rbadac (June 10, 1998)This story is from Walpole's ALL SOULS' NIGHT (Macmillan; London 1933, with the American edition probably Doran). It can also be found in Asquith's THE GHOST BOOK, Hugh Lamb's A TIDE OF TERROR and A CENTURY OF CREEPY STORIES. Heck, might even be in the damn Oxford book too.The narrator is at dinner with Runciman, a novelist, and asks him the quintessential framing question, "Do you believe in ghosts?" After an amusing reference in passing to novelists of the 'half-and-half' school ('...not quite novels, not quite poems, rather mystical and picturesque, and...the very devil to do well. De La Mare's RETURN is a good example of the kind of thing.' <!>), Runciman relates his experience of visiting such a novelist, a Mr. Robert Lunt, in Cornwall for Christmas.
He is confronted with a house that is cold and depressing, a host who is a big, burly, bearded man with a shrill, piping, almost feminine voice, and a malignant-looking old woman he glimpses in his room and elsewhere, and with whom he comes to associate a disagreeable smell, which he compares to bad sanitation, stuffy rooms, and people who don't bathe often.
The ending is ambiguous, and has been attributed possibly to conscience by at least one reviewer, but well, you know how these things are... I for one thought Lunt's high-pitched voice meant some sort of possession, but after reading about how he seemed to like to put his arm around Runciman at every opportunity, hold his hand and so forth, I've developed another theory on that.
Where the 'smell' is supposed to have come from is anybody's guess; it apparently is not a charnel smell, nor is it explained in the text in relation to how Mrs. Lunt died- it's just a stink, plain and simple. The smell of evil, maybe? Or perhaps the smell of fear, to borrow the title of a Birkin collection?
I dunno; it was an okay story, certainly in the classic ghost story mold, and I do like Walpole, but I preferred 'The Silver Mask' from ALL SOULS (also in Karloff's AND THE DARKNESS FALLS, Van Thal's TOLD IN THE DARK, and Wheatley's A CENTURY OF HORROR STORIES); that was a real chiller !! Not a ghost story, though.
It did get me started on Walpole's PORTRAIT OF A MAN WITH RED HAIR (Doran; NY 1925, probably Macmillan; London too) though, which I'd been meaning to read for eons. So far, that's going well; it's actually Machen-esque, which is fine by me, and makes me wish I'd started it sooner.
rbadac, who rambles like this all the time, even when the listener has long since walked away
oOo
Robert Suggs (June 11, 1998)
rbadac wrote:
>The smell of evil, maybe? Or perhaps the smell of fear, to borrow the title of a
>Birkin collection?Could you repeat everything you said after the above? I got excited thinking about the anthology possibilities of "The Smell of Fear." It's right down my alley, so to speak . . . I'm on it!
Rob
oOo
rbadac (June 11, 1998)
[The Smell of my own Fear]Uh-oh.
Guys, I didn't mean it, honest...
rbadac
ooOoo