Blog-o-ween 2023: Daphne du Maurier

Can you believe it, Blog-o-weeners? It is 30 October. We are on the cusp of the big day — not to mention the Big Giveaway during the Horrorthon. I wonder what Conal Cochran is giving away this year? It must be something B-I-G, because look how excited Dr. Challis is getting.

We here at LARPing Real Life are wishing you the luck of the Irish this year. We’re pulling for ya, Doc.

While the good doctor is keeping the phone lines (not to mention his local barkeep) busy, let’s you and me settle down for an evening of quiet horror. The three stories we have on tap for today are tales of creeping dread told in the calm, cool style that only British writers seem capable of mustering. Writers like M.R. James, Marjorie Bowen, and Robert Aickman (just to name a very, very few) never allow the out-of-this-world, weird nature of the action in their stories to influence the measured, reasonable tones of their storytelling. There are very few exclamation points in the work of these types of writers, which makes the appearance of the outré even stranger and more disquieting.

The stories we are focusing on today are all from the typewriter of Daphne du Maurier. (Although there are some rumors that some of her work passed through the pens of other writers first — more on that later.) Best known for the 1938 Gothic novel Rebecca, du Maurier also penned several short stories that are darker, more ambiguous, and more shocking than her more romance-oriented novels. Two of today’s three stories have been adapted into major motion pictures, and the third feels as though it would have been ripe for an adaptation of The Twilight Zone. So without further ado, let’s you and I head out to the southwestern tip of England, to County Cornwall, and see what Dame Daphne is up to and where her quiet horror takes us...

For our first story, “The Blue Lenses,” du Maurier takes us to a hospital in London where Marda West is recuperating after an operation to restore her sight. She lies in bed with her eyes wrapped in gauze. The voices of all the nurses and doctors passing through her room assure her that the operation was a success and that her bandages will soon come off. When they do, her doctor tells her that everything will be tinted blue because she has been fitted with temporary blue lenses that will help her eyes adjust to seeing light and shapes and whatnot. After this brief adjustment period, the lenses will be removed and she will see everything perfectly fine.

Ain’t medical science a miracle, dear reader?

The day comes when Marda has her bandages taken off and she gets to see for the first time. She is not prepared for what is revealed to her:

“Smiling, she saw the figure dressed in uniform come into the room, bearing a tray, her glass of milk upon it. Yet, incongruous, absurd, the head with the uniformed cap was not a woman's head at all. The thing bearing down on her was a cow...a cow on a woman's body. The frilled cap was perched upon the wide horns. The eyes were large and gentle, but cow's eyes, the nostrils broad and humid, and the way she stood there, breathing, was the way a cow stood placidly in pasture, taking the day as it came, content, unmoved.”

“‘Feeling a bit strange?’

“The laugh was a woman’ laugh, a nurse’s laugh, Nurse Brand’s laugh...She shut her eyes, then opened them again. The cow in the nurse’s uniform was with her still.”

Uh-oh.

More people come and go. All have animal heads. Some are cats, some snakes, others dogs. Her husband has the head of a vulture. Is Mrs. West dreaming? Hallucinating? Is it the blue lenses? And what will the world look like when they are removed? Find out by listening to the story as read by Nightmare Diary below:

Incongruous animals are at the heart of our next story, “The Birds,” which, aside from Rebecca, is perhaps the most famous story du Maurier wrote.

On a farm on the coast of Cornwall, disabled war veteran Nat Hocken, notices large flocks of birds behaving strangely. He chalks their restlessness up to their intuitive knowledge that winter is coming. That night, Nat’s house and family is attacked by dozens of robins, finches and other small birds.

The next morning, on a walk to the beach, Nat sees whitecaps on all the incoming waves. Soon, he discovers that what he is seeing is not foaming water but thousands upon thousands of gulls. While the BBC announces that birds have attacked people across the country, they do not quite comprehend the seriousness of the situation. Nat does, and he begins boarding up his cottage against further attacks.

The days pass and the attacks become more frequent and more dangerous. Hiding in their house, Nat and his family hear the sounds of naval guns firing and of planes flying above them. Soon, the bombardment, like the radio, goes silent.

What has happened beyond the walls of the cottage? Why are the birds attacking? Will it ever end? Does humanity stand a chance? Listen to Tony Walker read “The Birds” over at his Classic Ghost Stories Podcast to find out:

Our last story, “Don’t Look Now,” was, like “The Birds,” made into a motion picture. Most people who know the tale will picture Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in the lead roles and have a preternatural fear of red raincoats. That’s justifiable. No matter how familiar one is with the movie, however, the original story still has the power to delight and terrify.

After the sudden death of their daughter from meningitis, John and Laura take a trip to Venice, Italy, in an attempt to put some actual, as well as emotional, distance between them and their grief. One night, John catches sight of a small figure in a pixie-hooded cloak. It appears to be a girl running away from some danger. While out for dinner, John and Laura meet a set of middle-aged twin sisters, one of whom may blind, but has second-sight. She tells John that what he saw was a vision of his daughter trying to warn him that he is in danger if he remains in Venice. It seems that Venice has been plagued by a series of murders recently.

A telegram comes informing John and Laura that their son, who is staying at a prep school back in England, has fallen ill. Laura agrees to fly back as soon as possible, leaving John behind to take care of getting their car on a special train running from from Milan to Calais. Long after Laura should have been on her plane home, John sees her in a water taxi with the two sisters. He chases after the trio, but cannot find out where they went. While searching for her, he sees the pixie-hooded girl running through the streets again, this time pursued by a man. The murderer, John assumes. He gives chase, determined to save the girl.

Does he reach her in time? Why was Laura on the water when she should have been in the air? Does John also have the gift of second sight as the old woman said? If so, what is the small figure running through the streets trying to tell him? Tony Walker reads “Don’t Look Now” for his Classic Ghost Story Podcast below:

Daphne du Maurier was born in London, England, in May of 1907. Her father was the actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and her mother was the actress Muriel Beaumont. While she grew up in Hampstead, London, she spent her summers at the family home in Fowey, Cornwall. In 1932, she married Frederick Browning, who was known as the “father of the British Airbourne Forces” and was also an Olympic bobsledder(!), and became Lady Browning after he was knighted in 1946. Later, after being made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1969, her full title was Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, DBE. But she remained plain old Daphne thereafter, as she never used the title.

Though seemingly happily married and the mother of three children, du Maurier held an interesting view of her own sexuality. She claimed that her personality was made up a feminine side — the wife and mother roles she projected to the world at large — and a masculine side that she kept hidden from view. This “male energy,” she said, was the source of her writing. This dichotomy, according to her biographer Margaret Forster, was never truly resolved, and du Maurier allegedly remained in denial of her own bisexuality.

Du Maurier’s writing career began by having some early stories published in her great uncle Comyns’s magazine Bystander. In 1931, she had her first novel, The Loving Spirit, published. In 1938, Rebecca was published and became an immediate hit. However, shortly after Rebecca hit bookstores in Brazil, critics and readers noticed many similarities in plot and specific situations between it and a 1934 novel by Brazilian writer Carolina Nabuco, A Sucessora (The Successor). Though du Maurier and her publisher claimed no prior knowledge of Nabuco’s book, it must be pointed out that when Nabuco had her novel translated into French and published in France, the publisher that she sent it to in Paris was also du Maurier’s publisher.

Did du Maurier see Nabuco’s book, read it, and inadvertently absorb its story? It’s hard to say for sure, but the fact that this wasn’t the only time that du Maurier would be accused of plagiarism does muddy the waters a bit. Author Frank Baker thought there was something funny going on when du Maurier’s short story “The Birds” came out in 1952. The something funny was that Baker had published a novel in 1936 about millions of birds attacking the people of London. His book’s title? The Birds.

Oops!

It doesn’t help quell public opinion that du Maurier worked as a reader for Peter Llewelyn Davies, Baker’s publisher, at the time he submitted his manuscript.

Double oops!

I’m not here to accuse or exonerate anyone of anything. I just report on the news, I don’t make it. I do feel, however, that if one is burning with indignation over du Maurier’s supposed literary offenses, one should take a look at Jonathan Lethan’s 2007 Harper’s Magazine essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” In it, Lethem suggests that everything from inadvertent copying to outright stealing is the norm of literature and has been since the dawn of (written) time. It’s an interesting article made even more interesting by the fact that everything in it has been cut-and-pasted from other sources. The art of literature, it seems, is much like the art of architecture: the importance is in how the bricks are stacked and not where one found them in the first place.

It’s time to say good-bye, Blog-o-weeners. We’ve had a great time here on the coast of Cornwall, but we don’t want to overstay our welcome. What’s that? Why, yes, that does seem like an unusually large flock of birds in the sky. I don’t think it means anything sinister. They’re just migrating to warmer climes. Maybe we’ll see them when we get back to Italy? In the meantime, snuggle up against me, close your eyes, and have...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh?

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Dog Park" by Dennis Etchison

As I’ve mentioned before, I live in Los Angeles, and if you’ve ever been to La La Land, then you know that it’s a dog town. (And as a cat person, it pains me to say that, but there you have it.) Dogs accompany their owners everywhere (or is it the other way around?) — to restaurants, to the grocery store, to the beach. There are dogs of all shapes, all sizes, all breeds. I’ve probably seen more dogs riding in strollers than I’ve seen children — and I’ve probably seen more children on the ends of a leash than I’ve seen dogs. Go figure.

One place that you are sure to encounter a dog off its lead is on the countless hiking paths that wind their ways through the canyons of the Santa Monica, Santa Susana, and San Gabriel Mountains. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been reassured by a fellow hiker that their dog is friendly and they just wanted to get off their leash and have the same freedom as everyone else. Why not just let them run wild in one of the many dog parks in the city, I wonder. Then, I remember this story by Dennis Etchison, and I figure ol’ Fido is safer here with us on the path. God only knows what goes on in the canyon when the sun goes down there in...“The Dog Park.”

“Madding heard the dogs before he saw them.

“They were snarling at each other through the hurricane fence, gums wet and incisors bared, as if about to snap the chain links that held them apart. A barrel-chested boxer reared and slobbered, driving a much smaller Australian kelpie away from the outside of the gate. Spittle flew and links vibrated and rang.

“A few seconds later their owners came running, barking commands and waving leashes like whips.

“‘Easy, boy,’ Madding said, reaching one hand out to the seat next to him. Then he remembered that he no longer had a dog of his own. There was nothing to worry about.”

Madding, a writer in Los Angeles, takes a trip to one of the many dog parks that the city offers. This one happens to be off Mulholland Drive, at a place where the homes of the rich, attached precariously to the canyon walls, overlook everything. It is one that he used to take his own dog to. Only now, he no longer has it. At the park, he meets Stacey and her dog Greta. Stacey is also a writer. She asks Madding where his dog is, and he hints at the canyon beyond the park. “Down there,” he tells her, “I hope.”

Uh-oh.

As they talk, Madding reveals that his dog (who never had a name — Madding hadn’t gotten around to it yet) went missing the month before at this very park. He took off running and never returned. Madding tells Stacey that he is leaving the city for good, but that he thought he would give it one more chance.

Soon, Stacey’s dog Greta goes missing, as well. And as she panics, and Madding tries to calm her, the people in their balconies above seem to go quiet, watchful. It is as if they are waiting for something to happen. But what? Where did Greta go? What awaits Madding as he slips into the dark and verdant canyon?

“The Dog Park” is not a story of out-and-out horror. There is no monster (well, maybe) and no outward violence. There is only the setting sun, the dark of the canyon, and the tinkling of ice in the glasses of those watching the scene below them. Etchison’s story would probably be best described as “quiet horror” (though not, thank god as “elevated horror,” whatever is meant by that backhanded compliment), though its horror may be so quiet that many miss it the first time through. I know I did. After going back to the story again and again and experiencing Madding’s sad desperation, his disgust with life in Hollywood, his decision to go into the canyon and look for Greta, and his hope (however lost) of finding his dog again, the horror of all this happening under the watchful eyes of the people in their canyon homes grew. I’ve been in those canyons, seen those houses, and you just wonder if they are like the boxes at the opera. Merely there to watch the play of life being performed below.

Dennis Etchison was a California native, born in Stockton in 1943. While still in high school. Etchison wrote the short story “Odd Boy Out.” She submitted it to many science-fiction magazines without any luck. Finally, taking a page from the book of his hero Ray Bradbury, who said that a writer should submit their stories to the least likely market, Etchison sent the story to Escapade, one of many “gentlemen’s magazines” that were being published at the time. It was accepted, and Etchison earned himself a $125.00 check.

Etchison has written in many fields, including novels, short stories, screenplays, and movie tie-in novels. Under the pseudonym “Jack Martin,” he wrote the novelization for Halloween II, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (which includes an explanation of just what it is that is happening beneath the mask of the young boy exposed to Conal Cochran’s Halloween commercial — chilling stuff!), and Videodrome.

He’s written screenplays, teleplays, and radio scripts for numerous outlets, including HBO’s series The Hitchhiker, the CBS radio series The Twilight Zone, and Fangoria’s Dreadtime Stories. He teamed up with John Carpenter to produce a script for Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers. Said script was rejected by movie producer Moustaoha Akkad as being “too cerebral.” As Etchison himself described the story:

“Halloween was banned in Haddonfield and I think that the basic idea was that if you tried to suppress something, it would only rear its head more strongly. By the very [attempt] of trying to erase the memory of Michael Myers, [the teenagers] were going to ironically bring him back into existence.”

Ah, what if...what if...

Dennis Etchison died in May, 2019, after a bout with cancer.

“The Dog Park” was originally published in 1993 in the anthology Dark Voices 5: The Pan Book of Horror. Later, it was included in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection. Etchison included the story in his own collections The Death Artist, Talking in the Dark: Selected Stories, and Fine Cuts. “The Dog Park” is another story I’ve chosen from the excellent anthology My Favorite Horror Story, edited by Mike Baker and Martin H. Greenberg.

There you have it, folks. Another day, another Blog-o-ween 2023 entry. If you, like our friend Madding, find yourself alone in the canyons at night calling for your dog to come back, be sure to ask one of those nice people on the balcony of their home for their help. I’m sure they’ve seen exactly where your dog went and are more than willing to point you in the right direction. Well...in a direction, at any rate. What are neighbors for, after all?

In the meantime...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Chimney" By Ramsey Campbell

Parents think they are, oh, so smart. They assume they know so much about the inner lives of their children, and how they think, and how they’ll react to a given situation that parents never stop to remember that a child’s mind is so open to all possibilities that the littlest things can be misconstrued and become a source of fear. In a vain attempt to protect their kids’ psyches, many parents shield them from the world’s obvious sources of terror and anxiety — upsetting world news, the death of older family members, scary television programs and movies, rap music and heavy metal...you know, the usual stuff.

Part of this assumed understanding (or arrogance depending on the parent) stems from misremembering their own childhoods. Parents never seem to recall the mundane moments that happened to their younger selves, the ordinary items that, when seen from the perspective of a child, sent shockwaves of terror through them and opened the door in their minds to a world of fear. Sometimes it was a jacket hung on a chair that looked like a ghoul crouching in the dark of a bedroom when the lights went out that sent shivers up a child’s spine. Or maybe it was when the child turned the crank on a jack-in-the-box, and the tune “Pop Goes the Weasel” played in that off-kilter way, and the anticipation of the lid springing open to reveal the clown within. But what if, the child’s mind proffers, what if it isn’t a clown at all under there? What if...it were something else...something with teeth and claws...and hunger...

Other times, children simply misunderstand the words that their parents say, and that opens vistas of horror to them. Stephen King, in his 1981 history of horror in print, TV, radio, film, and comics, Danse Macabre, talks about the child who couldn’t sleep without the light on because he’d heard his father, who was a baseball fan, talk often of the “twi-night double-header.” King also passes along the story of author John D. McDonald’s son’s fear of something he’d overheard adults talking about, “The Green Ripper.” I myself, growing up as a Planet of the Apes fan, was terrified when I heard Walter Cronkite talk about the “gorilla war” that was happening in Central America in the early 1980s.

I mean, c’mon, I think my fears were justified! It's only a matter of time before our ape overlords take over!

Today’s short story from Ramsey Campbell is also about a child’s misunderstanding of what should be one of the joys of childhood: Christmas. Let’s take a look at the terrors that live in “The Chimney.”

“Maybe most of it was only fear. But not the last thing, not that. To blame my fear for that would be worst of all.”

An unnamed narrator, now an adult, looks back at the time he was twelve years old and afraid of the chimney in his bedroom. He was a socially awkward child, someone who was picked on by those above and below him at school. Everything affected him and caused to feel anxiety and fear — the shout of a teacher, examinations, the size of his school, his mother’s own fears, and his father’s exasperated anger at the both of them.

But the narrator’s worst fears were in his own room. These fears were centered upon the large fireplace there and what the narrator imagined was waiting for him within the chimney. He recalls the time, when he was three years old, that he had seen a movie on television and how that movie had planted the seeds of his fears deep in his little mind:

“I’d seen two children asleep in bed, an enormous crimson man emerging from the fireplace, creeping toward them. They weren’t going to wake up! ‘Burglar! Burglar!’ I’d screamed, beginning to cry. ‘No, dear, it’s Father Christmas,’ my mother said, hastily switching off the television. ‘He always comes out of the chimney.’”

Always? Gulp!

And so a child’s terror is born. It is one that will follow the narrator throughout his young life. Though he tries to confront it and control it, that fear of someone — something — coming out of the chimney persists. But is it just an irrational fear? What of the noises the narrator hears in the chimney? What of the massive form that stands at the foot of his bed one night, its face “like a charred turnip carved with a rigid grin?”

“The Chimney” is one of those slow-burn horror stories that only British writers seem able to tell successfully. On top of that, Campbell uses the perspective of a child (even though the narrator is an adult when he tells his tale) to great effect. Everything for the boy is a source of anxiety. Every sentence seems to depict a world that can never be understood, and therefore, never be controlled. The adults around the narrator are just as confused, just as anxious, so there is no succor to be found there. Anxiety and fear seep from the page into the reader, and we become like children again, confused, powerless, and afraid. All in all, it’s a fantastic story of quiet horror and dread.

Ramsey Campbell was born in Liverpool, England, in 1946. He grew up in a broken home, his parents having become estranged shortly after his birth. His mother, also a writer, but one who went largely unpublished, encouraged Campbell from an early age to send his work off to publishers. Growing up a fan of H.P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and Franz Kafka, Campbell wrote stories of the supernatural and the macabre from an early age.

Having published many short stories throughout the 1960s, it wasn’t until Arkham House came out with his collection of tales, Demons by Daylight, in 1973 that he quit his job working in a tax office to become a full-time writer. His first published novel was The Doll Who Ate His Mother in 1976. This was followed up with The Face That Must Die in 1979. Both were well received, and Campbell was on his way.

“The Chimney” won the World Fantasy Award in 1977. It was first published in Whispers: An Anthology of Fantasy and Horror. Later, it would be a part of Campbell’s own collection, Dark Companions.

For myself, this is another Blog-o-ween story that I found in the excellent Stephen Jones collection Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night (see also the entry on Robert Shearman’s “Granny’s Grinning”). Like the other tales in that book, “The Chimney” is accompanied by some fearsomely creepy illustrations from the pen of Randy Broecker.

That’s all for today, kiddies. Just remember that the world can indeed be a scary place, but our fears are often caused by our not fully understanding what we are seeing and hearing. So, when you hear something scraping its way down the chimney towards you, do not be alarmed! Know that it is only a soot-covered man waiting for the fire to die out so he can bring you...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

Since we are heading into the weekend, I thought I would dead-icate (heh-heh-heh!) Fridays here at Blog-o-ween 2023 to longer form stories. We won’t be checking out anything that can’t be read (or listened to for you audiobook fans) in an evening or two. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you read The Naked and the Dead or anything. I mean, that sounds like an erotic thriller starring Andrew Stevens and Shannon Tweed...

...wait a minute...is The Naked and the Dead the basis for an erotic thriller with supernatural overtones about a high-profile security firm employee (played by Andrew Stevens) who sets up cameras in a swanky mansion in the Hollywood Hills and captures the ghost of a starlet who dances in the nude every night at midnight (Shannon Tweed, natch) and he has to solve her murder so she can find peace and move on but he’s fallen in love with her and can’t let her go? And all this happens against a backdrop of chiaroscuro lighting, neon, and a musical soundtrack made up of saxophone and synthesizers? Is that what The Naked and the Dead is about? Why aren’t we reading that?!

Sorry...got off the main road for a second there.

Anywho, today’s Blog-o-ween entry is a short novel by American writer Elizabeth Hand. It isn’t an erotic thriller set in 1990s Hollywood concerning itself with the surveillance of naked starlets, but it is a folk-horror set in 1970s England and involves a documentary film, a psychedelic folk-rock band, and the supernatural. All these factors come together at an ancient, crumbling house in the Hampshire countryside called...Wylding Hall.

Windhollow Faire, a 1970s acid-folk band with one record to their name and a tragedy in their past, retreats to the country to lay the ghost of the suicide of their lead singer Arianna and to put together enough tracks for their second album. Their manager suggests they take off and isolate themselves from the world at a place called Wylding Hall. Things don’t go to plan, however, when Julian Blake, songwriter, guitarist, and former boyfriend of the dead Arianna, begins acting weird (or is that “wyrd”?) He seems strangely familiar with Wylding Hall and its environs, history, and architecture, even though he tells the group that he’s never been there before.

Then, one day, Julian disappears.

And it’s Julian’s mysterious disappearance that draws a documentary film crew together forty years later to interview everyone involved — the surviving band members, their manager, etc. What happened to Julian? Where did he go? Did the mysterious woman who showed up at the local pub the band was playing in have anything to do with it? Why does every person who stayed at Wylding Hall have a strange story to tell?

The genius of Wylding Hall, I think, is in its construction as an epistolary novel made-up of single person interviews. It reminded me of Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s book Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk. That book is a fascinating collection of remembrances, anecdotes, and yarns culled from hundreds of hours of interviews with scores of people who were there when it happened. These interviews are then presented to the reader in a seemingly unstructured way. There is very little in the way of scene-setting or context. McNeil and McCain remove themselves from the playing field, so to speak, and let their subjects speak for themselves.

I imagine the documentary film crew doing the same in Hand’s novel. They collected all their interviews, then pulled out the parts that they wanted, the snippets that made the best, most coherent story, and set it down for the reader to take in and make up their own minds about what happened. Hand does a wonderful job of giving each of the interviewees their own voice and point-of-view, so that it really feels like we are hearing from different people from different backgrounds with different desires and who have come to different conclusions. It is masterfully done.

This being a folk-horror story, there are plenty of unsettling occurrences that may or may not involve strange rituals, old folk tales, poems that might be spells, and sacrifice. Hand blends all of these together in a heady brew that is powerful, but not overwhelming. She never hits the reader over the head with anything. Everything is subtle, strange, unsettling, as if it were taking place just out of the corner of the eye.

Elizabeth Hand was born in 1957 and grew up in Westchester County, New York. She sold her first story, “Prince of Flowers,” to Twilight Zone Magazine in 1988. Two years later, her first novel, Winterlong, was published by Bantam Spectra. She has written movie tie-in novelizations for The X-Files, 12 Monkeys, and Star Wars. She is a columnist for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She also created and wrote the 1990s DC Comics series Anima.

Both the novel and its multi-narrator audiobook should be available electronically at your local library. If you’d like a soundtrack to go along with your reading, may I suggest listening to Pentangle? They are a band who would have traveled the same circles as Windhollow Faire, and their music is a beautiful and haunting accompaniment to Wylding Hall.

So, cue up the music, pick up your copy of Wylding Hall, settle into a comfy chair in front of a roaring fire...preferably located in a crumbling, rural manse...and...well...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!