Blog-O-Ween 2025: The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale: Day Two — “The Photograph”

Welcome back, Blog-o-weeners, for day two of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. Yesterday, we had a brief introduction to the life and work of the Manx science fiction and horror writer, then we got down to brass tacks by visiting a lovely little home by the sea called “Minuke.” Today, let’s read another offering from Kneale’s 1949 short story collection, Tomato Cain and Other Stories. Today, let’s sit for “The Photograph.”

“When he stuck them sideways out of the bed, his legs felt as if they were doing a new thing, something they did not understand...”

Young Raymond has been ill lately. Very, very ill. But Mamma and Gladys, his sister, think he is well enough to get dressed in his best Sunday clothes — the nice green suit with the white curly collar — and take a ride in a horse-drawn cab into town to have a photograph made.

At the photographer’s studio, Raymond is fretted over by one and all. The photographer, a man in “black clothes…[with] no hair on his head, and…yellow eyes that moved in a sort of liquid,” poses Raymond on a chair, positions his arms, and tidies his clothes and hair. The man stands beneath the black cloth of his camera and insists that Raymond “keep-quite-quite-quite-still—” Then, with a click of the camera’s shutter, Raymond’s image is captured.

Raymond’s trip to the photographer has taken a toll on his health. That night, as he lies in bed suffering from pains in his arms and legs, his sister visits him with a surprise:

“She held something up, high above his chest. A reddish-brown picture. He knew the table in it, the huge chair, the book, the shiny plant, from some time in the past.

There, too, was that terrible face.

After a moment he turned to her, She smiled and nodded. ‘It’s the photograph, darling. Isn’t it nice?’

He twisted his head away, and his neck ached. Tears came out of his eyes. He felt angry and frightened; as if he had lost part of himself.”

Gladys sets the picture upon the mantelpiece of Raymond’s room so that he can see it all the time. She exits the room, leaving Raymond with the photograph, a burning candle, and his own thoughts.

Only it isn’t just his own thoughts that command him to “keep-quite-quite-quite-still.” There is something else in the room with him, speaking to him. Something wearing a green suit that is now colored reddish-brown, something with brown fingers with their nails split wide open, something with little bony teeth...

“The Photograph” is short and (bitter)sweet. It never lingers on its images for long, yet we see everything that Kneale desires us to see, and we see and feel them clearly. Through small details, we understand that Raymond is not just suffering from a brief illness, that his trip to the photographer’s studio isn’t a whim on his mother’s part. The way she and Raymond’s sister act around him — the deep lines that crease his mother’s face when she looks at him, the false jollity that his sister puts on, the way both of them hover around him — we realize that this photograph might be his last. It will be how the family remembers him.

That fear of being reduced to an image, of being replaced in the minds of one’s loved ones by a photograph, is what drives the final horror of Kneale’s story. In the space of a single page, Kneale gives us the uncanny appearance of the “picture-child.” Like the rest of the story, its form is outlined in short, sharp sentences with a scalpel’s precision.

Horror has a particular source in much of Kneale’s work: technology. The ways in which the supernatural finds an entry into our world via technology is a theme that Kneale will return to again and again. We will find that ancient beliefs and spirits coexist with new fangled contraptions in many of his stories — a new house, a camera, a telephone, recording equipment, the computer. Keep an eye out for this theme as we continue through The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale.

As mentioned earlier, “The Photograph” is one of the “other stories” included in Kneale’s 1949 collection Tomato Cain and Other Stories. Comma Press released a new edition of this book a few years ago, and you may be able to find it at your local library.

If you’d like to sit back and have someone read it to you — and who doesn’t love to have someone read a spooky story to them?! — then please visit Redbeard - Horror Books & Vinyl over on YouTube. There you will find a great selection of spooky books and music — reviews, book hauls, and more. You will also find a video of Mr. Redbeard reading “The Photograph”:

For you Doctor Who fans and lovers of old British television, there is also this episode of Late Night Story. LNS was a BBC show that featured Tom Baker reading macabre short stories directly to the camera. These episodes were bedtime stories usually shown at the end of the broadcast day. Seems like the perfect way to sign-off for the day, if you ask me! (All we got  when it was time for the TV to go night-night here in the United States was the lousy National Anthem.)

Tom Baker and Late Night Story is also the perfect way to sign off this second day of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. Come back tomorrow, and we will talk about the ghost in another kind of machine. You won’t want this telephone call to go directly to voicemail. You’ll want to pick up on the first ring, because...well...“You Must Listen.”

And always, Blog-o-weeners, this holiday season, be sure to live by those immortal words spoken by a wise man: