A ghost with a club-foot, a lost E F Benson tale, a pioneering female journalist, the writing Barr brothers, the not-quite-first Sherlock Holmes parody, plus other curiosities. Join us, dear listener, in another journey into the past of weird and horror fiction. We were excited to discover, last year, that the British Library had begun to release a whole new series of supernatural publications. Some of these volumes offer an introduction to the writing of various Gothic and horror writers; others are built around a theme, or present rare and largely forgotten stories, a number of which of which have never been anthologised before. Huzzah! There’s an outline schedule of planned releases at the end of this post, but today we visit their anhtology Glimpses of the Unknown, and we add some of our usual supernatural and detective trivia…

Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories (British Library Tales of the Weird Book 3), is edited by that veteran anthologist Mike Ashley. This also seemed appropriate to cover because we had some contact with Mike last year, when we received his blessing to re-publish his landmark article from the seventies (revised in the nineties) ‘Fighters of Fear’ in the anthology Occult Detective Quarterly Presents (Ulthar Press). Here he turns his attention to lesser known supernatural short stories from the 1890s to the 1920s.

One of the tasks facing any anthologist of late Victorian and Edwardian supernatural fiction is that many, many such stories were churned out for the periodicals, and many of them were mundane, featherweight, and sometimes downright dreadful. The vast majority of stories slumber with the last archived copies of the periodical they were first published in – they were never printed again, either in collections or anthologies.

The hunt through such dusty archives is something we’ll be exploring in a later article on greydogtales, with anthologists Alastair Gunn, Tim Prasil and Johnny Mains, but along with the late Hugh Lamb, Mike Ashley has excellent credentials – he has a deep knowledge of the popular supernatural literature of the period, and extensive experience of delving deep. So Glimpses of the Unknown is a must-have for lovers of these sorts of tales. Not because these are all perfect stories, but because of the range of themes and tropes which have been included – there are a few gems thrown in there as well – and the rarity of the stories included. We’re going to pick out a few which particularly earn their keep, or have unusual elements…

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Glimpses of the Unknown Examined

 

Let’s get E F Benson out of the way. He’s the most well-known author in the collection, these days, and has – to our mind – a chequered record in the ghost/horror area, with a few outstanding stories, yes, but quite a lot of minor pieces (his non-supernatural Mapp and Lucia tales are very entertaining, though). The only really unusual element here is that ‘The Woman in the Veil’ is a previously ‘lost’ Benson, which guarantees a look. It’s basically a period murder mystery with a veiled ghost hanging around outside a country hotel, leading to the reconstruction of what really happened, and a touch of justice. Benson completists and enthusiasts will want it, but it doesn’t linger greatly.

‘The Missing Word’ by Austin Philips is a far better story, a neat tale set in a telegraph office and referring back to something which happened fifteen years before. It’s well written and very atmospheric, which lifts it above some of the others. Oddly enough, the premise brings to mind a certain tale of the ‘clacks’ towers in Terry Pratchett. Philips had a post office background, and it shows, in a good way.

Eric Purves’ ‘The House of the Black Evil’ is a story which relates to the occult and summoning practices, and although its final explanation is tolerable, the circumstances themselves elevate the tale. An ordinary house is found to be completely dark inside. Not just dark, but dark dark – utter blackness which defies any attempt to illuminate it. When the postman discovers that letters disappear into the blackness beyond the letter box, a group of local gentlemen dare to investigate. A grisly and unexpected discovery awaits in the pitch black rooms within…

Philippa Forest’s ‘When Spirits Steal’ is a welcome inclusion for a number of reasons. ‘Philippa Forest’ was the pseudonym of journalist and women’s suffrage activist Marion Holmes, and this is one of her stories about a kind of occult detective/psychic investigator, Peter Carwell. He is described as a “Borderland expert” by the narrator, a nice term for someone with an interest in psychic matters. Here they share an effective, rather tragic tale, of a village inn, a sleep-walking maid – and vengeance.

Marion Holmes (née Milner, 1867-1943) is a fascinating character in her own right. She was born in New Wortley, Leeds, which is only a few miles from where the greydog kennels are situated, and grew up near Barnsley, where her earliest memories were of miners begging for food. She first became involved in suffrage activism, serving as first as President of her local WSPU and doing time in Holloway. She later became a member of the National Executive of the WFL and co-editor of The Vote, first with Cicely Hamilton, then with Mrs T.P.O’Connor. She was also a freelance journalist for 25 years, serving on the committee of the Society for Women Journalists.  Pretty cool. (thesuffragettes.org)

Back to the book. An additional pleasure was to find a story which echoes the emergence of weird fiction in these decades. ‘Haunted’, by Jack Edwards. This is one of the most interesting in here – a man is haunted by what is at first a glimmer, then a vaguely humanoid presence, and then… The story seems at first to be a typical ghost story, but builds to an unexpected ending which is open to a number of interesting interpretations. An odd tale altogether, well worth the read, and of interest to those outside the ‘classic supernatural’ reader circles.

Two more are worth noting (yeah, it’s a matter of personal taste, as always). Lumley Deakin’s story ‘Ghosts’ is curious in that it include the presence of a repeat character of the author’s – the mysterious urbanite Cyrus Sabinette. Deakin wrote a number of Sabinette stories:

• ‘The Man Who Saw To-morrow’, The New Magazine (UK) Aug 1914
• ‘Jealousy’, The New Magazine (UK) Sep 1914
• ‘Ghosts’, The New Magazine (UK) Oct 1914
• ‘The Ghost Ship’,The New Magazine (UK) Nov 1914
• ‘Eyes’, The New Magazine (UK) Feb 1915
• ‘Confidences’, The New Magazine (UK) Mar 1915
• ‘The Vision of Abberly Neate’, The New Magazine (UK) Apr 1915

Quite who Sabinette is, and why he is, are not explained in ‘Ghosts’, which has a traditional ‘ghost vengeance’ twist, and yet is also the story of a man (the main character) who is a generous eligible bachelor at night and a grasping magnate running sweatshops by day. It acts as a pointed commentary on forced/indentured labour, which sadly still has a lot of relevance.

Also of some interest is ‘On the Embankment’ by Hugh E Wright, a tale of an empty bench in the part of the Embankment where the homeless and destitute huddle at night. The plot is slight, but the way the story unfolds makes it worth a read.

Finally, for Glimpses of the Unknown, to James Barr (1862-1923), who sometimes wrote as Angus Evan Abbott. He caught our attention because James was the younger brother of Robert Barr, who was a close friend of Jerome K Jerome and a force behind the ‘Idler’ magazine. On to Robert in a moment. James, a writer/journalist, wrote a number of strange stories, though he dallied more with early speculative fiction than with typical supernatural ones.

His stories included ‘The Last Englishman’ (July 1906 Monthly Story Blue Book Magazine), a Yellow Peril tale in which a worldwide Chinese hegemony proves hollow; ‘The World of the Vanishing Point’ (March 1922 Strand), a striking adventure in a microscopic world of Monsters, and ‘Lord Hagen’s Dress Suit’ (August 1911, The Red Magazine) where advancing Technology has a retrograde effect and forces people back into caves (ISFDB).

In this anthology, James Barr is represented by a sentimental but not cloying story which is most definitely supernatural, ‘The Soul of Maddalina Tonelli’. A violinist picks up a promising, though not perfectly toned, fiddle, and then begins to see a vision of a young woman in concert audiences – a young woman no one else can see. A historical mystery eventually unravels. Quite a nice tale.

In addition, James wrote the novel The Gods Give My Donkey Wings (1895), a wry tale of a young packman (selling items from his donkey pack) who finds himself in a sort of mountainside utopian community call the Thorp.

CROSSING THE BAR(R)

Now, on the subject of Barrs and anthologies, we’ve probably mentioned Stories In The Dark before. Stories In The Dark: Tales Of Terror by Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain, and Robert Barr, was compiled by Hugh Lamb, who sadly passed away recently, and published in 1989 in the excellent but short-lived Equation Chillers series. As with James Barr, Barry Pain wrote a number of SF type stories, including his own utopian strand in The New Gulliver and Other Stories (1913). Of Jerome, we have said many things before – see here, for example:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/jerome-k-jerome-ghosts-dystopias/

Stories in the Dark includes Robert Barr’s supernatural fiction, but he may be known to you as the creator of detective Eugene Valmont. His collection The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont is freely available, including from Project Gutenberg, and has some interest for both period fiction fans and detective fiction enthusiasts.

The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19369

For the reader of supernatural tales, the Valmont tales even include ‘The Ghost with the Club-Foot’ (though as with many other such stories of the period, you will have guessed that the ghost is not a ghost).

“Lord Rantremly at that time was sixty-five years old. His countenance was dark, harsh, and imperious, and his language brutal. He indulged in frightful outbursts of temper, but he paid so well for service that there was no lack of it, as there has been since the ghost appeared some years ago. He was very tall, and of commanding appearance, but had a deformity in the shape of a club-foot, and walked with the halting step of those so afflicted. There were at that time servants in plenty at the castle, for although a tradition existed that the ghost of the founder of the house trod certain rooms, this ghost, it was said, never demonstrated its presence when the living representative of the family was a man with a club-foot.

“Tradition further affirmed that if this club-footed ghost allowed its halting footsteps to be heard while the reigning lord possessed a similar deformity, the conjunction foreshadowed the passing of title and estates to a stranger. The ghost haunted the castle only when it was occupied by a descendant whose two feet were normal. It seems that the founder of the house was a club-footed man, and this disagreeable peculiarity often missed one generation, and sometimes two, while at other times both father and son had club-feet, as was the case with the late Lord Rantremly and the young man at Oxford. I am not a believer in the supernatural, of course, but nevertheless it is strange that within the past few years everyone residing in the castle has heard the club-footed ghost, and now title and estates descend to a family that were utter strangers to the Rantremlys.”

The older Barr brother, Jerome and Pain were all acquaintances of Arthur Conan Doyle. Robert is often credited with the first Sherlock Holmes parody, but this is not quite correct. J M Barrie’s may be the first ‘legitimate’ parody – he wrote the amusing ‘My Evening with Sherlock Holmes’, where the narrator mocks the detective by showing his own abilities. This was published in November 1891. Conan Doyle apparently wrote (in an 1892 letter to his mother):

“I went in to the ‘Idlers’ dinner and met J. M. Barrie, Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain, Zangwill, Barr (‘Luke Sharp’), Robertson, and others. [ ] It was Barrie who wrote the skit on Holmes in The Speaker.”

Not long after Barrie, in 1892, Robert Barr provided his own masterful detective with Detective Stories Gone Wrong: The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs.

“I DROPPED in on my friend, Sherlaw Kombs, to hear what he had to say about the Pegram mystery, as it had come to be called in the newspapers. I found him playing the violin with a look of sweet peace and serenity on his face, which I never noticed on the countenances of those within hearing distance. I knew this expression of seraphic calm indicated that Kombs had been deeply annoyed about something. Such, indeed, proved to be the case, for one of the morning papers had contained an article eulogising the alertness and general competence of Scotland Yard. So great was Sherlaw Kombs’s contempt for Scotland Yard that he would never visit Scotland during his vacations, nor would he ever admit that a Scotchman was fit for anything but export.”

You can read more Kombs stories in the Eugene Valmont collection mentioned above, or online here:

http://vsfp.byu.edu/index.php/title/detective-stories-gone-wrong-the-adventures-of-sherlaw-kombs/

GLIMPSES OF THE UNKNOWN can be found here:

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After putting this piece together we looked up the links for Glimpses of the Unknown, and found that Multoghost, an informative website which holds much of interest to us, had also covered the volume. You might care to go there for Nina Zumel’s own summation and comments on Glimpses.

https://multoghost.wordpress.com/2019/01/01/reading-glimpses-of-the-unknown/

According to a kind soul at the British Library publishing department, the outline schedule is as follow, and we hope to cover a number of volumes during the year:

Autumn 2018:

• From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea – edited by Mike Ashley
• Haunted Houses: Two Novels by Charlotte Riddell – edited by Andrew Smith
• Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories – edited by Mike Ashley
• Mortal Echoes: Encounters with the End – edited by Greg Buzwell
• Spirits of the Season: Christmas Hauntings – edited by Tanya Kirk

Spring 2019:

• The Platform Edge: Uncanny Tales of the Railways – edited by Mike Ashley
• The Face in the Glass: The Gothic Tales of Mary Elizabeth Braddon – edited by Greg Buzwell
• The Weird Tales of William Hope Hodgson – edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes
• Doorway to Dilemma: Bewildering Tales of Dark Fantasy – edited by Mike Ashley

Hardback series:

• The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Tales – Edgar Allan Poe (with an introduction by Greg Buzwell)
• The Ghost Stories of M.R. James – edited by Roger Luckhurst
• The Gothic Tales of H.P. Lovecraft – edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes

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If you enjoy greydogtales, why not help old greydog, John Linwood Grant, feed his hungry lurchers? Buy his latest novel The Assassin’s Coin today. It’s quite good, if you like that sort of thing…

Latest 5 Star Amazon Review: “A gripping, atmospheric tale from a fascinating period of British history, whose two main protagonists are equally fascinating. Chilling, humane, occasionally very moving, and highly recommended.”

 

The Cthulhu Mythos is a dark and twisted place in which unpronounceable deities scheme endlessly for dominion over the unsuspecting world of ordinary, everyday speech therapists. Ftaghns and Ia!s lurk in the depths of the earth, or brood inside distant stars, waiting to insert themselves into conversations about washing machines. And even when humans manage to get their tongues around the non-Euclidean terminology, who are these deities really?

H P Lovecraft didn’t know, because he made them up and then altered them as it suited him; Clark Ashton Smith had some spare letters in his Scrabble set, and added his own contributions. August Derleth, having worked in a canning factory, liked everything neatly packaged and labelled, so whilst he added his own beings, he also tried to sort the others into orderly groups which could be represented by elements, nature, and weight of contents when drained.

Hence his identification of Cthulhu as a water deity, despite Cthulhu’s known dislike of its enforced holiday in the oceanic depths. And Derleth’s creation of Cthulhu’s bad-tempered brother-in-law, Cthugha, when it was pointed out that he’d missed Fire out.

Writers continued to pile on long after Lovecraft, Ashton Smith and Derleth – Brian Lumley alone created eight hundred and seventy three Mythos deities, all of whom were surprisingly describable, and interactive. Ramsey Campbell attempted to stem the flow by developing a more modest number of well-characterised deities, most of these restraining themselves to British waterways and the less popular bus routes, but despite his brave efforts, things were getting out of hand.

So we realised that we should shoulder some of the organisational burden, being uniquely placed to do so. We once read some Lovecraft stuff, we can spell (mostly), and we have a Scratch’n’Sniff copy of ‘The Li’l Old Ones Go To the Seaside’. But what could we add? Is there any real agreement as to how the Mythos gods should be organised, unionised, and provided with an adequate dental plan? Not really.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Real Cthulhu Mythos deities don’t care if you know what they’re called, or if you can pronounce them. Only their obsessive human enthusiasts bother with that stuff.

The current broad – if inadequate – hierarchy has emerged over decades:

A. THE OUTER GODS

Attended by the Lesser Outer Gods, the Really Unimportant Outer Gods, and an extremely bad woodwind section.

B. THE ELDER GODS

Less powerful than the Outer Gods, but less nuts, and occasionally willing to help out humanity in return for worship and spare change.

C. THE GREAT OLD ONES

Not quite as Great or as Old as the Outer Gods, and in a mood with the Elder Gods. Mostly locked in their bedrooms or on curfew, thus rather resentful when encountered at all.

D. THE GREAT ONES

Not terribly great. The deities of Earth’s Dreamland. Looked out for by some of the other gods, like you would keep an eye on a dim but earnest little brother.

E. THE DISPOSABLE ONES

Sundry entire populations of Mi-Go, Moon-beasts, Yithians, Deep Ones, Serpent People and others, all appearing, or being wiped out, as required.

F. THE YOUNG ONES

A British comedy series from the eighties.

Z. HUMANITY

Of limited value and interest to any of the above. Even more disposable than Deep Ones.

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That Cthulhu Mythos

Undaunted, we spared no effort in our research, apart from the effort of doing much of it. And after months of painstaking work, examining mouldering, yellowed tomes, certain obscene woodcarvings, and inscribed metal sheets hauled from abyssal depths, we can offer you the first entries in our easy-to-use guide to some of the key Cthulhu Mythos deities:

AZATHOTH

The speech impediment at the heart of the cosmos, driven insane by living next door to an inconsiderate and talentless flute ensemble. Father of Nyarlathotep, hence latter painting his bedroom black and staying away from home as much as possible.

CTHUGHA

Highly irritated being stuck inside the star known as Fomalhaut. Offspring are vampires on fire, and are therefore also highly irritated at their situation.

CTHULHU

Asleep.

GLAAKI

A more ambitious slug than most of its kind, which – after an unexpected meteor ride – managed to get itself pimped with some rad spikes and extendable wing mirrors. Prone to make embarrassing revelations on lakeside visits.

HASTUR

The Unspeakable, Unknowable, Never to be Named. Bored with being a minor shepherd deity, he stole some tattered robes from a nearby washing-line, went mad and became amorphous. And very yellow. Often seen shopping for masks in Carcosa.

ITHAQUA

Father of a Thousand Refrigerators, and Lord of the Snow Day, with a tendency to pick people up and then drop them at the wrong destination. Suffers from perpetual wind and red eyes.

NODENS

Primal music-loving pensioner, whose sea-shell chariot is powered by legendary beats, he is served by hordes of nightstands. Often confused with the god of Celtic travelling salesmen.

NYARLATHOTEP

Like a black Hermes who has attitude, but with his face pulled off. The only Outer God who likes riding camels and visiting Luxor, with more air miles than most Mythos deities, and may thus be encountered in places where jazz musicians or Goths hang out.

SHUB-NIGGURATH

Dark Mother of Malevolent Shrubberies and dedicated goat fancier. Prone to having children when disturbed or invoked without sufficient warning, hence her Thousand Young and constant headache. Also major ingredient in Caribbean curries.

TSATHOGGUA

Either a bat who ate a toad or a toad who ate a bat. Spends most of his time trying to get his Formless Spawn to stay in their basins, and stop messing the place up, godammit.

UBBO-SATHLA

Oozing, grey primordial porridge, without salt or syrup, and thus relatively inedible. Doesn’t get out of its grotto much, due to its habit of shedding amoebae at parties. Goes by name of Abhoth when trying to gatecrash.

YIG

The sound a serpent makes when stepped on.

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There. Now you know everything you need to know about the Chtulhu Mythos. Really. For unrepentant readers, John Linwood Grant, the greydog himself, writes the occasional bit of post-modern-neo-deconstructed Mythosian fiction.  Or something like that.  Weird stuff, anyway.

You can find such work in various odd corners, including:

• ‘Messages’, in Cthulhusattva, Martian Migraine Press 2016
• ‘With the Dark & Storm’, in Equal Opportunities Madness, Otter Libris 2017
• ‘Where All is Night, and Starless’, in Chthonic, Martian Migraine Press, 2018
• ‘Strange Perfumes of a Polar Sun’, in The Mountains of Madness Revealed, PS, 2019

The Mythosian tales ‘Songs of the Burning Men’ and ‘The Yuggoth Club’ are also on their way this year.

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And before you run away shrieking, why not take our ‘What Kind of Cthulhu Are You?’ quiz, a firm family favourite.

1. The vibrations of a human submersible are detected close to R’lyeh, intruding on your realm. Do you:

a) Use unspeakable protoplasmic servants to investigate and update you on the level of technology that the humans have achieved, making careful notes on their propulsion and weaponry?
b) Rise in majesty from the depths to tear the thin shell of the submersible asunder?
c) Turn over on your hideously carved obsidian couch and let it go?

2. The fungoid hordes of the Mi-Go have gathered in the void beyond Earth, threatening to come to the planet in large numbers. Do you:

a) Tell the Deep Ones and any other followers of Mother Hydra and Father Dagon that the Mi-Go are delicious, especially fried lightly in butter?
b) Thrash your tendrils violently and threaten the Mi-Go with immediate obliteration if they proceed?
c) Write it off as another boring alien experiment with humanity and brain cases?

3. Some Massachusetts academics complain that your vile emanations are causing their more artistic students to descend into madness. Do you:

a) Suggest that their students apply for Arts Council grants and call their work ‘installations’?
b) Obliterate the entire east coast of America with vast tidal waves?
c) Sink back into slumber and try to emanate less?

4. Human writers are publishing an increasing number of stories about your malign and eldritch reality. Do you:

a) Encourage these amusing fictions in order to disguise your true purpose on Earth?
b) Destroy their puny minds and leave them hollowed-out shells whose eyes reflect only the abyss?
c) Read a couple of their stories and doze off halfway through?

5. Hastur rides the storm above your Dread House at R’lyeh, complaining that he is the true heir of Yog-Sothoth. Do you:

a) Calm him down by pointing out that he has Carcosa to himself, and at least his place isn’t under water and leaking badly?
b) Invoke Azathoth, who blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of infinity, in order that Hastur be rended into vaporous nothing?
c) Write it off as another of Hastur’s tantrums and go back to sleep?

Your Answers

Mostly a)s. You are an imaginative thinker with a good sense of delegation. Well done. You are a CREATIVE CTHULHU.
Mostly b)s. You have spawning issues, and need to look into anger management therapy, as well as counting to ten before you act. You are a DESTRUCTIVE CTHULHU.
Mostly c)s. You may have narcolepsy, vitamin deficiencies or a number of under-active thyroid glands, and should seek medical help. Or, you are just a LAZY CTHULHU.

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Further Lovecraftian/Mythos articles can be found on greydogtales across the years, such:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/cthulhu-may-not-live-here-any-more/

http://greydogtales.com/blog/cthulhu-for-girls/

http://greydogtales.com/blog/krakens-and-cthulhus-squids-no-more/

http://greydogtales.com/blog/paul-stjohn-mackintosh-on-lovecrafts-legacy/

http://greydogtales.com/blog/lovecraft-lee-and-the-elder-gods/