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Reign of Terror: The 1st Corgi Book of Great Victorian Horror Stories
CONTENTS:
9 • Introduction: An Age in Horror • essay by Michel Parry
27 • A Singular Passage in the Life of the Late Henry Harris, Doctor in Divinity: As Related by the Rev. Jasper Ingoldsby, M.A., His Friend and Executor • [The Ingoldsby Legends] • novelette by Richard Harris Barham (variant of Singular Passage in the Life of the Late Henry Harris 1831)
53 • The Phantom Regiment • (1847) • novelette by James Grant
86 • A Night in an Old Castle • (1843) • short story by G. P. R. James
104 • The Forsaken of God • (1849) • short story by William Mudford
117 • The Monk's Story • (1850) • short story by Catherine Crowe
133 • The North Mail • (1865) • short story by Amelia B. Edwards (variant of The Phantom Coach 1864)
149 • The Old Nurse's Story • (1935) • novelette by Mrs. Gaskell [as by Elizabeth Gaskell]
173 • The Signalman • (1866) • short story by Charles Dickens
9 • Introduction: An Age in Horror • essay by Michel Parry
27 • A Singular Passage in the Life of the Late Henry Harris, Doctor in Divinity: As Related by the Rev. Jasper Ingoldsby, M.A., His Friend and Executor • [The Ingoldsby Legends] • novelette by Richard Harris Barham (variant of Singular Passage in the Life of the Late Henry Harris 1831)
53 • The Phantom Regiment • (1847) • novelette by James Grant
86 • A Night in an Old Castle • (1843) • short story by G. P. R. James
104 • The Forsaken of God • (1849) • short story by William Mudford
117 • The Monk's Story • (1850) • short story by Catherine Crowe
133 • The North Mail • (1865) • short story by Amelia B. Edwards (variant of The Phantom Coach 1864)
149 • The Old Nurse's Story • (1935) • novelette by Mrs. Gaskell [as by Elizabeth Gaskell]
173 • The Signalman • (1866) • short story by Charles Dickens
- GenresHorror
187 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
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April 11, 2010
So, after finishing some big reads I decided to escape from modern horror fiction for a while (all those MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR and Pseudopod submissions were getting too samey in feel) and immerse myself in some Victorian short horror fiction. After that, probably this year's MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR...
The public domain is a fruitful source for canny anthologists and Michel Parry made quite a career as an anthology editor, here offering up some famous (and not so famous) pieces from old magazines whose authors are long dead. Parry's informative introduction, "An Age In Horror", is a wonderful reminder that history is fractal, in a sense, and any detail of it can be zoomed down into, opening up vast new vistas or at least reminding us how much we telescope the past to make it manageable to our memories. A reductive tactic, yes, but unless you're an expert it's easier to just remember the broad strokes, and little essays like the introduction here help jog you out of complacency. Parry provides a concise little history of the development of the horror story current from Gothic Novel and Newgate Novel (real world crime stories presented as fiction) - and their eventual devolution into bloods, blood & thunders, penny dreadfuls and shilling shockers - and the concurrent, parallel treatment of the same themes by upscale writers (stabilized by the Domestic story school) into the classier, classic Victorian Ghost Story, along with the middle-classes embracing of the Sensation Novel. Nicely done.
And so you then get a brace of stories, some already familiar, some certainly less so - I didn't take the time to re-read Charles Dickens' excellent story "The Signal Man" because I'm very familiar with it already (I scripted a radio drama version back in college, for one thing). Also, while I tend not to re-read stories I've noted as not enjoying, only one tale here fit the bill and I decided to give it a second look anyway, due to it's reputation and ubiquity in collections like this - and was glad I did. So let's start there.
When originally reading Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story" I was probably turned off by its "Woman's Gothic" stiffness and predictability, but I'm a bit more forgiving about such things nowadays (I'd still say it's a bit too long-winded for its own good and the thuddingly obvious moral conclusion is just not my cuppa) and found I could appreciate it more. So you get such stolid standbys as wealthy gentry and servants, dark family secrets, an illegitimate child, a family curse, a ghostly organ that plays on stormy nights and a sealed wing of an isolated mansion - no doubt, someone walked down a corridor while holding a candle somewhere within there as well! Probably the best thing about this story is the ghost (or ghosts, to be exact) - a wailing woman and ghostly child who haunt the snowy evening wastes around the mansion, attempting to lure a living child to her death. A bit like the Hispanic-American La Llorona folklore ghost, to my eye.
Of course, all the stories here have to be read with at least some thought to their age. They are not "dated", of course, just examples of how people wrote about certain topics in the past and anybody approaching them from a modern perspective should expect some differences of style and approach. "A Singular Passage In The Life Of The Late Henry Harris, Doctor In Divinity" by Richard Harris Barham (but presented, like most of his fiction was, as the work of the Rev. Jasper Ingoldsby who was purportedly relating to us one of "The Ingoldsby Legends") is a good example of this needed tweak of perspective. Is it long-winded and stuffy? Yes, but the story it's trying to tell is so oddly unprecedented that one could argue it needs the rather elaborate framework structure of period gossip and tales within tales just to present its idea in a way that would be understandable to people at the time (never mind how obvious we may find such a set-up, with 175 years of popular culture refractions under our figurative belt). The crux of the tale are various religious records of a mysterious, recurring trance state endured by a young woman during which she finds her soul transported to another place wherein she is tortured in some manner. These records are assembled for the reader (in a sense, like Ambrose Bierce's approach in "The Moonlit Road", though not as ambitious and cynical as that fine tale) to make connections with implications of a larger tale of black magic experiments and rituals being performed by debauched young men away at foreign University. What makes this tale interesting is the way the modesty of the period makes the victim unwilling to elaborate or provide details on the spiritual tortures she endures - thus allowing this modern reader to imagine much worse than what was (probably) originally intended. Aside from that, there's something to be gleaned from the story's capturing of a time period when formalized religion begins to cede the care of unwell individuals to doctors and formalized science (the latter are represented as unfeeling idiots, but then how could they be expected to treat a spiritual malady like this, anyway?). An interesting story.
In James Grant's "The Phantom Regiment", an old Scots couple lets their vacant room to a boisterous, profane stranger who arrives on a dark and stormy night, promising to stay for only one year, at which point he will re-engage with his old regiment. As the innkeeper begins to get to know the cartoonish old blackguard (he struck me as as Scots version of Yosemite Sam, all bluster and swearing and odd rough-and-tumble habits like drinking his whiskey mixed with gunpowder!), the latter regales him with wild tales of his unsavory military career and misdeeds - he seems to have been involved in every combat atrocity of the time, including a slaughter of Native Americans that led to his own death (a detail he blithely mentions in passing). As expected, his regiment does return for him in spectacular fashion. I enjoyed this piece. I might have enjoyed it more with some background in Scottish history - as an examination of Scots nationalism, its conflicts and contentious events and the Scots character, seems to be part of the point - but the old warrior was a vivid and interesting character to spend time with.
"A Night In The Old Castle" by G.P.R. James (George Payne Rainsford James) is, in a way, the type of tale that got endlessly parodied in satires of the Gothics as far back as Northanger Abbey - and yet I really had fun reading it! In a nutshell, it's all sensation writing - two men traveling in a carriage along the Rhine get caught in a terrific thunderstorm one night and have to take refuge in the ruined remains of castle. After a fire is built and drinks consumed, they've just settled down to sleep when a shriek pierces the dark. Could it be coming from beyond that door that leads to the ruined cellars? As I said - such set-ups are hackneyed, certainly, but after having to recently digest a vast quantity of modern horror writing in my editor's role, there was something very pleasing about reading fiction that shamelessly concentrated itself on mood, atmosphere and the building of moment-to-moment suspense from basic blocks like darkness, storms, ruins, wailing, a dead body and a sudden attack in the dark. The explanation - when it comes - is confusing and, essentially, superfluous.
I'd previously read William Mudford's "The Forsaken Of God" and liked it, but couldn't remember a thing about it. It's a cracking good morality lesson about the danger of pursuing forbidden knowledge at the cost of your soul - with some wonderfully lurid moments of satanic imagery. In a set up that brings to mind Guy de Maupassant "Was It A Dream?" (although to different ends), a cynical necromancer and his equally worldly friend decided to raise the dead in order to uncover what truths they possess - the friend does not believe it will actually work, but it does, and he finds out more personal truth than he ever wanted to know, all under the taunting ministrations of his supposed comrade (the betrayal of a friendship in the name of evil is the least of his worries). It's very "blood & thunder" and overwrought and all the more enjoyable for it.
Catherine Crowe's "The Monk's Tale" is also very Gothic, turning on imagery of monks, monasteries and sleepwalkers invading your room in the dead of night to go through the motions of stabbing you to death as they compulsively act out some terrible event they witnessed years before (nice little bit of proto-psychology there). I enjoyed it - even if, again, the "explanation" of the mysteriously impossible climax is a bit of "over-egging the pudding", and the story works some structural violence on basic story construction (essentially, it's a frame with a flashback inside of a flashback inside of a flashback!)
Finally, there's "The North Mail" by Amelia B. Edwards another story I had previously liked and re-read to find I still like it quite a bit. A hunter gets caught in a snowstorm, lodges for a short time with a a reclusive and grumpy gentleman (a philosopher who has hidden himself away from the modern world after being mocked for his belief in the supernatural) who expounds on the mysteries of life and death and the afterlife, and then reenters the night to catch transport home - but winds up catching the wrong coach. While very basic in structure (essentially, it's almost a classic bit of folklore without the professor) there's also some very nice creepy descriptions of the coach's inhabitants. Must have froze the blood, back in the day.
And that's it - the second volume of this series is currently being read and there will be a review of that soon.
The public domain is a fruitful source for canny anthologists and Michel Parry made quite a career as an anthology editor, here offering up some famous (and not so famous) pieces from old magazines whose authors are long dead. Parry's informative introduction, "An Age In Horror", is a wonderful reminder that history is fractal, in a sense, and any detail of it can be zoomed down into, opening up vast new vistas or at least reminding us how much we telescope the past to make it manageable to our memories. A reductive tactic, yes, but unless you're an expert it's easier to just remember the broad strokes, and little essays like the introduction here help jog you out of complacency. Parry provides a concise little history of the development of the horror story current from Gothic Novel and Newgate Novel (real world crime stories presented as fiction) - and their eventual devolution into bloods, blood & thunders, penny dreadfuls and shilling shockers - and the concurrent, parallel treatment of the same themes by upscale writers (stabilized by the Domestic story school) into the classier, classic Victorian Ghost Story, along with the middle-classes embracing of the Sensation Novel. Nicely done.
And so you then get a brace of stories, some already familiar, some certainly less so - I didn't take the time to re-read Charles Dickens' excellent story "The Signal Man" because I'm very familiar with it already (I scripted a radio drama version back in college, for one thing). Also, while I tend not to re-read stories I've noted as not enjoying, only one tale here fit the bill and I decided to give it a second look anyway, due to it's reputation and ubiquity in collections like this - and was glad I did. So let's start there.
When originally reading Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story" I was probably turned off by its "Woman's Gothic" stiffness and predictability, but I'm a bit more forgiving about such things nowadays (I'd still say it's a bit too long-winded for its own good and the thuddingly obvious moral conclusion is just not my cuppa) and found I could appreciate it more. So you get such stolid standbys as wealthy gentry and servants, dark family secrets, an illegitimate child, a family curse, a ghostly organ that plays on stormy nights and a sealed wing of an isolated mansion - no doubt, someone walked down a corridor while holding a candle somewhere within there as well! Probably the best thing about this story is the ghost (or ghosts, to be exact) - a wailing woman and ghostly child who haunt the snowy evening wastes around the mansion, attempting to lure a living child to her death. A bit like the Hispanic-American La Llorona folklore ghost, to my eye.
Of course, all the stories here have to be read with at least some thought to their age. They are not "dated", of course, just examples of how people wrote about certain topics in the past and anybody approaching them from a modern perspective should expect some differences of style and approach. "A Singular Passage In The Life Of The Late Henry Harris, Doctor In Divinity" by Richard Harris Barham (but presented, like most of his fiction was, as the work of the Rev. Jasper Ingoldsby who was purportedly relating to us one of "The Ingoldsby Legends") is a good example of this needed tweak of perspective. Is it long-winded and stuffy? Yes, but the story it's trying to tell is so oddly unprecedented that one could argue it needs the rather elaborate framework structure of period gossip and tales within tales just to present its idea in a way that would be understandable to people at the time (never mind how obvious we may find such a set-up, with 175 years of popular culture refractions under our figurative belt). The crux of the tale are various religious records of a mysterious, recurring trance state endured by a young woman during which she finds her soul transported to another place wherein she is tortured in some manner. These records are assembled for the reader (in a sense, like Ambrose Bierce's approach in "The Moonlit Road", though not as ambitious and cynical as that fine tale) to make connections with implications of a larger tale of black magic experiments and rituals being performed by debauched young men away at foreign University. What makes this tale interesting is the way the modesty of the period makes the victim unwilling to elaborate or provide details on the spiritual tortures she endures - thus allowing this modern reader to imagine much worse than what was (probably) originally intended. Aside from that, there's something to be gleaned from the story's capturing of a time period when formalized religion begins to cede the care of unwell individuals to doctors and formalized science (the latter are represented as unfeeling idiots, but then how could they be expected to treat a spiritual malady like this, anyway?). An interesting story.
In James Grant's "The Phantom Regiment", an old Scots couple lets their vacant room to a boisterous, profane stranger who arrives on a dark and stormy night, promising to stay for only one year, at which point he will re-engage with his old regiment. As the innkeeper begins to get to know the cartoonish old blackguard (he struck me as as Scots version of Yosemite Sam, all bluster and swearing and odd rough-and-tumble habits like drinking his whiskey mixed with gunpowder!), the latter regales him with wild tales of his unsavory military career and misdeeds - he seems to have been involved in every combat atrocity of the time, including a slaughter of Native Americans that led to his own death (a detail he blithely mentions in passing). As expected, his regiment does return for him in spectacular fashion. I enjoyed this piece. I might have enjoyed it more with some background in Scottish history - as an examination of Scots nationalism, its conflicts and contentious events and the Scots character, seems to be part of the point - but the old warrior was a vivid and interesting character to spend time with.
"A Night In The Old Castle" by G.P.R. James (George Payne Rainsford James) is, in a way, the type of tale that got endlessly parodied in satires of the Gothics as far back as Northanger Abbey - and yet I really had fun reading it! In a nutshell, it's all sensation writing - two men traveling in a carriage along the Rhine get caught in a terrific thunderstorm one night and have to take refuge in the ruined remains of castle. After a fire is built and drinks consumed, they've just settled down to sleep when a shriek pierces the dark. Could it be coming from beyond that door that leads to the ruined cellars? As I said - such set-ups are hackneyed, certainly, but after having to recently digest a vast quantity of modern horror writing in my editor's role, there was something very pleasing about reading fiction that shamelessly concentrated itself on mood, atmosphere and the building of moment-to-moment suspense from basic blocks like darkness, storms, ruins, wailing, a dead body and a sudden attack in the dark. The explanation - when it comes - is confusing and, essentially, superfluous.
I'd previously read William Mudford's "The Forsaken Of God" and liked it, but couldn't remember a thing about it. It's a cracking good morality lesson about the danger of pursuing forbidden knowledge at the cost of your soul - with some wonderfully lurid moments of satanic imagery. In a set up that brings to mind Guy de Maupassant "Was It A Dream?" (although to different ends), a cynical necromancer and his equally worldly friend decided to raise the dead in order to uncover what truths they possess - the friend does not believe it will actually work, but it does, and he finds out more personal truth than he ever wanted to know, all under the taunting ministrations of his supposed comrade (the betrayal of a friendship in the name of evil is the least of his worries). It's very "blood & thunder" and overwrought and all the more enjoyable for it.
Catherine Crowe's "The Monk's Tale" is also very Gothic, turning on imagery of monks, monasteries and sleepwalkers invading your room in the dead of night to go through the motions of stabbing you to death as they compulsively act out some terrible event they witnessed years before (nice little bit of proto-psychology there). I enjoyed it - even if, again, the "explanation" of the mysteriously impossible climax is a bit of "over-egging the pudding", and the story works some structural violence on basic story construction (essentially, it's a frame with a flashback inside of a flashback inside of a flashback!)
Finally, there's "The North Mail" by Amelia B. Edwards another story I had previously liked and re-read to find I still like it quite a bit. A hunter gets caught in a snowstorm, lodges for a short time with a a reclusive and grumpy gentleman (a philosopher who has hidden himself away from the modern world after being mocked for his belief in the supernatural) who expounds on the mysteries of life and death and the afterlife, and then reenters the night to catch transport home - but winds up catching the wrong coach. While very basic in structure (essentially, it's almost a classic bit of folklore without the professor) there's also some very nice creepy descriptions of the coach's inhabitants. Must have froze the blood, back in the day.
And that's it - the second volume of this series is currently being read and there will be a review of that soon.
October 11, 2010
The first story was not a great choice as it was very slow, dry, and filled, I must say, with a preponderance of commas. However, the others were a lot of fun and I even got a chill or two. There are three more volumes in the series which I just might have to check out!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews