moon_custafer

Andrew’s copy of Thor: Ragnarok arrived yesterday, and he’s been enjoying it ever since. One thing he likes, which I don’t think has come up in most reviews, is the sound balance – unlike most action films of the past couple of decades, he can watch it at home without constantly having to adjust the volume for comfort, because there isn’t a noticeable number of decibels’ difference between the dialogue and the sound effects.

In my continuing tendency (it’s too vague to call a quest) to read old Weird fiction, I have come across “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” (Robert Smythe Hichens) and “Mysterious Maisie” (Wirt Gerrare).

https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/english/documents/pdf/centrevictorianstudies/guildeaetext.pdf

A scientist repelled by affection confides to his one friend, a priest who is his opposite in most matters, that he’s being stalked by an invisible entity that’s fallen in love with him, because even being too open about what you *don’t* want is tempting fate. Arguably ablist, in that the phantom is described as “moronic” and “an idiot,” and Father Murchison, even if he’s not sure his friend isn’t just imagining everything, feels a shudder of sympathy because he himself once had a mentally-challenged woman obsessed with him. Granted, being stalked by *anyone* is creepy, and arguably Guildea and Murchison, being middle-class and male, are less likely to have had to deal with it from anyone sufficiently in the middle of the bell-curve to have internalized social rules that say “don’t go around attempting to hit on priests or professors without invitation” (it’s probably significant that when Guildea first acts if he might be unintentionally attractive to anyone, Murchison’s first thought is that a particularly intellectual woman might go after him.) At any rate, even the late Victorians seem to have been slightly repelled by this tale of a man being felt up by an invisible-and-inaudible (to humans, anyway) entity that might be a ghost, or might never have been human to begin with; while the 20^th-century produced two radio adaptations, which I wouldn’t mind hearing for comparison.

https://archive.org/details/phantasmsorigina00gree (scan of a complete anthology: “Phantasms”)

This falls into the “girl meets house” trope, I guess. The innocent heroine’s family poverty forces her to take a job as a lady’s companion, and of course the lady who hires her turns out to be head of a cult that recruits victims by this method. Interesting details you don’t always get in this kind of story – the housekeeper, Agnes, who sympathizes with the girl but will absolutely not stick her neck out to help (and who cheerfully admits ‘I’m just no good”); the household guard-crocodile (no self-respecting dog would stay in that place); the various grotesque beings that are brought out for seances (no ambiguous shadows in this tale, unless we want to assume the heroine is just straight-up mad, but that’s a boring interpretation); “Mysterious Maisie” herself, who doesn’t show up until nearly the end and whose nature is left ambiguous.