Randy’s latest review on our Countdown to Halloween is a recently reissued classic:
My first impression of Fengriffen House was skeletal. I saw it from the carriage, rising against a stormy sundown like the blackened bones of some monstrous beast – not the fragile, bleached bones of decaying man, but the massive, arched columns of a primordial saurian who had wandered to this desolate moor and there lay down and died, perhaps of loneliness, long ages before. The spires and towers loomed up in sharp silhouette and the structure squatted beneath, sunken but not cowed, crouched ready to spring, so that the house seemed to exist on two planes at the same time – massive and slender, bulky and light, gross and fragile. It was a building that had aged through a series of architectural blunders, and it was awesome.
Charles Fengriffen, the current heir and twelfth master, is concerned by his pregnant wife’s behavior since coming to Fengriffen House; Catherine has become more and more distant as the time of her delivery approaches after learning of the Fengriffen curse placed on the family after a deed of one of Charles’ ancestors, a curse to which she is more vulnerable than any previous Fengriffen bride. Engaged to cure her of what Charles calls superstition, Doctor Pope, an early psychologist, must contend with events seeming to support her belief. Can he cure her or is she destined to be a victim of Fengriffen’s curse?
This novella would be easy to spoil by describing too closely since the plot isn’t especially complex or convoluted, but Case is a solid professional writer who captures the tone of late 19th century prose, and develops and deploys the Gothic feel of his setting effectively. Frankly, you will likely guess the ending, but much of the enjoyment comes from getting there and the final scenes still hold some of the shock value that has made Case a favorite of editor Stephen Jones, who introduces this volume and who included this novella in one of his anthologies (The Mammoth Book of Short Horror Novels).
I haven’t read Case before but apparently he is another American drawn to historical Gothic fiction set outside the United States, rather like Ray Russell, and like Russell mixes it with sex and sadism. (Just to note, sex and sadism were not exactly unheard of in Gothic fiction before them.) “Fengriffen” would make a good companion piece for reading before or after Russell’s collection, Haunted Castles.
(Update: In the U.S. Haunted Castles has recently come out in a trade paperback edition.)
“FENGRIFFEN” by David Case (1971; from Fengriffen & Other Gothic Tales, 2015, Valancourt Books)
