Randy’s latest review for Halloween is a good old-fashioned collection of stories from an author who is better known for their non-genre fiction and often lies below the radar.
It may have been a form of madness. Or it may be that he really was what is called haunted. Or it may – though I don’t pretend to understand how – have been the development, through intense suffering, of a sixth sense in a very nervous, highly-strung nature. Something certainly led him where They were. And to him They were all one.
— first paragraph, “In The Dark”
Nesbit is best remembered for The Railway Children, Five Children and It, and other children’s stories. But popularity doesn’t always translate into financial security and according to the editor (Hugh Lamb) Nesbit and her husband were often in need of money, leading her to write a variety of fiction, among them several ghost stories, twenty-one of which are collected in this book. In The Dark, originally published in 1988, has been expanded by seven stories for this reissue.
Two stories in this volume, “Man-Sized in Marble” and “John Charrington’s Wedding,” are among Nesbit’s most famous works, among the more famous ghost stories of their time and still often anthologized. While each will be predictable for contemporary readers, they have a certain power derived from that predictability, insinuating a sense of an unavoidable fate. Somewhat more surprising is that so many of the other stories are quite good, some on a par with those two; for instance, I wonder why that the title story, “The Shadow” and “The Power of Darkness” have been mostly neglected by anthologists. The first is a story of retribution, the second though a bit sentimental deals effectively with a lost love and the issue of that love, and the last is a dark story of murderous envy.
A bigger surprise is that two stories are proto-s.f. “The Five Senses” uses the consequences of scientific research to tell a very human story (it also leans to the sentimental) and “The Haunted House” tells of a lonely man driven to contact an old friend and on reaching what he believes is the friend’s home finding himself in a dubious, potentially dangerous, situation. Meanwhile, “The Three Drugs” and “The Head” wouldn’t have been out of place in Weird Tales, the former offering a mad scientist (and some non-PC language) and the latter offering a mad artist, and both, like “The Power of Darkness,” bordering on the Grand Guignol.
Some of the stories in In The Dark are a bit tongue-in-cheek – telling which might spoil the fun – and a few are rather slight (“Uncle Abraham’s Romance”; “The Violet Car”; “The Mystery of the Semi-Detached”). Of the remaining stories the ones I most enjoyed are “No. 17,” in which a commercial traveler staying at a public house tells a tale of the haunting of one of the house’s rooms and “The Pavilion,” in which a young, sensitive woman’s misgivings about her friends’ activities play out. While I wouldn’t say the best of Nesbit’s stories are the equals of the best by M. R. James or E. F. Benson, all are well-written, their events deployed and described by a thoroughly professional hand in command of her materials, and if you’ve exhausted the works of those other writers, these are worth seeking out.
In The Dark by E. (Edith) Nesbit
Edited and Introduced by Hugh Lamb
(2017, HarperCollins [Collins Chillers Series])
320 pages
ISBN: 978-0008249014
Review by Randy Money
