Before we get to the reviews: I think the Evangelion posts will be back this weekend. We got her (my headache) on the run boys… we got her on the run.
Reassuring Tales (Expanded Edition) (T.E.D. Klein, 2021)
To get this out of the way: T.E.D. Klein’s name is actually Ted Klein. That’s his name. Theodore “Eibon” Donald Klein. As you may surmise the “Eibon” was put there to achieve the effect of your initials spelling out your actual name. Anyway. I was intrigued by a collection of horror stories with such a pleasant title.1
It was interesting to read these while thinking about the Aickman collections I recently read, where part of the pleasure lay in their sheer unpredictability. Some, but not all, of these stories work as well as they do not because they are wholly unpredictable but because the “twist” is so clearly telegraphed you have no choice but to watch characters walk straight into traps. Take “Camera Shy,” in which a married couple discover their new son-in-law is somehow, unaccountably, not in any of his wedding photographs:
“I can’t understand it,” he said. “I’m sure I never posed this way for anyone. Believe me, I’d remember if I did. The closest thing was… Well, you remember, don’t you? That photographer asked me and Laszlo to get together for a close-up, and Laszlo didn’t seem to want to, and I made a joke about how maybe he was afraid to have his picture taken alongside a handsome guy like me. In the end, of course, he agreed, and we posed together by the doorway—me and Laszlo, standing arm in arm…”
He fell silent.
“Well,” his wife said at last, “Laszlo certainly isn’t in this one.”
You know from basically the first words why he isn’t there (he’s a vampire) but it’s not until the end that the people in the story realize it. And instead of being unbearably frustrating, it makes the story function like a dark joke, where you know the punchline and the vampire also knows the punchline but the poor saps with the pictures are still waiting. It is, yes, a bit hokey, but it is just the right amount of hokey… sort of like a season six or seven X-Files episode.2
Klein has written one novel, The Ceremonies, which seems to be an expanded version of the first story in this collection, “The Events at Poroth Farm.” I’m interested in reading it, partly because I liked this collection quite a bit but also because the short story, which is about a professor who holes himself up on a farm on upstate New York while reading horror stories for his syllabus, contains a truly accurate description of what it’s like to read The Mysteries of Udolpho:
Sat up tonight finishing The Mysteries of Udolpho. Figure it’s best to get the long ones out of the way first. Radcliffe has unfortunate penchant for explaining away all her ghosts and apparitions—really a mistake and a bore. All in all, not exactly the most fascinating reading, though a good study in Romanticism.… But can’t demand students read Udolpho—too long.
Feeling seen in literature is so important.…
The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (H.P. Lovecraft, collected 2001)
This one was “for work” (TBA) if you can believe that—which you shouldn’t, as it was “for work” in the sense that a teacher of mine chose to write his dissertation on Spenser because it gave him an excuse to teach himself Hebrew. Am I writing something about Lovecraft, no, but am I writing something… about something… adjacent to something… adjacent to Lovecraft…? In theory. Anyway.
You haven’t really read something until you’ve read it—which, written out, is obviously true. But if you had asked me what if I knew H.P. Lovecraft’s “deal” I would have said sure, that I had not read him but I knew his “deal” to be unspeakable horrors, eldritch geometries, man delving where man ought not. Cthulhu. Fish people. Racist cat names.
And all of the above is present (including, yes, the racist cat names). The stories collected here, are, however, different from what I expected. There’s a lot that Lovecraft chooses to do that infuses his stories with a genuine sense of the bizarre and, in some cases, real creepiness. “The Thing on the Doorstep” is an extremely unsettling and nasty story that loses none of its bite through Lovecraft’s subsequent—what to call it?—memeification. Even the stories that do sort of live up to the memes (like “At the Mountain of Madness”) are more interesting than I thought they would be.
One of the devices Lovecraft uses in these stories to great effect is using real books and news stories and names, mixing them up with the ones of his own invention. Thus “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” ends with a quotation from a scientific article a reader could have looked up for themselves and found to actually exist, had they been so curious. “At the Mountains of Madness” goes back repeatedly to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket3 to suggest that Poe put more reality into that story than people realized.4 So that creates ambiguity about the parts Lovecraft really is inventing—is the Necronomicon real, too? It’s not like you could go online and check Miskatonic University’s library catalog.5
So I finished this collection with more of an understanding of why people, including writers I really admire and respect, go so nuts for Lovecraft. It’s not just the vast dark cosmology that he (apparently) developed over time, though obviously that kind of thing is catnip to a certain kind of mind (see: Tolkien, J.R.R.) but the way he carefully ties that cosmology to the familiar everyday world, such as this point where one of the scientists in “At the Mountains of Madness” begins reciting all of the stops on a subway line out of sheer panic:
“South Station Under—Washington Under—Park Street Under—Kendall—Central—Harvard. . . .” The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home-feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it.
The second thing I noticed reading this collection is that Lovecraft is a much better writer than his reputation suggests.6 He has a lot of flexibility of tone; he is even humorous (such as when the narrator of “The Temple” keeps putting the mental deterioration of others down to them being from other parts of Germany).7
A recurring fact that I found increasingly funny as the stories continued is that the Necronomicon is sitting in a university library where it certainly seems like basically anybody who wants to can wander in and read it.8 But while it is funny—and I think maybe meant to be a little funny, but who knows—I also think it’s sort of a brilliant touch. The forbidden knowledge is really just there. You don’t have to be a special chosen one to access it, and indeed the one story that features somebody who could plausibly be called that (“The Dunwich Horror”) doesn’t see him achieve much in the way of success.
But most people just don’t want to know these things—so they don’t try to learn about them. Even in “The Mountains of Madness,” where the scientific expedition into Antarctica is not meant to serve some sort of shadowy arcane purpose, the two people who discover and record the lost civilization of the Old Ones are coincidentally the ones who are already obsessed with the occult. There is some implication that somebody else, coming across the same thing, simply wouldn’t have recognized what they were looking at—much as the first team that goes out unearths the bodies of hibernating Old Ones and saves them for dissection (only to suffer the consequences).
So you can just put your cursed tome in the library, where only obsessives will seek it out, and those obsessives have by their very nature already caused other people to tune them out. There’s no need to hide anything. It’s not precisely that you need a certain knowledge level to be harmed—plenty of innocent and unknowing people die. But it’s almost like that.
The Travelling Grave and Other Stories (L.P. Hartley, 1948)
I was pleasantly surprised to discover the first story in this collection (“A Visitor from Down Under”) was anthologized in some collection of ghost stories I read as a kid that freaked me the hell. I have always remembered this story without remembering who wrote it. L.P. Hartley. There you go.9
A question I found myself asking while reading this: why are most short stories bad? Granted, “most” of any category is bad. Many of these, however, very much exploit what they can do as short stories. For instance, “A Change of Ownership,” in which protagonist Ernest imagines himself as a variety of different people when trying to enter into his own house—such as “the New Proprietor”:
More insistently than ever, as the house drew near, did Ernest crave the loan of this imaginary person’s sturdy thoughts. He had lived always in cramped, uncomfortable rooms; perhaps shared a bedroom with three or four others, perhaps even a bed! What fun for him, after these constricted years, to come home to a big house of his own, where he has three or four sitting-rooms to choose from, each of which he may occupy by himself! What a pleasure it is for him, in the long evenings, to sit perfectly still in the dining-room, with time hanging on his hands, hearing the clock tick.
This device would be extremely annoying if placed in a narrative of any great length, but in the story it works very well, being at first playful and then more and more creepy as the story progresses. Are all of these stories about imaginary people really stories about Ernest? Is he unable to recognize himself, and if so… why?
Some of this inventiveness can probably be put down to when these stories came out—i.e., in a time when short stories were actually widely read—and some of it is probably because the “weird tale” has its own tradition, conventions, and so on. In any case I was very impressed while reading by the ways in which none of the stories felt like the other ones—they were all approaching their weird subject matter in their own peculiar slant ways—while also all being very clearly products of the same writer.10
The Valancourt edition is accompanied by an introduction which contains some melancholy biographical material, essentially painting a picture of man who was lonely, achieved some surprising success as a writer (in addition to making some friendships), but outlived most of his social circle and thus died as lonely as ever (“he remained for longer periods in his London flat, isolated and ineffectually cared-for by a succession of ill-chosen and unsuitable servants”). I have some (all?) of the L.P. Hartley novels that NYRB put out… I should read them.
My favorite piece in this collection was actually not one of the short stories, but a poem called “The Father of the Witch,” in which somebody who seems to have deliberately raised a supernatural child congratulates himself on his achievement:
“She was such a good girl,” neighbors sigh.
Forgive them, Nick, they know not that they lie.
But let those who know better call her bad—
Even a witch has someone she calls Dad.
Klein himself is a little dismissive of it in an interview included in the collection, commenting:
A word about the tale’s intended function: It was written for a glossy corporate magazine that Polaroid was publishing (was it to be the first issue? I forget), and the assignment was to write a horror story that would be illustrated with Polaroid photographs. Either the magazine never came out, or the notion of running a piece of fiction every issue was scotched once the editors saw “Camera Shy”; all I remember is that I was paid.
Which I also haven’t read, incidentally.
T.E.D. Klein actually mentions this quality in an interview included with Reassuring Tales:
Personally, I find it effective to mention real places in a horror tale—and sometimes, as in “Children,” even real events, like the blackout of 1977. For me, that was one of the things that made Lovecraft’s stories so effective: They were set amid actual Providence streets, even actual houses. As a young reader, I recall believing that the books Lovecraft quoted from might also be real.
Granted, that would partly be because Miskatonic University doesn’t exist either.
While I’m aware of Lovecraft’s racism and general racial obsessions, I do think this is a joke. The story doesn’t really make a lot of sense if the German submarine captain is correct.
Though in one story there’s a reference to it being guarded under lock and key. (Not very tightly, apparently.)
Also funny: there’s a story here about a princess and a dragon that is very close to a doomed short story I kept trying to write a long time ago. But I definitely hadn’t read it until now.
My favorite little quirk in one of these stories comes in the title story, where Hugh, who has been forced into a social obligation he doesn’t really want, has the following conversation with himself:
He would arrive at the house, he calculated, soon after seven. ‘Even if dinner is as late as half-past eight,’ he thought to himself, ‘they won’t be able to do me much harm in an hour and a quarter.’ This habit of mentally assuring to himself periods of comparative immunity from unknown perils had begun at school. ‘Whatever I’ve done,’ he used to say to himself, ‘they can’t kill me.’ With the war, this saving reservation had to be dropped: they could kill him, that was what they were there for. But now that peace was here the little mental amulet once more diffused its healing properties; Hugh had recourse to it more often than he would have admitted.
I liked this blog post about the story itself, incidentally.
I must recommend Mat Johnson’s Pym, which also posits that Poe’s novel was actually true
For some reason, I read the email as "t.e.d. lasso, h.p lovecraft, l.p. hartley" and I was like, one of these things seems not like the others.
Also, Pickman's Model stands out for me as not just the scariest HP Lovecraft story, but one of the scariest stories I personally have ever read, and now that you've put your finger on it I guess it is sort a manifesto about what vibe HP Lovecraft is going for.
"You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into Nature to turn out stuff like Pickman’s. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches’ Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That’s because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear—the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness."