My review of ‘The Red Lodge’:
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/17/the-red-lodge-by-h-russell-wakefield/***
“Look Up There!”
“For whom do you lodge the responsibility for the somewhat less palatable spectacles provided by bull-fights and battle-fields?”
God or the Devil, or Dualism, or simply Nothing? This story, intentionally or not, presents the flag of surrender waved to none of these perhaps, but simply to the storms the earth naturally brings upon us. But now, since the times of HRW, not so much natural as man-made? Man is the only God, I wonder? But we continue figuratively to look up with increasing fright at the unknown, the indefinite, the ambiguous…
This is well-told, beautifully couched in prose, a story of a civil servant, Mr Packard, on sick leave from the Home Office because of pressure of work (or the pressure of his own overlords or ladies there!) and he recurrently spots a couple of unusual folk…and this is one helluva opening paragraph to this story… just savour it endlessly…
“Why DID he always stare up? And why did he so worry Mr Packard by doing it? The latter had come to Brioni to read and to rest, and to take the bare minimum of notice of his fellow-men. Doctor’s orders! And here he was preoccupied, almost obsessed, by the garish idiosyncrasy of this tiny, hen-eyed fellow. He was not a taking specimen of humanity, for his forehead was high and receding, his nose beaked fantastically and the skin stretched so tightly across it that it seemed as if it might be ripped apart at any moment. Then, he had a long, thin-lipped mouth always slightly open, and a pointed beard which, like his hair, was fussy and unkempt. He was for ever in the company of a stalwart yokel — a south-country enlisted Guardsman to the life; a slow-moving, massive, red-faced plebeian who seemed a master of the desirable art of aphasia, for no word ever seemed to pass his lips. But, good heavens! how he ploughed and furrowed the menu!”
And the tiny man eventually tells at storytelling length to Packard outside on the Adriatic coast, telling it during an encroaching real-time storm, of his visit to Gauntry Hall, and the tradition of never stepping foot in it on New Year’s Eve ….until, with some parvenus called Relf, he did just that thing! It would spoil it for me (or even for HRW via the tiny man!) to describe what then had induced him, ever since, to be looking up (at an angle of 35 degrees, happening to be the temperature today in my own real time near Frinton), looking up at or for something fearful… The “Bogey Man”, some outcome of the “Feudal System”, the ‘parvenus’ called Relf who once owned Gauntry Hall, or something “I had to breast my way through [it] as through a hostile tide” towards whatever God or Devil or Nothing that resides on the other side? A page of white blankness or something writ upon?
***
Above image by Tony Lovell for The HA of HA (2011)
My reviews of separate older horror stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/
Please see further HRW reviews in comment stream below.
ANY FURTHER HRW STORIES WILL BE IN THE COMMENT STREAM BELOW…
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The Frontier Guards by H. Russell Wakefield
“It seems to me sometimes as if I actually assist in evoking and materialising these appearances, that I help to establish a connection between them…”
Modest though I think I am, I do sometimes have an inexplicable knack to evoke the same effects when entering story texts that I happen to choose to real-time review, the same as Lander does when he dares to enter haunted houses. The fact that he is said also to be a novelist is neither here nor there, I guess!
Ignoring all that for a moment I was genuinely terrified by this brief story, perhaps more than any other, particularly when encountering its two undoubtedly crucial ‘elbow’ moments, after having been justifiably obsessed with elbows as triggers in literature for the last year or so in my real-time reviewing.
The story itself is well-written, atmospheric, about this house that is purported to be both ‘malevolent’ and ‘fatal’, and Lander — who has avoided entering it to date for fear of his own aforementioned ‘skills’ — is tempted to take Jim Brinton, at the latter’s request, to view it briefly just after dark on a foggy day, a day which they had earlier spent playing golf. I shall leave it there!
But I now wonder, as an aside, who or what tempted me into reading August Heat by W.F. Harvey a few days ago, a story that I had somehow instinctively avoided till then!
“Concentrate on NOT concentrating.”
THE SEVENTEENTH HOLE AT DUNCASTER by H. Russell Wakefield
There seems something significant in the number as digits 1 and 7 in contiguity as 17, but when you try to explain why it means what you think it means, then that meaning seems mad and ceases to be. It was just the two victims of this new hole, at a golf course upon the dunes of the Norfolk coast, to replace a previous inferior hole but the new one made even more inferior itself by dint of the damnably sensitive location of ‘Blood Wood’ where it is sited. I was simply thinking of “Cyril’s left leg, a disgusting, dangling thing” and Sybil’s head “lolling hideously.’ And more that came to mind that I decline to mention. Notwithstanding any premonitory dreams of Mr Baxter who later escaped to London.
USED CAR by H. Russell Wakefield
“‘You’ve put your elbow bang through the glass, sir.’ […] ‘What a funny position to get your elbow into,’… […] Then very stealthily she tried to move her elbows. […] And why couldn’t she move her elbows; it was just as if they were gripped by two hands.”
A Wakefield story that involves a family of man, wife, daughter and dog, his golfing, his finances, and his buying of a used car originally from America called a Highway. A car with a stubborn sticky stain and bought from a car salesman, “A trim and sprightly young Semite”, and mixed with other reprehensibilities such as social class regarding their chauffeur. But, otherwise, it is a spooky tale that mildly appealed to me, the gazing at the ‘digestive system’ within the car, and its clinging shape and touch of a ghostly shadow, but again spoilt, this time by the neat ending of spectral rationale in an exchange of letters between England and America. Above all, I relished its central ‘elbows’ after a year or two of discovering that literature is full of such elbow-triggers, à la ELizabeth BOWen, another writer of, inter alia, ghost stories.
“Used Car” reminds me in a way of another story about a father who thought he got a bargain: “Tragic Casements” by Oliver Onions. Quaint that a used car can be potent as a tractate or a mezzotint. Or a flint knife.
Thanks for the Onions reference. I really need to get back to him, though I did review his Beckoning Fair One recently.
Masrur by H. Russell Wakefield
This is a decidedly effective ‘vengeful cat come back as a ghost’ story. A male cat called Masrur that, when alive, once throttled a thrush like the cat in EF Benson’s ‘The Cat’. And, as a supposed ghost (or a nightmare of a cat revenant amid his ‘troubled sleep filled with sad, silly little dreams which came chasing each other’s tails”), yes, whatever the case, the cat near mangles the man who hated it as his wife’s cat (compare and contrast the monstrous marital cat called Monmouth in William Trevor’s ‘The Old Boys’) — and this man, the husband, buried, in fright, his elbows into his mattress on one such occasion of being haunted by what he, and only he, knew to be a dead cat. Or seemingly it was a cat’s ghost, depending on how you interpret the tantalising ending. The story also involves a parrot that imitates the cat’s mew.
The other striking aspect of this story is a portrait of a certain social circle that involved the Duke and Duchess of Essex! And a certain marital relationship, he a painter and bridge player, she a socialite, and aspects of reprehensible political-incorrectness, with her many friends including someone referred to as ‘he’ but called Carol and dubbed a ‘pansy’ and a ‘grinning gynandromorph.’ And passages like these…
“It was five o’clock, and if she were at home the house would be filling up with the usual horde of dwarf lions; authors, columnists, gilded scroungers, and tutti quanti. Veronica got the most ecstatic satisfaction from collecting this rabble around her, utterly failing to realise that if her quarter of a million got involved with a high wind, nearly all of them would have heaved her overboard like a dead nigger from a slave ship.”
“‘I wonder, Carol,’ he said, ‘why there isn’t an operation for turning young men into girls? Why is it always the other way about, when they’ve “put a shot” an unwomanly distance, and their anatomy been the subject of catty, dressing-room dissection? I’m sure you could be made happier, Carol, if only that were so.’”
“I’d rather stroke a black Mamba than a black cat.”
And, so as to cleanse inside the mouth’s cave by opening and then shutting that closet, I will re-evoke or rewoke the husband as, not his elbows this time, but “his face burrowed softly into the pile carpet” and the story’s earlier metaphor of his nightmares chasing him from their source in time’s dark cavern, and at the end the ambiguity of whether he managed to either close or open that ‘pocket’…. “…they were only just below the horizon and beginning to fling up rays of remembrance through a pocket in the sky. He knew he must keep that pocket closed.”
OLD MAN’S BEARD by H. Russell Wakefield
“Yet she seemed shadowed, brooding over something.”
The story of a would-be ‘regular fella’ Mr Bickley, and Mrs Bickley, together with their daughter Mariella (the word ‘erotic’ being used twice in her connection and who at 15 almost seduced the chauffeur) and the latter’s fiancé Randall (who often said unexpected or rudely direct comments to Mr B and had just had a legacy from his uncle’s ‘slipping anchor’) — all on holiday at Brinton-on-Sea (cf Frinton-on-Sea mentioned in HRW’s Red Lodge in the context of someone ironically not being scared of swimming in the sea! – also mentioned in Aickman’s Mr Millar in the same Fontana anthology as Red Lodge – and Frinton is indeed a seaside place very close to where I live!).
I am intrigued by the Hungarian blood in Mrs B and thus in Mariella, and thus perhaps its “dangerous and irregular Mittel-European strain.” The references to Larwood’s bowling as climax and Mariella’s replacement life with a different man who one had a “‘brilliant and daring’ novel” up his sleeve, only halted by becoming a Tory candidate for Parliament!
I won’t tell you what happened to Mariella’s previous man Randall and how it played out in Mariella’s nightmares of inimical grey hair (hair that haunts her in the sea as well as in her sleep and, perhaps for real, through a ‘groin’ or breakwater), a girl who develops serious mental issues in which we become embroiled and that need dealing with by a doctor called Perseus who specialises in the female nervous system… nor will I tell you what else happened in Brinton. Suffice to say, it is a famous ghost story that needs no describing of its plot nor does it need a recommendation from me for its evocatively haunting quality, if not for its eventual trite epistolary rationale! It’s some of its side issues, indeed, that are most memorable. And some extrapolations upon ‘waking’ and ‘dreamland’ that are ‘too hard for my old cranium to digest.’
“The peculiar beauty of her figure is due to the fact that while she seems very long from hip to knee, she is one inch longer from knee to foot…”
I note it is Jim Brinton in HRW’s Frontier Guards…
BLIND MAN’S BUFF
“…a little narrow passage.”
The story of Mr Cort getting lost getting there, and getting lost again inside once there, later than he hoped, with night drawing in! The solitary Manor he tentatively planned to buy, outside sown with eyes like windows staring at him, once inside, seemingly without a match to strike and somehow no other means for lighting, the entrance door playing hide and seek behind him in the dark, and at every turn a recurrent narrow passage…. and Mr Runt whose own later recurrent narrow incantation was that “None of us chaps goes to Manor after sundown.” Why not THE Manor, Mr Runt? And was Cort caught by some deadly torque’s seizure in one of the heart’s own narrow passages — or simply a funny Turn and Turn About? A party game without windows-for-the-soul that some call eyes.
***
My other reviews of disconnected horror stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/
LUCKY’S GROVE
“It was just that he asked no quarter from the unforgiving minute, but squeezed from it the fruit of others’ many hours.”
This is a crushingly crusading story in itself, with unmitigated cascades of fire and thunder being brought down upon all the characters we get to know*, a punishment perpetrated by a being or god disturbed by its perfect Christmas Tree being uprooted from its ironically lucky Grove and placed in the large house by a man who did not know the sacredness he was spoiling, just as I may be subject to such punishment from the ghost of HRW for issuing such unwarned-about spoilers about it!
It is a genuinely remarkable story that needs to be read if you think you know about horror stories, and I say this in hopeful mitigation of my own actions in reviewing it, a story with “furtive and demoralising dream”, “cadentic conclusions”, “pullers and haulers”, ‘a casually cruel Walt Disney’, a huge Christmas cracker “ten feet long and forty inches in circumference”, “Pyrexia unknown origin”, a furnace installation said to be “diseased”, “A tea of teas, not merely a high-tea, an Everest tea”….and “More spring in these branches than you’d think,” especially in this spring’s winter of storm and thunder snow. A spring that lethally ‘weals’ a workman’s face. And, oh yes, ironically, in this direst winter an ‘August Heat’ type curse by a pre-labelled death upon the tree, as Christmas present!
“Mary had just picked up little Angela Rayner so that she could reach her card, when the child screamed out and pulled away her hand. ‘The worm!’ she cried, and a thick, black-grey, squirming maggot fell from her fingers to the floor and writhed away.”
A name, used uniquely in full, that strangely comes out of the blue!
===
*The characters are adeptly made to seem believable, Curtis who is the first to inadvertently dig up the tree, with lethal results, and there is also the story’s main man who lived on this estate as a boy whose father laboured there, but now he is a commercial success with millions of pounds, and the families of his children who come here for Christmas, each of whom we get to know, particularly the boy Greg who is a ‘genius’ in the making, and whose wolf-headed snowman he builds shows he is co-opted by the evil forces within this story, forces that are still within it even as you read it! And these characters all have what my reviews often call co-vivid dreams: “Their dreams were harsh and unhallowed, yet oddly related, being concerned with dim, uncertain, and yet somehow urgent happenings…”
BEWARE FULL-SPEED SPOILER!
NOT QUITE CRICKET
“His first ball struck the small man on the right elbow-bone and the fielders lay down while he rubbed it.”
A story full of delightful cricketing details, about a hiking writer, who makes good money by meeting his characters and their plots in his head while walking! He sees a cricket match where various body parts are given minor buffets by the bowler. But hr later meets an old timer in the local pub who had also been watching the match, a man who earns his drinks by telling ‘shivery’ tales. And he tells our hiker of a needle match between neighbouring villages where a bowler is accused of killing the batsman by aiming at his head to win the match. Many occult matters and plotting, eventually resulting in the batsman being killed in revenge by a cricket ball picked up by a storm’s somewhat induced lightning….
When I saw the expression ‘demon bowlers’, I suddenly saw what letters the expression contained as a single block. And this sentence came back to me from earlier in the tale…
“The sixth was an ant-slosher, which rattled the base of the small man’s castle, and he retired limping, and alternately rubbing his elbow and gingerly feeling the rim of his skull.”
***
And was the old timer someone our writer had created in his head just for this tale? Or was he real?
And if real, did he re-tell a tale to the writer that the writer had had already published, in other words, retold it just to earn a drink?
I sense it was neither!
I think I spun in my head a new twist for this tale from its unlikely reference to “a Stravinsky ‘Bacchanale’, played on an ancient and well-tempered clavichord.”
A FISHING STORY
“Sometimes he gave the impression of being very tired and tired of feeling tired. And he had to peer up close when he tied a fly. He spoke in a charming, reflective sing-song, but it was the voice of an old man.”
“By ten o’clock the sun was elbowing the clouds away, and the three of them were trudging along beside the racing, rising Glady, and soon to the loch and in the boat and out upon it.”
And so the scene is set in Donegal, with the old gillie and much fishing parlance, and bridges over the Glady that more often break when someone’s on them, and places where fishing or hunting avoided by gillies, with haunted implications from the old Irish troubles, today two tourists fishing with this gillie, and well, a catch that took one tourist in and the other after him, some strange hardness and softness to be parted beneath the river…reminded me (me, a sensitive tired old man, too) of flesh needing to be unhinged from bone….
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INTO OUTER DARKNESS
“If those who took part in them knew even as much as he had cause to know of the latent might of those blind powers they joked about, they’d try to call no spirits from the vasty deep, not even one silent shadow moving through the dusk, but build up great Maginot Lines of resistance to keep those tense, straining potentials within their proper frontiers.”
An eventually terrifying story about this book’s tenuous frontiers, evoking, for me, names of writers who have darkly dabbled or openly joked inside horror, Lytton and Probert, the former a sensitive who feels on the brink of nothingness, the house in his brain, by being used for his closeness with ‘those blind powers’ — and the latter who wants to let out his Manor house to tenants, where gossip has got round there are ghosts and dangerous wallings-in, so he hopes for an outward black comedy rather an inward stiflingly dark-swaddling insane tragedy of plot’s brick upon brick. And Lytton succumbs suddenly to a most claustrophobic haunting, his brain stifled inside the house, and a gratuitous vision of some of us readers in candlelight, when Probert’s smouldering end spurts, a page that lasts only a minute or two, if that, and leaves us with the rest of what would have been an otherwise longer story … leaves each of us, in fact, to create the rest of it as terrifyingly as possible, without help from its original instigator. Horrifically sinister, if not gauche.
THE CAIRN
A story of two young men holidaying in the area and warned, after Dim Lane, not to climb above Dim Wood to the Cairn when snow is on the ground, but one of them does and the other watches his climb on a telescope. The first one was determined to make the climb, even it ‘snowed ink’. I won’t easily forget the segue of these two men, who are close friends, who always holiday together and each worries that the other one might get married, and how this relates to the one going after to rescue the other when strange marks were seen through the telescope in the snow and thoughts of a Wakefield-typical shadow are transferred to me, as I infer that they face each other with whatever was between them. Highly haunting, emotionally oblique, too. A ghostly classic that I am pleased to have been directed towards by this book. Whose frontier was being guarded by what? Not forgetting a Mrs Elm who watched the second young man go up after the other one, a woman whose “brain never exceeded largo in its tempo.”
NURSE’S TALE
“….bedclothes getting up and walking about, just when they’d made the bed, too? I can’t see why people want to think of such things.”
This is the tale that Master Gilbert’s nurse has promised to tell him when he becomes ten years old, a nurse who seems wary of such tales as James’ ‘Oh Whistle…’, but I wonder if this nurse is all she seems. She says she doesn’t want to scare him, but her tale of a field that is really a wood, or vice versa, and the curse on a child when he got to six, a child she was once caring for, as previously employed by a Lord Layton whose wife had died during the child’s birth. All children in the Layton family seemed to be thus cursed to die at six, i.e. to die before midnight at the start of that birthday. So why did she take him out into that spooky field, scarily enough envisaged with ghostly trees, on the day just before his birthday? Surely, she should have tucked him up in his bedcovers for all that last day, just to be as far as possible on the side of safety! I have my suspicions about her and perhaps about Lord Layton. Whatever the case, this is a strange, sly autonomy of a tale that seems to transcend the author’s intentions. A sort of waking field?
THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH
“What happened to mad people in that Other World? Were they mad there, too, and forever?”
That Other World where we all go after we die, I infer. At first, madly, I thought ‘The Triumph of Death’ was this book’s horror hoax, because it has such unmitigated nastiness.
It what it is
Amongst even worse things, it has a legend of small girls being tortured for curious purposes. And it is another work with Jamesian bedcovers but here they grow even greater in amounts — a swaddling nightmare to envelop the church Rector who comes into this story to rescue the latest young attenuating female companion of the ‘she-devil’ Miss Pendleham.
Miss Pendleham has out-lived several such companions in this large house overlooking Lake Windermere. The Rector’s wife, an agnostic, made him go there at night to carry out such a rescue! What actually happens, I’ll leave you to discover, assuming you can rescue this story from where it hides.
It is where it is. Frontier or not.
“One cannot defeat death,…” as someone in the next story has it…
A BLACK SOLITUDE
“Only the dead can live in this room.”
This is beautifully written, more inspired, more everything. It has a swastika earlier decorating a man and a perfect jade ring which we shall hear more of, and a coda to the awful climax involving a Second World War doodlebug upon a Surrey house, opening up again the mystery of a man who is so evocatively characterised that I believe he may haunt me forever, a characterisation that has at its start these words … “Apuleius Charlton. This person was generally deemed a very dubious type and a complete back-number, the last belated survivor of the Mauve decade, with a withered green carnation in his frayed buttonhole and trailing thin clouds of obsolete diabolism.” And several pages onward with this characterisation, the style even outdoes itself, describing him. And there is also a remarkable description of a painting of a man and woman making you feel as if they had been a single ‘It’ (“To destroy man is It’s delight. In that It finds It’s orgasm”), a painting that is also most wickedly described, on a wall in a room that needs “cleansing” of evil, but can only the doodlebug do it? The painting also showed “a tiny figure of a hare with a human and very repulsive face at the right-hand side of the gentleman, a crescent moon with something enigmatic peering out between its horns on the same side of the lady.” Make of that as you may. I must also add gratuitously that Charlton was also a “goodish minor poet of the erotic, adjectival Swinburne school,..”, and that Chumley the butler is — I am repeating myself, sorry! — a conjured-up character to die for! — and he appears at the awful climax in the battle with the room, with him “wearing, I noted, a mink-collared dressing-gown over a pair of the Chief’s most scintillating monogrammed silk pyjamas.” The Chief being the boss of the narrator as well as of the butler, and this Chief having invited Charlton to stay, while he, the Chief, was absent. Again, make of that as you may. This is a striking example of the horror story that may somehow make you regret you ever read it, whatever its major literary wiles, whatever the story’s title implies otherwise about any satisfaction in a sole soul’s stasis of self amidst the blackness that death brings.
“(You will hear of it again.)”