Dear Dead Women by Edna W. Underwood

Dear Dead Women: The weird stories of Edna W. Underwood
By Edna W. Underwood
Introduction by S.T. Joshi
Tartarus Press, May 2010
ISBN 978-1-905784-21-9

This volume collects together nine weird stories from the pen of Edna W. Underwood (1873-1961), a writer best known in her own day as a historical novelist and a translator from many languages, Chinese, Persian and Russian among them.

Some eight stories appeared originally in the collection A Book of Dear Dead Women (1911), while the remaining one, ‘An Orchid of Asia’, made its debut in Asia magazine in 1920.

The first story, ‘The Painter of Dead Women’, is about a serial killer of upper-class beauties, which makes a welcome change from lower-class prostitutes, I guess.  Count Ponteleone kills them and then he preserves them (or he gets them in a coma first, I forget the M.O. exactly) and in that state he paints them.  He has a nice line in necrophile spiel, this aristocratic precursor to Ed Gein:

Besides, when I love, I love only dead women.  Life reaches its perfection only when death comes.  Life is never real until then.  (9)

There is a sensuous, decadent atmosphere to the story that I very much liked (and in fact it recalled the episode in Locus Solus where the dead come alive momentarily to enact the key event from their lives) but I found the ending to be rather perfunctory.  As with many of the other stories, Underwood seems mainly concerned with exploring a stance or attitude towards life (usually involving beauty, art, love, death and other similarly significant abstract nouns) and seeing what moods and scenes she can conjure out of it, how far she can take it.

To my mind, ‘Sister Seraphine’ is the best story, from the 1911 batch at any rate.  It is (on my reading) an ironic take on the myth of Narcissus: a nun is given a mirror to place in her room and she is slyly seduced from holy orders by her own beauty, by its capacity for pleasure.  In this lush passage, typical of Underwood’s prose, we are given a description of the young nun’s mouth and lips:

In its colour alone were hidden all the sins of the earth.  Such a colour might have been born from the conflagration of a world, or in the feverish brain of some sightless dreamer.  In its curves there was all the restless languor of a medieval mondaine, or a voluptuous Roman woman who had idled in the villas of Baiae.  Imagine, if you will, such a mouth beneath that ascetic brow!  (59)

Sister Seraphine breaks out of the convent and into a world that is to be conquered and enjoyed, or at least where the fruits and bounty of life are all up for grabs; quite a contrast to the Greek myth where the beautiful youth – after a prolonged period of self-immersion – winds up with his head up his arse, the world nowhere in sight.  What I like most about Underwood’s story is its sense of transgression, hedonism and freedom; as one character says: ‘Everyone has a right to happiness.’  Or as Frank O’Hara put it in that poem about his heart: ‘I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar.’  (Indeed, what is the point of art if it doesn’t lead to a heightened vitality?)

Another high point of the volume for me was the long short story, ‘An Orchid of Asia’, with the third quarter of it (about pages 209-220 here) being particularly powerful.  A convalescent, one Jacques d’Entrecolles, attempts to cultivate a new species of orchid as a kind of therapeutic hobby, on the recommendation of his doctor.  At length he succeeds  but (untoward consequences, answered prayers and all that…) the newly made flower comes to dominate his being as it assumes the role of drug, vampire, predator, monster, invasive alien…  One might almost say that the orchid becomes a kind of femme fatale, her addictive beauty and intoxicating perfume creating a craven dependence in d’Entrecolles, leading on to an enervating, erotic obsession.  There is a terrific psychological subtlety to this story and Underwood makes you aware, as well, of the uncanny nature of flowers, their wonderful yet terrible beauty.

Some time ago I read a book called Sensory Exotica by Howard C. Hughes, which was all about creatures whose sensory systems are quite unlike our own.  Though they are as real as we are, and live in the same world, their experience is beyond our ken, quite literally alien to us.  The same kind of wonder engendered by Hughes’ book is present also in certain passages of ‘An Orchid of Asia’.

As for the rest of the stories, each has something remarkable about them, and Underwood’s prose is always sophisticated and stylish.  I’d raise a qualm and a concern about ‘The King’, mainly on account of its anti-Semitic tenor (not untypical for the time, and even John Buchan flirted with anti-Jewish conspiracies in The 39 Steps).  All in all, though, Dear Dead Women is a welcome set of stories from an accomplished writer who has been curiously neglected.

Further details of Dear Dead Women can be found here.

Cold to the Touch by Simon Strantzas

Cold to the Touch
By Simon Strantzas
Tartarus Press, July 2009
ISBN 978-1-905784-15-8

In the Afterword to this fine collection of stories the author identifies the key characteristic of horror fiction as the elicitation of fear, albeit of the subtle or vicarious kind.  He also speaks of writing – and of reading too – as a guided dream or a ‘lucid daydream’, a term apparently taken from Stephen King.  The words on the page make the author’s imaginings the reader’s own.  And certainly there is often a compulsion to writing, and to reading, though both are acts carried out in private by consenting adults.  There is complicity at work as well, especially acute perhaps when the imaginings in question are unsettling, transgressive and fraught with peril, as is the case here.

Many of these stories are about people who are driven to the margins because of a fear, an anxiety, that they cannot otherwise contain.  For the main someone in ‘Here’s to the Good Life’ horror is to be found in an everyday place (a rather sinister Irish pub) and in what one might call a customary social practice (getting pissed at the end of a working day).  But alongside the urge toward flight there is as well the need for human contact and connection; and ‘A Chorus of Yesterdays’ is a considered weighing up of these competing drives; it is also a formidably atmospheric tale.  And there’s an amusing or maybe a cruel paradox at play in this story, which is that in trying too hard to connect we can drive another away.

Another common thread: a lot of the stories here are about loved ones or friends who suddenly leave or are taken away.  There’s sometimes as well the possibility that they were never actually present in the first place, just imagined.  ’Fading Light’ is one of these stories: it is melancholic and a little mysterious.  Another one, ‘Poor Stephanie’, is more unsettling because of its ambience of coercion and implicit sexual/physical abuse.  ’The Other Village’ deals with unconscious intention and the startling realisation of one’s own capacity for evil and violence.  It has a fine engine this one, being superbly paced and as unpleasant as any Patricia Highsmith yarn.

Among the other riches herein are the title story, which for me evoked that terrific Howard Hawks film, The Thing from Another World (and yes I know Hawks doesn’t actually have the director credit for it) as well as Lovecraft and the Quatermass series.  In a way, it is about a failure to connect with the natural world, an unwillingness to succumb to enchantment and awe.  A story with a related theme, ‘Pinholes in Black Muslin’, concerns itself with the stars and life on earth, with environmental collapse and the very slim possibility of human survival.

Death, or more precisely dying, is the specific subject of two stories, both beautiful and curiously exhilarating.  In ‘Like Falling Snow’ a woman enters a hospice; this one’s about the strangeness of dying and is sort of Rilkean in tone.  ‘The Sweetest Song’ sees death as metamorphosis, transmigration, a step beyond: it is a ‘don’t fear the reaper’ story, if you like.  In between reading this story and writing the review I’ve seen Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee film (the feature; I’ve not yet found the short) and that has a similar vibe.

One story, ‘Writing on the Wall’, suggests that complicity, like responsibility, is infinite.  This could conceivably be construed as an urgent and energising message.  Another, ‘A Seed on Barren Ground’, hints that there’s only so much vitality, good will and kindness to go around.  Giving exhausts the giver.  Finally or almost finally, ‘The Uninvited Guest’ reads like a riff on Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, which is no bad thing.

Rewinding somewhat, the first story in the book, ‘Under the Overpass’, strikes me now (and suddenly) as the most personal and a coda to what follows.  There is an atrocity, a shared childhood secret.  There is guilt like a stain that cannot be removed  There’s absolutely no possibility of redemption.  All that good, non-cheery, serious stuff.

I could go on, but it would be better by far if you just got the book and read the stories.  They’re terrific.

Tales of Terror by Guy de Maupassant

Tales of Terror
By Guy de Maupassant
Selected and Translated by Arnold Kellett
Foreword by Ramsey Campbell
Tartarus Press, December 2008
ISBN 978-1-905784-12-7

There is a telling moment in Isaac Babel’s great story, ‘Guy de Maupassant’, when the narrator, on glancing at a row of the French writer’s works, refers to them – or rather their morocco leather bindings - as ‘the magnificent crypt of the human heart’.  One arrives at the same judgement, a similar feeling comes over one, after reading this selection of 32 of Maupassant’s darkest tales, superbly translated by Arnold Kellett.

In the foreword, Ramsey Campbell warns that ‘the light of these tales may shine into your own dark’, but of course for the select few – meaning you and me, naturally, as well as one other whom you’re free to nominate – this is a very good reason to read them.

Many of these stories take a peek at the mental processes of some very disturbed people.  ‘The Case of Louise Roque’ looks at events following the rape and murder of a young girl.  It is vividly realised in terms of setting (a village astride a wood) and character (the postman who discovers the child’s body, the girl’s grief-stricken mother, the priest who likes his food, etc.) but where Maupassant excels is in his description of the torment of the murderer.

Another story along these lines – abnormal psychology and its malcontents – is ‘The Head of Hair’, an account of how covetousness and fetishism leads eventually to madness.  An antique collector shuns women – they’re alive and so fearful and dangerous – and places all of his passion into his hobby.  Yet when he acquires an eighteenth century watch, he can’t help but wonder who was ‘the first woman to wear it on her bosom, keeping it warm and cosy in the folds of her dress – the heart of the little watch beating close against the heart of the woman?’  Our hero nonetheless plumbs for the mechanical movement of the watch over a living woman’s vital heart and when he later discovers the relic of a woman’s head of hair, he is transported into an ecstatic state.  Degeneration and madness ensue.  While this is an unpleasant, perverse tale it does have a definite ring of truth; and the juxtaposed polarity of the heart/watch is, I’m sure you’ll agree, neatly done.

And, in fact, there is a psychological truth and subtlety to all of these tales.  For example, ‘Fear’ makes the point that this emotion need not be a rational response to objective danger; no, it may simply overpower and take possession of you.

The tales of escalating cruely (such as ‘Coco’ and ‘The Blind Man’) were the most difficult to read; the nastiness gradually increases, as in a Michael Haneke film, and it’s unclear how or when or indeed whether it will end.  Both Ramsey Campbell and Arnold Kellett make the point that many of these stories predict Maupassant’s own descent into mental illness, and it is difficult to disagree with this.

The penultimate paragraph in Babel’s story gives an account of Maupassant’s life and especially of his last years.  It was a hard road he trod and a harder fall he took.  Arnold Kellett has wisely selected from among the myriad health-giving but poisonous fruits of a tragic, artistically productive life.  The ‘magnificent crypt of the human heart’ indeed.  Open these pages at your own peril.