HENRY BARTHOLOMEW
This is a book of stories about the uncanniness of stone or, rather, sculpted stone – stone that has been shaped to resemble something or someone, or carved to serve some purpose. As the stories collected here demonstrate, once stone has taken a shape, it is remarkable how easily it can become a vessel for all manner of hopes, fears, terrors, and desires. ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image’, the God of the Old Testament commands jealously, and it is easy to see why. There is something divine (or perhaps demonic) about sculpture. As the Prussian philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder put it in 1778, ‘the sculptor stands in the dark of night and gropes toward the forms of gods’ (quoted in Forster 2022). Statues have a strange, perhaps even dangerous, vitality, one capable of inspiring a range of responses, from devotion to destruction, obsession to repulsion.
This vitality has occasionally taken on supernatural proportions. Indeed, stories of statues coming to life have a long history. In the West, the foundational myth of this type is the ancient Greek story of Pygmalion. As told by the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses, the sculptor Pygmalion, offended by the wickedness he sees in the prostitutes of the city of Amathus, sets about sculpting an ideal woman and soon falls obsessively in love with his creation. After praying to Venus for a bride in the likeness of his sculpture, he returns home and kisses his statue only to find warm lips and supple flesh; Venus has made his fantasy a reality. The story has inspired countless imitations, adaptations, and reinterpretations, including Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, where a ‘statue’ comes to life at the close, reuniting a king with his long-lost wife.
This is only half of the picture, however. For while this book is about stories of stone ‘come to life’, it is also, and conversely, a book of stories about the transformation – whether real or figurative – of people and things into stone. The literary scholar Patricia Pulham has shown how this theme of ‘reverse pygmalionism’ is used metaphorically in a range of nineteenth-century realist novels by notable authors like Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and George Eliot (Pulham 2022, 12, 34). For this editor, however, it is in supernatural fiction, not realism, that this idea finds its most powerful expression. After all, when people are scared, they ‘turn to stone’; fear petrifies us. From the myth of Medusa whose gorgon stare was the terror of the ancient world to the White Witch in C S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) – who decorates her palatial grounds by transforming her enemies into stone – becoming lithic is often depicted as a fate worse than death. Embodying the inorganic, stone represents in many ways a kind of anti-life – unchanging, inscrutable, inhuman. It is no wonder that the most terrifying Doctor Who villains of recent years are the statue-like Weeping Angels – alien entities who can only move when they are not being observed and who, in one episode, seemingly turn the Doctor herself into stone.
These two themes – stone come to life and life frozen into stone – give shape and substance to the stories presented here, all of which deal with the darker consequences attending to the creation and admiration of sculpture. The majority of them coincide with the ‘golden age’ of the ghost story (roughly, the 1880s to the 1920s) and the concomitant rise of weird fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Of all the arts, sculpture, it must be said, lends itself especially well to weird fiction’s emphasis on materiality, on strange matter, or rather, the strangeness of matter. Unlike the relatively flat surface of a painting, sculpture occupies space three-dimensionally. Our sensory experience of it, especially of large statuary, is never total. It cannot be experienced from a single viewpoint but retains haptic depths and surfaces that reveal themselves as the viewer changes their position. Circling Bernini’s Baroque masterpiece Apollo and Daphne at the Borghese Gallery in Rome, for example, one could almost believe that the ‘front’ and ‘back’ are two different statues entirely, such is the revelatory power of the shift in perspective.
In this regard, sculpture is often more physically present than other kinds of art – more bulky, durable, and long-lived. It possesses strange temporalities, too. Many of the world’s most famous sculptures are relics of a distant past – the hands that shaped them, the culture that encircled them, long since passed from the world. ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’, reads the inscription on the pedestal of a shattered statue in Percy Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’ (1818), but the pharaoh’s ‘Works’ have long since disappeared, lost to time and the desert sands: ‘Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away’ (Shelley [2014], 311).
As Shelley’s poem powerfully dramatizes, sculpture can outlive its historical moment. Two of the oldest carved figurines ever discovered – the ‘Venus of Hohle Fels’ and the ‘Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel’, both shaped out of mammoth ivory some 40,000 years ago – date from an almost unimaginably distant past when homo sapiens still shared the planet with the last Neanderthals. Even here, however, one can see plainly the imprint of a mind, a vision, a purpose that connects the past to the present, making it tangible, real; a past you can touch. Sculpture is explicitly physical. Of course, in order to preserve these objects, visitors to museums and galleries almost never get to touch sculpture, despite tactility being one of the distinguishing sensory draws of the medium – a proscription developed largely in the nineteenth century in response to increasing visitor numbers (Pulham 2022, 24).
The Victorians, for their part, were bombarded with all manner of carved and sculpted objects, from bric-a-brac to ancient monoliths, academic statuary to cheap souvenirs, architectural reliefs to figurative statuettes. Homes, cemeteries, parks, museums – stonework could be found almost everywhere and at every scale. Nor was its creation the sole purview of solitary artists working in bohemian studios in the hope of winning acclaim at one of the prestigious Academy or Salon exhibitions in London and Paris – even if several of the stories here depict just such a figure. Most shapers of stone were masons or stonecutters – artisans, designers, and tradespeople working in an industry dedicated to quarrying and shaping the material.
And yet, despite the ubiquity of the stuff, sculpture itself remained enigmatic. As the critic Angela Dunstan puts it, sculpture was ‘hauntingly present but rarely interrogated, monumental yet mundane, and, above all, disconcertingly difficult to read’ (Dunstan 2016, 3). Nor was it confined to stone. New techniques and technologies meant that desirable pieces could be reproduced in bronze at a more affordable price for the thriving middle-class market (op cit, 8). Wood was another ubiquitous material, but more outré mediums were also in use, including glass, clay, ceramics, precious metals, wax (Madame Tussaud’s waxworks was founded in London in 1835), and even animal skin (Ross 2020, 117).
Stone, however, served a particularly wide range of purposes in the period – commemorative, aesthetic, structural, and ornamental. In fine art circles, stone sculpture was typically neoclassical and looked to Antiquity for its models and methods. The initially controversial naturalism trailblazed by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) reoriented the field, and by the end of century movements like Symbolism and the New Sculpture were revitalising the artform – as seen in works like George Frampton’s Lamia, a polychromatic bust first displayed at a Royal Academy exhibition in 1900. Its innovative combination of ivory, bronze, and opal infuses the figure with an allusive witchery.
Outside the rarefied halls of the Royal Academy of Art, neoclassicism had already lost some of its lustre thanks to the ongoing Gothic revival in arts and architecture. Beginning in the late eighteenth century but really gaining steam in the nineteenth, the Gothic Revival marked a re-energised interest in Britain’s medieval past. The Gothic – the chief architectural style for large ecclesiastical buildings in the Middle Ages – was positioned as Britain’s indigenous artistic heritage – a ‘northern’ style better suited to the country’s political and religious history than classical architecture (which was seen by its detractors as a foreign, Mediterranean import). The revival generated fresh interest not only in new kinds of medieval-inspired objects, ornamentation, and architectural projects (the Houses of Parliament, for instance), but in the original medieval works themselves – the sepulchral effigies of long-dead knights found in churches up and down the land, for example (and used with chilling effect in E Nesbit’s 1887 story ‘Man-Size in Marble’).
The Gothic Revival also spurred the ‘restoration’ of parish churches – a practice that reached its zenith in the 1860s. Under the influence of the Cambridge Camden Society (later the Ecclesiological Society), described by one historian as ‘the most influential undergraduate society of all time’ (Watkin 1980, 70), almost every parish church in the country requiring refurbishment was overhauled according to the rules and strictures promulgated by the society in their pamphlets and printed proceedings – an approach now considered to have been, in many cases, overzealous, if not downright destructive. Ecclesiastical restoration was occurring elsewhere in Europe, too. The chimeras peering over the parapets of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris (see the front cover of this book for an illustration) are not medieval but date to refurbishments begun in 1844 by the architects Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus, who were keen to revive the cathedral’s Gothic majesty.
Alongside building (and rebuilding) upwards, the Victorians were also busy digging downwards. As the century progressed, archaeology replaced antiquarianism as the most salient means of understanding ancient artefacts, and innovations in the field were numerous. To give just one, somewhat macabre, example, in the 1860s the Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli developed a technique for making plaster casts of the cavities left by the decayed bodies caught in the volcanic eruption at Pompeii in 79 CE. Images of these casts, many taken by the photographer Giorgio Sommer, together with speculative details of the victims’ terrifying final moments, circulated throughout Europe and America (see, for example, Hopley 1870). Though not stone per se, the casts have a poignant statue-like quality, their semi-molten forms – some details in sharp relief, others disturbingly blurred – are notably uncanny.
For an account of British archaeology in this period, the reader is encouraged to look at another Handheld Press title: Strange Relics: Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural, 1895–1954, edited by Amara Thornton and Katy Soar. As their introduction makes clear, the nineteenth and early twentieth century was an exceptionally active period for archaeology. New research, societies, and digs – including a series of major excavations at Stonehenge by William Hawley in the 1920s – were putting Britain’s pagan past in the cultural spotlight. The influence of this past can be seen in several of the stories reprinted here, including those by Arthur Machen, N Dennett, Eleanor Scott, and E R Punshon.
During the colonial period, Britain’s archaeological interests also extended overseas. As the British Empire expanded and new ‘discoveries’ were made, an enormous amount of money and effort flowed into the collecting, itemising, and displaying of world sculpture, much of which was acquired by or gifted to the British Museum, whose Department of Antiquities was established in 1807. The Parthenon Marbles, removed from Athens to London by the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin, between 1802 and 1812, were bought by the Crown in 1816 and placed in the museum shortly thereafter. Hoa Hakananai’a – a moai basalt megalith stolen from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) by an English commodore in 1868 – was gifted to the museum the following year by Queen Victoria. The Amaravati sculptures – decorated limestone slabs from one of the most important Buddhist shrines in ancient India – were received by the museum in 1880 following the dissolution of the India Museum in London (the official museum of the East India Company between 1801 and 1879). The Benin Bronzes – a collection of decorated plaques and sculptures made in the West African Kingdom of Benin between the sixteenth and seventeenth century – came to the museum in 1897 following a brutal military invasion of Benin city by British colonial forces earlier that year.
The list of these sculptures is long, and the history of their acquisition shameful, but the accumulation and display of them attest to a public and institutional appetite for the sculptural productions of the colonies and beyond, an appetite reflected in other public displays such as The Great Exhibition of 1851 (moved to the purpose-built Crystal Palace in 1854), where, in rooms like ‘The Grecian Courts’ visitors could find reproductions of famous sculptures rendered in plaster of Paris (Pulham 2022, 5). For some, however, these imitations weren’t enough. While the souvenir ‘trade’ may have been limited at the beginning of the nineteenth century to Grand Tour aristocrats winding their leisurely way through Europe, by the end of the century new railway and steamship infrastructure had given birth to an energetic tourism industry. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made Egypt an especially popular destination. Gripped by a fascination with all things Egyptian, unscrupulous Victorians started taking souvenirs – from scarabs to mummified remains – back home with them (Edwards 1891, 51–52). Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon’s sensational unearthing of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 further cemented Egypt’s reputation as a destination of choice for the intrepid tourist.
The ghost story and the weird tale responded enthusiastically to this influx of ‘exotic’ objects and artefacts, often using them as a mechanism for curses, apparitions, and revenants of all kinds. Typically, these narratives exploit fears around ‘reverse colonisation’ which is to say, fears that the subjugated colonial Other might return in spectral, monstrous, or displaced form to terrorize British subjects (often in their own homes) or destabilize British society (Arata 1990). I have consciously avoided overloading the book with stories of this type, many of which are, by dint of their historical moment, xenophobic if not explicitly racist. E F Benson’s ‘Bagnell Terrace’ has been included as a less egregious representative of this type. Nevertheless, published just three years after the media frenzy surrounding Tutankhamun’s discovery (and the supposed curse it unleashed), it echoes the orientalist prejudices of its time.
As weird fiction started to cohere into a discrete genre in the first half of the twentieth century in American pulp magazines like Weird Tales, statuary began to take on cosmic, extra-terrestrial aspects. Strange monoliths, ‘Cyclopean’ bas-reliefs, and Elder God idols are regular features in H P Lovecraft’s tales, while Mary E Counselman’s wonderfully bizarre ‘The Black Stone Statue’ (1937) features a sculptor who steals an alien creature for its power to turn everything it touches into unbreakable black stone. Clark Ashton Smith was a sculptor as well as a writer and painter, and produced several hundred figurines from rocks sourced near his home in Auburn, California. With names like ‘The Sorcerer Eibon’, ‘The Mysteriarch’, and ‘The Moon-dweller’, these small, hand-carved pieces were often inspired by (or the inspiration for) his own writings and those of his circle, including work by Lovecraft, who owned several pieces. Smith’s sculptures are an underacknowledged medium for high strangeness, suggesting, as they do, that ‘the weird’ should be understood not merely as a literary phenomenon but as a more encompassing artistic movement. The statues certainly loomed large in the imaginations of other weird fiction writers, including the director of Arkham House publishing, August Derleth, who alludes to them directly and by name at several points in his intertextual short story ‘Something in Wood’ (1948).
While to contemporary eyes many of Smith’s figurines may appear comical rather than nightmarish, there remains something highly suggestive about them. Smith understood the mysterious ambiguity at the heart of statuary. In his prose poem ‘The Statue of Silence’ (1922), an unnamed narrator wandering an Olympian hall spies a statue veiled in drapery. Uncertain as to its form and meaning, the narrator asks Psyche for an answer, to which she replies: ‘The name of it is Silence, but neither god nor man nor demon knoweth the form thereof, nor its entity […] and the gods and demons of the universe are mute in its presence, half-hoping, half-fearing the time when these lips shall speak’ (Smith 1922, 139). Even the gods, it would seem, are not immune to that strange blend of fear and desire that halos statuary.
Psyche’s response is also a testament to the paradox of stasis and activity that characterises the uncanniness of sculpture, and ‘uncanny’ is an important term here. The subtitle of this book is ‘Stories of Uncanny Sculpture’, but what is the uncanny, precisely? While most people know what it is to feel uncanny, definition has proven elusive. Sigmund Freud defined it as that strange sensation of the familiar suddenly becoming unfamiliar, or vice versa, and he lists an impressive number of possible triggers for the experience including déjà vu, dead bodies, misrecognising oneself in a mirror, and, in a bizarre anecdote, the inability to escape a red-light district in a small Italian town.
For Freud, uncanny feelings are the result of the return of a repressed anxiety or belief. In his famous reading of E T A Hoffman’s short story ‘The Sandman’ (1816) – which follows the plight of a man who falls blindly in love with an automaton – Freud’s diagnosis is that the protagonist is suffering from a repressed castration anxiety, relayed symbolically through the man’s fear of eyes and eyesight. It is perhaps worth mentioning that Freud was himself a great collector of statues, idols, and figurines, and kept an assortment of them in his office – including twenty phallic amulets. A recent exhibition at the Freud Museum in London suggests that these objects acted as spurs to his own thinking and may have even informed the development of various psychoanalytic theories and methods (Freud’s Antiquity). Another instance of sculpture’s compulsive power.
Still, if you don’t find Freud’s argument particularly convincing, you may prefer the theory put forward by Freud’s precursor on matters of the uncanny, Ernst Jentsch. Jentsch claimed that we feel uncanny when we experience something that we can’t grasp intellectually or psychologically. As soon as we ‘master’ the experience – for instance, when we realise that the shambling ghoul in the bedroom corner is just a coat being blown by the wind from an open window – the uncanny feeling dissipates. However, for a fleeting moment, Jentsch claims, we are exposed to the true nature of things: nothing is really what it seems – familiarity is a psychic structure or procedure that protects us from the primordial otherness of reality. The most reliable trigger of the uncanny, Jentsch says, is ‘doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate’ (Jentsch 2008, 221). For the tale of terror, this doubt becomes a literary device, a lever by which to turn something ordinary into something profoundly disquieting.
Of course, readers must decide for themselves whether these psychoanalytic explanations hold water. Some critics have argued that psychoanalysis should be thought of not as a science or a therapy but as a kind of Gothic fiction or ghost story in its own right. It is certainly intriguing that the uncanny should coalesce into an object of study at the beginning of the twentieth century – the peak years of the ghost story’s ‘golden age’ (see Luckhurst 1999). Nevertheless, if there is a thread that runs through all of the stories gathered here, it is precisely this troubling of the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, the human and the lithic. Each author, in their own way, makes use of the strange life/death we find in, or project onto, sculpted stone. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen reflects in his book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, ‘stone brings story into being’ (Cohen 2015, 4). This book collates some of these stories, acting as a monument, a monolith in words, to the remarkable potency of the material and the strange influence it has exerted on the darker facets of the human imagination.
The first story is ‘Master Sacristan Eberhart’ by Sabine Baring-Gould, an Anglican priest as well as a prolific author. With interests ranging from hymnody (he composed the lyrics to ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’) to werewolf lore, this story first appeared in the December 1858 issue of The Hurst Johnian – the school magazine for Hurstpierpoint College in West Sussex, where Baring-Gould worked as a Master between 1855 and 1864. Subtitled ‘Not Quite a Ghost Story’, this creepy tale pivots on a strange friendship between a sacristan and a beloved church gargoyle. While the story was likely conceived as a bit of ghoulish Christmas fare for students and colleagues like many of Baring-Gould’s tales it deserves a larger audience.
W W Fenn’s ‘The Marble Hands’ is the first of two stories with this title republished here. First published in the two-volume collection Woven in Darkness: A Medley of Stories, Essays, and Dreamwork (1885), it tells of a young sculptor who receives an unexpected gift from an old friend. In a cruel twist of fate, the ‘gift’ is linked to a shocking family legend and the sculptor must reckon with the phantasms of his ancestry. The story’s author, William Wilthew Fenn, was a painter until his sight began to fail him. He was diagnosed with amaurosis and by his mid-thirties was completely blind. His several collections of stories and essays – produced with the help of his wife, Elizabeth Bowles – were all published after the loss of his sight. Artists and artworks are, unsurprisingly, a recurring theme.
Robert W Chambers’ story ‘The Mask’ is taken from his seminal collection of weird decadence, The King in Yellow (1895). A sculptor has developed a liquid for transmuting any object into pure marble; calamity ensues when a painful truth is unexpectedly revealed. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Chambers trained initially as an artist and illustrator and studied for several years in France. Inspired by these years abroad, ‘The Mask’ is a blend of Beaux-Arts, chemistry, and a love triangle gone awry – all set in the heady atmosphere of a Parisian art studio at the fin de siècle.
Not much is known about Nellie K Blissett. Her father worked for the African Commissariat, and census data shows that she lived on the Isle of Wight (Bassett 2023). Between 1896 and 1905, she wrote eight novels, including The Sea Hath Its Pearls (1901), The Bindweed (1904), and The Silver Key (1906). The story included here is ‘The Stone Rider! A Short Story of the Weird’ – a pacey Gothic tale of secrets, villainy, and comeuppance first published in The Harmsworth Monthly Pictorial Magazine in 1898. Aside from a 1998 reprint in the short-lived horror zine Enigmatic Tales, the story has sunk into obscurity. Its reprinting here should solidify its reputation as one of the quintessential narratives of its type.
‘A Marble Woman’ by the American author William Chambers Morrow presents a disturbingly literal account of reverse pygmalionism. A man’s desire to keep his wife forever young and beautiful, to keep her skin perpetually smooth and pale, leads him to carry out an unorthodox chemical experiment. As her skin begins to harden, the fantasy soon turns into a nightmare. Morrow’s early stories appeared in papers like The Argonaut and the San Francisco Examiner (putting him in contact with another author of the weird, Ambrose Bierce), and a volume of his collected tales, The Ape, the Idiot and Other People, appeared in 1897. ‘A Marble Woman’ was one of his last stories and first appeared in the June 1899 edition of The Penny Pictorial Magazine.
The next entry is from the Pulitzer Prize winning author Edith Wharton, best known for her satirical exposés of upper-class American socialites in novels like The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), and for her bleak New England narrative, Ethan Frome (1911). While Wharton’s short stories have received less attention, they are of remarkable quality and much beloved by ghost story afficionados. ‘The Duchess at Prayer’ first appeared in the August 1900 edition of Scribner’s Magazine. Touring the country mansion of a seventeenth-century Italian ducal family, the narrator is shown a remarkable Bernini sculpture in a private chapel, but something is wrong with her face, terribly wrong. A story told to the caretaker by his grandmother may hold the key to the statue’s extraordinary expression.
An artist by training, the Yorkshire-born author Oliver Onions published three stories concerning sculpture, each one involving a different medium – ‘The Smile of Karen’, ‘Resurrection in Bronze’, and the story featured here, ‘Benlian’. Published in The Fortnightly Review in January 1911 and collected in Widdershins shortly after, it tells of a sculptor who requires a witness (and worshipper) for an experiment involving a misshapen statue in his studio. As the story progresses, the reader, like the narrator, must grapple with Benlian’s magnetic personality. Wrapping an innovative take on the theory of metempsychosis around a masterfully executed character study, this is Onions at his very best.
At under a thousand words long ‘The Marble Hands’ by Bernard Capes is the shortest story in the collection, but no less potent. An author, journalist, and editor, Capes published some forty books in a range of styles and genres, and his work appeared regularly in many of the leading papers and periodicals of the day. Despite this, his stories remain perennially underappreciated. ‘The Marble Hands’ originally appeared in the journal The New Witness along with several other tales. These were then collected together into a single volume titled The Fabulists, published by Mills & Boon in 1915. The book employs a classic framing device in which various narrators take it in turns to tell a tale. ‘The Marble Hands’ is narrated by the enigmatically named Raven, and tells of a peculiar grave in a village cemetery, and the fate of the woman it commemorates.
Howard Philips Lovecraft needs little introduction. The doyen of weird fiction, his stories are a veritable pop-cultural phenomenon and despite the toxicity of the man himself (he was an ardent racist and white supremacist) his influence on the genre’s philosophical and aesthetic commitments is unparalleled. ‘Hypnos’ comes from his early to middle period. A young sculptor in London is fiercely drawn to a beautiful ‘godlike’ man he meets in a crowded train station. The man becomes his friend and teacher and the two commence a series of drug-fuelled cosmic dream quests into unplumbed spheres with dramatic consequences. Is the sculptor’s friend real or just a projection from the wish-fulfilling unconscious of a chronically lonely and unstable young man? Readers must decide for themselves. A characteristic example of Lovecraft’s breathless, catachrestic diction, it was first published in The National Amateur in May 1923.
Arthur Machen’s interest in ancient statues and artefacts can be traced back to his boyhood in Gwent, South Wales, and the unearthing of pagan finds by some local archaeologists. Statuary would go on to feature in several of his major works, including The Great God Pan (1894) and, more directly, The White People (1904). The story published here, ‘The Ceremony’, is a clear precursor to the The White People in terms of theme and content, but is more of an atmospheric vignette than a full story. A masterpiece of suggestion, it was written in the 1890s but didn’t see publication until 1924 in a collection titled Ornaments in Jade. As this title suggests, Machen saw these particular writings in an ekphrastic register in which prose might be wrought into a kind of ornamental sculpture.
Edward Frederic Benson OBE, is perhaps best known for his series of six playful social satires known collectively as the Mapp and Lucia novels. For horror fans, however, these are eclipsed by his several volumes of ‘spook stories’, which stand as some of the best in the genre. His father was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1883; his mother, Mary, was the sister of Henry Sedgwick, a Cambridge philosopher and the first president of the Society for Psychical Research. Edward graduated from Kings College, Cambridge with a degree in archaeology and was involved in several excavations in a professional capacity before taking up writing full time. His sister, Margaret (Maggie) Benson was an amateur Egyptologist and conducted the first woman-led excavations in Egypt in the 1890s. Edward visited her site in Luxor, helping where he could. Maggie’s finds were significant, and a book detailing the excavations, co-authored with Janet Gourley, appeared in 1899. The story published here, ‘Bagnell Terrace’, is one of several that draw on his experiences in Egypt. A mysterious neighbour and a strange statuette of a cat brought back from the Valley of the Kings lead to a terrifying climax. The story was first published in Hutchinson’s Magazine in July 1925.
‘At Simmel Acres Farm’ by Eleanor Scott, the pen name of Helen Leys, is one of the more subtle and sinister tales in the collection. Appearing in Leys’ single volume of supernatural fiction, Randalls Round (1929), it tells of two Oxford students vacationing in the Cotswolds. It soon becomes clear, however, that the name of the farm they’re staying at may refer to something far less bucolic, a simulacrum or, in Middle English, a simulacre: ‘an image (of a god, etc) to which honour or worship is rendered’. While Scott’s debt to other ghost story writers (including most notably M R James) is inarguable, her rich atmospherics are uniquely effective. With folk horror back in the limelight, Scott’s pioneering work in the genre is beginning to receive the acclaim it deserves.
‘The Maker of Gargoyles’ by Clark Ashton Smith is the fourth of a dozen or so stories set in Averoigne – a fictional medieval province in France. As mentioned above, Smith was himself a maker of ‘gargoyles’ – small outlandish statues hand-shaped out of local stone, so the theme is not an unexpected one. Largely self-educated, Smith was wildly creative if something of a recluse. His first published book was a well-reviewed volume of poetry titled The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912), produced when he was just nineteen. A correspondence struck up with H P Lovecraft in 1922 introduced Smith to the weird fiction scene, and would see him go on to produce over a hundred short stories for various pulp magazines. ‘The Maker of Gargoyles’ tells of a shunned mason who pours too much of himself into the two gargoyles he has been commissioned to carve for the city’s cathedral. An unflinching tale about lust and hate made manifest and the ultimately self-destructive consequences of these emotions, it first appeared in the August 1932 edition of Weird Tales.
‘The Man of Stone’ by Hazel Heald tells of a jealous husband (descended from evil wizarding stock) who uses arcane knowledge gleaned from the Book of Eibon to wreak vengeance on his wife and her suspected lover. While Heald is credited as the sole author, the story had in fact been heavily edited and revised by H P Lovecraft, who occasionally offered his services to aspiring weird fiction authors. While the exact nature of their relationship is unknown, they collaborated on at least five published stories, ‘The Horror in the Museum’ (1933), ‘Winged Death’ (1934), and ‘Out of the Æons’ (1935) among them (see Derie 2021). Lovecraft claimed to have all but ghostwritten these stories, but it is Heald’s voice, not Lovecraft’s, that shines through in ‘The Man of Stone’ – their first collaboration and Heald’s first ever story – not least because it features a young woman with guts, intellect, and agency, a virtual impossibility in stories of Lovecraft’s own devising. The story made its debut appearance in the October 1932 edition of Wonder Stories.
‘The Menhir’, by N Dennett, begins with the arrival of a church curate in a small rural village in which he is to take up his new position. His indignation is roused when he observes the local villagers paying superstitious deference to an ancient carved pillar in the church cemetery. But there is something … malignant about the stone menhir, and soon his own faith and sanity are put to the test. A masterfully wrought slab of English weirdness, the story traps the reader in an ever-tightening spiral of claustrophobic dread. Nothing is known about N Dennett – a strong indicator that the name was a pseudonym. Richard Dalby proposed that Dennett might be another of Helen Leys’ pen-names, an attribution echoed by Aaron Worth, who includes this story in his recent edition of Randalls Round. Still, as there is no conclusive proof for this attribution, the theory remains speculative for now. The story was first published in Panics: A Collection of Uneasy Tales (1934) – a book in the ‘Creeps’ series published by Philip Allan between 1932 and 1936. Notably, the jacket illustration for the book, designed by Philip Simmonds, shows a man fleeing from a menacing carved figure behind him; clearly ‘The Menhir’ was a standout story. The Creeps series was edited by Charles Lloyd Birkin, who prefaced this story with the following tag: ‘The power of the Old Gods and of Evil still lingers in quiet corners of England’.
Birkin’s line would not be an inaccurate description of the next story either, Ernest Robertson Punshon’s ‘The Living Stone’, first published in Cornhill Magazine in September 1939. A professor of comparative religion on a trip to Cornwall starts asking questions about local missing persons cases. Teaming up with a chief inspector from Scotland Yard, the pair discover a curious granite monolith known only as the Hunting Stone. The professor has his suspicions, but some horrors have to be seen to be believed. The initial set-up of this story would have been a familiar one to fans of Punshon’s work. Though he produced several short stories over his career, this London author was known primarily for his detective novels, of which he wrote almost sixty. The chief inspector, for example, would not be out of place in one of Punshon’s thirty-five ‘Bobby Owen’ novels, in which a policeman rises up the ranks from constable to commander. Some foes, however, defy natural explanation.
The final story in the anthology is James Oliver Causey’s ‘The Statue’, published in the January 1943 edition of Weird Tales. Jerome Winters, a callous moneylender, seizes a sculptor’s unfinished statue as collateral for a failed repayment. An ultimatum issued by the desperate sculptor is dismissed by Winters, but things change when he starts waking in the night to sounds of a chisel at work. Stranger still, the statue’s limbs seem to be in a different position each morning. Born in California, Causey wrote at least three stories for Weird Tales in the 1940s, of which ‘The Statue’ was the first. In the 1950s, he pivoted to science fiction and crime fiction, producing several stories for various science fiction pulps and a number of hardboiled crime novels with titles like The Baby Doll Murders (1957) and Frenzy (1960). ‘The Statue’ is an expertly self-contained revenge story. For all its straightforwardness, it is perhaps the quintessential example of our theme, and it is hoped the reader will leave this story, and thus the book, feeling decidedly uneasy.
Note
Two stories that deserve a place in the volume but are not to be in found in its pages are Edith Nesbit’s ‘Man-Size in Marble’ and Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s ‘The Black Stone Statue’ as they have already been published in other Handheld Press titles (British Weird: Selected Short Fiction, 1893–1937 and Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891–1937, respectively). Various other tales made the longlist but ultimately had to be left out. These include Lady Emilia Dilke’s ‘The Shrine of Death’ (1886), Thomas Hardy’s ‘Barbara, of the House of Grebe’ (1891), ‘The Black Statue’ (1899) by Huan Mee (the pseudonym of Charles and Walter Mansfield) – a story flagrantly plagiarised a quarter of a century later by Laurence D’Orsay in a 1925 issue of Weird Tales – Margery Lawrence’s oneiric ‘The Shrine at the Cross-roads’ (1932), and A N L Munby’s ‘The Alabaster Hand’ (1949). In the case of Vernon Lee’s stories, of which at least five feature sculpture or statuary, it was felt that as they have now been reprinted several times in recent years, including in a prestigious Oxford World Classics edition, space should be given to lesser-known tales. Nevertheless, if, after finishing this volume, the reader is hungry for more, the above stories come with the editor’s recommendation.
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First publication details
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N Dennett, ‘The Menhir’, Panics: A Collection of Uneasy Tales, Philip Allan, 1934.
E R Punshon, ‘The Living Stone’, Cornhill Magazine, September 1939, 321–33.
James Causey, ‘The Statue’, Weird Tales, January 1943, 20–26.