Whew...a few recent reads

Sorry to be dragging this month. I've been mentally and physically drained by various goings-on. I decided to skip the monthly musical interlude and go straight into some reviews...

This is an omnibus collection; the first part is by Louisa Baldwin, and the second by the lesser-known Lettice Galbraith. Neither had enough to warrant their own volumes, so they went with one.

Baldwin's The Shadow on the Blind has a few highlights; the title story has some eeriness and menace to it, but at the end people's reactions to the haunting seem overblown. "The Weird of the Walfords" was pretty interesting as the heir to a manor house is determined to not fall victim to an ancestral curse, and the measures he takes are a bit surprising considering the Victorian origin of the tale. And "The Real and the Counterfeit" is a memorable Christmas horror story.

But...the rest of it is rather unmemorable and predictable, and sometimes the sentimentality is laid on a bit thick. "How He Left the Hotel" and "The Empty Picture Frame" depend on revelations that experienced readers see coming a mile away. "The Uncanny Bairn," "Many Waters Cannot Quench Love," and "The Ticking of the Clock" are simply too sentimental. "Sir Nigel Otterburne's Case" has some interesting macabre elements, but in the long run is unremarkable in execution.

Little is known of Lettice Galbraith, aside from that she published two story collections and a novel in the mid-1890s and then nothing more was heard of her. The Trainer's Ghost is a very Victorian collection...but with a slightly harder edge. Sadly, much of it is unmemorable, but it has its moments. "The Case of Lady Lukestan" has a heartless woman getting her just deserts from a ghost, and "In the Seance Room" is delicately brutal in its depiction of a harsh man's confrontation with the shade of an abused wife. Others, like the title tale and "The Ghost in the Chair" and "The Missing Model" are unremarkable tales, save for their Victorian atmosphere.

This is a good collection for folks who like Victorian ghost stories, but it's a relatively unremarkable one, with no real ground broken and little to linger in the memory.

Birkin's Spawn of Satan suffers no Victorian delicacy. From 1970, this deals with modern horrors and surprisingly little of the supernatural. The title story may make you think of demonic terrors, but it's more a conte cruel about an idealistic mixed-race couple in a small conservative town and the buildup to acts of violence and revenge. "Wedding Presents" gives us a vicious murder and the murderer's attempts to cover the truth, in a story that would have been a perfect episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." And most of the stories are along that vein, tales of hatred and cruelty, and of their tendency to self-destruct, to the point that it becomes rather unpleasant reading. I had to put it down and walk away a few times. A little Birkin goes a long way.

Hope everyone's spring is going well, and you filed your taxes on time!

THE CRAZY CORNER by Jean Richepin

Here's a real treasure house!

Jean Richepin (1849-1926) was a contributor to the legendary Grand Guignol and to the conte cruel literature of fin-de-siecle France, but his relentless ghoulishness set him apart from the rest, who normally wallowed in mere irony. This collection, translated by Brian Stableford, brings together two of Richepin's short-story collections, with a sprinkling of his other works.

It starts off subtly, with the story "Lilith," in which two students observe a neighbor's strange ritual and slowly piece together a vague idea of a terrible tragedy that might be behind it. It becomes more and more gruesome...in "The Clock" an old man attempts to repair a town's tower clock, but only can do so at a terrible price. Some, like "The Enemy" and "A Duel of Souls," deal with madness and obsession. "The City of Gems" look at the line between madness and sanity, and how seemingly sane people can be coaxed into mad beliefs. Some deal with sexuality, like "Booglottism," in which a man is coaxed into a sexual encounter with a woman who keeps her face hidden....and later find a secret, not quite horrible, but chilling and a bit disgusting. Or "The Ugly Sisters," of two old women who live in a small town....who have a somewhat surprising secret. There's femmes fatale, feckless men, criminals, and sex at its most destructive. One faintly appalling story, "La Morillonne," deals with a beautiful woman who consistently gives birth to monstrously deformed children....and it's her livelihood. And the nasty "Jeroboam," a tale of human deception and manipulation that reads like something from a Jim Thompson tale. There's even a novella, "In Less Time Than It Takes to Write," about a callow youth's adventures in the Paris underworld.

Perhaps the most harrowing tale is "Mademoiselle," a tale of a somewhat not-all-there boy in a small town who dresses as a girl and is accepted as "mademoiselle" by the townsfolk until he tries to dress in male clothes...and disaster results. Cross-dressing was nothing new...but this could be an early example of gender confusion or even transsexualism.

The stories are relatively short, and often lack traditional denouements, so sometimes you'll be left feeling like they cut off too soon sometimes...but then you stop and think and piece them together and then...yikes! That was the art of the conte cruel; it was often short and nasty.

This is a superior collection that is available both in print and as an ebook from the good people at Black Coat Press. Look into it...