Category Archives: RIP Challenge

R.I.P.III Challenge Completed

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Carl’s R.I.P. Challenge ended yesterday and I completed it, finishing four books for Peril the First.

I picked a long list to choose from and read two books from my original list and added two more. The four books I read are (click on the title to read my review):

 

My favourite book has to be The Gravedigger’s Daughter.

They’re all very different books and vary in the amount of “peril” they contain. None of them are scary. Chocky has a definite supernatural element; the others are full of suspense. There’s a fair amount of horror in The Gravediggger’s Daughter ; The House on the Strand is dark fantasy; and Tales of Terror are suitably gothic and dark.

I didn’t get to the other books on my list during the Challenge, but they are all books I hope to read before long:

  • The Turn of the Screw by Henry James – I’ve been meaning to read this for ages.
  • The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly – apparently creepy and disturbing.
  • The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeir – a mystery surrounding the afterlife.
  • The Collector by John Fowles – haunting and darkly melancholic.
  • The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks – macbre and bizarre.
  • Not Dead Enough by Peter James – murder and deception.

Tales of Terror

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The Body Snatcher and Olalla are two short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson included in my copy of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a Penguin Classic. Both stories were written for the Christmas “crawler” tradition in 1884 and 1885. Christmas was a season traditionally associated with supernatural and creepy tales. In the introduction to the book, the editor, Robert Mighall explains that a “crawler” was a ‘sensational tale of a supernatural incident designed to produce a pleasurable thrill in its readers.’

The Body Snatcher is very much a traditional Christmas ghost story, beginning with four men gathered in an inn on a dark winter’s night telling tales round the fireside of grisly deeds. On this particular night Fettes, the local drunk, is roused from his stupor  as if “arisen from the dead” when he hears the name ‘Dr Macfalane’. What follows is the tale of their relationship in the past when they were both medical students. The title of this story of course gives the game away and it is based on the activities of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh in the 1820s, body snatchers who turned out to be murderers selling bodies that had never been buried. I didn’t find this story to be very chilling or thrilling, although I didn’t predict the slight twist at the end. The interest for me is in the two personalities of Fettes and Macfarlane and how the turn of events affected their lives. Macfaarlane had gone on to be a successful and wealthy doctor, untroubled by his conscience, and

richly dressed in the finest of broadcloth and whitest of linen, with a great gold watch chain and studs and spectacles of the same precious metal; he wore a broad folded tie , white and speckled with lilac, and he carried on his arm a comfortable driving coat of fur.

Whereas Fettes overcome by his conscience had lived in idleness, pursuing

“crapulous, disreputable vices”. Permanently in a “state of melancholy, alcoholic saturation”, a “parlour sot, bald, dirty, pimpled and robed in his old camlet cloak”.

Olalla is a longer story and to my mind is the better of the two. When does a short story cease to be considered short, I wonder? It is definitely written as a Gothic tale, set in an ancient Spanish castle surrounded by deep woodland, about a young man recovering from his war wounds and to “renew his blood”, who finds himself living with a strange family. The castle is as much a character in this story as the people, fallen into disrepair as much as the family has degenerated from its noble ancestors who fell prey to evil.

The young man, naturally, falls in love with Olalla, the beautiful daughter, with a strange mad mother and a simpleton brother.  She fears she has inherited the evil of her ancestors and the hint of vampirism in her mother. There is almost a fairytale feel to this story with references to Sleeping Beauty locked by magic within the castle, and also a chill factor which Bram Stoker later developed in Dracula.

This completes my reading for the RIP Challenge, although I have several more books that I would like to read such as The Turn of the Screw. Thanks to Carl for hosting the Challenge.

A Real or An Imaginary Friend?

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Chocky by John Wyndham qualifies for the RIP Challenge in the Supernatural category. It seems at first as though Matthew has an invisible friend, just like his little sister’s Piff, who appeared when Polly was about five. Matthew at eleven seemed a little bit old for such a friend, and when his father overhears him having what seems like a one-sided conversation he becomes worried. It all becomes more puzzling when Matthew starts asking unusual questions about physics and maths and starts to do things he couldn’t do before.  When Matthew becomes ill he can’t keep his secret any longer and running a high temperature he asks his mother to tell Chocky to go away and stop asking him questions. Just who Chocky is and where is he/she from, and indeed what gender  Chocky is, is all most mysterious.

Matthew who can’t swim, saves his sister from drowning, much to everyone’s astonishment. Does he have a “Guardian Angel”? He suddenly starts painting in a most unusual style and it appears that he is “possessed”.  On the face of it this is a simple story and told in an innocent, almost facile style. But every now and then philosophical questions are thrown into the story as Matthew’s parents discuss the problem. Mary, his mother reflects on reality:

Reality is relative. Devils, evil spirits, witches and so on become real enough to the people who believed in them. Just as God is to people who believe in him. When people live their lives by their beliefs objective reality is almost irrelevant.

 She wonders if they dealing with the problem in the right way. Is Matthew mentally ill? Eventually they get professional help from Landis who specialises in mental disorders. Landis is baffled and says it has him beat:

More than anything I’ve come across it resembles what our unscientific ancestors used to consider a case of “possession”. They would have claimed quite simply that this Chocky is a wandering, if not a wanton, spirit which has invaded Matthew.”

But Chocky is not malevolent. It appears sometimes as though John Wyndham, writing in 1968, is using this book as a means of stating his criticsm of the state of technology and the use that was being made of scientific advances, such as atomic power. Chocky tells Matthew’s father:

You have not done badly with electricity in a hundred years. And you did quite well with steam in quite a short time. But all that is so cumbersome, so inefficient. And your oil engines are just a deplorable perversion – dirty, noisy, poisonous, and the cars you drive with them are barbarous, dangerous …

Chocky is convinced that resources are being squandered. At the end of the book it does come over as a lecture for finding and developing new sources of energy, of gaining access to an infinite power supply.

Chocky advocates that she/he contacted Matthew because young minds are disposed to accepting the improbable because

they have absorbed so much that is unlikely and inexplicable from myths, legends, fairy-stories, and religion, that they are disposed to accept the improbable with little question, providing it is not alarming. Older minds, on the other hand, have formed rigid conceptions of probability, and are very frightened by any attempt at contact: they usually think they must be going mad, which interferes with rapport.

I liked this strange little book, although it is now a bit dated, and I had little difficulty in accepting its reality ( after all, I have read many myths, legends and fairy tales). One other topic I found interesting is the view put forward that women have “a compulsion” to “produce a baby as soon as possible after marriage” and that this is not just a biological urge but also a response to pressure to conform with other people’s expectations and the

“desire to prove that one is normal, the belief that it will establish status, a sense of personal achievement, the symbol of one’s maturity, a feeling of solidarity, the obligation of holding one’s own in competition with the neighbours. … It is not the least use pointing out that some of the world’s most influential women, Elizabeth the First, Florence Nightingale, for instance, would actually have lost status, had they become mums, in fact it is much wiser not to try. Babies, in a world that already has far too many, remain desirable.”

On one hand it seems as though John Wyndham was being rather condescending but on the other as though he was advocating feminism. Matthew is adopted and Mary’s sisters do think of her as inferior until Polly is born.  So there are also some reflections on the difficulties of adoption and its effect on children. Until Polly was born Mary felt that she was not a real mother – she had the impression that “some babies confer a little more equality than other babies”. 

I liked this mixture of story with its gentle sci-fi theme and its social and philosophical reflections. All of which was different from Chocky, a children’s TV series of the 1980s which I remembered watching. I found this great site – Little Gems - which contains lots of information on children’s TV shows and films of years gone by, including Chocky. If you have time on your hands and fancy enjoying a bit of nostalgia I can recommend Little Gems. 

Final Thoughts about The Gravedigger’s Daughter

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I finished The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates last week and parts of it have remained in my mind. Mainly I think it’s the general atmosphere of its world. It’s a grim, dark world, a violent and pessimistic world, gothic and grotesque. In some ways it reminds me of Hardy’s novels – you know something terrible will happen whatever the characters do to try to avert tragedy.

The main character is Rebecca Schwart, born in New York Harbor, the daughter of Jacob and Anna escaping from Nazi Germany in 1936. They live a life of abject poverty whilst Jacob can only find work as a caretaker of Milburn Cemetery, a non-demoninational cemetery at the edge of the town. A rent-free “cottage”, which is a stone hovel of four cramped rooms,  goes with the job. Jacob, once a maths teacher is reduced to a troll-like figure, harassed and tormented by schoolboys and young men: “Gravedigger! Kraut! Nazi! Jew!”.

It’s this first section of the book recounting Rebecca’s childhood that has stayed with me; the effect of the suppressed anger, prejudice and resentment on the whole family. Her mother Anna, retreats into a world of her own, hiding away from other people “the outsiders”. It’s only through through listening to music on Jacob’s radio when he is out of the house that she can communicate with Rebecca. Briefly the family have their hopes raised with the news that Anna’s sister and family are fleeing Germany and will come to live with them. Rebecca is excited and entranced by thoughts of her cousin Freyda and imagines playing with her, whilst Anna does her best to ’fix-up’ the cottage. Alas, they never arrive. Jacob is sickened by his inability to protect his daughter and exhorts her to hide her weakness:

He told her solemnly as if she were of a age to understand such words, “Humanity is fearful of death, you see. So they make jokes about it. In me, they see a servant of death. In you, the daughter of such a one. But they do not know us Rebecca. Not you, and not me. Hide your weakness from them and one day we will repay them! Our enemies who mock us.”

Eventually, Jacob’s rage at his desperate life erupts into violence and life is never the same for Rebecca and her brothers.

More violence and despair follow as Rebecca falls in love with Niles Tigor, a man whose moods alternate wildly, one moment tender and passionate towards Rebecca and then cruelly indifferent and brutally agressive. Rebecca has a miscarriage, brought by Niles’s violent attack. She stays with him until she can no longer bear his cruelty and in fear of her life and that of her son Niley she turns on him and flees thinking she may have killed him.

The third section of the book follows her life with Chet, his desire to marry her and her increasing anxiety and fear that Niles will discover where she is. Chet is a musician and helps Niles to become a pianist. Chet is from a wealthy family in contrast to Rebecca, now Hazel and she lives a life of luxury, still haunted by the fear of Niles. Music is a motif that runs through the book. Niley has inherited his musical talent from Anna, who used to play in the ‘old country’ and stifled by Jacob she still listened secretly to music on the radio and introduced Rebecca to Beethoven’s Appassionata; a memory that Rebecca cherished throughout her life, culminating in Niley’s triumphant performance of the sonata. I read the account of his performance with increasing tension as Hazel (Rebecca) can hardly breathe in her dread of a catastrophe.

History and how we perceive it is a thread running through the book. Here are two quotes that struck me:

History has no existence. All that exists are individuals, and of these, only individual moments as broken off from one another as shattered vetebrae.

and

History is an invention of books. In biological anthropology we note that the wish to perceive “meaning” is one trait of our species among many. But that does not posit “meaning” in the world. If history did exist it is a great river/cesspool into which countless small streams and tributaries flow. In one direction. Unlike sewage it cannot back up. It cannot be “tested” – “demonstrated”. It simply is. If the river dries up, the river disappears. There is no “river-destiny”. There are merely accidents in time.

But it’s the final section for me that stands up to the story of Rebecca’s childhood and in some ways completes the story. And yet …

I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, so I’ll just say the ending did surprise me and touched me enormously. It made a great ending for this melodramatic and memorable book. There is an interview with Joyce Carol Oates at the back of the book and I was not surprised to read that this part of the book had the power to bring tears to her eyes, even though she had written it herself. It brought tears to my eyes too. The favourite parts of the book for her included the scenes in the gravedigger’s house and the exchanges between the father and his children, which I think are very powerful.

I’ve also written about this book here and here. It qualifies for my second book for the RIP III Challenge.

The Sunday Salon – This Week’s Books

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This last week has been yet another week away from home and reading has had to be slotted in. I read late at night when I nodded off with a book in my hand or early in the mornings when the time speeds up at an alarming rate so I hardly felt I’d read much at all. However, this week I finished reading Joyce Carol Oates The Gravedigger’s Daughter and yesterday I finished reading Daphne du Maurier’s The House On The Strand. I also started Linda Grant’s The Clothes On Their Backs (short listed for the Booker Prize).

This morning I read the introduction to The House On The Strand and dipped into Margaret Forster’s biography of Daphne Du Maurier to see what she had to say about it too. This was my first reading of The House On The Strand and I was drawn into its world immediately. I read it quickly and without taking notes, so this is just a brief summary of the book. It’s a story of time-travel as Dick Young moves between the present day and the 14th century set in Cornwall – around Par Sands and the Manor of Tywardreath. Dick is staying at Kilmarth (the house where Du Maurier lived after she was forced to leave Menabilly), the guest of his friend Magnus, a scientist researching the effect of a psychedelic drug. The drug produces hallucinations of time travel and as Dick moves in his mind to the 14th century he physically moves across the present day landscape crossed by roads and railway lines that he cannot see. The difference in the landscape plays a central part in the story.

Life in the 14th century is more to Dick’s liking than his own, where he is married not too happily to Vita, an American with two sons from an previous marriage. The 14th century world is full of danger, intrigue, adultery and murder and he falls in love (from afar, of course) with Isolda, a beautiful young woman married to a scoundrel, Sir Oliver Carminowe and in love with Sir Otto Bodrugan. Du Maurier had researched the history of Kilmarth and the local families and she was so exhilarated by the story that she actually  ”woke up one day with nausea and dizziness” and could hardly bear to leave it for more than a few hours. Dick is a rather pathetic figure disllusioned with his marriage, unable to relate to his step-sons and alienated from his own times.

The combination of historical fact and psychological study moves into fantasy with the effect of the mind-expanding drug Dick takes. Du Maurier was writing in 1967 when LSD was well established, and in this book she has elaborated on its effects in describing Dick’s experiences as though on each trip a chemical time machine enabled him to continue the narrative of events with the same characters.  I did have to suspend my disbelief at times whilst reading but was carried along by Dick’s increasing obssession and addiction to the 14th century. It reminded me a bit of The Scapegoat by Du Maurier, a book I read many years ago – time for a re-read of that soon.

I alternated my reading between Linda Grant’s The Clothes On Their Backs and The House On The Strand. Grant’s book is narrated by Vivian as she looks back on her life, growing up in London in the 1960s and 1970s, the only child of refugee parents, fascinated by her glamorous and notorious Uncle Sandor. In the acknowledgements Grant states that the character of Sandor was inspired by that of the Notting Hill landlord Peter Rachman. I’m only about half way through this book which includes, as you would expect from its title, many descriptions of clothes and how they define us; how we use them to create or disguise our personalities.

I particularly liked the description of how Vivian reads:”Somehow I would climb inside the books I read, feeling and tasting them – I became the characters themselves.” It reminded me of Du Maurier’s immersion in the characters in her novels. Both books look at identity and how personalities influence and are influenced by others and both have entertained me thoughout this week.

The House On The Strand is the first book I’ve read for the RIP III Challenge.

RIP III Challenge

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It feels like autumn is very near now, if not actually here as I’ve noticed the leaves are already turning golden on some trees. And it’s that time of year approaching, when “things go bump in the night”, or in other words it’s time for the RIP III Challenge, Readers Imbibing Peril. This year I’m not putting any pressure on myself but I’m jumping straight into Peril the First which is to read four books from any of the following sub-genres of scary stories between 1 September and 31 October. Carl, who is hosting the Challenge, suggests first of all to post a list of potential books and feel free to change any or all of them as we wish. That suits me and I may even read only one “scary” book. The sub-genres are:

Suspense.
Thriller.
Dark Fantasy.
Gothic.
Horror.
Supernatural.

My potential reading may be drawn from these books:

I think that’s enough to be going on with – I may change, add or subtract from this list.

Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke and illustrated by Charles Vess

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I started the R.I.P. Challenge II aiming to read just one book. It’s now nearly the end of the challenge and I have exceeded my target. I have read Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott, several short stories from Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, from the Great Ghost Stories collection published by the Chancellor Press and today I finished reading The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke. I’m glad I took this challenge as it has made me read Poe’s Tales after years of wondering what they are like, but I am a little disappointed that they are not as spooky as I imagined them to be and I don’t like the gory elements and Poe’s fascination with premature burials. I’m probably in a minority on this.

Ghostwalk was to my mind a much more satisfying read and I’m pleased that The Ladies of Grace and Adieu was as fantastical as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (also by Susanna Clarke), which I read about two years ago. I was entranced by Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which is set in a parallel nineteenth century England and tells the story of two magicians, full of mystery, magic, fantasy and faerie tales and The Ladies, although much shorter, is another book full of fantasy stories.

As a child I read all the fairytale books I could find and The Ladies collection takes me back to the magical world of those stories. They are full of deep dark woods, paths leading to houses that seemingly move locations, ladies who are never what they appear to be, princesses, owls, and above all fairies, including the Raven King.

The stories are all captivating and strange and set up echoes in my mind of such fairytales, as Rumpelstiltskin (in On Lickerish Hill). My favourite stories are The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Mrs Mabb, and The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse. The Ladies explains why Jonathan Strange prevented his clergyman brother-in-law from an engagement with Cassandra Parbringer as Strange discovers that his magic is no match for Cassandra and her two friends, the three bewitching ladies of Grace Adieu.

Mrs Mabb is a fascinating story in which the heroine, Venetia Moore contends with the mysterious Mrs Mabb who has stolen away Venetia’s fiancé. Whichever path she takes to get to Mrs Mabb’s house she cannot find it, although she catches sight of the house and wonders at the smallness of it. She is surprised to realise that she remembers little of what has happened to her after she is found in a state of confusion, with her clothes in tatters. On another occasion after trying to get to the house she dances all night until her feet are bleeding, and finally she is attacked by what seems to be a great crowd of people with glittering swords. This reminded me of a book my mother used to have full of strange and wonderful stories and poems, one of which was about Queen Mab. I wish I still had that book. I have tried to find what the poem could be – as I remember it, Queen Mab was a fairy queen, full of malice and mischief, who turned out to be not what she seems. I think the poem I read must have been from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in Mercutio’s speech in Act 1 scene iv:

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.The story I enjoyed the most was The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse. I have not read any of Neil Gaiman’s books, but I think I really should. The story of the Duke’s horse is set in Wall, a village in the world created by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, where there is an actual wall dividing our world and the world of Faerie, guarded by burly villagers with cudgels. The proud Duke, the Nation’s Hero, passes unchallenged by the intimidated villagers into Faerie, in pursuit of his horse. His fate is then seemingly set in stitches in a magnificent piece of embroidery in exquisite pictures. I wonder if the creator of Heroes has read this story – there are similarities with the painter, Isaac, who has the ability to paint the future? The Duke’s fate depends on whether he can alter the future shown in the embroidery. The ending has a satisfying twist.

I have enjoyed this Challenge and although it ends on 31 October I shall carry on reading “R.I.P.” books. I have Susan Hill’s The Man in the Picture and Raold Dahl’s Completely Unexpected Tales waiting in line.

Ghost Stories R.I.P.Challenge II

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Great Ghost Stories

This is a collection of ghost stories by different authors including G.K. Chesterton, Walter De La Mare, O. Henry, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, R.L.Stevenson, and H.G. Wells. So far I have read just a few of them and I’m looking forward to reading the rest. It’s a good book to dip into from time to time.

Berenice by Edgar Allen Poe
Keeping His Promise by Algernon Blackwood
Honolulu by Somerset Maugham
The Hostelry by Guy de Maupassant
The Murder of the Mandarin by Arnold Bennett

Berenice is not included in Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. According to Wikipedia it was first published in the Southern Literary Messenger in March 1835 and due to public outcry an edited version was published in1840.

The opening sentence sets the scene “Misery is manifold.” From then on you know that this is another of Poe’s tales of unrelieved tragedy. There is no escaping it. The narractor is Egaeus, an obssessive intellectual who falls in love with his cousin, Berenice. She is his opposite, beautiful, agile, healthy and full of energy. His obssession is monomania;he is fixated on objects to the exclusion of everything else around him. Alas, disease befell Berenice and she wasted away until all that was unchanged were her teeth. Egaeus as you would expect is devastated, but is totally obssessed with her perfect teeth and he sees them everywhere. She dies. He comes to as though “awakened from a confused and exciting dream” to an horrific discovery …

This story is very much what I’ve come to expect from Poe and repeats a number of themes he uses in other stories – death, burial and mental illness. To me they lack suspense, maybe because they are so short. When he revised Berenice Poe wrote in a letter to the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger on April 30, 1835: “I allow that it approaches the very verge of bad taste — but I will not sin quite so egregiously again.” I not sure that he succeeded.

Keeping His Promise by Algernon Blackwood is a story with a supernatural twist; he builds up a tale of gradually increasing tension. Marriott is a student at Edinburgh University studying for his exams. He is disturbed in his room by the arrival of a Field, who appeared to be starving, thin as a skeleton, exhausted and under the influence of drugs. Marriott gave him a whisky and they had supper together before Field dropped with exhaustion on Marriott’s bed where he slept the night. Marriott could hear his heavy deep breathing in the next room as he resumed his studies. When morning came there was no sign of Field and Marriott feels a sensation of fear, his left arm throbs violently and he trembles from head to foot. There is the impress of a body on the bed and Marriott can still hear the breathing.

The pain in his arm is caused by a scar on his wrist and he realises that it is now bleeding. Then he remembers how the scar had been made and why, which leads him to discover the truth about his nightmare experience. Had Field really been there? Marriott had fed him and seen him eat and drink– but in the morning the food was untouched, although he could still hear the breathing…

In contrast Honolulu is an amusing but sinister tale of a little fat sea captain, who tells of the strange events that had overtaken him whilst sailing in the South Seas between Honolulu and various small islands. An enjoyable tale of love, betrayal and voodoo.

The Hostelry by Guy de Maupassant is set in the High Alps in the depth of winter. The Schwarenbach Inn is left in the care of two mountain men as the family descend to the village below. De Maupassant’s description of the freezing conditions as the snow falls and the two men are isolated on the mountain sets the scene for the events that follow. When one of the men goes out hunting and doesn’t return the other is alone in the inn. He can’t get out because something is trying to get in!

The Murder of the Mandarin by Arnold Bennett tells the story of a young wife with an unimaginative and controlling husband, set in one of the Pottery towns in Staffordshire. She wants a belt to enhance her ball dress, which leads her to a strange experience connected (or is it?) to the death of a mandarin in China. This is not a scary story. It’s a study of how an ordinary situation can become seemingly extraordinary through the power of imagination.

The Pit and The Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe

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It seemed appropriate that I should read The Pit and The Pendulum today as on this day in 1849 (Oct. 7) Edgar Allan Poe died in mysterious circumstances in Baltimore in the Washington College Hospital.

I have read several of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination and so far had not found them to be too scary. I had come to the book with great expectations that I would be terrified, so to some extent it was a relief to find that the tales did not freeze my blood, although I do think they are gory and sickening. Today I have changed my mind, now that I’ve read The Pit and the Pendulum.

This story is as horrifying as I had imagined it to be. I woke up in a tent once in pitch darkness, convinced I couldn’t breath and in a mad panic to get out. This is how The Pit and the Pendulum starts – the narrator wakes after being sentenced to death by the Inquisition, lying, aware of the “tumultuous motion of the heart, and in my ears, the sound of its beating” – oh, how I know that petrifying sound and feeling in the dead of night. He opens his eyes and can see nothing:

“The blackness of eternal night encompassed me. I struggled for breath. The intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me.”

The horror continues as he cautiously examines his prison and only by luck avoids falling into a pit at the centre of the dungeon. The mental torment piles on him at the thought of the means of his death, and the hideous torture awaiting him. Exhausted he then sleeps and on waking finds the dungeon lit by a “wild, sulphurous lustre”, a pitcher of water and a loaf within his reach. The water is drugged and on waking again he finds himself bound head to foot on a low framework of wood, a pendulum suspended over him swinging and slowing descending towards his heart. He is left for hours to contemplate the result of the pendulum’s descent and then becomes aware of rats swarming around him, “wild, bold, ravenous – their red eyes glaring upon” him.

I think my reaction to this tale is partly because of my own fear and panic at waking in utter darkness and breathless, but is also due to the tension and suspense Poe has instilled into the text. I did anticipate the ending to a certain extent, but not completely, so that was a plus as well.

The Poe Shadow, by Matthew Pearl gives a fictional account of the mystery surrounding Poe’s death, based on the historical facts. I read this book some months ago and although I think it is too long and tedious in parts, it did trigger my interest in Poe, as did a more entertaining novel, The American Boy, by Andrew Taylor, which is based on Poe’s childhood. For more information on Poe, go to The Poe Society.

I also found Ed’s post Poe’s body claimed by Philadelphia at The Bibliothecary Blog very interesting. He has written a piece calling for the exhumation of his body to “translate his remains” from Baltimore to Philadelphia, where Ed maintains he belongs.

R.I.P.Challenge II The Murders in the Rue Morgue

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The Murders in the Rue Morgue from Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

I’m finding these short stories interesting, if not spine chilling, although some of the descriptions (as in this story) turn my stomach.

This short story is the forerunner of the detective story, in which an amateur discovers who committed the crime through using his superior skill and logic when the police are baffled.

The key to this story is analysis. It opens with an account of analysis using the games of draughts, chess and whist as comparison. Poe writes:

“As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles.’

Monsieur C Auguste Dupin is the amateur, the analyst, who discovers the identity of the murderer of an old lady and her daughter. About 3 o’clock in the morning the neighbours in the Rue Morgue, Paris are awakened by a succession of terrific shrieks. The daughter is found on the fourth floor of the house behind a locked door (locked on the inside). The room is in the “wildest disorder’, there is a razor smeared with blood and tresses of long, grey, bloody hair, apparently pulled out by the roots. There was no sign of a body, but one was eventually found in the chimney:

“ … and (horrible to relate!) the corpse of the daughter, head downward, was dragged therefrom: it having been thus forced up the narrow aperture for a considerable distance.”

The body of the mother is found in the yard at the rear of the building “… with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off.”

Both bodies showed signs of brutal mutilation, vividly described by Poe. There are several people who gave evidence all differing about the nationality of the voices that they heard coming from the building. There is seemingly no way that the murderer could have either entered or left the room, or indeed the building. Dupin with his superior analytical skill manages to uncover the fantastical sequence of events that resulted in the murders and establishes the identity of the killer.

Poe’s style is detailed and to match the character of Dupin is detached and dispassionate. Apart from the horrific details of the state of the bodies there is nothing macabre in this tale. I could guess the identity of the murderer, but I think that’s because I’ve seen films and read books with a similar storyline – lifted from Poe, I now suspect. Dupin is not a particular likeable detective, but he uses his little grey cells in a manner much like Agatha Christie’s Poirot and, of course, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.