a whole host of other yarns.  Utterly formulaic; entirely predictable; crashingly dull.
Still, don't let me put you off [!]: you can read it online here.

For an alternative version of the EFB Spook Story Formula see here.

The Terror by Night

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, 1912
2,880 words
(First read 06/04/2012) 

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
Somewhat unusually EFB starts this spook story with a bit of background 'theory' on what he calls the transference of emotions:

[...] to take the analogy of wireless telegraphy, we are all of us probably 'receivers' to some extent, and catch now and then a message or part of a message that the eternal waves of emotion are ceaselessly shouting aloud to those who have ears to hear, and materialising themselves for those who have eyes to see.

Jack Lorimer, a friend of our Unnamed Narrator's, has been forced to pack his new wife Daisy off to Davos to recover from consumption in the pure Swiss air.  Obviously as soon as EFB/UN says "She's making a spectacular recovery" we know the poor lass is doomed.  Meanwhile, back in London, Jack and UN, now living together at the latter's house for convenience's sake, start to feel exactly the same sensation of dread ~ of what they don't know ~ at the same time.  In a bid to shake off this inexplicable fear the two pals invite a third (Philip) to come to the theatre¹.  That evening, as they're getting ready to go out, Daisy expires in Switzerland, but not before 'manifesting herself' to no fewer than four people: our three friends and (perhaps a shade incongruously) UN's 'man'.
For some unknown reason I've always been partial to stories about moment-of-death revenants, and this is a good example of the genre.  It also has the advantage that it's only about half the length of the average EFB spook and so seems to go at a decent clip, for once.
It's available online here. 

¹ To see The Man from Blankley's, by F. Anstey, another favourite author of mine.

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

By the Sluice

Fiction ~ short story (spook)
Published in The Tatler, 25th March 1927
Approx. 4,700 words
(First read 27/12/1994) 

The first of three spook stories to be found in Fine Feathers and Other Stories (1994).  [EFB?] goes to spend a weekend with his friends Louis Carrington + wife.  Louis is a bank manager and it turns out his sub-manager has mysteriously gone missing after embezzling a 'paltry sum' from the bank.  The usual kinds of ghostly happening come to pass (including a phone-call from the beyond), all enveloped in a thick fog for added atmosphere, until the mystery is revealed.  Actually quite a good story of its type ~ the motivation for the sub-manager's initial crime is discreetly swept under the carpet so as not to detract from the spookiness.

Atmospherics

Fiction ~ short story
I have a feeling that this story made its world début when it was broadcast on the BBC in December 1928, read by E F Benson himself.  It was first published in The Radio Times on 28/12/1928
Subsequently collected in Fine Feathers and Other Stories
Approx. 1,700 words
(First read 27/12/1994)

Our nameless author goes to spend a weekend with ... well, with himself, basically ~ at Mayor's Orchard, which is the house of his friend Harry Armytage, in the Cinque Port town of Tillingham.  He takes with him to show off his 'new toy': an Ad Astra wireless set.  Having rather failed to impress his pals, persistence pays off when ~ as if by magic ~ he tunes in to scenes from King George II's visit to Rye-I-mean-Tillingham as they are happening.  That's it.  Fred briefly re-used the idea (sort of) in his opinion piece Magic White and Black (1934) and, possibly, in another story I haven't succeeded in pinpointing yet.

See also: The Confession of Charles Linkworth (1912).

'Through'

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Storyteller, July 1917
Subsequently collected in The Countess of Lowndes Square and Other Stories, 1920  
(First read 14/06/1992)

As with various other 'paranormal phenomena', EFB could never quite make up his mind whether or not he believed in mediums, séances, the living contacting the dead, etc.  'Through' is a good example of this dithering in action.  The hero, Richard Waghorn¹, is a self-avowed mediumistic fraud: he and his sister use the full panoply of gadgetry and trickery to ply their trade.  And yet, there are moments when he seems genuinely able to see inside the heads of his sitters.  The story deals with one such occasion, when, in fact, he has his first genuine full-blown trance and his client's dead brother speaks 'through' him.  Not a bad story ~ the pace is good and it doesn't outstay it's welcome.  You can read it online here.



¹ Why EFB didn't go the whole hog and call him Richard Wagner is unclear.  And immaterial.

The China Bowl

Fiction ~ short story
Published December 1916
3,485 words
(First read 10/06/1992)

A spook story in which our intrepid heroes [EFB?] and Hugh Grainger solve the mystery of the revenant ghost infesting the spare bedroom of the former's new house in Barrett's Square, London.  To my mind a very routine and somewhat humdrum supernatural/crime yarn.  I marked this in it because it struck me as odd (the bolding is mine):

I was expecting the arrival of my friend Hugh Grainger the next week, to stay a night or two with me, and since the front spare room, which I proposed to give him, had not at present been slept in, I gave orders that a bed should be made up there the next night for me, so that I could test with my own vile body whether a guest would be comfortable there.

As it turns out, [EFB?] and pal Hughie end up sharing the room to do their ghost-hunting.  But why 'my own vile body'? ~ very curious.  The story is available online here.