Oscar Cook was a kind of pulp Conrad, using his decade running a large chunk of Borneo as the basis for a series of memorably gruesome and ghoulish tales of colonial horror, generally featuring cannibalism, sexual revenge or unspeakable rites. One by one, Mr A's fingers start to get infected. ![]() Paulina becomes his lover, and gets pregnant. Oscar Cook – His Beautiful Hands (1931) "Mr A", a celebrated concert violinist, is irresistibly drawn to a Paulina, a Javanese manicurist, who cares for his fingers like no one else. Could it be that what's really terrifying here is not the unreal branch line but the real main line, whose commuters all take the same train every day for the rest of their lives? What's striking about Branch Line to Benceston is not just its uncanny sense of the possibility of living two different lives in two different realities at the same time, but also its contemporary postwar setting of city commuters and Green Belt suburbanisation. Andrew Caldecott took to writing fiction late in life, after retiring from the colonial service – he was governor of Hong Kong and then of Ceylon in the 1930s and 1940s. Back at home with his friends, he awaits the appointed hour of his execution in what he thinks is an alternate reality. Sir Andrew Caldecott – Branch Line to Benceston (1947) A London music publisher travels by train to a non-existent seaside resort called Benceston, where he kills his hated business partner, and is found guilty of murder. Profoundly frightening (especially for middle-aged professors) and unbearably sad. Aiken was a distinguished poet and a friend of TS Eliot, with whom he shares a Modernist sense of contemporary humanity as the walking dead. Conrad Aiken's dazzlingly literary story is in a tradition of metaphysical sea-stories, from Poe to Melville to Conrad. He keeps hearing the same piece of music over and over again. On board the ship, he meets people who remind him of other people: a travelling companion who looks like a woman he met at the hospital a doctor who looks like his father. Mr Arcularis begins to dream that he is walking through the stars, and starts sleepwalking. The ship is fogbound, surrounded by icebergs. Faber recently did the world the inestimable service of bringing many of his books back into print.Ĭonrad Aiken – Mr Arcularis (1931) A middle-aged Harvard professor, recovering from surgery, takes a voyage to Europe on a ship which, he learns, is also carrying a corpse home to Ireland. Caught in the right mood, his stories are unforgettable. Aickman was a magnificent writer of short fiction at its most unsettling and uncanny – in the Freudian sense of not being at home with oneself. And so they find themselves in the Kurhus, where they wander the labyrinth of paths in the wood all night. ![]() Sleepers cannot live with them for long, and drive them out. Insomniacs, she is told, are unearthly and mysterious, and often seem to acquire foresight they are like trolls, like lost souls, like witches, like vampires. She travels to Sweden on a business trip with her husband, where she finds herself staying overnight at the Kurhus, a sanitorium for insomniacs, some of whom have not slept for years (there is a young girl who has never slept in her life). Robert Aickman – Into the Wood (1968) Margaret Sawyer, the wife of a prosperous Manchester building contractor, is bored and unsatisfied with her life. ![]() Think of them as doors into secret gardens, or haunted attics, or forbidden cellars. Here are 10 of the best – stories which have haunted me for years, which I can’t get out of my head. The horror short story flourished in great anthologies, often containing unforgettable works by forgotten writers, or by familiar writers straying into unfamiliar territory, as well as by established genre titans. Horror works most effectively in concentrated, intense bursts – which is why the short story has always been its great literary medium.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |