Christopher Roden (July 7, 1998)[Appetite whetter (from Ash-Tree Press)]This month's title is NIGHTMARE JACK AND OTHER TALES, a first-rate collection of macabre stories from John Metcalfe, who, it strikes me, must have been a prime influence on Robert Aickman. I'm going right out on a limb here (O.K. cut my head off if you will!): I reckon that Metcalfe is just as mysterious in his writing as anything I've read by Aickman - and, I have to say, I prefer Metcalfe. Richard has included that Arkham scarcity THE FEASTING DEAD in the volume - and the Arkham text has been corrected to Metcalfe's own page proofs (which RD just happens to own! - along with the original MS and various diaries covering the last years of this tragic writer's life). The whole is, of course, accompanied by a thorough biographical/ bibliographical introduction, and there is yet another gruesome wraparound from the scraper boards of Douglas Walters. Walters will also be in charge of jacket illustration for the E.F. Benson series, edited by Jack Adrian - though I must note that our very own Rob Suggs (he of original windy fiction fame) is playing a part in that, too, besides providing a new illustration for the 1998 Annual Macabre (which will have previously un-reprinted stories by John Buchan, Arthur Ransome, W. Somerset Maugham, E.C. Bentley, and Hilaire Belloc).
Now, don't say I don't tell you what's going on!
Christopher Roden
oOo
John Pelan (July 8, 1998)
Ah, I can finally find justification in passing over numerous copies of TFD that have come way over the years... Sounds like a super value, and from the sounds of it, must be a rather hefty collection. Have to agree that Metcalfe is quite mysterious in his writing, though I haven't read nearly enough of his work to make a fair comparison with Aickman, I'm certainly looking forward to this collection.Cheers,
John Pelan (Anticipating an interesting round of Metcalfe-Aickman comparisons)
oOo
rbadac (July 23, 1998)
['The Bad Lands' - John Metcalfe]Timely? With a new collection due soon, I'd say so. Moreover, this can be found in THE OMNIBUS OF CRIME, edited by Dorothy Sayers, which you all have. Sure you do, it's right there holding up one leg of the refrigerator. The water damage only soaked up through Arlen's 'The Gentleman From America.'
'The Bad Lands'- John Metcalfe
Well, you wouldn't expect a visit to a place called 'Todd' to be particularly remarkable, but there you are. Brent Ormerod has a problem with neurosis, and this is where he's gone to rest up.
He should have known he was in for a bad time when they sat him down at the dinner table with a one-eyed man. Here's lookin' at you, Guvnor. No sleep tonite. His subsequent rambles in the following days all seem to lead to the same place: a ruined tower on the dunes, with a road beyond that leads nowhere.
Add to neurosis a feeling of moral uneasiness and spiritual dissolution. Your typical lost weekend. Nowhere, eh? We'll see about that. Hey, I feel much better now ! That's odd, what happened to Todd?
Young Mr. Stanton-Boyle is acquainted with the Twilight Zone of Fennington, but doesn't have the guts to see it through. It's 'gone abominable.' Everyone else says it's just Hackney's Farm, no big woop.
What goes up must come down. Spinning wheel, got to go round.
Glossary:
frore fossicking patent separator terre-mauvaise
rbadac
oOo
Christopher Roden (July 24, 1998)
rbadac wrote:
> Timely? With a new collection due soon,Pleased to tell you that NIGHTMARE JACK and Other Stories by John Metcalfe is already out, and has been despatched to those who order in advance, and will be despatched to dealers tomorrow. It's a brilliant collection and I do hope that there will be some discussion of Metcalfe when folk have had chance to digest the stories. For one thing, it seems to me that Metcalfe must have been a significant influence on Robert Aickman - in my view, perhaps not enough of an influence, since I enjoyed many of the Metcalfe stories better than anything by Aickman that I've read so far. But that is just a personal view. The Ash-Tree collection has 17 stories, including 'The Feasting Dead', which has been corrected to Metcalfe's own page proofs.
Christopher Roden
> Glossary:
>
> frore fossicking patent separator terre-mauvaiseDoes rbadac invite comment on the above, or is it just a warning to folk?
oOo
rbadac (July 24, 1998)
[Glossary]> >
> > frore fossicking patent separator terre-mauvaise
>
> Does rbadac invite comment on the above, or is it just a warning to folk?
>My new feature when reviewing ghost stories written by overeducated people- I've been noticing that certain words pop up from time to time that I just don't have a clue what they mean without looking them up. And I'm not exactly a dummy. So I put them in the review in order to either make myself feel better or pass the frustration onto you all, whichever melts my butter at the moment, probably both.
Check out what I got from Oliver Onions' 'Hic Jacet':
unconvenanted amanuensis bistred
'Would you say the detective story is the proper exercise of noble minds?'
-approximate quote from Lawrence Olivier to Michael Caine in 'Sleuth'
rbadac
oOo
Jessica (July 24, 1998)
frore: opposite of brehindfossicking: foreplay
patent separator: machine for cream extraction
terre-mauvaise: mud mixed with paint
uncovenanted: a goy. not circumcized
amanuensis: raw eggwhite
bistred: in a pot, mixed with a spoon
not to mention:
Hic Jacet: having belonged to a drooling moron who hic-upped on the dustwrapper.j.a.s.
oOo
rbadac (July 25, 1998)
Heh heh. I love this group.rbadac
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Robert Suggs (July 24, 1998)
rbadac wrote:
> Check out what I got from Oliver Onions' 'Hic Jacet':
>
> unconvenanted amanuensis bistredAfter reading 'Hic Jacet,' do you still place Widdershins on a list of the 10 best ghost story collections? I thought not. It almost cancels out 'The Beckoning Fair One.' Almost, but not quite.
By the way, my amanuensis is typing this.
Rob
oOo
rbadac (July 25, 1998)
[Glossary with Onions]Hey, don't be a fossick.
'Hic Jacet' is rather a bore, isn't it? [snip - read rbadac's comments in Peelings]
oOo
Christopher Roden (July 24, 1998)
> By the way, my amanuensis is typing this.
>
> RobWasn't he the brother who wrote down the music for Mozart: Wolfgang Amanuensis Mozart?
CR (blame it on the sizzling weather in B.C.!)
oOo
Brian McNaughton (July 25, 1998)
Christopher Roden wrote:
>Pleased to tell you that NIGHTMARE JACK and Other Stories by John Metcalfe is
>already out, and has been despatched to those who order in advance, and will
>be despatched to dealers tomorrow.So how does one go about getting a copy?
--Brian McNaughton
oOo
John Pelan (July 26, 1998)
A visit to http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/ashtreecurrent.html with credit card at ready should do the trick. IMO, this is one of the bargain books of the year considering what one would have to spend on even battered copies of THE SMOKING LEG and THE FEASTING DEAD.Unfortunately, my copy has not arrived yet, or I'd have more comments to pass on...
John Pelan (Eyeing the mailbox with anticipation)
oOo
rbadac (July 31, 1998)
['Not There'- John Metcalfe]I almost did 'Mr. Meldrum's Mania' first, but this bon-bon was available at the time (from TRAVELERS BY NIGHT, Arkham House 1967), and proved to be even more satisfactory.
What a beautiful, lyrical story ! This is a very good example of Metcalfe's 'Aickmanosity'- the languid descriptions of character motive, the dreamlike atmosphere- very nice.
Angela Ivy Snell was a looker in her time, but spurned an assortment of potential husbands and grew old in spinsterhood from a mistaken perception of her own self-worth, which culminated in her being a model for the 'Science' statue above the viaduct, but then dissipated and vanished in the wind of human caprice. As time goes by, she visits her bronze counterpart regularly, and acquires a kinship with it that is 'blitzed' when the statue is destroyed in an air raid. And then...
This is Metcalfe at his finest, I think. You won't want to miss this one. Besides enjoying the stylistic elements that make JM so readable, I learned the phrase, 'on the mutter', describing someone who is slowly going cuckoo.
The Arkham dj has photos on its back of some of the authors, including Metcalfe, who is an old and rather severe-looking gent in a military uniform, not at all like I had pictured him (younger, more of a dreamer/dilettante type), as well as photos of Aickman, Brennan, Wakefield, Counselman, and Hodgson with Mr. Ed.
Glossary: mocium parky undulant-fever
rbadac
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Robert Suggs (August 1, 1998)
rbadac wrote:
>I almost did 'Mr. Meldrum's Mania' first, but this bon-bon was available at
>the time (from TRAVELERS BY NIGHT, Arkham House 1967), and proved to be even
>more satisfactory.Leave it to you to select a story many of us can't get our hands on. We can only hope and pray this story appears in the Ash-Tree. I'm in a bit of a cold sweat waiting for my copy.
>What a beautiful, lyrical story ! This is a very good example of Metcalfe's
>'Aickmanosity'- the languid descriptions of character motive, the dreamlike
>atmosphere- very nice.glossary: aickmanosity
>Angela Ivy Snell was a looker in her time, but spurned an assortment of
>potential husbands and grew old in spinsterhood from a mistaken perception of
>her own self-worth, which culminated in her being a model for the 'Science'
>statue above the viaduct, but then dissipated and vanished in the wind of
>human caprice. As time goes by, she visits her bronze counterpart regularly,
>and acquires a kinship with it that is 'blitzed' when the statue is destroyed
>in an air raid. And then...YES? YES? Aw, c'mon. . . .
Rats.
>This is Metcalfe at his finest, I think. You won't want to miss this one.
Thanks, but we already have.
>Besides enjoying the stylistic elements that make JM so readable, I learned
>the phrase, 'on the mutter', describing someone who is slowly going cuckoo."Quickly going cuckoo" you would have recognized immediately. And that address is 1860.
>The Arkham dj has photos on its back of some of the authors, including
>Metcalfe, who is an old and rather severe-looking gent in a military uniform,
>not at all like I had pictured him (younger, more of a dreamer/dilettante
>type), as well as photos of Aickman, Brennan, Wakefield, Counselman, and
>Hodgson with Mr. Ed.What about the Pig People? "But Wilbur, you know I only oink to YOU."
I'm off to read "Meldrum's Mania." . . . I'd HAVE to be.
Rob
oOo
rbadac (August 1, 1998)
['Not There' - 1860]Robert Suggs wrote:
> >Besides enjoying the stylistic elements that make JM so readable, I learned
> >the phrase, 'on the mutter', describing someone who is slowly going cuckoo.
>
> "Quickly going cuckoo" you would have recognized immediately. And that
> address is 1860.Grrr....(private joke, folks. Continue with what you were doing.)
By the way, I read TRAVELERS BY NIGHT at the library, which has TWO copies.
And the one I have at home is their THIRD, which they discarded, and which I
bought at a library sale for 0.50. Clink!rbadac
oOo
rbadac (August 3, 1998)
['Mr Meldrum's Mania' - John Metcalfe]Yes, I'm afraid NIGHTMARE JACK is indeed a 'must-have'. Someone should give me one. Until then, I'll dance around the stories in the collection in a mad fertility dance like I've been doing...
Mr. Meldrum (whose first name is 'Amos' ) is having trouble with his pecker. No, I'm not on the wrong board, you're in the wrong gutter. His schnozz. His nozzle. His proboscis. His Durante. His NOSE. What's the trouble? Well, seems that it's not there, or rather it IS, but no one can see it, or ... He's also peculiarly sensitive to other things, like the number 32, and, well, it gets complicated. Through gradual investigation his plight is illuminated, though more to others than to himself, unfortunately.
Metcalfe is quite funny for a horror writer, a feat not easy to pull off. The tone of the story is initially pretty wacky, but in the midst of enjoying this, we find ourselves suddenly pulled into something very different. He misdirects us (while continuing to entertain) with extra characters, nutcases all, behind which poor Mr. Meldrum's problem becomes something of a slapstick bit, and then...
Last time I compared Metcalfe to Aickman; here I'll compare him to John Collier, and more felicitous comparisons could hardly be wished for. Would that all of us could write like the best in the business. Little touches like Meldrum's seeing flies walking on his invisible nose, or being rendered by modern psychoanalysis into an infantile state are worthy of that master satirist of the human condition, and even the final plunge into horror is handled with a similar dexterity.
Don't miss this one, either.
Glossary: uncinate Llandilo Flags brailing sybarite gallooning
Pio Baroja niblicks pecker
rbadac
oOo
Bill Barnett (August 3, 1998)
Yes, this is a funny one. Meldrum's regression into baby talk is the most startling of the images in this dark, dark comedy. (Well, second most...) Even though I saw the ending coming from the incident in the British Library (though not the cause, to be sure), Metcalfe still manages to deliver a chill in the moment of revelation.Now on a personal level, I am 32 years old myself; I have put my parents to work checking out a certain page number of every book I read as a child, and making a list of all the images appearing thereon. With luck I can make it to 33 (2 months) without a hitch, though I may cancel next week's appointment with the periodontist.
Bill B.
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Robert Suggs (August 4, 1998)
rbadac wrote:
>Yes, I'm afraid NIGHTMARE JACK is indeed a 'must-have'. Someone should
>give me one. Until then, I'll dance around the stories in the collection in a mad
>fertility dance like I've been doing...I was going to describe it as John Collier meets American International Pictures--"The Incredible Schnozz Man." I hadn't been aware Metcalfe had this kind of sense of humor, so I wasn't quite prepared for what I experienced. But what a satirical tour de force. Those wanting something scary will be disappointed, perhaps, if they're the types always offering new reasons why there shouldn't be a lick of humor in a horror story. It's hard not to wonder what brought this story on for Metcalfe, there's so much restless comic invention in here. In a few pages, there's a professional shrink buffoon, cocktail party/ scientist buffoons, two separate best-friend buffoons, a dentist, an elevator operator. Yet the whole nose angle--so to speak--seems original to me. I don't know of any other ghostly nose stories (Jessica? How about ghostly amazon lost world noses?). And I don't want to say more about the explanation of the nose, but lovers of Weird Tales approaches will get a great kick out of it. One final note: I'm glad I didn't read this story before going to the dentist for three fillings last week. He actually sat there before beginning, stared at his drill while it ran for a minute, and said, "Seems like it ought to go faster than that." To which his assistant said, "Oh, is that the bad one?" As he proceeded, I heard the assistant in the next room, in an unsuccessfully haute voice, ordering new "drill bits" over the phone. If I'd already read this story, there would be a new window on his wall, shaped like my silhouette.
Rob
oOo
Randy Money (August 4, 1998)
Robert Suggs wrote
> Yet the whole nose angle--so to
> speak--seems original to me. I don't know of any other ghostly nose
> stories (Jessica? How about ghostly amazon lost world noses?).Er ... No thoughts about ghostly noses, but there was Gogol's "The Nose". Perhaps, in a sense, Metcalfe was conversing with the ghost of Gogol?
Randy
oOo
John Brower (August 5, 1998)
Yes, Collier came to my mind in reading "The Renegade".I hesitated making the comparison on the basis of reading one story.
Wow -- Aickman and Collier, that's keeping company with the best of short story writers.
oOo
Christopher Roden (August 6, 1998)
Metcalfe came before Aickman, and Metcalfe, if anyone did, influenced Aickman.
And Metcalfe was better than anything I've ever read by Aickman.Come on you guys, let's talk!
Christopher Roden
oOo
rbadac (August 4, 1998)
['The Double Admiral' - John Metcalfe]Fueling Metcalfe-mania once again...
John Charles, a bishop, visits his friend, Admiral Hood, who is plagued by the vision of a brown cloud on the horizon which proves to be a weird semi-corporeal island that is haunting him with the presage of death. The admiral is also in the company of a 'psychist', a fellow named Beverley (this is English, so I guess that's okay), and the three of them launch a cutter and sail towards this island on the insistence of the admiral, who feels it necessary to confront his fear.
I'm sorry. That's as far as I can go. We're either going to have to wait until everybody gets their copies of NIGHTMARE JACK or digs this story out of Dorothy Sayers' SECOND OMNIBUS OF CRIME (or THE SMOKING LEG, if you're so lucky) and reads it, because I need some feedback on this. It's tales like this one where this ng is essential- so whenever everyone is ready, just let me know, because I have NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN THIS STORY. You'll see what I mean when you read it.
That's a big "Huh?" from
rbadac, who doesn't cave in easily, enjoys Aickman without a qualm, and who had no trouble at all with De La Mare's 'Out Of The Deep.'
Glossary: vertigo of direction, which I had in spades after I read this
oOo
J. Max Gilbert (August 6, 1998)
All right. I read the story over breakfast (in Sayers), and I have to admit it's an odd one. But is the question what happens in the story or how to interpret it? The latter question is the more difficult, but I'm willing to have a go at either. For some reason the lines "It's killing me. I-I-I am being undermined!" reminds me of Humphrey Bogart yelling about his strawberries. -- MaxoOo
rbadac (August 6, 1998)
Hee hee. Captain Queeg, get in the boat, we're going to face this thing once and for all !! Would you mind leaving those steel balls in your stateroom?What do you think, folks? What exactly DID happen to the Admiral?
rbadac
oOo
Robert Suggs (August 7, 1998)
['The Doppel Admiral' - Metcalfe]Comedian Stephen Wright used to ask: "How do you know that, while you're asleep at night, someone doesn't break into your house, steal all your furniture and replace it with exact repicas?" Metcalfe has written the nautical version of that idea.
T.E.D. Klein suggests that the story feels like an allegory. He may be on to something. Three men in a boat, but no butchers, bakers or candlestick makers this time. It's an admiral--that is, a man of war--a "psychist", and a bishop. Could it be . . . body, mind and soul, perhaps? Just a guess. That said, the model doesn't stretch too far without breaking. We could say that the mind and soul survive the body, but find themselves in a kind of dream in which they can't tell whether the next world is just a continuation of the old. Perhaps the soul wonders if this could, after all, be hell. Notice there's a moment in which the soul feels a loathing for the mind. Those little details often mark an allegory. But what's the body doing hanging around in this next life? The bishop would know the biblical teaching of a solid "resurrection body." I'm not partial to Freudian lit crit, but there it is . . .
On a surface level, there's an effective story that continues what is done in "Brenner's Boy" and particularly "The Feasting Dead"--this time with friends instead of children. It's the horrible sense of dread that comes when we wonder who, really, is this other person? It's the 20th century, existential spin on the old doppelganger theme. The most powerful working-out of this theme I know is Shirley Jackson's "The Beautiful Stranger." I don't know whether Metcalfe writes about marriage. But I do think this is the kind of story which will come a bit clearer as we read some of his other tales. It could be that, like Aickman, he's a writer whose works are a discipline unto themselves. Aickman wrote a couple of allegories about mysterious islands, too. But this one is certainly eerier than "The Wine Red Sea."
Rob
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J. Max Gilbert (August 10, 1998)
If it is an allegory, what is it an allegory of? Does the body disappear in one place and is reborn in another? And why is there so much stress on the fact that something "Bad" (with a capital B) going on? There definitely seems to be some competition between the doctor of the soul (the bishop) and the doctor of the mind (the psychist) but neither of them seem to have an answer for the admiral's problem. It strikes me as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sort of a tale but there seems to be no clear difference between the one admiral and his double. The Freudian possibility is worth investigating, but at best it seems to say that what they're afraid of is disorder. There is the bishop's childhood fear of a stain on the ceiling and the admiral's fear of the island that appears as "a kind of brown stain just on the horizon." But these excremental images seem to really represent an inexplicable disorder, and what makes the story most effective is that it describes the inexplicable.--
MaxoOo
Brian McNaughton (August 9, 1998)
I think Metcalfe is trying to describe psychological states that really cannot be described: the terror that a child attaches to an innocuous picture in a book, the exhilaration that an adult associates with a change of light on a seascape. Most "normal" people would say that the reactions are far out of proportion to the stimuli. To take these states as seriously as Metcalfe does, one must be either a mystic or a loony.Well, we know that Metcalfe was prone to "nervous breakdowns." On the other hand, loonies don't usually write so well as he does.
He failed (of course) to put this transcendental vision in plain words, but at least he gave it literary shape and form. Trying to explain it line by line wouldn't help. When you break open the hourglass, you're left with nothing but loose sand.
But even if this is a brilliant exercise in obscurantism, I'm still dissatisfied by the ambiguity of the last line, when the Admiral announces that he's had the same dream. "The same dream" doesn't make much sense. If he means a similar dream, one in which the bishop died, the story becomes much more discomfiting.
I was struck by the similarity of this story to the model of a standard, all-purpose joke: A bishop, an admiral and a psychiatrist go for a boat-ride... . The punchline may be that _nothing_ happens to the shrink, who is noted more than once to be sinister, who is sometimes described in bizarre terms, who is compared to the terrifying picture from the bishop's childhood, and who may somehow be the instigator of these curious events: as Death, as the Devil, or perhaps merely in his professional capacity. The tale may be Metcalfe's way of telling us that a psychiatrist can really bend you out of shape.
--Brian McNaughton
oOo
Robert Suggs (August 9, 1998)
Good observations, Brian. I would probably place this story more heavily in the realm of a supernatural experience than a psychological one, though both are certainly involved. But as Dorothy Sayers (quoted in the Ash-Tree introduction) has said, "Try to tidy it up and tuck in the ends if you can . . . There is no explanation and no attempt to explain." Metcalfe planted clues that lead in the directions of the classic doppelganger (hinted at not only by the phantom boat but by the narrator's sudden sharp dislike of the psychist before he blacks out), of madness on the part of any or even all of the three principals, of the allegory as T.E.D. Klein has pointed out (and I discussed earlier), and even of the classic joke as you've just pointed out-- Three Men in a Boat, a sailor, a psychist and a sacrist: Is that a joke or a parable? Metcalfe was capable of either. But in other stories, he made it clear when he was having us on. This is more akin to the dry-to-the-point-of-invisible humor of Aickman in "The Trains"--if it's humor at all. It's a puzzle with just a piece or two missing from every scenario we could attempt to build by way of explaining, and as I think you've pointed out, if we could "solve" it we would find ourselves disappointed. By the way, one other "clue" (which leads nowhere, unfortunately): I can't get away from the admittedly obtuse "body, mind, soul" angle, given the consistency of "body" dying, "soul" experiencing some kind of mystical experience and "mind" standing by explaining things. "Body's" name in the story is "Hood," by the way, which surely suggests Death. This grouping of people to represent the "parts" of a human, more often in terms of id, ego and superego, is after all fairly common in short stories written during this period. But again, you can't sustain this model and explain the story.Rob
oOo
John Pelan (August 10, 1998)
Well, after re-reading "The Double Admiral" several times over the weekend, I'm afraid I've come away with no more definitive explanation for the tale than I started with.Metcalfe is apparently trying to give us an accurate depiction of a transcendental experience which may (or may not) have deep roots in the Bishop's early childhood. If we are to take the three men as metaphors for body, mind, and spirit; the story makes the statement that it is the "body" or physical reality that feels the most profound effect from an early experience that was initially felt by the "soul". Further, in this scenario we are given internal evidence that the "mind" is not to be trusted too closely. In light of Metcalfe's rather unhappy experiences, this attitude certainly makes sense.
John Pelan (Wondering if people do come in to the house at night and replace all his furniture...)
oOo
rbadac (August 11, 1998)
['The Double Admiral' - one more time]Thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion on this pretzel story. Despite my whining, I really liked it, and I feel I understand it better now, or at least intuit its purpose to some degree, which is sufficient as far as I'm concerned !
The body-mind-soul angle works, albeit in a limited fashion; somehow I don't think Metcalfe intended to labour this to all logical conclusions. Max's note on the Three Men In A Tub made me wonder: what if they ARE a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker? A man of war could certainly be termed a butcher in some lights; a headshrinker goes a long way towards helping people who are half-baked, and a bishop surely keeps the candlestick makers in business.
The story opens and closes with the confidences of two reluctantly admitting a third; Admiral Hood loses 'virtue or something' when It comes. Beverley tells John Charles, 'The second Hood appeared as you were unconscious. That was seven hours ago.' Yet they are not the only ones changed- the returning shore is strangely transformed. To the question,' who are they now?' must be added 'WHERE are they now?'
rbadac
ooOoo