A.A. McBraid is something of an anomaly in the literature of the ghostly; though his approach seems Edwardian in intent, his characters and settings remain stubbornly Victorian-- but of a somewhat bizarre variety that exhibits a peculiar imprecision and uncertainty with the trappings of that age. Liable to equip his protagonists as if from a rummage sale spanning three centuries, an oil lamp in one hand and an automatic weapon in the other, or possessed of buckled shoes and ballpoint pens simultaneously, McBraid may be attempting a kind of temporal disorientation designed to put the reader at disadvantage, or may simply be trying to avoid a closer examination of his equally anachronistic dialogue patterns. Symptomatic of this also is his employ of quasi-French names for two of the characters, while plunking them in the middle of some unspecified geography with place names ostensibly intended to be British. Beyond not knowing where he is going with all this, McBraid obviously does not even know where he is.The Edwardian concern with individual psychology, so evocative of unease in the hands of traditional masters like Hartley, Sinclair, and Wakefield, here seems more like some poorly-mended net thrown over the general mishmash, to haul it up onto a rather creaky hulk that threatens to soak the cargo in adumbrative bilge until it falls apart with soggy inconsequence, if indeed the vessel itself can manage to keep from sinking like a stone upon launch. McBraid bails where he can; lacking a real sense of security in his positionless narrative, he is apt to jump scenes like a cat pawing the TV remote when events begin to collapse beneath their own insubstantiality, but his introduction of pseudo-analytical headscratchers like "...how soon before he rends himself to spite its teeth when the trap of it comes to resemble a means of some graceless salvation..." only numbs with its obliquity rather than attaining any real insight, though it does succeed in distracting the reader's attention away from whatever malaprop occurred immediately before. To his credit McBraid thus achieves a certain balance between his period conceits; no one can forthrightly accuse him of failure in either the Victorian or the Edwardian sense, as he is fully as uncomfortable in the one as in the other.
To term him a "naturalistic" writer would be absurd on the face of it, as few exhibit a more profound lack of knowledge of Nature in their work as does McBraid. A simple examination of the flora and fauna of this particular story is sufficient to demonstrate. Examples of the first amount to exactly five: "new wheat", elms, blackthorns, oaks, and primroses, a timid selection fired over the gunwale once only, hoping we will blink and miss it. It is entirely possible that McBraid has never even *seen* a primrose, but has selected this herb merely because he has read of so many of them in the ghost stories he tries to copy. Of fauna we have birds and dogs, neither of which are actually seen long enough to be described, nor their type or breed mentioned, lest it create problems which the already overextended McBraid would likely be unable to solve.
His people, however, must be dealt with, and it is here that McBraid performs with his characteristically remarkable cluelessness; the unnamed narrator's fondness for salt herring sandwiches and taking pointless walks in a vain effort to further the action is quite as unlikely as the "old switcheroo" forced upon us at the end. His villain Dumars is little more than a catalogue of qualities selected to elicit boos and hisses, his transparent character prevision the worst of crutches for it. But in the manservant Cebron is achieved a pinnacle of stereotype rarely braved by even the densest amateur. From his subservient yet ubiquitous presence to the single line of dialogue he utters, a truly ill-conceived stab at Cockney dialect (one shudders had he attempted more), we find ourselves longing desperately to know how even M. R. James would have handled him.
All of which brings us to the ghost, if ghost is the right term for what is actually a reanimated corpse. Scion of the histrionic namby-pambics of a thwarted love and murder plot (prompting even the ordinarily shameless McBraid to hangdoggedly term it "seamy melodrama," a staggering understatement), the haunting begins with a few standard manifestations of spectral activity culled from back issues of *The London Magazine* or *Hutchinson's*, which are presumably the work of the dead Ethan Reynolds (who at this point isn't even in the ground yet), though they could be those of the equally dead Judith-- it is quite unclear, and probably unimportant-- then, at the climax, these abruptly become more physical and, as a result, somewhat more effective, though almost risible in light of Ethan's burial having occurred immediately proceeding, as if he were compelled to spring from the grave like a Jack-In-The-Box the moment he was put in it.
Finally, the labored connection with playing cards only serves to twist these frayed threads of hapless invention so tightly round their spindle that they lose whatever identity they may have had, though the use of the game of cribbage admittedly does provide a rather nice double-entendre title for the story. This was probably a lucky accident, most likely generated by McBraid's seeing Julian Karswell and his mother playing cribbage at the beginning of the film *Night Of The Demon*. It could also be a subconscious admission of the "cribbage" which occurs throughout the tale itself.
Daria Combato