Blog-o-ween 2023: "Minuke" by Nigel Kneale

Look, I gotta come clean with you good people who show up everyday to Blog-o-ween looking for guidance. I owe it to you to tell the truth, to lay it all on the line. So, here goes: Yes, monsters are scary — what with the waving tentacles and the dripping goo and the gnashing teeth in the multiple mouths that are set vertically instead of horizontally all over its body and I don’t know what else — but, and this is just between you and me, monsters aren’t real.

I know, I know...but someone had to tell you. Monsters aren’t real. There are people who act monstrously, sure, but monsters? What with the waving tentacles and the dripping goo and the gnashing teeth in the multiple mouths that are set vertically instead of horizontally all over its body and what not? Monsters? They don’t exist except in the pages of horror stories and on the big- and small-screens. And once the author or the filmmaker shows you the monster? It’s not as scary anymore. You can deal with it.

The best horror, I think, is grounded in the more mundane, universally felt, everyday fears and anxieties: the fear of death, the anxiety of not being able to make ends meet, the fear of the dark, the anxiety of walking back to your car late at night in an unfamiliar neighborhood, the fear of waving tentacles and dripping goo and gnashing teeth...the usual stuff that everyone has experienced in their lives.

Let’s take for an example the anxieties that come with homeownership. Part of the American Dream is to own your own home. Me, I’m a renter. Always been a renter. Always will be a renter. The thought of owning a home and having electrical problems or plumbing issues or a leaky roof and having to pay for those repairs sets my flesh crawling. Not to mention dealing with the infestation in the basement of things with waving tentacles and dripping goo and gnashing teeth...but that’s a whole other thing.

Owning a home and being only one poorly soldered pipe away from disaster and financial ruin is probably what drove people to the cinemas in 1979 to see The Amityville Horror. Sure, living in a house where a guy once killed his entire family is pretty scary — and those two red eyes of “Jodie” floating outside the daughter’s second-story bedroom window certainly are — but as Stephen King points out in his 1981 history of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, the real horror in Amityville has less to do with the events of the past and more to do with the house that the Lutzes now own lock, stock, and barrel. Upon reevaluating the film after leaving a screening where he noticed the average age of the attendees was closer to middle age than the usual teenager, King writes:

“Here is a movie for every woman who ever wept over a plugged-up toilet or a spreading water stain on the ceiling from the upstairs shower; for every man who ever did a slow burn when the weight of the snow caused his gutters to give way...

“‘Think of the bills,’ a woman sitting behind me in the theater moaned at one point...but I suspect it was her own bills she was thinking about...[T]he main reason that people went to see it, I think, is that The Amityville Horror, beneath its ghost-story exterior, is really a financial demolition derby.”

Today’s short story is also steeped in the fears and anxieties of home ownership. Let’s take a trip to post-war Britain with writer Nigel Kneale and hear the story of a house that is on the market for a song. It has a strange past and an even stranger name. Let’s take a open-house tour through "Minuke."

“The estate agent kept an uncomfortable silence until we reached his car. ‘Frankly, I wish you hadn’t got wind of that,’ he said. ‘Don’t know how you did: I thought I had the whole thing carefully disposed of...’”

It is after the Second World War in England, and an estate agent is driving the unnamed narrator to see a house. At first glance, the narrator seems to be someone who is in the market for a home, but as the estate agent’s story of the house unfolds, the reader quickly gets the sense that the narrator is simply a curiosity-seeker. No one could possibly want the home that the estate agent is describing. What’s wrong with the house? Well, for starters, the name.

“It was taken by a man named Pritchard. Cinema projectionist, I think he was. Wife, a boy of ten or so, and a rather younger daughter. Oh — and dog, one of those black, lop-eared animals. They christened the place ‘Minuke’, M-I-N-U-K-E. My nook. Yes, that’s what I said too. And not even the miserable excuse of its being phonetically correct.”

The house was built in a hurry along a coast-road overlooking the sea during the interwar period, and that’s when the estate agent says he sold the house to the Pritchards. Everything started out fine until little things began to go wrong. First, the plumbing seemed to go haywire. Then, the plaster on the walls in the bedroom crack from floor to ceiling. Next, Mrs. Pritchard is injured when a hatch door between the kitchen and dining room comes down on her wrists. The funny thing about that, said Mr. Pritchard to the estate agent, is when he tried to lift it off of his wife’s arms

“...it wouldn’t come! I got my finger under it and heaved, but it might have weighed two hundredweight. Once it gave an inch or so, and then pressed harder. That was it — it was pressing down!”

And that’s just the start of the Pritchards’ troubles with Minuke.

What is the cause behind these problems? What does one of the men who helped build the house have to say about the enormous flat stones that were found on the site and used as the foundation of Minuke? And what of the old Norse — or older! — burial mound?

Nigel Kneale was born in Barrow-in-Furness, England in 1922. In 1928, his family returned to the Isle of Man, and it was there that Kneale was raised. In the 1940s, unable to enlist in the army due to photophobia (a sensitivity to light), Kneale moved to London and worked for BBC Radio. He acted in radio plays and wrote stories for magazines such as Argosy and The Strand. In 1949, he published a collection of his tales, Tomato Cain and Other Stories. In 1950, it won the Somerset Maugham Award.

After this success, Kneale began to write scripts for radio and television. It was in the early 1950s that he created his most enduring character: Professor Bernard Quatermass, head of the British Experimental Rocket Group. Quatermass would be the main character of four television serials over the next twenty years. Beginning in 1953 with The Quatermass Experiment, the professor’s adventures would continue in Quatermass II (1956), Quatermass and the Pit (1958), and the final, melancholy chapter of the professor’s life, 1979’s Quatermass.

Outside of the Quatermass adventures, Kneale was busy with other serials of the weird and supernatural. Beasts (1976) was a six-episode character-based anthology series. The Stone Tape (1972) was a scientific ghost story about a group of engineers in an old mansion trying to find a new recording medium. Instead, they find something in the old stone walls of the house. He also wrote an episode of the ITV series Against the Crowd called “Murrain.” (I’ve, uh, written about it before...you can find my blog entry on it here.)

Kneale’s list of projects that came to fruition or died on the vine is too lengthy to go into here. To learn more about these projects, I urge you to look for a copy of Andy Murray’s biography Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale. Tomato Cain and Other Stories (of which “Minuke” is but one) has been brought out in a new edition recently by Comma Press. If you are just interested in today’s story, then look for anthologies such as Classics of the Supernatural (edited by Peter Haining) and A Classic Collection of Haunting Ghost Stories (edited by Marvin and Saralee Kaye).

If you need to know what happened to the Pritchards and Minuke right this very instant, well you are in luck. Here is a reading of the story from Tony Walker’s excellent Classic Ghost Stories Podcast:

So, that’s it for today, Gentle Reader. Come back tomorrow for more tales of the macabre. That knocking sound in the walls? Probably just the pipes. That’s nothing. It’s the fact that it’s knocking in Morse code that is disconcerting. Anyway...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!