Reviewish: Randalls Round

I recently finished up this collection of out-of-copyright short strange stories. It's part of the British Library Tales of the Weird collection which has been gradually building, releasing a steady trickle of mostly little-known stories in a convenient format. I've read quite a few now and they're a mixed bag, but a pretty good mixed bag, particularly if you're comfortable with the rather dated writing style. It really shows how standard writing styles have shifted over time.

This collection is... interesting, intriguing, I can't honestly say it's particularly good. Most of the stories have obvious weaknesses, not around supernatural events, but around the basic plausibility of human behaviour. In some cases the supernatural events seem wildly disjointed from the foreshadowing.

I enjoy a good bit of ambiguity about what's going on, but sometimes it just feels muddled. There's probably something here one could harvest for roleplaying. Some have a nice Jamesian vibe; a couple felt closer to Robert Chambers. The descriptions and atmosphere are generally solid, but let down by aspects of the plot.

What follows is a set of quick reflections on these stories, at least, the ones I made notes about or remember well. The level of detail therefore varies enormously.

Randalls Round: A decent folk horror story about a little-known traditional dance at a small village. I liked the depiction of the dances, and the climax is suitably grim. Even if you can't provide any proof, you should probably tell somebody that you saw the villagers leading a prisoner to the mound on that date and see if that's linked to any mysterious disappearances. You don't need to prove it was occult to get people investigating a potential murder.

The Twelve Apostles: I enjoyed this one. It's distinctly strange in the nature of the occult peril, and the protagonist's cluelessness makes sense given how odd that peril is. It has the familiar "protagonist is in a weird house with a possibly-compromised servant", with some nice description and tension. There's a decent twist around the Apostles. We do close with a friend saying "Oh, if only while we were talking about your evil house I'd told you this very specific and important detail about the other person who died there! I just didn't, for no reason." I cannot in good conscience endorse that particular move.

Celui-La: A man sent for a rest cure in the countryside sees a horrible thing; all quite Jamesian. It's generally considered polite to warn your visitors if there's a monstrous presence haunting the countryside that literally everybody who lives here knows about and avoids, but I do understand the French have mixed feelings about the English. The writing is pretty evocative, and the slow progression of the curse was effective for me. So, too, is the total refusal to explain what the hell the Thing actually is or how it has supernatural influence over anyone.

The Room: This feels 100% like a Father Brown story. Haunted room traumatises everyone with what is clearly the fundamental truth of their own sin, so the obvious innocent whose lack of mental fortitude they're all worried about is completely fine. Nothing about the actual room is disclosed to us, so there's very little weirdness; the story consists of the interactions between the men and showing how their experience changes them.

The Cure: "Tragedy could have been averted if I made the slightest effort or took any interest whatsoever, but I didn't." (not a quote)

Initially it was hard to accept the basic premise of "This man has the interpersonal skills of a cheesegrater, minimal interest in other people or anything beyond his personal affairs, and is prejudiced against anyone unlike himself, and when we were children we'd make fun of my sensitive brother together, so he's the ideal person to host my brother during a severe mental health episode."

But then it occurred to me that yes, the conventional sister who used to make fun of her brother with this fellow, and doesn't like having her traumatised brother in the house with the children because his nervous breakdown creeps out her (but not, from anything the text says, the actual children in question) might well think like that.

Why would you make the slightest effort to keep track of a disturbed man, specifically placed in your care, with a powerful fascination with folklore, on a night repeatedly associated with weird deaths in a specific location? You have a harvest to oversee.

The Tree: A story of accidental tragedy, as a young wife's determination to poison a tree that her artist husband has become obsessed with results in his death, since he has, for reasons that are never clear, become metaphysically bonded to this one nondescript plant with neither occult antecedents nor any pre-existing connection to himself. Pretty much exactly as good as that summary makes it sound.

Simmel Acres Farm: Scholarly sort takes an injured acquaintance to the countryside. It turns out that "my family came from around these parts" means your family held unspecified occult meetings in the exact farm where you are staying. Inherited memory of the precise magical incantation to curse yourself to death, which... I know seeing the weathered and incomplete inscription triggered it, but I don't know why anyone would have written that on the wall anyway.

Markham taking on the face of the sinister statue could be quite effective, but alas, I've seen it before and the lack of any clear reason for that to be happening undermines it. Neither the fragments of family history, nor the surviving clues in the garden, suggest either taking on the likeness of the statue or becoming petrified are plausible things to happen.

All easily avoided by not insisting the farmers whose house you're staying in unlock the private garden they repeatedly asked you to stay out of so you can sunbathe in an overgrown ruined chapel, and maybe not leaving your invalid friend outside in a walled garden alone for the entire day. Did things like "water", "food" and "going to the toilet" not occur to you?

At the end of the story it's not entirely clear whether the friend is actually dead this time, given previous events, but one must assume so because the story ends with no other suggestion.

And Will Ye No Come Back Again? A sort of haunted house story, except the haunting turns out to be the owner herself. To me this suggests that either her real life isn't real - she can't have done all those things if she's a ghost - or, more eerily but without any obvious textual support, that the house is generating a fake memory haunting for her.

On rereading I wonder if the intention is that she's simply returned to her former home having (deliberately) forgotten it all? Her intended age isn't clear, which makes this hard to parse. I read her as a strong-willed youngish woman based on the other stories, her physical fitness and independence, and lack of any history or comment on her age in the text. In that case, it's preposterous that other people wouldn't know it's the same house where she used to live. If she's significantly older, that's slightly more plausible but still not very, given the house and its former owners are well known to her friends.

The idea of this being a story about the weirdness and undoing power of memories and our suppression of them is interesting, but I don't think that's the intention. On balance it just seems to be an indifferent haunting. Perhaps I'm unfair; perhaps it's a deliberately ambiguous story that falls distinctly into the weird. To me it felt more that the story simply isn't very clear about what is going on. Reading it on the heels of At Simmel Acres Farm, which is equally unclear on crucial points, may have coloured my interpretation.

The Old Lady: Despite the off-putting premise of "bet you can't deceive this person into friendship", I enjoyed this on the whole. The protagonist is refreshingly ready to accept unnatural forces at work and they do seem to develop a kind of bond, albeit trauma-based. However, the fairly casual solving by entirely offscreen methods that the protagonist somehow(???) discovered, whose effects are never specified, disappointed me. The climax is trying hard to be frightening, and it manages to be somewhat tense, but the handwaving of the resolution mars it badly for me.

Specifically, the way the protagonist saves them from the awful supernatural power is: she's Irish.

Okay, more specifically: she's Irish, so her brother believed her about the evil curse and they both talked to a cunning man a lot over the summer. That's it. We're left to assume that they somehow happened to find a cunning man who knew genuine supernatural lore, and could identify the specific magic at work from her scanty description, and happened to know a solution, and the first thing he thought of was the correct solution, and they it understood perfectly and executed it correctly the first time.

And none of this was important or interesting enough to cover in the text, so we go straight from "protagonist is in mortal peril" to "everything is fine" with what is functionally a deus ex machina.

More importantly, what became of their budding friendship afterwards? Did anyone, including the friend, mind that they burned down the house and thus probably left friend totally impoverished? Did the friend get treated any better once she was also destitute, or did she have to leave college and get a job, which seems more probable? What is this brother like who was so readily convinced to burn down a stranger's country house as part of a witch-busting scheme but does not appear in the story at all?

Unburied Bane: This is fundamentally a story about how men are absolute bastards, with an incidental haunting.

On renting an absolute wreck from a peculiar old woman who lives alone in a house, and then being told by confused locals that nobody lives in that house since the death years ago, I feel most people would at a bare minimum tell the locals the name of this woman. If nothing else they're already probably looking at you like a lunatic and giving that information is a natural way to support the story you told them. I do not think anyone at all would go back to the extremely sinister fungal wreck and simply carry on.

However, the insensitive husband obsessed with his work and blithely ignoring his wife's opinions, concerns, and health to go ahead and stay in the place for weeks or months is sadly believable. Having seen her turn into a nervous wreck, he finishes his work and promptly heads off for a week in London to show it off, refusing to let wife join him despite her earnest pleas, for no reason at all beyond "you don't need to be scared of this place, silly woman". A plausible, but textually-unsupported, reason is that he's going off to have an affair or otherwise get up to no good. His miserable death is a welcome conclusion to this story.

Of course, in any roleplaying game, the party would have burned the farm to the ground and left long ago. I'm not entirely sure why the wife doesn't do something other than remain miserably in the house - she must have some money to pay for supplies while her husband is away on a long trip, so it seems plausible she could pay to lodge at a different farm. I assume her not telling anybody about the incredibly haunted house is because she's physically isolated (her husband isn't walking her to the village or anything), and socially isolated by being a relatively posh outsider who perhaps can't bring herself to gossip about supernatural goings-on with the country folk.

As I recall, the hag's endgame isn't clear here. That's fine for weird supernatural powers, but with a conspicuously human(ish) antagonist, I feel like she should have some discernable motivation. It seems to be mostly generic malevolence, but the story seems torn on whether she wants to be left well alone or actually wants somebody to interfere so she can... return? Regain her power? Dunno.

The Menhir: A curate moving into a village with an ancient stone idol by the graveyard succumbs to terror. It's fairly effective in its depiction of unstoppable, creeping menace, and the nature of the thing is pleasingly enigmatic. It feels like somebody should at some point have tried smashing the extremely evil statue over the last thousand years or so? I remain baffled as to why a large assortment of villagers are crushed to death by, apparently, the statue seeking vengeance for our protagonist's defiance and being unable to locate him... in a cottage directly across the road.

You'd think something like "half a dozen people have been inexplicably crushed to death in the past coulpe of weeks" would result in some attention from the authorities, even in this time period and in the countryside. Also the enormous storm and perpetual fog that's engulfed one specific village.