So, I spent all day yesterday reading Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories by Montague Rhodes James (edited with an introduction by S. T. Joshi), and I’d like to talk it over a bit. I hadn’t been planning to read it, but my wife gave me a copy for Christmas, and I’m really glad that she did! There’s some really interesting stuff in here and it’s got me thinking about what “ghost stories”, “weird fiction”, and “horror” really are or should be.
Who was Montague Rhodes James?
Before getting into the actual stories and the discussion on horror I’d like to have, let’s consider their author for a bit. MRJ was born in 1862 and died in 1936. For context, Lovecraft’s numbers are 1890 and 1937, and Lovecraft explicitly writes that he took inspiration from MRJ in his (really long) essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature. (I’m going to talk about Lovecraft a fair bit here as I’m much more familiar with this stories and I imagine that this is true for most horror fans today.) MRJ was a medievalist scholar and provost of King’s College, Cambridge and of Eton College. He was born into a dedicated Anglican family: his father was an Evangelical Anglican clergyman and one of his two older brothers became Archdeacon of Dudley. Based on his family background, the time he lived in, comments made about him, and his own writing, he’s… basically the most cliched image of an old-timey respectable English scholar as you could come up with.
It seems that his worldview was fairly innocuous: he was a traditionalist even for his time, but as far as I can tell, not in any particularly unethical ways that would make him overly distasteful today. He certainly wasn’t progressive, saying of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness “I believe Miss Hall’s book is about birth control or some kindred subject, isn’t it? I find it difficult to believe either that it is a good novel or that it’s suppression causes any loss to literature.” His tone, in the stories, definitely comes off as very classist to me… but I always get the impression that it’s not out of any real animosity. His lower class characters are treated condescendingly, but he also makes – as far as I can tell – an honest attempt to portray how they talked and acted, and he seemed to have a fair bit of experience in actually talking to regular people while traveling. I doubt that, if he suddenly stepped out of the past today, that he’d create a successful twitter account (or, at least, not successful for any reasons that I’d consider lauding as “successful”), but to my knowledge he wasn’t nearly as backwards as someone like Lovecraft (whose stories I love so much that I can’t bring myself to think too poorly of him, but I’m certainly not going to write out a paragraph to defend Lovecraft’s racism.) My honest impression is that MRJ was a product of his time, but also enjoyed really talking to people to hear their perspectives, and he seems to have taken his ethics and religious views both seriously and with a healthy degree of levity and uncertainty. In his very short story, A Night in King’s College Chapel, the stained glass windows of the chapel come to life at night. One particular bit stands out to me:
“Besides the lion and the dog, Mrs Tobit had another awkward neighbour in the shape of Jonah’s whale, which (I heard her saying) was always flapping about the place, and splashing one’s silk dress when one went out to tea with any lady, and “what a blessing it would be if some people as give themselves airs about being prophets could keep themselves to themselves a trifle more. “An innuendo which so moved Jonah that he said, with some asperity, that he had yet to learn that a prophet, even though he might have only five chapters, wasn’t a cut above an old woman out of the Apocrypha with half a dozen verses to bless herself with. Besides, wasn’t it a trifle mean to complain of a harmless animal like that whale, which after all was very likely only an allegory? To which Mrs Tobit, together with much other matter, retorted that if it was a whale it couldn’t be an allegory. She hoped she’d learnt her geography better than that when she was a girl, and allegories didn’t live at Ninevah but Egypt.”
A Night in King’s College Chapel
I don’t say all of this to judge or excuse him, just to give some context: he’s a bit stiff and old-fashioned, even for his time, but he seems like a fairly practical and friendly guy. Everything I’ve seen about him demonstrates that he greatly enjoyed spending time chatting with younger members of his college and that he was well-liked. In particular, he enjoyed telling ghost stories at Christmas Eve.
How did MRJ see his ghost stories?
This actually brings me around to what I find most interesting about MRJ in the context of horror: he did not see his ghost stories as a significant professional endeavor or as a means to spread any message, but as entertainment. In his preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (which I haven’t been able to find online, but I have here in my book), he states: “My stories have been produced (with one exception) at successive Christmas seasons. If they serve to amuse some readers at the Christmas-time that is coming – or at any time whatever – they will justify my action in publishing them.”
We can see MRJ’s thoughts on ghost stories spelled out more thoroughly in his essay, Some Remarks on Ghost Stories. Side note, he praises Carmilla here and I’m honestly curious whether he picked up on the homosexuality in it, or if he’d be surprised to learn that it’s now considered the prototypical lesbian vampire story. In any case, he walks through some of his thoughts on what a ghost story should be, or at least of the type of ghost story that he’s personally interested in. I’ve seen this condensed to a list of five points, but I think that gives it a bit more structure than is required. The main point, in my view, is that ghost stories should be written for the purpose of entertaining people. MRJ doesn’t care – or is actively antagonistic towards – stories meant to demonstrate some real metaphysical theory. He doesn’t appreciate gratuitous bloodshed or sex. Now, I want to elucidate this a bit: he’s not looking for sterile stories. Of the image at the top of this post, from the story Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You my Lad, you might think – as I initially did – that MRJ’s stories would be pretty lame: basically just some people with a bit of white powder on their faces and some chains in their hands. Nope! MRJ’s supernatural beings are fucking gross. They’re all hair and teeth and hot breath. Regarding their victims, take this bit from Count Magnus: “Anders Bjornsen was there; but he was dead. And I tell you this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was once a beautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off the bones.” MRJ wasn’t squeamish, but his intent was to make his audience “pleasantly uncomfortable.” He was telling stories to a fairly broad audience of people so that they’d have a little thrill on Christmas Eve, he wasn’t trying to outdo the competition in grotesquerie. His stories are also all fairly short: the length of a comfortable verbal telling.
So, this has got me thinking: what are ghost stories even about? What should a ghost story be, or at least, what do I, personally, like about them? Is “ghost story” even the correct term, or do I really mean “weird fiction” or “horror”?
What even are “ghost stories”?
Maybe I’m common in this regard, but my favorite horror authors are King and Lovecraft. I like weird stories and I like them even more when they’re scary. I particularly enjoy fantastic, otherworldly works, but I like them most when they’re couched in places rooted to this world. I love stories with a surprising cthonic twist, where a cellar or forgettable alley hides a passage down into some fantastic hell. The Rats in the Walls is one of my favorites from Lovecraft (one of many.) There’s sort of a feeling in my gut where I can sense a good story or scene like this. It’s somehow both comfortable and alien. Imagine dropping something under your desk – let’s say it’s your phone – and needing to crawl under it to find it. You crawl forward and keep crawling, getting tangled with cords. In the cramped frustration, you don’t realize how long you’ve been crawling for. You finally find your phone and you start trying to back out, only to find that you seem to be caught on… roots? The loose soil beneath you suddenly gives way and you tumble down the awkward crevice you never realized was just under your home (or in the place of your downstairs neighbor?) Phone in hand, you use its light to look around and see that the crevice opens up into a wide cavern. Perhaps this explains the noises you excused as pipes, a neighbor, a spouse, or some raccoons. But, what’s that shambling mound approaching you, still a bit too far away for your phone to fully illuminate?
That’s the sort of story that I like. Sure, I like longer horror stories like King’s work as well, but even there, I’m generally drawn towards the secrets and dark places he explores. I’ve intentionally seen Graveyard Shift several times, which should illustrate my point. I also prefer his short story collections to his full-length novels (though pretty much everything he writes is good.) When I was little, I once bought Night Shift on tape and listened to it over and over until I was absolutely terrified of the boogeyman. I think, if I had to choose, that I’d say that it’s the strangeness more than the horror that grips me. I don’t care much about mundane slasher films or whatever distasteful genre Hostel and Saw belong to.
Alright, I’m adding this paragraph later because I realized that I never mentioned 「不安の種」 (Fuan no Tane or Seeds of Anxiety.) This is some of the best short form horror I’ve ever seen and it’s very similar to MRJ’s work. You can find it translated in English online pretty easily. I’ll probably talk more about this in another post, but I just had to shove it in here somehow. It’s a collection of very short “seeds” of just weird and creepy situations. Most chapters aren’t even “stories”, but just a few panels: someone bathing and a creepy head emerges from the water while they’re washing their hair or a figure on a distant building stretches all the way to the observer’s window. Junji Ito’s work is another good example of intensely creepy manga of the sort that I love. I get the impression that Uzumaki and The Enigma of Amigara Fault (which was published alongside Gyo, one of the most grotesque things I’ve ever read) have become fairly popular, but I’d also highly recommend Hellstar Remina, particularly if you’re looking for some cosmic horror.
I certainly love metafiction. My favorite entry here is probably House of Leaves. I can easily and fondly recall reading through it with my wife and a series of drinks at AFK Tavern a few years ago. I think it was raining badly, but it’s hard to say for sure. It certainly felt as though the corners of the room were too dark and too expansive. The dark, dank hallway leading towards both the bathrooms and the kitchen took on special significance as the light and noise and pleasant smells fell away behind me, walking through the narrow hallway and past the bustle – just out of sight – of the kitchen. Not a trip downwards, into the earth, but still cthonic in feel, at least as much as in the book I was reading, where doors and hallways led into near infinite darkness and cold. A Tale for the Time Being was also fantastic, and this doesn’t have any horror at all (or, at least, not much.) I read that one for a Japanese literature course and narrowly missed meeting the author, which I’ve always regretted. I’d roughly include the original web version of John Dies at the End in the category of metafiction as well. I distinctly remember reading that for the first time as well, though it was much longer ago: probably 2007 or 2008, in Waunakee. Clicking through the pages in my browser (I think I was using Epiphany at the time, but it may have been Firefox) made it feel more real, somehow. As if I had stumbled upon some secret knowledge leaked out to the internet to be picked up in IRC chatrooms and 4chan threads. The Creepypasta genre is fairly well-known these days, which takes a bit of the fun out of it, but it’s still just excellent. John Dies at the End was really more of a straightforward web serial, but in its original web version it certainly felt a bit like SCP, Smile Dog, or any other bit of esoteric web horror. I remember walking around in the Wisconsin night’s cold and just mulling over the story, letting myself believe – just a bit – that it might be real. Speaking of Wisconsin, Creepypasta, and stories being too real, I suppose I should at least drop the link for the Slender Man stabbing. Note here that in one member of the Creepypasta wiki’s community’s defense, they stated “We are a literature site, not a crazy satanic cult”. Seems a bit odd to me that anyone felt the need to distance themselves from Satan here. But, I’m getting off topic. My point is that, at least in my head, metafiction is in the same rough category as Lovecraft and MRJ.
Why “antiquarian” ghost stories?
This brings us back around to the book I’m presumably talking about today. MRJ isn’t credited with pioneering “ghost stories”, but “antiquarian ghost stories”. Now, in my view, MRJ wasn’t setting out to create any specific formula or genre: he was just making up stories based on his personal experiences that would be of interest to the individuals he would personally tell these stories to. It seems like lucky chance that this formula is also just rock solid.
To be clear, “antiquarian ghost story” is explicitly not about stories set in the past: it’s about stories set in the present but with ties to the past. MRJ’s stories were set in his time and were meant to be understand as contemporary and relatable to his audience. He talks about Cambridge so much because that’s where he worked. He talks about finding rare old stories, documents, or prints with such familiarity because he was a medieval scholar. He was specifically attempting something different from Gothic fiction, which is often set in a medieval setting. Placing a story in the past makes it far easier to suspend disbelief, but it also makes it difficult to place yourself in that story. From MRJ’s preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary: “A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in bring romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself, “If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!””
I find it interesting that to read these stories today is to read them explicitly as MRJ did not intend them to be experienced. For us, these stories are similar to the Gothic stories for him: they’re set in a past close enough to pull at our sensibilities but distant enough to feel safely removed from and to suspend our disbelief. While reading these stories, I really tried to put myself into the position of the perspective characters and see – for a little while – everything I know from my real life as futuristic nonsense. It’s hard to say whether this worked, but it’s definitely part of the reason that it took me about twelve hours to get through this fairly short collection of stories.
So, MRJ’s intent was to create relatable ghost stories, and he was an antiquarian himself, so were the stories “antiquarian” merely because that was relatable to MRJ?
Well, I can’t exactly interview him to know his personal thoughts, but… I don’t actually care either. What’s more interesting is why his antiquarian ghost stories became so popular among people who weren’t in his intended audience, and this wraps back around to metafiction and Creepypasta. The function of the “antiquarian” aspect of these stories is to provide a link to the past with a sense of verisimilitude. A regular person isn’t generally looking for a supernatural experience on purpose, and even if they were, if it were feasible for a regular person to actually find such an experience, then it wouldn’t be so mysterious, would it? But, anyone who’s been to a library can capture the sense of finding some weird book on a shelf (sadly, I don’t suppose that this will be a relatable experience for much longer.) One of my favorite creepy places is the Memorial Library in Madison: there are all these creepy caged cubicles, flickering lights with proximity activation, obscure sections, movable shelves, and study rooms that I recall being absolutely silent even when filled to capacity. I could half-believe a weird story that starts there without any effort at all, and at the right hour and mood I could probably believe it fully, if only for a few hours. Anyone who’s had an older relative pass since reaching an age where they’re included in the aftermath could buy the idea of coming across some weird old artifact they only vaguely remember seeing in a room they rarely entered as a child and now need to decide whether to store, sell, or send to a relative with a better claim to it. Traveling to a distant city primarily to read some old documents is a bit less relatable for those outside of MRJ’s intended audience, but it’s not so great a stretch. Perhaps I’m just unpopular or uncool, but I can certainly imagine pouring over records in a foreign city more readily than I can imagine spending time in a cabin in the woods with a bunch of attractive young people. Alright, this is probably a bad example that only applies to me, but I don’t think it distracts from my point here: having an antiquarian character or situation in a story is a convenient device to link something obscure to something relatable.
Well, that’s pretty much the function of Creepypasta too: it’s something you stumble upon “in the wild”, online. Unaccredited stories on the internet are apparently reputable enough to make major medical and political decisions for around a third of my country, so why shouldn’t they be at least credible enough to suspend disbelief for something more harmless? Metafiction is interesting in that it really should invalidate a story entirely: the narration is broken somehow and you cannot ignore that it’s not the simple testimony of a witness… but that’s not how it works, is it? Being pulled into it ourselves forces our rational mind to discard the story, but it pulls at our senses far more strongly for it. There’s a scene at the end of Earthbound (spoiler, if you somehow are intending to play Earthbound, haven’t gotten around to it yet, and haven’t been spoiled yet) where you need to tell your party of characters to pray for help against an overwhelming, unknowable enemy. They pray out and get a response in the good wishes of the various people your party helped throughout the game, but that’s not enough. You keep telling them to pray and the only response is an empty, uncaring darkness. It was honestly really shocking, to me: it’s one of the bleakest scenes I’ve even encountered in a story. Finally, as your party struggles to merely stay alive and you keep telling them to pray for help, the game states that you – the person playing the game – “prayed for the kids, having never even met them before.” By joining the narrative myself, it felt far more real. Granted, this is much more direct than most metafiction: it’s often not about involving the reader, but just about playing with the narrative structure or the medium that the story is told through.
I don’t even need to jump directly to Creepypasta for this, really. Creepypasta is basically just urban legends on the internet. Do kids today still tell urban legends without the internet? Would telling a ghost story in person, with no digital component, feel more real or less real to a very young person today? I’m honestly not sure and it might depend on the story.
In any case, it seems to me that the trick to antiquarian ghost stories is that they can conveniently vouch for their own probability in very few words with a relatable excuse. If you want to really go all out, as MRJ often does, you can look up some historical figures to include or accurately describe some places you’ve been to. Hell, I try to do that in my writing all the time: I just ranted about the Memorial Library a couple paragraphs up. That detail wasn’t necessary for whatever point I’m trying to make here, but it added a post to bind the ethereal substance of my words to a physical place in reality, not unlike the post in The Rose Garden, one of the stories I’ll eventually get around to discussing here.
Don’t worry, we’re almost done with this preamble (pre-ramble?) I just want to mention Lovecraft again for a moment.
What did Lovecraft think?
So, Lovecraft’s essay I mentioned before: Supernatural Horror in Literature. This essay is fucking long (yes, I’m aware that this is hypocritical, but the beauty of hypocrisy is that you can buy yourself an all-access pass to being a hypocrite by forgiving it in others.) It’s also lacking in sources and makes a lot of strong claims that, although seeming fairly “reasonable”, are hard to accept as fact without proper citation. It’s… also a little racist. The tricky part there, though, is that it’s clearly obvious that folklore has an attachment to the people and region that it comes from: that’s what gives it much of its charm, unique flavor, and verisimilitude. We can’t really talk about folklore without talking about cultures, religions, and regions in aggregate. Just, yikes, much of this language hasn’t aged well at all and some of it probably felt at least a bit off even at the time. Note, however, that I think there’s more Orientalism than anti-black racism in this particular essay, and – for what it’s worth – it’s pretty hard to find English writings about “The East” more than a few decades back that aren’t about this bad. I’m… not sure whether that matters, but at the very least, I didn’t notice the N-word anywhere in this essay.
In fairness, I might just be picking at it because it’s pretty similar to this essay that I’ve written here today, just written in Lovecraft’s time and with far more stories and authors referenced. It’s long, but if you’ve stuck here with me thus far, then you’re clearly not ailed by a superfluously wordy ramble, so give it a read. The first and last parts – the introduction and section on “modern” masters – are most relevant to us today.
In Lovecraft’s introduction, he says a few things that closely mirror what I’ve written here (I wrote most of this post before reading the essay, so I’m encouraged by the similarity!) I’ll just dump the quotes here, as Lovecraft’s style makes it difficult to pick out short quotes to work into a paragraph of my own.
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
We may say, as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finally explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it remains a fact that such narratives often possess, in isolated sections, atmospheric touches which fulfill every condition of true supernatural horror-literature.
The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.
I have two reactions to this. First, I really like these thoughts as they relate – very specifically – to the genre of short weird cosmic horror stories that he’s known for. Being not merely “unknown” or “unexplained” isn’t enough: the dread has to come, at least to an extent, from something “unexplainable”. Having “rules” is fine or better. Having the character decipher enough of the rules to affect a change in events is also fine. Explaining them until they fit with a legitimate, real, and documented nature of the world ruins them. A good weird story has a slow build of dread and unknown and leaves the reader with a sense of only barely understanding. It’s a difficult balance to accomplish this without merely being “confusing” or “stupid”, but it’s necessary to a good story of this form.
My second response is to want to dig just a bit deeper on the assertion that a weird story cannot teach or produce a social effect. This is something that MRJ asserted as well. Now, to be clear, I’m not sure whether this means precisely what it sounds like it means. At this point in history, there were a lot of theories floating about regarding spiritualism, psychology, and metaphysics that had the appearance of science. That’s… not actually all that different from today, but it would’ve been even more difficult at the time for a regular person to research the validity of such a claim. It’s fun for an urban legend or Creepypasta to pretend as though it’s “for real”, and a good reading of such a story will attempt to believe it for a moment, but a person capable of critical thought isn’t going to incorporate it into their worldview without a lot more research, and that research would invariably discredit the story very quickly.
There’s another form of social effect though, and that’s metaphor. Let’s just ask the question we’re probably all thinking: “What would Lovecraft and MRJ think of Lovecraft Country?” I mean, what would they think about it in abstract: MRJ was very far removed from the specific points here and Lovecraft probably wouldn’t have appreciated having his racism called out so publicly in a time where it’s no longer even remotely acceptable. Of course, I mean that it’s not even remotely acceptable for most of us. (My condolences if that felt too political to you, but I sincerely don’t see how that’s “political” at all.) So, in other words: “Did MRJ and Lovecraft mean that weird stories cannot be used as metaphor for real issues?”
…probably? I mean, it does lesson the strangeness of the story if you can see that it’s an intentionally crafted metaphor for a real situation. Lovecraft Country is fantastic, and it’s legitimately horrifying, but it’s a very different sort of story from this sort of weird fiction that Lovecraft and MRJ were talking about. Well, sort-of. Lovecraft Country is horrifying because it’s real. The horror comes from the fact that the supernatural elements are superfluous. The ruling class and nationalists don’t need magic or monsters. Note how many stories about Nazis having occult powers there are in popular fiction. Some of this is just exaggeration for the indulgent pleasure of throwing in all the spices, but it’s often done in the same way as in Lovecraft Country: to really highlight that the supernatural element doesn’t even matter. Wolfenstein’s world might be less scary than our own: sure, the Nazis have crazy technology, but the anti-fascists have goddamn B. J. Blazkowicz.
That said, Lovecraft Country really does hit a lot of the tropes of a weird story. It’s certainly antiquarian. There’s an element of cosmic horror. There’s no attempt to fit the supernatural elements with natural law. There’s even a real sense, as in MRJ’s words, that if we’re not careful, this could happen to us. Only… well, which “us” and which “this”? That might be the key difference. Regardless of race, we can all sympathize with the protagonists and imagine – to an extent, at least – what it would be like to be in their situations. But, it’s hard to miss that for much of the intended audience, there’s not much danger that we could find ourselves in their particular situations. I mean, we can find ourselves on the wrong side of a 100% broken and corrupt criminal justice system or being ground to dust beneath a hulking capitalist behemoth, but I’m not personally anxious that I’d be unsafe stopping at any particular business in an unfamiliar town. Not enough to want a Green Book, at least. For me, some of the horror comes from worrying that if I’m not careful, I could be on the other side. If one of those hypothetical “good cops” watched the show, they must have wondered – at least a little – whether they’ve missed the runes, secret gestures, and transformations of their colleagues.
But, for the black audience of Lovecraft Country, I’d imagine that it feels very much as MRJ said. If I’m not careful, that could happen to me.
I don’t know if I can come to a good conclusion on this point. In general, I agree that metaphors or lessons – despite having their place in literature – do weaken weird fiction by constraining it and binding it into a form that we know to be understandable. It lessens the cosmic element of cosmic horror. But, I think that Lovecraft Country is a good example of how there is absolutely a way to do this correctly, it’s just a very tricky task that needs to be approached carefully, and the result might not be exactly the sort of story that MRJ and Lovecraft were talking about, but I don’t really give a shit because I like both forms.
Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories
Alright! We’re here! We’re finally to the actual topic I set out to write about: my response to Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories by Montague Rhodes James. I’ll link each heading to the story in Wikipedia. The full text is available for each story and linked from the pages. I’m not going to provide a summary of any of the stories – as that would simply ruin them. I’m specifically providing my response and anything that may be interesting to someone else who’s read the story. I will assume that you’ve read each story before reading my response to it. I obviously can’t enforce that, so do what you want, but my intent here is to create some companion conversations regarding the stories.
Canon Alberic’s Scrap Book
First story in the collection! Let’s see what my first note is…
“monomania is a cool word”
Well, it is. Still, I’ll try to dig a little deeper than that.
As this was my first exposure to MRJ’s writing, most of what struck me immediately was his style. It’s very conversational: I can definitely see how these stories were basically transcribed from a literal “oral tradition” (of telling them on Christmas Eve every year.) MRJ’s stories often start off kind of weak, loosely introducing us to the perspective character in far too many words. Now, I get what he’s attempting here: he sort of pretends as though he’s trying to remember the details or else trying to describe a real person while hiding their identity. It’s pretty true to the urban legend form of saying that you heard the story from a cousin or a friend from another school: someone very relatable but not someone that the audience has met personally.
He’s also pretty condescending towards the poor verger. It’s actually hard for me to tell here whether we’re meant to think less of the perspective character or if this felt like the natural way to talk for MRJ (“let us call him Dennistoun” – this character shows up in a few of the stories as sort of an anonymous stand-in that nonetheless has some weak continuity between tales.) I’m inclined to think that we’re supposed to feel as though Dennistoun is a bit arrogant, which would also explain him missing out on the very obvious signal that if someone is letting you buy something from them for a ridiculously low price and looks excessively relieved when you agree, there’s probably a reason. The verger even starts to get cold feet at one point and gives Dennistoun an out, as he clearly feels a little guilty that he’s going to try to pawn off this curse on a stranger. Actually, the more I think of it, the more I think that the verger was actually done pretty well as a character – he wants to be rid of this curse, but he also does try to protect Dennistoun a bit – so I think that the condescending way that he’s spoken to is meant to be a character flaw in Dennistoun.
It’s a nice touch that MRJ mentions that the verger is definitely a “verger“, but he really prefers the term “sacristan“. Changing a detail like this in real time, while telling the story, gives a sense of verisimilitude (alright, I’ll try to stop using this word so much, but it’s a neat word and I actually have a good reason to use it today). MRJ does this sort of thing often, where he’ll conversationally mention that he’s making up this elemental or can’t remember that particular detail, implying that the rest of it is “true” in a way that’s sort of fun and transparent. He’s not really trying to trick us here – we know that he’s making these stories up – but he really was very well traveled and did his research, so many details are accurate or at least realistic.
The actual description of the awful scrapbook is excellent. I don’t want to have too many excerpts here, but this one is just great:
What he then saw impressed him, as he has often told me, more than he could have conceived any drawing or picture capable of impressing him. And, though the drawing he saw is no longer in existence, there is a photograph of it (which I possess) which fully bears out that statement. The picture in question was a sepia drawing at the end of the seventeenth century, representing, one would say at first sight, a Biblical scene; for the architecture (the picture represented an interior) and the figures had that semi-classical flavour about them which the artists of two hundred years ago thought appropriate to illustrations of the Bible. On the right was a King on his throne, the throne elevated on twelve steps, a canopy overhead, soldiers on either side—evidently King Solomon. He was bending forward with outstretched sceptre, in attitude of command; his face expressed horror and disgust, yet there was in it also the mark of imperious command and confident power. The left half of the picture was the strangest, however. The interest plainly centred there. On the pavement before the throne were grouped four soldiers, surrounding a crouching figure which must be described in a moment. A fifth soldier lay dead on the pavement, his neck distorted, and his eyeballs starting from his head. The four surrounding guards were looking at the King. In their faces the sentiment of horror was intensified; they seemed, in fact, only restrained from flight by their implicit trust in their master. All this terror was plainly excited by the being that crouched in their midst. I entirely despair of conveying by any words the impression which this figure makes upon anyone who looks at it. I recollect once showing the photograph of the drawing to a lecturer on morphology—a person of, I was going to say, abnormally sane and unimaginative habits of mind. He absolutely refused to be alone for the rest of that evening, and he told me afterwards that for many nights he had not dared to put out his light before going to sleep. However, the main traits of the figure I can at least indicate. At first you saw only a mass of coarse, matted black hair; presently it was seen that this covered a body of fearful thinness, almost a skeleton, but with the muscles standing out like wires. The hands were of a dusky pallor, covered, like the body, with long, coarse hairs, and hideously taloned. The eyes, touched in with a burning yellow, had intensely black pupils, and were fixed upon the throned King with a look of beast-like hate. Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America translated into human form, and endowed with intelligence just less than human, and you will have some faint conception of the terror inspired by the appalling effigy. One remark is universally made by those to whom I have shown the picture: ‘It was drawn from the life.’
That’s just fantastic. The description itself is appropriately gruesome, but I also like the framing. Even without the larger context, that last line is really chilling: “It was drawn from the life”.
Really, that bit there is most of the story. The demon does appear to Dennistoun, but only very briefly. The story is really about the scrapbook. Dennistoun not appreciating the weight of this forms the ending and his very near tragedy. Great way to start off the collection.
Lost Hearts
Okay, I can sum up what I love about this story in one quote: “And when is your birthday, my dear boy? Eleventh of September, eh? That’s well—that’s very well. Nearly a year hence, isn’t it? I like—ha, ha!—I like to get these things down in my book. Sure it’s twelve? Certain?”
Okay, that’s not everything I love about it, but it made me laugh a lot.
I really liked the actual story of this one and I’m a bit curious whether the television adaptations are any good (there’s at least one, maybe more? I haven’t seen them in any case.) The creepy descriptions are solid, but they don’t really compare with the bit from the scrapbook above. I really enjoyed following up some of the references, particularly for Mithras and Simon Magus.
The ending is also really solid. In particular, I thought it was brilliant how Mr. Abney actually anticipated his victims’ ghosts coming to attack him and in his arrogance did nothing to protect himself: “Some annoyance may be experienced from the psychic portion of the subjects, which popular language dignifies with the name of ghosts. But the man of philosophic temperament – to whom alone the experiment is appropriate – will be little prone to attach importance to the feeble efforts of these beings to wreak their vengeance on him.” What a stupid prick.
The Mezzotint
Starts off conversationally by referencing Dennistoun and the scrapbook. Reading the collection in order, I liked this introduction, but it probably would’ve been dull if I hadn’t been reading these in order.
So, to start off, I didn’t know what a “mezzotint” is, so I had to look that up. That wasn’t enough to feel like I really understood this type of print, so I also checked out a couple of YouTube videos. This one’s sufficient for a quick look. You can find some really stunning mezzotint images online too. In short, it’s a style of black-and-white printing that enabled tints between white and black (hence the name) without using crosshatching or anything similar. Side note, back when I really wanted to be a manga artist, I did a lot of drawings with crosshatching and that technique really kind of sucks, so this must have been a great innovation. Key to the story, mezzotints can look really creepy even when that wasn’t the intent.
This story has a lot of rambling conversation between characters as well as asides from the narrator. It made the story pretty cozy, but it also made it a bit dull compared to some others in this collection.
I really like how we don’t waste any time waiting for characters to get over their disbelief. The mutual respect and reputation of the characters lets us jump right past that: everyone is just immediately on board with figuring out how this print is changing.
Okay, I’m really happy with the Dore Bible reference. I hadn’t heard of that before, and it’s just amazing. Note that I’m pretty sure that these images aren’t mezzotints but wood engravings.
The ending, and the explanation of the story within the print (and how it came to be) were pretty vague. This is by intent, I’m sure: explaining it more would ruin the story, but I kind of wonder whether it’s already been explained too much, as it did come off as more confusing than weird to me.
The Mezzotint was adapted for a short film very recently. I haven’t seen it, but it has decent reviews.
The Ash-Tree
This is the first story in the collection that I found to be fairly boring. It wasn’t “bad”, but it didn’t really grip me. I found the historical analysis of the area very boring and it takes up a solid chunk of the story. A little would have been great, for authenticity, but it’s just way too much for such a short story.
What did stand out to me here is how MRJ’s English, particularly in stories like this one, are very specific to the time and his scholarly position. It didn’t really dawn on me until I saw the phrase “must needs” and the word “poysonous”, which both appear in The Ash-Tree, that this is the exact English dialect used by learned characters in Final Fantasy XIV. Neat!
Number 13
Okay, I know I said that I wouldn’t say “verisimilitude” too many more times, but this story is just dripping with it: plenty of authentic knowledge of the region and of traveling in general. I mean, it seemed authentic to me and the editor agreed: I wouldn’t know first-hand. MRJ occasionally mentions that he’s relaying the story “as I heard it from him”, which occasionally includes leaving out some detail that he couldn’t speak to, which is also a nice touch.
This story, as opposed to The Mezzotint, has some skeptical characters, which makes sense here as they’re strangers who wouldn’t trust each other so easily with such fantastic assertions. Despite the story’s short length, there’s a good development of trust between some of the characters, who initially don’t want to admit that they’re seeing odd things too, but eventually concede that their rooms both have three windows during the day.
“Is this the Danish courage I’ve heard so much about? It isn’t a German in there, and if it was, we are five to one.” – I just thought this was a good line. Funny, specific to the time, and effective. There are also repeated assertions about the general state of people in Denmark, such as that they don’t ever steal. This strikes me as the sort of thing that someone who had a very pleasant trip in Denmark once would say.
Once again, the actual description of the supernatural element – the arm, in particular – is really well-done. “His back was now to the door. In that moment the door opened, and an arm came out and clawed at his shoulder. It was clad in ragged, yellowish linen, and the bare skin, where it could be seen, had long grey hair upon it.” There’s also a scene of a person’s shadow, cast across the street, dancing madly in their room. This all reminded me of Lovecraft’s descriptions, but more subtle. I, personally, prefer the more fantastic descriptions from Lovecraft, but I like this style a lot too, and it’s quite similar.
The box and contract at the end were… fine. Honestly, I think the story might have been better with that bit removed, as it seemed a bit anticlimactic to me.
This story definitely reminded me of some similar stories that I really like, most notably Silent Hill 4: The Room. I won’t dive into that in this post, but it’s a fantastic game that is sometimes underrated within the franchise.
Count Magnus
Given that this collection is titled Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories, it’s safe to assume that this is one of the better known ones.
MRJ comes off as a bit classist in much of his writing, as I mentioned a long while back, but that probably shows through the most in this story: lots of phrases like “person of quality” or “greatest families”. Though, again, it’s hard to tell how much of this is MRJ’s own perspective as opposed to his portrayal of a character. In any case, it wasn’t offensive to me personally, but it did make the story feel dated in a way that I noticed without much emotional impact.
It’s interesting how, despite Count Magnus having been an exceptionally brutal and cruel lord, Wraxall – being separated from him by a few centuries – is simply impressed by his sense of power.
This is the story where a man’s face is “sucked off”. I posted the snippet towards the start of this post, but it’s not too long, so here it is again: “Anders Bjornsen was there; but he was dead. And I tell you this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was once a beautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off the bones.” That’s just juicy.
The plot and how Wraxall is sort of seduced by Magnus was interesting. Reminded me of vampire stories; combined with the title “count”, it’s hard not to at least think of Dracula. Wraxall has to call out to him three times to free him, and this rule of threes thing is just great. Comparing it to Peter denying Christ three times might be a bit of a stretch, but I can definitely use it as an excuse to whip out this Penny Arcade comic and the accompanying podcast episode, which have some comments on the sort of rules that are invented at children’s camps.
The reference to the devil as the “Prince of the Air” was also interesting.
Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad
The intro of this story bored me to tears; was this written specifically for a group of golfers? I mean, it probably was. But christ it goes on for too long about it. That said, I honestly thought that Parkins’s “Determination to improve his game” was just a hilarious. I think it just reminded me of myself whenever I excuse playing too much Destiny by saying that I’m finally going to get better with sniper rifles. I mean, if I’m still bad with snipers in first person shooters after playing them for so long, then it’s probably not going to happen today, and even if it did, why bother?
The scene where he’s lying awake and imagining how his organs could be giving out hit pretty close to home.
Awake he remained, in any case, long enough to fancy (as I am afraid I often do myself under such conditions) that he was the victim of all manner of fatal disorders: he would lie counting the beats of his heart, convinced that it was going to stop work every moment, and would entertain grave suspicions of his lungs, brain, liver, etc. — suspicions which he was sure would be dispelled by the return of daylight, but which until then refused to be put aside. He found a little vicarious comfort in the idea that someone else was in the same boat. A near neighbour (in the darkness it was not easy to tell his direction) was tossing and rustling in his bed, too.
The dream itself was also very well done. I’ve certainly had dreams like that, where I’m outside in some large, open place and something vague and menacing is approaching me steadily from a distance that’s initially great but grows shorter and shorter gradually as I desperately attempt to escape or hide. In my dreams like this, it often turns into trying to hide in a house – my old house or a near facsimile – as some giant monster (generally the tyrannosaurus from Jurassic Park) tries to look in and find me through a window and I have to keep entirely silent and hide from all windows. Parkins’s dream doesn’t go that far, but I liked the scene a lot. This also reminded me of the scene from The Eye of the World where Perrin and Egwene are running across hills to avoid the crows. Really unsettling stuff.
I also really liked the colonel here. He’s gruff and grumpy, but he’s also a kind and helpful person. I’m surprised how much he stuck out to me in so few pages.
The scene at the end, where the animate blanket comes for Parkins, was really spooky. This is also the image from the book’s cover. That overwhelming sense of dread, where you finally just want to suicidally throw yourself either at your pursuer or out a window is definitely a familiar thought to me. When I was very young, I’d sometimes get the notion that something was coming for me, and it would just drive me to near madness. It was usually something roughly human-shaped and crawling that I was terrified of. Medusa was a frequent tormentor. Sometimes I’d stand perfectly still and hear my heart pounding in my head until I’d just start screaming or else run, frantically, into a room with some other people in it. Granted, this still happens to me as an adult more often than I’d like to admit, but I don’t actually scream anymore, I just turn the TV on. The funny part in this story, as the colonel says, is that Parkins could’ve probably just tackled the apparition and it couldn’t have done anything to him: the very real danger was only that fear would drive him either out the window or mad.
Side note, occasionally being certain that there’s some awful thing about to crawl around the corner of a hallway or that every shadow is somehow malevolent is a common experience, right? I mean, I have to think that it is and we’re all in agreement that we just shouldn’t talk about it often. Let me know if this isn’t the case so I can go to a doctor or something.
Before closing on this one, I should probably mention the whistle itself. Now, the whistle – as a physical object – is hardly worth talking about: it’s a whistle, but it does have some Latin written on it. “QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT”. This is from Isaiah 63:1 (KJV): “Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? this that is glorious in his apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength? I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save”. Thus far, I haven’t been digging too much into the biblical references in these stories, but there have been a lot of them. From my experience, this is pretty common for English writing from this period – I still know some Christians who quote scripture about this often – but MRJ is particularly well-read on the topic, so it does seem to me that he makes more frequent and more subtle references. In particular, his references aren’t nearly as limited to works closely related to Jesus or those related to modern political issues. MRJ also really likes to slip in little bits of Latin, which I would’ve really enjoyed if Latin was a language I had any real knowledge of. I mean, I still enjoyed it, but I definitely had to look pretty much every Latin phrase up. Parkins believes this whistle to be from an old Templar outpost, which he finds fascinating, but the colonel is not at all happy about. “In Parkins’s place, he should himself be careful about using a thing that had belongs to a set of Papists, of whom, speaking generally, it might be affirmed that you never know what they might not have been up to.” Given that I was raised Catholic, I found this pretty funny. If there’s a deeper meaning to this particular reference, then I didn’t get it: I’m pretty sure it was just a fun way to say “who goes there?“
The Treasure of Abbott Thomas
Treasure hunt! This one was fun and the spookiness really worked for me. The plot follows Somerton as he attempts to solve a cipher and find a disgraced abbot’s treasure. This has to be inspired by The Gold-Bug.
The cipher itself is a cool idea… but, given that it’s a cipher into Latin, and it’s completely broken down immediately after being revealed, I didn’t solve it myself. I kind of wish that I’d attempted to, but it would’ve been pretty hard without being familiar with Latin. If you want to try it yourself, here it is.
There’s a ton of Latin in this story, but the bit of language that stuck out to me more was actually the “uneducated” writing of Somerton’s valet, William:
‘Honourd Sir,
‘Has I am in a great anxeity about Master I write at is Wish to Beg you Sir if you could be so good as Step over. Master Has add a Nastey Shock and keeps His Bedd. I never Have known Him like this but No wonder and Nothing will serve but you Sir. Master says would I mintion the Short Way Here is Drive to Cobblince and take a Trap. Hopeing I Have maid all Plain, but am much Confused in Myself what with Anxiatey and Weakfulness at Night. If I might be so Bold Sir it will be a Pleasure to see a Honnest Brish Face among all These Forig ones.
‘I am Sir
‘Your obedt Servt
‘William Brown.
‘P.S.—The Villiage for Town I will not Turm. It is name Steenfeld.’
This is a great example of how MRJ portrays lower class people. I’m… not sure exactly how to interpret that today. It definitely comes off as condescending, but it also seems authentic, as far as I can tell. That’s really what this hinges on: is this a solid portrayal of an uneducated person’s English from the time, or is it a caricature? If it’s an honest portrayal, then I’m glad to have read it.
The well and the “treasure” were really creepy, maybe my favorite individual scene from any of these stories. The descent into the well, the opening of the sealed treasure, and finally the digging around in the chamber: I really liked all of the layers here. It reminds me of the long sequence towards the end of Silent Hill 2 where James just keeps descending more and more levels into the Silent Hill Historical Society… then the Toluca Prison… and finally just the “labyrinth”. Staggering a descent into levels like this really demonstrates the distance more than any single leap could. For the exact opposite effect, watch Gurren Lagann (it’s on Netflix right now), in which the protagonists begin the story digging around in a cavern ignorant of the surface world but gradually, over 27 episodes, climb higher and increase the size of their robot until, by the very end, they need to pass into another dimension to fight because they’ve grown far too large to fit in this one. The trick really is to do it in steps. Is this related to how stripes on clothing change our perception of height and weight?
A School Story
I don’t have much to say about this one other than that I really enjoyed it. It’s short and simple. Once more, we have a fair bit of Latin, but this time it’s very simple Latin and the trick is that much of it is incorrect (spoken by students.) The line “Si tu non veneris ad me, ego veniam ad te”, written on the 17th assignment in a class of 16 and in red ink when no one had a red pen, is much creepier when you need to either look it up or try to remember what “venio” means.
I also liked the little bit at the beginning, where they’re just trading some simple stories. “There was a man who heard a noise in the passage at night, opened his door, and saw someone crawling towards him on all fours with his eye hanging on his cheek.” Ah fuck!
The Rose Garden
This story… was entirely too long for what it was. I liked how much personality the characters had, but hardly anything interesting happens, and I really wasn’t too creeped out by anything.
More Latin in this one too. “Quieta non movere”: the editor assures me that this should be translated as “[One must] not move quiet things” in context. It’s a good ending line for the story, but I’m still mostly bored.
The Tractate Middoth
Way more fun than the last one! It’s more of a mystery than a ghost story, though the ghost actually is pretty creepy. I don’t even want to spoil much of this one, just read it, it’s probably the most accessible of all these stories.
This one has been adapted quite a few times. It also reminded me of the Supernatural episode “Everybody Hates Hitler“. I’d hate to accidentally turn someone towards Supernatural, but if you’ve already struggled through it, this story made me think of that episode and I liked that episode.
Casting the Runes
I should stop saying “this one is really good” as though it’s a surprise, given that really only a couple of the stories were boring to me. Well, “this one is really good.” The introduction is kind of long again, similar to The Rose Garden, but it picks up afterwards. There’s more suspense and action in this story than in most of the others, probably why it’s been adapted into a full length movie: Night of the Demon. I was able to find it online easily, but I haven’t seen it yet. I probably will though, this story would make a good movie.
It’s not really significant, but I found the reference to “ptomaine poisoning” to be interesting.
The sudden appearance of the monstrosity is really shocking in this story and it’s an image that will likely stay with me for a long time. “So he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and he declares, not the mouth of a human being.” Goddamn that’s scary! I’m going to think of this every single time I put my arm under my pillow from now on, aren’t I? In addition to just how gross it is, I think what really seals it is: “not the mouth of a human being”. Taken literally, you could imagine that it’s just a cat or something, which isn’t nearly as creepy… but that he had to state that it’s not the mouth of a human being implies that it’s similar to one. I got to meet this guy (well, I met his monster) while I was in Japan. I was really impressed, but I’d be pretty horrified to find that fucking thing’s head under my pillow too.
There’s a reference here to putting the runes on someone as giving them the “black spot“. I’m pretty sure that this is a reference specifically to the black spot from Treasure Island, which I’m seems to have been mostly made up, rather than to some actual myth or practice like nazar battu. Treasure Island would’ve been a fairly recent reference, so that makes sense to me.
The narration in this story is kind of weird. It’s very conversational, almost bluntly so. At times the narrator just says that they don’t need to explain something and skips over it. To be clear, this wasn’t said in order to skip the scene: it’s a story, MRJ could’ve just skipped ahead and no one would’ve been confused. The point was to make it sound more real and conversational. I often like how MRJ does this, but I think he went a bit overboard here, particularly for a written story. It would’ve sounded fine if spoken.
I liked the implicit rules that popped up here. The runes cannot be planted on someone, they must accept them. They don’t need to know what they’re accepting, just that they’re accepting something. There’s an incubation period and there’s a lull in the curse just before the end. The runed paper wants to be destroyed once cast so the curse will be sealed. These rules are conveyed quickly and naturally: I’m impressed! I’ll probably reread this story the next time I’m trying to write some fantasy/sci-fi of my own as an example of how to expose complex systems naturally. If you want my favorite example of how to explain the rules of a fantasy system particularly terribly, read Shakugan no Shana. Side note: do not actually read Shakugan no Shana, there are much better light novel series to read.
The last line is really good. “After a judicious interval, Harrington repeated to Dunning something of what he had heard his brother say in his sleep: but it was not long before Dunning stopped him.”
The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral
Both this story and the next one play with the narrative form a bit and I really like that. I didn’t find The Stalls as creepy as some of the other stories, but the story itself was really good and there are a lot of interesting things in here. It’s told from the perspective of a person reading the obituary of a deceased archdeacon and finding some documents that shed light on what really happened. Much of the story is told via the obituary itself, letters, and journal entries. There’s a voyeuristic “found footage” fun to this and I definitely recommend reading it closely. Both of these stories are especially good examples of the “antiquarian” element.
A lot of attention is paid towards the description of the cathedral. I’ll admit that I had to look up some cathedral layouts to make sense of it. There are plenty of fairly obscure religious terms in here too, if that’s your thing. I found it entertaining. It wasn’t all that necessary for the story though.
I liked the description and appellation for the “King of Terrors“. Come to think of it, Diablo from the Diablo series is definitely named for this, and his appearance in Diablo II‘s cover art is clearly meant as a “personification of death”. Fun side note: we had a large version of this picture at our wedding that we used as our guest book. It’s currently framed and on a wall just a few feet from me.
The mystery element to this story was really fun. You can definitely figure out what happened to the previous archdeacon pretty quick, but I like how you need to pick it up from clues before it’s explicitly stated.
The phrase “wet lips were whispering into my ear” is just good, visceral horror. The descriptions of the carved figures was also very good. That they’re carved from the hanging oak is a nice touch… though it did kind of pull me out of the story as I was reminded a bit too strongly of Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei. I should really do a post about that some time.
Martin’s Close
Alright, here it is, my favorite of these stories. I mean, it’s hard to pick just one and I like different aspects of each of them, but if you’re only going to read one from this collection, I’d recommend this one. Ironically, this story isn’t even particularly scary or weird: I probably would’ve hated it from its summary. What I like about it is the narrative: it’s framed from the perspective of a person traveling and coming across the titular close. Most of the story is told via the long-form notes of a trial from 1684 and, as far as I can tell, MRJ did a fantastic job of representing this. I mean, it feels very authentic to me, but I’ll admit that I haven’t ever read any real trial notes from that far back, so I can’t say with any authority whether this actually is accurate. In any case, I liked it.
This story is also fairly unique, within this collection, as the supernatural element isn’t something that we, as the readers, would hate. It really sounds like the poor ghost is justified in her behavior. Now, I hate to side with a prosecutor or a judge – particularly in a trial so slanted as this one – but I’m kind of with the “Lord Chief Justice” here when he says “and I hope to God that she will be with you by day and by night till an end is made of you.”
That said, it is interesting to read just how slanted this procedure is. I mean, even the US justice system today is pretty fucked, but at least there is a defense attorney, and it seems to me that there’s a difference between the prosecutor working for the state and them working for the king. I guess there’s been a little bit of progress in the past several hundred years.
Mr. Humphreys and his Inheritance
WE’RE FINALLY HERE – the last story. Is anyone still reading? Well, I’m still writing, so let’s power through this last one.
As an actual story and as a collection of characters, this is easily the best in the collection. Several characters really stand out to me as being unique individuals with a personality. I’m almost surprised, thinking back on it, that this story accomplished so much in fewer than 30 pages. That said, it is pretty long compared to most stories in this collection.
A good story about a maze or labyrinth is always good. This is hardly the first reference to labyrinths in this collection, but this is the first story that really has one.
The description of the “prize” at the center of the labyrinth was pretty cool:
One feature seemed familiar; a winged serpent—Draco—encircled it about the place which, on a terrestrial globe, is occupied by the equator: but on the other hand, a good part of the upper hemisphere was covered by the outspread wings of a large figure whose head was concealed by a ring at the pole or summit of the whole. Around the place of the head the words princeps tenebrarum could be deciphered. In the lower hemisphere there was a space hatched all over with cross-lines and marked as umbra mortis. Near it was a range of mountains, and among them a valley with flames rising from it. This was lettered (will you be surprised to learn it?) vallis filiorum Hinnom. Above and below Draco were outlined various figures not unlike the pictures of the ordinary constellations, but not the same. Thus, a nude man with a raised club was described, not as Hercules but as Cain. Another, plunged up to his middle in earth and stretching out despairing arms, was Chore, not Ophiuchus, and a third, hung by his hair to a snaky tree, was Absolon. Near the last, a man in long robes and high cap, standing in a circle and addressing two shaggy demons who hovered outside, was described as Hostanes magus (a character unfamiliar to Humphreys). The scheme of the whole, indeed, seemed to be an assemblage of the patriarchs of evil, perhaps not uninfluenced by a study of Dante.
The story within a story also impressed me. It’s a bit too long to usefully reproduce here, but I liked it.
The Latin engraved in the stones reads: “PENETRANS AD INTERIORA MORTIS“. Slightly modified, this would be something like “inner places (chambers in KJV) of death”, right? Pretty creepy stuff.
I’ll admit that if there’s some deeper meaning to the “monster” at the center of this labyrinth taking the form of an Irish yew, in particular, then I didn’t really see it. I suppose that, from a distance, it’s sort of a man-shaped tree. It works in the story, but I did find myself digging vainly for more.
I also need to call out that I really enjoyed Cooper’s comically wrong idioms. “Here he would have been of course, as I told you, but for his son’s being horse doover with a fever, poor fellow!” I didn’t even get what he was going for here, but the editor states that he’s trying to say hors d’oeuvre as he apparently thinks that it literally means “out of work”, rather than “extraneous”. One I did get was when he’s impressed that Humphreys managed to find his way to the center of the maze without help and exclaims: “Well, well! what’s the old proverb about angels fearing to tread? It’s proved true once again in this case.” “Humphreys’ acquaintance with Cooper, though it had been short, was sufficient to assure him that there was no guile in this allusion, and he forbore the obvious remark.”
We’re done!
Alright, that’s the end of it! I’m not sure whether I’m happy with the format I took here of having some essays first and then a response second. Maybe I should have split this into two posts? I’m going to leave it as-is this time, but if either of the people who read this have any thoughts… well, I’d say leave a comment, but there’s no chance that someone I don’t speak to regularly is going to stumble upon this and then read all of it, so just let me know what you think the next time we talk. I will probably have a shorter post next time, as I do feel like this one is probably a touch too long. Well, I had fun writing it – I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!