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Dec. 27th, 2015 04:04 pmTrying to recall who it was posted a link, back before Christmas, to a Project Gutenberg collection of E. F. Benson spook stories, but I've been reading through them the past few days, so thanks.
I'd read at least one ("And the Dead Spake") as a child, and one or two others felt vaguely familiar. I'm positive I've read a different story, possibly by Roald Dahl, with a similar theme to "The Man Who Went Too Far;" I can't recall a thing about what happens in it, just that somebody tries to create their own Eden through meditation and things inevitably go violently bad with no obvious trigger because humans can't have nice things.
I looked up Benson's Wikipedia entry and facepalmed to read that he'd been a champion figure-skater, along with his other talents. More disturbingly, his death from throat cancer loads even more body horror into "How Fear Departed form the Long Gallery" and "Caterpillars."
Other stray thoughts:
The endings are awfully abrupt, and sometimes a bit anticlimactic. I was disappointed that something like "The Gardener" didn't end in a showdown, after the amazing build-up, but I guess Benson doesn't roll that way.
You'd think Hugh Grainger in "The Gardener" and "The China Bowl" is the same Hugh Grainger from "The Bus-Conductor," but I can't tell since he never mentions, when a haunting comes up, that he's encountered such things before; of course if it's the same narrator he wouldn't need to.
Cats in Benson stories appear to be invariably (a) sinister, and (b) large and gray. If they were solely the former I'd assume Benson just didn't like cats, but the recurring physical description makes me wonder if he had a large gray cat himself and liked to wryly Tuckerize it into the stories.
I really want to know more about the people of Achnaleish.
I'd read at least one ("And the Dead Spake") as a child, and one or two others felt vaguely familiar. I'm positive I've read a different story, possibly by Roald Dahl, with a similar theme to "The Man Who Went Too Far;" I can't recall a thing about what happens in it, just that somebody tries to create their own Eden through meditation and things inevitably go violently bad with no obvious trigger because humans can't have nice things.
I looked up Benson's Wikipedia entry and facepalmed to read that he'd been a champion figure-skater, along with his other talents. More disturbingly, his death from throat cancer loads even more body horror into "How Fear Departed form the Long Gallery" and "Caterpillars."
Other stray thoughts:
The endings are awfully abrupt, and sometimes a bit anticlimactic. I was disappointed that something like "The Gardener" didn't end in a showdown, after the amazing build-up, but I guess Benson doesn't roll that way.
You'd think Hugh Grainger in "The Gardener" and "The China Bowl" is the same Hugh Grainger from "The Bus-Conductor," but I can't tell since he never mentions, when a haunting comes up, that he's encountered such things before; of course if it's the same narrator he wouldn't need to.
Cats in Benson stories appear to be invariably (a) sinister, and (b) large and gray. If they were solely the former I'd assume Benson just didn't like cats, but the recurring physical description makes me wonder if he had a large gray cat himself and liked to wryly Tuckerize it into the stories.
I really want to know more about the people of Achnaleish.
