This H. Russell Wakefield collection has been published in October 2022 by INCUNABULA MEDIA
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/14/look-up-there-by-h-russell-wakefield/
My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I review this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
’He Cometh and he Passeth By’
I feel threatened or unclean simply by divulging here the exact title of this Wakefield work as its own intrinsic accursed spell upon the reader. A sense of “something sniggeringly evil”, a phrase this work slips into its own text, no doubt first written in ink of a “smoky sullen scarlet.” A barrister called Bellamy trying to avenge his single-lunged friend by the name of Franton, a friend who is himself more adept than Bellamy, but Franton was an adept overmastered by someone even adepter, a man with the ring of the name of Oscar Clinton, a man who also reminds me strongly of the wayward ways and wiles of one of our past prime ministers who was then, at the time of this story, a future prime minister. Read it and simply compare, I say! And indeed this work conveys the essence of evil more than most others I have read, for example, the nature of a certain esoteric pattern adeptly drawn on paper, like words can also be seen as forming a pattern, with the paper pattern creating a potentially lethal and recurrent lengthening of a shadow across the page as well as in the plot.
I should be grateful — for a reader like me who seeks out such things in fiction literature — that this new Wakefield collection has brought such a work to my attention for the first time. I particularly relished the nature of Oscar’s confidence in himself, his ability to foster his personal “stud-farms” wherever he went, and his blindness to his own badness of motive. And his future, as well as, past reincarnations, no doubt! And “ornate and gaudy” or “decorated with violence and indiscretion” being other phrases slipped surreptitiously into this text.
A strange afterthought — Mr Solan arguably equivalent in his role here to today’s (but then future) PM!
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.
THAT DIETH NOT
“Driving was an agony to me at first; I imagine a crash at every corner, and a corpse in every adjacent pedestrian,…”
Cross-referenced above by random chance with my previous review earlier today of ‘Throttle Body’ HERE. A remarkable co-frisson.
Meantime, in this Wakefield story, a self’s duality is portrayed in a “sex-crime” trauma as we follow the marital difficulties of the introverted, writerly narrator’s ‘I’ numbered 1 and 2, or even higher numbers of his selves, as he tells us of their or his own irreconcilable chasm in a marriage to socialite Ethel, then her child abortion by miscarriage, leading to his love affair with another woman, and his mental breakdown or was it a genuine return of Ethel whom he tells us he murdered, in a climax that is genuinely most disturbing, with a panoply of mixed motives and nightmares that are far more powerful than I believe Wakefield could ever be in such a mainstream evocation of madness — a tension between an inner madness and a genuine haunting by a revenant that third parties or his other selves also experienced, not a traditional ghost story at all. Why haven’t I read it before? The Future of the Novel, a book’s pages as once slithered out by its protagonist’s shadow? —“flung them by handfuls in the fire.”
From the eternal inner darkness of the previous story above to the ‘causal connections’ with the awkwardly brief ghostliness of the next…
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 RED LODGE by H. R. Wakefield
“Directly I had shut the door I had again that very unpleasant sensation of being watched. It made the reading of Sidgwick’s The Use of Words in Reasoning — an old favourite of mine, which requires concentration — a difficult business. Time after time I found myself peeping into dark corners and shifting my position. And there were little sharp sounds; just the oak-panelling cracking, I supposed. After a time I became more absorbed in the book, and less fidgety, and then I heard a very soft cough just behind me. I felt little icy rays pour down and through me, but I would not look round, and I would go on reading. I had just reached the following passage: ‘However many things may be said about Socrates, or about any fact observed, there remains still more that might be said if the need arose; the need is the determining factor. Hence the distinction between complete and incomplete description, though perfectly sharp and clear in the abstract, can only have a meaning—can only be applied to actual cases—if it be taken as equivalent to sufficient description, the sufficiency being relative to some purpose. Evidently the description of Socrates as a man, scanty though it is, may be fully sufficient for the purpose of the modest enquiry whether he is mortal or not’—when my eye was caught by a green patch which suddenly appeared on the floor beside me, and then another and another,…”
I think the above section from it undertows not only this famously and truly terrifying work but also much of Aickman’s work. Indefiniteness and Ambiguity being the heading for one of its sections. The parents and small son and the nanny and other servants are staying for three months at the eponymous Lodge about which we are told straight from the start that they left before completing their stay because of its haunting qualities, involving patches of slime, and I dare not tell you about one particular entity that will give you “pure undiluted panic” if you tell anyone else about it without their having read the story first. I can tell you about the mysterious door in the garden, though, and the nearby knighted gentleman who comes to their assistance, and the little boy’s lack of fear of the sea previously in Frinton but his utter fear today of the river at eponymous Lodge. Seriously, this story is disturbing and will no doubt affect you even more adversely if you divulge too much to those who have not yet read Red Lodge. (The most I could dare do was reproduce an example edition of Sidgwick that was not red.)
“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?
THE FRONTIER GUARDS…
“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!
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…”
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.”
THE FIRST SHEAF
“…and we were driving to Manchester for a Harty Sibelius concert.”
…when this story discovery (a true classic!) — read today I think for the first time — was told to ‘me’ in the car by Old Porteous about his younger days in the notoriously drought-ridden countryside area in Essex around where I myself still live today (the clue about ‘Colchester police’ is telling). Not sure about the ‘inter-breeding’, though! Nor about ‘intuition’ (tellingly discussed here about its intrinsic meaning as a word) being singularly lacking in women! This story itself, meanwhile, is a thunderous, drought-breaking, crop-triggering, climactically arm-diselbowed apotheosis of ‘folk horror’ as well as of any intuitive powers of the reader, whoever he or she happens to be. Just a few necessary words by me about the above mention of Jean Sibelius: I imagine the concert, it being in Manchester during HR Wakefield’s day, would have featured the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir Hamilton Harty who also famously conducted Elgar’s ‘Dream Children’. HR Wakefield’s words about “a horrid, thin cry of agony that seemed to have been carried from afar” are maybe his nod to the latter music as its children attenuated to nothing… Did the child here (“The result was an oddly lovely child, as fair and rosy as her father. She shone out in the village like a Golden Oriole in a crew of crows”) also attenuate to a single tooth as a sacrifice to the rain gods within the Round Field’s stone pillar? Anyway, Sibelius famously ‘suffered’ a complete creative composing ‘drought’ in the whole of the last 33 years of his life! — known as the the “silence of Järvenpää” — and who knows what rituals could have evoked such a climactic thunderous symphony now added to his canon by this story!?
“This emptied my little bag of courage and, with ‘zero at the bone’, I got up and ran for it.”
THE SEVENTEENTH HOLE AT DUNCASTER
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.
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.
Not forgetting what I recall as a ‘sharp elbow’, but I have not gone back to check.
“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, in the context of this whole book, 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’s frontier brings.
“(You will hear of it again.)”
end