The sullen, lead-coloured weight of the North Sea and the strangenesses of the Yorkshire Wolds still press on me every so often. And when it comes to writing there are at least three sides to every coin. So I have a number of strands when I write about the land of my largely miss-spent youth. Why you should care, I don’t know, but some people rather like the stuff, so what the heck – the pictures are nice, anyway…
Do you like Holmes, M R James, strange investigations, Victorian ghost tales and genuine vodoun? Today, dear listener, we re-visit a classic literary character – Flaxman Low. We have the original illustrations for Low’s adventures, and we muse on a tale by writer/publisher Barbara Roden, one which manages to include both Flaxman Low and Sherlock Holmes whilst at the same time following up on elements of an M R James story. We also found an 1899 observation of vodoun ritual in practice written by one of the Low authors. Too much to ignore.
Rather than mutter for a couple of minutes and then say, Oh, and here’s a link or two which might be of interest, we therefore present some new oddities and a much revised Flaxman Low article illustrated by drawings from 1899, by B E Minns.
A while back we delved into the issue of Sherlock Holmes pastiches and wilder re-imaginings of the Great Detective (see our article shades of sherlock). And we hedged our bets by saying that we liked straight, canonical Holmes adventures, but that sometimes a really well-written excursion into the supernatural could work. In the process, we mentioned The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (ed. John Joseph Adams, 2009), but had only dipped in and out of that anthology.
Then we came across this review, entirely by accident, on Goodreads:
“…this story should be taken as the model for Holmes-meets-Occult kind of adventures… But more importantly, in this story Sherlock Holmes does NOT do anything that goes against the canonical template of his thoughts & action, and the supernatural element is presented with its chilling moments and menace through the interpretations of the events as done by Flaxman Low… And the topping is that the story actually ties up a few loose ends in one of the greatest horror stories of all times (clue: the most-anthologised story by M.R. James).”
This story was originally published in the Gaslight Grimoire anthology in 2008. In the introduction to the tale in Improbable Adventures, the author says:
“The story setting – Lufford Abbey – former home of Julian Karswell of M R James’s classic ‘Casting the Runes’ – came after I watched, with our son, the film version of ‘Casting the Runes’, Night of the Demon, and found myself wondering what happened to Karswell’s home after he died in somewhat mysterious circumstances, in France. The involvement of a ‘Dr Watson’ in James’s story was a gift from the writing gods.”
THE THAMES HORROR and Other Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, four of Barbara Roden’s Holmesian tales including the above, is also available from Amazon and Calabash Press:
Since we last Flaxman-ed, the British Library has made many of its archive images available on-line, and we were delighted to find B E Minns’ illustrations for the 1899 edition of the Low stories in there, so we had to put them on show as well.
Minns looks rather like M R James in this one.
Warning: There are occasional spoilers below.
That acute observer, M R James, said of the stories which follow:
“K and Hesketh Prichard’s ‘Flaxman Low’ is most ingenious and successful but rather over-technically ‘occult’”
We think it’s fair to say that if you are called Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard (1876-1922) and nicknamed ‘Hex’ at school, you ought to do something interesting with your life. The fascinating HVH-P did not let anyone down.
He hunted for (probably) extinct giant sloths in South America, helped counter German snipers on the Great War, played a mean game of cricket and explored the world. Through Trackless Labrador is one of his, for example, and he is supposed to have brought back some of the first reports of vodoun from the interior of Haiti. He could have been invented for the Boy’s Own Library.
In 1899, Prichard was the first white man to cross the interior of the black island republic since 1803, and wrote very prejudiced book about it called Where Black Rules White. The nasty politics of the period (and basic humanity aside), it does include a chapter on Vaydoux (voodoo, vodoun), where he describes practices he saw for his own eyes:
“As she danced she cleared her throat and spat with a noise like artillery coming into action. The huge black woman in the centre droned on, and to the drum-beat was added the chink of a key on metal. The Mamaloi quickened in her sinuous dancing. The heat was terrific; humanity sweltered there. And over all presided a portrait of the German Emperor, whose eye I seemed to catch at this juncture.
“The Papaloi, a small and filthy old man, crouched at one side, as the Mamaloi caught the cock from the hands of the big woman, and, holding it by the neck, flung it over her head and shoulder. Her face was distorted with frenzy; round and round she twisted, accompanied by a swifter measure of the same dead song. She laid the cock upon the heads of the worshippers and began to whirl more and more rapidly to the hurrying, maddening drumming. Suddenly she straightened her arm, spun the cock round and round, its flapping wings beating impotently upon the air. A snowstorm of feathers floated up as she stood with rapt eyes and bared teeth, twirling; then she flung up her hand, and the headless body flew over her shoulder.
“Her excitement was horrible; she pressed the bleeding neck to her lips, and, when she slowly withdrew her hand, stood for an instant fixed and immovable, her lips and teeth stained red.”
With his mother Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard, ‘Hex’ wrote a series of occult detective stories. She also accompanied him on some of his travels, but that’s another matter.
The Flaxman Low adventures were attributed to E and H Heron, probably because the printers couldn’t fit both their full names on the covers. Published 1898-99, there were twelve stories in total, stories which brought his character onto the occult detective roll of honour. These tales are interesting, unusual and come with a twist of the new science of psychology (these are the 1890s, remember). But wait…
We re-read the Heron family, and realised that this stuff is, in fact, nuts. Enjoyable, but nuts. The detective himself is “one of the leading scientists of the day”, whose real name is not disclosed. He is also an accomplished sportsman, and a record-breaking hammer-thrower, strong and lean with a high forehead, long neck and thin moustache. We learn this early on, which gets us all a-quiver and ready for the horrors.
And boy did we have trouble picking which horrors to feature. So much gold in a shallow river. We have rarely felt so dumbfounded when we put a book down. Here are two of Flaxman Low’s encounters and discoveries, to give you the idea:
Flaxman Low the Man has a number of noble characteristics, apart from his high forehead. Firstly, he attributes almost everything to his advanced knowledge of psychology and study of psychic manifestations. When he can’t really answer someone’s question, he helpfully replies:
“Everybody who…. investigates the phenomena of spiritism will, sooner or later, meet in them some perplexing element, which is not to be explained by any of the ordinary theories. For reasons into which I need not now enter, this present case appears to me to be one of these.”
A wonderful paragraph, which in greydog’s humbler stories would have been rendered thus:
Inspector Chiltern: What was that, then?
Henry: Haven’t the faintest, old chap.
Secondly, he decides for quite unknown reasons to put everyone in danger (except himself) by declaring halfway through most stories that he has pretty much solved the case but won’t give them the answer until lots more harm has been done. We felt very Miss Marple sometimes, even at the end:
“But Aunt Jane, you still haven’t explained how the one-armed werewolf which killed Colonel Smythe knew that the spectral squid would be blamed…”
Thirdly, he likes burning/shooting/knocking things down as a quick end to the matter. If he had been written with a touch more Indiana Jones, the stories would be perfect. We have to commend to you the final scene with the barrow-wight/ghost/vampire/mummy, in which it is despatched by putting the bullet-riddled and beaten remains into a boat and giving them a Viking funeral. You couldn’t make this up – except the Heron family did.
There are tales in the collection which have genuine merit, but you have to pick and choose. To finish this piece we want to ruin one particular tale in more detail. The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith is the first Low appearance. It starts with the traditional motif of Flaxman Low being called in by a chum. The chum has inherited a house, and surprisingly, the house can’t be let for long because the tenants run away or shoot out the skirting boards. Financially embarrassed, the chum asks for help, and…
This story is wonderful, especially as it veers into Lovecraft before Lovecraft in its descriptions:
“The sensation he experienced as it moved was of some ponderous, pulpy body, not crawling or creeping, but spreading… then he became conscious of a pair of glassy eyes, with livid, everted lids, looking into his own… they were watery, like the eyes of a dead fish, and gleamed with a pale, internal lustre.”
This description follows the sighting of a bladder-like object regularly going into one of the rooms, but never there when pursued. “The bladder-like object may be the key to the mystery.” Low pronounces before any real investigation has started. There’s a detective for you.
It turns out that a leprous uncle who disappeared had died in the house, and is haunting it. Flaxman Low has a novel solution – they pull the house down. In doing so they find a malformed skeleton “under the boarding at an angle of the landing”. Low reveals that the uncle’s spirit has been intermittently animating the remains, at which point we kneel before Hesketh Vernon Hesketh Pritchard (and his mum) in awe.
You see, the bladder object was a bandaged, leprous foot, apparently visible when the rest of the body was not; marks on the sand-strewn landing were caused by walking sticks – lame ghost, apparently; the spirit had somehow become huge and pulpy despite animating a wrecked skeleton, and anyway, the leprous uncle who could hardly move had for some reason hidden himself ingeniously under the landing floorboards before he died.
We so get it. And there are many different versions of the collected tales available, new or second-hand, some of which only include six stories – look for the longer editions if you want to get all twelve.
The excellent blog site Skulls in the Stars has a nice summary of Flaxman Low, and it seems a shame not to quote that:
Assessment: Low is a moderately good psychic investigator, though a relatively passive one. He allows skeptical and unprepared bystanders to accompany him on dangerous cases far too often. Furthermore, he is often slow to act, to such an extent that people often die before the problem gets resolved. Still, he knows his supernatural phenomena, and he generally puts an end to the troubling manifestations.
We particularly applaud Skulls in the Stars, a site which manages to combine optics and physics with a love of classic pulp and horror. Such an animal suits our own lurcher-and-weird-fiction outlook. You can find it here:
And there you have him, Flaxman Low, the occult detective with a difference. You really have been warned.
More to come in three or four days. Subscribe for free (top left) to be alerted when we next venture into lurchers and longdogs, weird art or the latest in curiously dark fiction…
We all know the Seven Deadly Sins – Sleepy, Happy, Dopey, Incontinence, Edward, Coveting Thy Neighbour’s Toaster, and Doc. The Severn Deadly Sins, on the other hand, revolve around the Severn Valley in Englishland, home of many of Ramsey Campbell’s wonderful stories – of which more later. So today we have seven weird publications to mention. For the art and comics enthusiasts, we also feature fabulous art reveals from Brandon Barrows’ new graphic story collection, Mythos: Lovecraft’s Worlds.
We’ll start by being arty. Brandon Barrows, comics and story writer, is incidentally a fellow revivalist for Carnacki the Ghost Finder, as in his collection The Castle-Town Tragedy, which we’ve mentioned here before – three brand-new tales of William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective.
Please note that art throughout is copyrighted by their creators/publishers. Click for larger images.
Whilst not abandoning Hope Hodgson, he’s recently gone all H P Lovecraft again, with his collection Mythos: Lovecraft’s Worlds. In this production Brandon and artist Hugo Petrus adapt eight of Lovecraft’s stories to the comic format. Many of these are lesser-known and some have never before been adapted to comics, such as The Curse of Yig and Ibid (a rare humour story!).
We asked Brandon for a detailed breakdown of his inspiration and process when writing Mythos, bearing in mind the complexity of the creative process. After considerable thought, and numerous deeply philosophical emails between us, he said:
“Please buy my books and comics. I need money.”
When we showed him our cattle-prod, he did manage to add:
“Lovecraft has been an important influence on my horror and fantasy writing, but ‘Cthulhu’ is all most people seem to know about him. With Mythos, I want to shine a light on some of the more obscure pieces of his work and hopefully show folks that it’s worth exploring beyond the evil gods and tentacles.”
Which seems quite reasonable, so we settled for that.
Mythos is coming out in November from Caliber, a US comics publisher who had a strong bent towards creator-owned works in the 1990s. A couple of years ago they came back with a range of new publications, focusing primarily on original graphic novels and collections of previously released material.
They say of the book: “H P Lovecraft is known for tales of terror, cosmic abominations and his most famous creation, the dreaded Cthulhu! However, the true breadth and depth spanned by Lovecraft, who also penned stories of fantasy, science fiction and even humor. Go beyond tentacles and evil gods to explore the mythos of Lovecraft.”
Browsing around Caliber, we were also interested in having a look at this one if we ever get a free moment, our second book for today – Dark Detective: Chimera. (W) Christopher Sequeira (A) Philip Cornell, J. Scherpenhuizen (CA) Dave Elsey
“The brilliant Sherlock Holmes is plunged into a case of Gothic terror as he investigates horrific deaths that suggest an improbable monster. Only Holmes can stop the shadows from swallowing London and only his single remaining fried can stop the shadows from swallowing him. Collecting the acclaimed Black House series.”
No idea what it’s lik,e but it sounds tempting. Below is Caliber’s site for more news and details. They say US shipping addresses only, so we suppose you have to use other vendors outside of that when you’ve found something you like:
You can find Brandon himself here:
On to the other plot. According to the BBC, who know stuff like this, the River Severn, famous for its tidal bore, is the longest river in Britain. It flows for around 220 miles from its source in the Welsh Cambrian mountains, through Shropshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, finally emptying into the Bristol Channel.
The name ‘Severn’ may be derived from Sabrina (or Hafren in Welsh) and is based on the mythical story of a nymph who drowned in the river. In John Milton’s Comus, a mask (masque) presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, an angelic spirit conjures the nymph from the waters of the river to come to a lady’s aid:
“There is a gentle Nymph not farr from hence,
That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream,
Sabrina is her name, a Virgin pure…”
Proper trivia that you don’t get in pub quizzes: Comus was presented before the Earl of Bridgewater. Harking back to Brandon Barrows’ Castle-Town Tragedy title, the delivery of Comus was related to the Castlehaven Tragedy. The Earl of Bridgewater’s brother-in-law, the Earl of Castlehaven, had been convicted of rape and sodomy, and executed three years earlier.
Comus was all about chastity, and may have been a deliberate commentary to promote an air of cleanliness about the rest of the line. Whatever Castlehaven did or did not do, some said that his wife Lady Castlehaven was no better that he was, an attendant calling her “the wickedest woman in the world”.
The Severn has assisted and thwarted armies, disrupted life during floods and freezes, as well as being an important trade artery from medieval times. And it’s here that we find Brother Cadfael of Shrewsbury Abbey, and his… no, sorry, it’s here that we find the setting for many of Ramsey Campbell’s English horror stories. His Severn Valley is a counterpart to the twisted and benighted New England of H P Lovecraft.
The imaginary Cotswolds town of Temphill, Campbell’s first version of a Massachusetts setting, appeared in “The Church in High Street”, which was also his first published story (Dark Mind, Dark Heart anthology, Arkham 1962). In it, Campbell refers to
“worship of trans-spatial beings still practiced in such towns as Camside, Brichester, Severnford, Goatswood, and Temphill…”.
These names, especially that of Brichester, recur in a number of superb tales of horror. Campbell mentions, of this development of unique English locales:
“(August) Derleth told me to abandon my attempts to set my work in Massachusetts…”
Introduction to Cold Print (1984)
So he began this dark geography very early in his career, laying out a range of towns and other locations around the Severn. Goatswood itself is perhaps the caprine or hircine (ie. goat-like) equivalent of H P Lovecraft’s Innsmouth. Hooded figures with a goatish appearance (and whiff, we assume) lurk in its dodgy streets, and they worship, not surprisingly, The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, Shub-Niggurath.
“The close-set dull-red roofs, the narrow streets, the encircling forests—all seemed somehow furtive.”
The Moon Lens
Bearing this in mind, our third related book today is an older one. It’s a collection drawing on this background and released by Chaosium in 1995 – Made in Goatswood: A Celebration of Ramsey Campbell. New tales of horror set in the Goatswood region of the Severn Valley, edited by Scott David Aniolowski.
Which celebratory note brings us neatly to the fourth, fifth and sixth books for today, headline releases coming from Dark Regions Press – The Children of Gla’aki, Return of the Old Ones, and You, Human.
Gla’aki himself is a Great Old One. He first appeared in Campbell’s story “The Inhabitant of the Lake” in 1964, only two years after he had started laying out his fictional geography. As unnecessary re-writing is contary to our nature, here’s the main Wiki outline (though they call him Glaaki?):
“He dwells within a lake in the Severn Valley near Brichester, in England (though he has been reported in other lakes around the world). Glaaki has the appearance of an enormous slug covered with metallic spines which, despite their appearance, are actually organic growths. Glaaki can also extrude tentacles with eyes at the tips, allowing him to peer from underneath the water. It is believed that he came to the Earth imprisoned inside a meteor. When the meteor landed, Glaaki was freed, and the impact created the lake where he now resides.
“Glaaki is an ancient and wise creature with vast knowledge of the other beings which are active in Britain’s Severn River Valley.”
And this year Gla’aki is back, in…
Edited by Brian M. Sammons & Glynn Owen Barrass
“There is a lake in the Severn Valley, near a town called Brichester. It is an eerie, haunted place, both by day and by night. Night especially though, is a time when no one in their right mind would go anywhere near it, or those oddly deserted houses that stand, albeit barely, on the edge of the shore. But why? What is it that moves about in that lake, a thing that makes its presence known with three sinister glowing eyes that protrude from beneath the water? Some believe it is an entity that traveled to Earth, many thousands of years ago inside a hollow meteor.
“Ramsey Campbell, Nick Mamatas, John Goodrich, Robert M. Price, Pete Rawlik, W.H. Pugmire, Edward Morris, Scott R. Jones, Thana Niveau, William Meikle, Orrin Grey, Tom Lynch, Konstantine Paradias, Josh Reynolds, Lee Clarke Zumpe, and Tim Waggoner – these are The Children of Gla’aki.”
We can proudly say that John Linwood Grant, the greydog himself, has appeared in print with some of these folk, so they must be good. Hmm, maybe that didn’t come out quite as modest as it should have done. Oh well, at least they’re very tolerant and kind to confused Yorkshiremen who wander into their playground…
Their second offering is…
Edited by Brian M. Sammons
“Featuring all new stories of cosmic and Lovecraftian horror based pre, during and post the apocalypse by authors Jeffrey Thomas, Lucy A. Snyder, Tim Curran, Pete Rawlik, Sam Gafford, Christine Morgan, Cody Goodfellow and many more, Return of the Old Ones: Apocalyptic Lovecraftian Horror continues the Dark Regions Weird Fiction line with 19 original stories from some of the best authors in Lovecraftian horror and weird fiction today.
“Return of the Old Ones will only have one signed edition (deluxe slipcased hardcover) and will feature a similar stamp design to the popular Cthulhu head stamping featured on the World War Cthulhu hardcovers. It will be signed by all contributors and will feature the original color cover artwork by Vincent Chong as color end sheets.”
Notice a nod there to Sam Gafford, our co-editor for Occult Detective Quarterly. Good stuff. The third book from Dark Regions is a break from Lovecraftian and neo-Lovecraftian burrowing, so we thought it ought to be mentioned for variety:
Edited by Michael Bailey
“Bram Stoker Award winning editor Michael Bailey brings sci-fi back to Dark Regions Press with heart in this genre-bending anthology of dark science fiction and poetry: You, Human. With fiction illustrated beautifully throughout by world-renowned artist L.A. Spooner, with poetry and spot illustrations supplied by the always-impressive Orion Zangara, and with an incredible introduction on humanism by New York Times bestselling author F. Paul Wilson, You, Human is a triumphant return to science fiction for Dark Regions Press, initiating the new Dark Regions Sci-Fi imprint as book #1.”
Although we might cover one or two in more depth at some point, at the moment there’s an Indiegogo campaign running to support these three, including pre-order options. The power of Gla’aki compels you to check out their rewards!
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/three-new-books-from-dark-regions-press#/
“The 1970s were a transitional decade. The hangover from the swinging 1960s, and before the plastic, neon decadence of the 1980s. Fueled by war, popular protests, flagrant abuse of power, environmental shocks, and economic discord, the 1970s were a synthesis of paranoia and partying in a rapidly changing world. Blood, Sweat, and Fears: Horror Inspired by the 1970s takes readers back to that diabolical decade, in an unforgettable collection of ten stories that conjure the nightmare of the 70s for a new generation.”
Our last book is the usual shameless mention of something which earned us a silver sixpence. Published on 22nd August by Nosetouch Press, the anthology Blood Sweat and Fears includes a tale by the greydog, another one of his dark revenant stories.
In A Stranger Passing Through, the nameless or unnameable anti-hero is in New York in the bright, hard days of 1974, and finds himself, after some other unpleasantries along the way, having to have a few words with The Families.
Edited by David T Neal and Christine M Scott, the anthology features Daniel S. Duvall, David J. Fielding, Clare Francis, John Linwood Grant, Matthew Kresal, Tiffany Morris, Gregory L. Norris, Trent Roman, John McCallum Swain and Eric Turowski
Here’s the opening to A Stranger Passing Through – and no, goodness gosh, it genuinely is nothing to do with vampires, but you’ll have to read the full story to find out what’s really going on:
“So a man walks into a bar and he says to the bartender…
“But this was rural Minnesota, the visitor was no more human than I was, and afterwards, no-one was laughing.
“1974. A no-horse town, with a single bar off the dirt road that passed for a main street. I’d gone into the bar for a quiet beer and had settled down nicely enough, so I was none too pleased when I smelled one of my own kind on the dry night air.
“I tensed, and a few minutes later the door flapped open. There he was, a tall heap of dust and flapping leather. He’d chosen the long-rider look – even had the broad-brimmed hat and the stained red kerchief round his neck.
“Some farmer snorted a kind of laugh, muttered to his companion, a bleach-blonde lady of the night. The guy behind the bar, a big man with tattoos down his arms, glanced at the “we don’t want no trouble here” shotgun on the rack behind him.
” ‘Help you, Mistuh?’ he asked.
“The visitor smiled, but he was looking straight at me…”
The anthology includes nine other great tales of seventies horror, and you can find out more about Nosetouch and the contributing authors via Nosetouch’s website:
The book Blood Sweat and Fears can be picked up here:
blood sweat and fears – amazon uk
And them there’s seven weird books for you, dear listener, Land o’ Goshen and pickle our grits, or whatever people say these days. We’ll be back in two or three of your days with something entirely different, we imagine…
