Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs

Well, kiddies, Blog-o-ween 2023 is just flying by, is it not? We are more than halfway to Halloween. In fact, we have two weeks until the big day arrives. Fourteen days to pack in as many spooky movies, TV shows, books, and old time radio programs as we can before we have to pack it all in, give Thanksgiving a cursory nod, and then pretend we care about Christmas. It almost makes you want to wish for more time to enjoy it all, doesn’t it? And what would the harm in that be? Wishing for a little more free time to enjoy the things in life that give us pleasure, huh?

Obviously, you are not a Twilight Zone aficionado.

And obviously you are not hep to the subject of today’s Blog-o-ween post. For Mr. and Mrs. White and their son Herbert, the opportunity to have their wishes granted is too good to pass up. Unfortunately, they are too busy imagining how much better their lives will be to notice that the chalice their friend the sergeant-major is handing them is poisoned. Let’s gather round the fire on such a cold and wet night at this and let W.W. Jacobs tell us the story of fate, wishes, and...“The Monkey’s Paw.”

“‘To look at,’ said the sergeant-major, fumbling in his pocket, ‘it's just an ordinary little paw, dried to a mummy.’

“He took something out of his pocket and proffered it. Mrs. White drew back with a grimace, but her son, taking it, examined it curiously.

“‘And what is there special about it?’ inquired Mr. White as he took it from his son, and having examined it, placed it upon the table.

“‘It had a spell put on it by an old fakir,’ said the sergeant-major, ‘a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people's lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow. He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it.’”

It’s a wet and windy night, and the Whites are huddled around the fire awaiting their friend, Sergeant-Major Morris, fresh off the boat after spending twenty-one years in India. Whiskey is poured and time is passed with the soldier’s tales of “wild scenes and doughty deeds; of wars and plagues and strange peoples.” Soon, however, conversation turns to another subject: a small, mummified monkey’s paw in the sergeant-major’s possession.

The paw, the old soldier tells the Whites, was enchanted (or perhaps “cursed” is a better word? Heh-heh-heh!) by a holy man in India. It gives three people three wishes each:

“‘Well, why don't you have three, sir?’ said Herbert White, cleverly.

“The soldier regarded him in the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth. ‘I have,’ he said, quietly, and his blotchy face whitened.

“‘And did you really have the three wishes granted?’ asked Mrs. White.

“‘I did,’ said the sergeant-major, and his glass tapped against his strong teeth.

“‘And has anybody else wished?’ persisted the old lady.

“‘The first man had his three wishes. Yes,’ was the reply; ‘I don't know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That's how I got the paw.’

“His tones were so grave that a hush fell upon the group.”

Boy, isn’t the sergeant-major the life of the party?

The soldier leaves the paw with the family, but warns them of the consequences of their actions. But what’s the harm in it, the Whites wonder?

What indeed?

What follows is one of the great short stories in all of literature. It is, like “The Hook” (notice how we keep coming back to that tale?), told economically, and because of that simplicity, the punch at the end lands even harder.

I can recall reading “The Monkey’s Paw” in a junior high English class. It was probably a part of the lesson where we learned about the types of conflict used in literature. You know, the old tropes of “Man vs. Self,” “Man vs. Nature,” “Man vs. Society” and all that? (What “Woman” got up to in these stories, we never really discussed.) (What do you want? It was the early 1980s.) “The Monkey’s Paw” fits right into the “Man vs. Fate” trope, don’cha think? I can remember my head spinning at the irony of the wishes Mr. and Mrs. White made in the course of the story. And that dénouement — the knocking at the door, Mrs. White desperately trying to pull the bolt back to let her poor son into the house, and Mr. White, just as desperately, looking for the paw in order to make his final wish and hopefully to set the scales of fate and freewill in balance again.

William Wymark Jacobs was born in London, England in 1863. He began his working life at the age of sixteen as a clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank. He had his first short story published in 1885, and while literary success was slow to come, Jacobs was able to quit his job at the post office and dedicate himself to writing by 1899.

Jacobs wrote across many different genres, including tales of the supernatural (natch), humor, and stories of the sea. “The Monkey’s Paw” was included in his 1902 collection The Lady of the Barge and was also published in the September 192 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine. He would also go on to write for the theater and films, producing mainly adaptation of his own short stories, such as The Ghost of Jerry Bundler and The Bravo. Jacobs died in September of 1943 at the age of 79. British novelist, essayist, and historian Ian Hay wrote that he was

“quiet, gentle and modest...not fond of large functions and crowds. He invented an entirely new form of humorous narrative. Its outstanding characteristics were compression and understatement.”

“The Monkey’s Paw” is a tale that is nothing if not a wonder of “compression and understatement.” It has been anthologized countless times. Countless times, people! A list of the publications in which you can find it are longer than your arm. Heck, it’s longer than Wilt Chamberlain’s arm. Any good anthology of classic supernatural tales should carry Jacobs’s most famous story. I have it on my shelves in the collection Dark: Stories of Madness, Murder, and the Supernatural as edited by Clint Willis. (We’ll have another classic tale from that anthology coming up soon.) If you don’t want to get up from your seat (and who can blame you — it’s nice and comfy here by the fire), then you can follow this link to the Project Gutenberg version of Jacob’s story.

Not only has “The Monkey’s Paw” been anthologized countless times (countless!), it’s found its way onto the radio waves just as many times. For your listening pleasure, I offer this 1980 episode of the excellent Canadian radio series Nightfall. The sound design of this dramatization is chilling enough to make you toss an extra log onto the fire and pull the blanket closer around your shoulders. Brr!

How about television and movies? Well, “The Monkey’s Paw” has been filmed countless (countless!) times, as well. Here is a version from 1982 starring Sloane Shelton and William Cain.

Well, that’s all for today, fiends. I hope you enjoyed yourselves and learned your lesson. It doesn’t make any sense to go about wishing things were any different than they are. You know what they say about wishing, don’t you? You can wish in one hand, spit in the other, and see which one fills up first.

Of course...the person who said that probably didn’t have a monkey’s paw in one of their hands to help them along. What’s one wish going to hurt? One little, teensy-tiny wish and then it’s...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!