Amph A Century of Genre Fiction: Disc. The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu (1913) [Horror]

So, I really love certain genres and I’ve long wanted to kind of do a historical look at some of those genres as well as focus on certain authors in those genres. So, as is my wont, I ended up doing a lot of research, using reference books, online resources, etc. in order to create a list of essential books & movies in a few of my favorite genres. Namely: horror; espionage; British mystery; American mystery; & the incredibly broad “thriller.”

Anyway, these are the genres that kind of land right in my sweet spot (there’s one other that I’m kind of considering throwing in as well, but we’ll have to wait and see about that). Where’s sci-fi? Fantasy? Romance? Western? Not in my sweet spot; start your own thread. A lot of sophisticates tend to look down on “genre” fare and it’s true that genre fiction comes pre-loaded with a lot of tropes and clichés, but so too does literary fiction. And I don’t even require genre fiction to subvert those tropes and clichés; often just doing them in a particularly good way is more than enough to elevate a book from being just standard genre fare to being legitimately great literature in my opinion.

I have a list of both books & movies in all of those categories, as well as a few authors in each category that I’ve already kind of explored and want to essentially look at their entire bibliographies. For example, in horror, I’ve set aside Stephen King, Clive Barker and a couple of others that I want to really explore as well as going through my broader list of the best. Some of these lists go way back in time and I wanted a kind of more measured way to tackle these things so I settled on a hundred years (though I’m actually starting in 1914, given that I actually started working on all these lists in 2014, not this year). The plan is to pick a genre (I’ve arbitrarily chosen horror as my starting point) and look at a handful of works and then jump to another genre (I’ve tentatively set aside espionage as the likely candidate) and kind of “catch up” to that first genre. I also do want to work in the stuff that came before the 1914 deadline, so I have a way that I’ll be doing that too, but probably all this is glazing your eyes over. It’ll come clear once I get started, which I will with my next post.

So, horror. 1914. I have a scant three books to look at for 1914, but they look to be all winners. Next time, we’ll be looking at a novel that was originally published in serial form in a magazine in 1913 and was then collected into book format in 1914. The setting is Prague, the late 1800s, a Jewish ghetto . . . and a figure from myth or perhaps a figure from madness has arisen. Join me next time for The Golem by Gustav Meyrink.

 

I'll wait to discuss it more in depth after your review, but The Golem has become so influential in culture in very unexpected ways that it's a little bit amazing...

 

you mad, mad, beautiful, mad bastard.

Espionage you say?

 

Kind of a broad net, espionage. I'm kind of talking Frederick Forsyth, John Le Carre as a couple of the authors who get bibliographical treatment. And people like Eric Ambler, John Buchan, Robert Ludlum, Graham Greene, etc. showing up from time to time. All of these lists kind of stretch the boundaries of their particular genres, but you see there the basic tone of fiction I'm looking for under the espionage banner.

 

Look, you said le Carre and Greene, so we're all good.

 

I don't feel especially versed on any of the genres you listed, so I'm excited to follow this thread if only to see what I'm missing out on.

 

Sounds like a great thread. I look forward to watching it struggle to stay afloat in a sea of comic-book movie topics.

 

The Golem (1914) – Gustav Meyrink

Where is the heart of coral red? It hangs upon a silken thread.

In the Golem, Athanasius Pernath lives in the Jewish ghetto in Prague. He’s surrounded by a cast of memorable and grotesque supporting characters: a Lolita-esque vixen; a pair of twin brothers, one of whom is deaf & dumb; a horribly disfigured shop owner; a doctor who purposely maims his patients; a mysterious next-door neighbor; a strange woman that seems to know things about Pernath’s past that he himself does not remember; a murderer with strange psychic powers; a saint-like rabbi with hypnotic powers. As if this wasn’t enough, Pernath himself struggles with amnesia and epilepsy. A mysterious series of murders breaks out in the ghetto. And then . . . last but not least . . . there’s the Golem.

The Golem is a figure of Jewish mythology. I’ll be interested to hear dp4m give a little insight on how this book’s vision of the Golem stacks up against the versions he’s heard about. The tale told here is of a rabbi who creates a being out of clay and then puts a section of the Torah inside the mouth of the clay figure; enlivened by the power of the Word of God, the Golem is used by the rabbi to carry out various drudgeries, including working on the Sabbath, something no Jew is allowed to do. But one Sabbath night, the rabbi forgets to remove the Word from the mouth of the Golem and the Golem, a soulless, piece of walking matter, breaks free and rampages through the ghetto. In this book, it has been thirty-three years since a Golem was seen in the ghetto and, legend says, this is exactly the number of years that must pass before the Golem returns. According to legend, the Golem will manifest himself into a room with no doors and either stay there as a looming presence in the ghetto or dematerialize his way out of it.

Anyway, Meyrink is a mostly forgotten author; it was only in the 2000s that the bulk of his work became available in English. This book was originally translated into English in 1927 and then again translated in 1995 by Mike Mitchell. It boasts only those two translations, near as I can tell, and, much as I really liked Mitchell’s version, it seems ripe for another translation.

This book is really incredibly rich and filled with symbolism, Christian, Jewish & pagan. There’s also numerology, I think, though I couldn’t follow all that through. But it doesn’t seem like one would simply randomly pick thirty-three as the central figure of a novel unless it meant something. The book is a strange, discomfiting read; it’s a book that’s deeply atmospheric and it slips from reality to dreams to episodes of madness with this incredible facility that keeps the reader constantly struggling to understand where and when these events are happening, if they are even happening at all. It’s a book that really challenges the very nature of reality in its narrative and as such, you really do not know what’s going to happen next at any point. The book uses the Golem as a symbol for humanity. The book is really about the nature of humanity. Are we, like the Golem, simply animated hunks of clay, soulless, wandering without meaning, slaves to the Word of God? Or are we living, breathing spirits, only inhabiting these bodies for a brief while in the midst of our eternal existence? The book is layered and evocative. The book seems to certainly lean toward the first of those outcomes and we’re pursued by symbols for the essential powerlessness of humanity. A man keeps a life-size statue of the woman he once loved; scriptures are read about “chaff on the wind;” a statue changes shape in front of Pernath’s eyes; one of the characters is literally a puppet-maker.

And let me briefly get into some spoilers, so if you want to read this book (and I actually do really recommend it), skip this stuff. If you’re interested but doubt you’ll ever read it, then go ahead and read on.

Spoiler

The Golem really functions almost entirely as a symbolic figure and a figure of dread. I consider the following a spoiler because the book really makes you fear that the Golem could appear at any moment and I think that’s central to really getting the full experience. But in the end, the Golem appears only on a single page of the book, at the climax. But what a climax it is. It’s intense and gripping. Pernath confronts the Golem in his own apartment, only to find that the Golem is, in fact, his own doppelganger. He flees from the Golem and discovers a window that leads into the doorless room. He lowers himself on a rope and finally sees through the window; we, the reader, are not told what he sees. He leaps for the window and, in a really amazing image, “I am hanging between heaven & earth, head downwards, legs forming a cross.” The rope snaps, the Golem vanishes, the doorless room slips away as Pernath plummets downward to the street far below. And, astoundingly, an image from the very first chapter recurs and we finally understand what that image means. It’s an image I had completely forgotten about; it’s only mentioned in the first chapter, where Pernath wakes from sleep with the strange image of stone polished as “smooth as a lump of fat” in his head. In the climax, as he leaps for the window, his hands grasp and then slip off the window ledge; it is this ledge that is the smooth stone. I probably won’t always go into such detail about the ending of a book, but this climactic scene is easily the best scene in the book, so I wanted to talk about it a bit.

And the book does have some ambiguity in it. The murders taking place are central to the last quarter or so of the book’s plot, which finds Pernath framed for the murders by the villainous, hare-lipped Wasserstrum. But, though Pernath has been exonerated by the end of the book, the novel ends without the identity of the real killer being revealed. It could have been any of the characters really; or perhaps simply someone not even in the book. But it doesn’t feel like a cheat.

Okay, end spoilers.

So, I intend to check each book against the genre it falls under and kind of say how it fits there.

Horror? Oh, yes. There are creepy and frightening scenes galore. The most frightening scene is one in which Pernath is lost in a warren of tunnels beneath the city and finds himself in the Golem’s windowless room; the night he spends there is harrowing. A later scene in which a man talks in his sleep is equally terrifying. What’s so bad about a guy talking in his sleep, you ask. Well, for starters . . . he’s not talking in his own voice . . . But it’s the existential horror, the way the book frays reality and posits a monstrous kind of existence for humanity, that will stay with you.

All in all, I loved, loved, loved this one. Great book. 4 stars.

Next time, it’s a posthumous collection of short stories by a horror legend, including a prequel to the author’s most famous novel. Join me next time for Dracula’s Guest & Other Weird Stories by Bram Stoker!

Genre Project Homepage!

 

Yeah. This sounds insanely ambitious. I will be keeping an eye on this discussion.

I bend the knee to the nerd god.

 

I may actually have an explanation for 33 - it's the number of years King David reigned, and is also the number of elements in the Yosher configuration of the Sephirot (10 Sephirot, 22 connections, 1 whole). Consequently it ends up being a number with strong Kabbalistic associations, which makes sense since one of the versions of the Golem tale involves the Kabbalist interplay of the words for "Truth" and "Death" (I.E. in Hebrew the latter is the former with one character erased) - the Golem is brought to life by truth and returned to stillness by death.

Who says you never learn anything from having to do a bunch of research to beat that stupid floor in Wizardry IV video games?

 

What? Ramza. What.

 

Wizardry IV is ****ing hard, Ender.

 

Right, so that's it -- and basically matches my history of the story -- but it's become one of the most enduring of all Jewish folk tales, for a people that basically sum up their holidays thusly:

"They tried to kill us, we won, let's eat!"

Beyond it's original roots, it's always had an essence of fear -- because it's always THE EARTH coming to get revenge; it's always dust, mud, clay... rising up and being instilled with a soul of essentially pure vengeance to protect the Jewish people. It's evolved from the myth as a slave, or rampaging beast and turned into a protector, even inadvertently. Which neatly sums up Moses, really.

One of the fascinating things after this latest-version of the story was... everyone who then tried to kill the Jews (or even significantly ostracized them) at least paid lip-service to the Golem, or outright believed in it. Raiders of the Lost Ark is obviously a fictional film, of a non-fictional time period -- but the one thing they didn't make up was Hitler's belief in the occult for the most part. When Hitler drove the Jews from Prague and confiscated all of their relics and destroyed the synagogues... he destroyed all but one; the Old New Synagogue, where the Golem was rumored to come from -- and stored all of the religious artifacts there, rather than destroying them. Just in case.

This goes on, with even the casual anti-Semitism of the early-Americas and gets used as a narrative device to evoke a sense of wonder from a barnstorming Jewish baseball team in The Golem's Mighty Swing and it resonates because the legend would have made it to the new world and taken root there, though the most pervasive of the Golem stories was from before America was really settled at all.

Even modern culture references this today, with Inglorious Basterds specifically -- in the making of essentially a Jewish revenge film -- goes out of its way to reference the most brutal of the Basterds as "a Golem" as spoken by Hitler.

I think even Grimm took a stab at it and it "meh" but it's ingrained enough as a myth or fable, with enough historical byproduct, that it's unlikely to go away unless the Jews do.

 

Dracula’s Guest & Other Weird Stories (1914) – Bram Stoker

The last sight that I remembered was a vague, white, moving mass, as if all the graves around me had sent out the phantoms of their sheeted-dead, and that they were closing in on me through the white cloudiness of the driving hail.

In Dracula’s Guest, a man on the way to visit Count Dracula on unspecified business, finds himself lost in an isolated graveyard in a driving storm and the things he encounters there terrify him deeply. In the other stories in this book, a cruel judge haunts the house where he died, a writer finds himself in danger of being murdered by beggars, an American on holiday in Europe has an unfortunate encounter with a black cat, love drives a man to murder, a gypsy prophesies that a man will one day murder his own wife and more uncanny and terrifying events occur.

So, a couple of words about this book. It was published posthumously by Stoker’s widow; Stoker died in 1912, not long after the publication of his final novel, The Lair of the White Worm. The book was republished in a Penguin edition (if you can ever get a Penguin edition of any book you want to read, do so) and that edition also includes The Lair of the White Worm. According to Stoker’s widow, Stoker had been working on this collection of short stories before his death; a few of the stories had been published earlier in magazines, but many, including the title story, had never seen the light of day. According to Florence Stoker, Dracula’s Guest was originally written to be the first chapter of the novel Dracula, but it was cut by Stoker’s editors for length. Scholarship is divided on this. Dracula’s Guest is not written in the epistolary format that Dracula is written in and Stoker was notoriously prickly at allowing his editors to have much say in his work (maybe one of the reasons his writing, well, frankly, just isn’t that good). On the other hand, there are drafts of Dracula where Jonathan Harker refers in his journals to travelling through Munich, where Dracula’s Guest takes place, and to having strange experiences there. Probably, the decision to remove Dracula’s Guest from the novel was Stoker’s own and he probably made it early in the writing process. But it’s in Florence Stoker’s interest to sell it this way, of course: at last, more from her late husband’s most beloved book, just as he always intended! Selling it as an intended section of the book that Stoker himself cut very early because it wasn’t very good wouldn’t work quite as well.

Anyway, I am on record as a dedicated non-fan of Dracula (both the original novel and the classic Lugosi film), but I was interested to revisit Stoker and see if I might appreciate his short stories more than his novels. Well, in some ways I did and in some ways I found these stories to be rife with the same sketchy writing that kind of sunk Dracula for me. A lot of the stories are pretty mediocre; a few of them contain no supernatural elements, though this is, of course, not necessary in order for a work to be classed as horror. The Secret of the Growing Gold, A Dream of Red Hands & The Coming of Abel Behenna are the worst of the bunch, pretty typical morality tales, just kind of vague filler with no real point. But a big problem is the predictability. You start a story in this book and you kind of wonder how it’s going to turn out and then it turns out exactly the way you thought it would. This isn’t a crippling problem if the writing offers some reward, but I’ve always found Stoker to be a particularly poor writer. But when a story is so predictable and there’s nothing to set it apart from any other story that’s very like it, there just seems to be no point.

One exception is The Gipsy Prophecy in which a gypsy unsettles a man by predicting that he will murder his wife. It’s maybe the only story in the book that actually had an ending I didn’t see coming. Well, and Crooken Sands, but that ending was just idiotic.

But there are two really, really great stories here. The first, and best, is called The Squaw; I’ve seen it before, published under the title The Black Cat (which caused me no end of confusion when I read Poe’s Black Cat and found it to be not the Black Cat that I had read years ago and always remembered), presumably because of its racially charged title. It’s a genuinely brilliant story. In it, a thrill-seeking American on vacation in Europe has an unfortunate encounter with a black cat and finds the incident difficult to shake, if you get me. It’s a masterful story and the most genuinely suspenseful and horrifying story here. Even having read this one years ago, and thus literally knowing (not just guessing) how it would end, I was riveted by this one.

The other is The Burial of the Rats in which a writer in Paris decides to visit a slum area populated by beggars in order to research his book. But as evening draws on and the writer finds himself so deeply in the slum as to be somewhat lost, he begins to suspect that the friendly beggars have no intention of allowing him to leave alive. This one is really suspenseful; there’s a couple of pages of set-up, but once our protagonist tumbles to his situation, the tension mounts as he must pretend to have no idea of his impending murder and also desperately attempt to discover a way out of his fix. The ending to this one is, unfortunately, anti-climactic and disappointing, so it doesn’t have the haunting sting of The Squaw, which has a brilliant ending, but it’s a great short story nonetheless.

I will say that Stoker is exceedingly bad at characterization and writes some of the worst dialogue you’re likely to encounter, but there is one area at which he is very good and that is at creating atmosphere. He renders some of the locations here really vividly; a hailstorm lashed cemetery in Dracula’s Guest, the dark brooding atmosphere of the judge’s house in The Judge’s House, the dark, confusing paths of the beggars slum in The Burial of the Rats, the pagan shadows that hang over the small Scottish village in The Crooken Sands. These locations I’ll remember. I think that’s a large part of why Stoker’s work has maintained a level of success – I suppose people will always sacrifice great characterization and good technical writing for atmosphere, especially in their horror. I suppose it’s the same impulse that drives people to the multiplex to check out the latest crappily made, totally predictable horror movie: bad as it is, it has some atmosphere.

Anyway, I would recommend against reading this one. It’s just not very good, taken as a whole. You can find The Squaw and The Burial of the Rats online and you should really read them actually, but skip the rest of this book. In fact, here they are, provided free by the Stoker estate: The Squaw ; The Burial of the Rats. Please, do go read those, or at least The Squaw, and come back here and comment on them.

Want spoilers? I know sometimes a short story title or something will stick out and I’ll think, I’d like to know about that one cause I’ll probably never get around to reading it. Well, just ask and I’ll post spoilers and/or more in-depth summaries of whatever you’re interested in behind spoiler tags and we can talk that way.

Horror? Sure. At its best, this book achieves a real frisson. Basically the entirety of The Squaw, once the cat enters the story, is unsettling and, ultimately, genuinely horrifying. And maybe it’s not exactly horror, but a conversation in a small shack as killers gather around it in The Burial of the Rats, well, it’s a nail-biter for sure. But, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, murders, prophecies, spurting blood, eyes clawed out, men swallowed by quick-sand . . . yes, there are plenty of grim things going on here. Shame it isn’t better.

All in all, better than Dracula, but still disappointing on the whole. 1 ½ stars.

Next time, it’s another collection of short stories, this time by a British author with a grim view of the upper classes and an eye toward merciless satire. But is it horror? Well, we’ll find out next time as I finish up 1914 with Beasts & Super-Beasts by Saki.

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Beasts & Super-Beasts (1914) – Saki

Romance at short notice was her specialty.

A fraudulent mystic attempts to change a woman into a wolf – or is it the other way around? An elderly matriarch attempts to use a majestic elk to push her son into romance. A painter finds new inspiration after a wild ox demolishes his neighbor’s living room. A man recovering from a mental breakdown is told a strange story about mysterious deaths. And other high-class folk face situations they are entirely unable to cope with.

Saki was a British satirist who often took as his target the upper crust of British society. He’s been compared to P.G. Wodehouse of the Jeeves series and it’s rather apt but there’s a big difference between the two. Wodehouse saw the upper class as stupid and mostly useless, but he had enough affection that he helped us want to see them come out of their troubles okay. Saki also sees the upper class as stupid and mostly useless, but he has no affection at all, only a razor sharp pen.

This collection of short stories is quite good, but it doesn’t really fit into the horror genre at all. I think Saki’s previous book, The Chronicles of Clovis, would have been a better fit here. There are quite a few stories there that really fit perfectly in the horror, or at least the fantasy, genre. In The Chronicles of Clovis, are the following stories: Esme, a perfectly hilarious story about a wild hyena intruding into a fox hunt; Sredni-Vashtar, one of Saki’s most disturbing stories, about a young child creating a religion focusing on a wild mongoose that lives in a shed on his property; The Remoulding of Groby Lington, a gut-bustingly funny story about a man who takes on the animalistic attributes of his pets; The Peace of Mowsle Barton in which a city man takes to the country for a peaceful vacation only to discover that the legends of witches in the vicinity may be more than legends; Tobormory in which a lovable cat is granted the gift of speech; and the absolutely chilling Music on the Hill in which a couple head into the country for a vacation only for the husband to develop a strange obsession with the great God Pan. It’s, for my money, the creepiest and most gripping of Saki’s stories. Obviously, as you can see from this, Saki’s main theme was the placing of the mannered and proper upper crust in confrontation with nature red in tooth and claw – and the upper crust rarely comes out the winner. These stories are often very funny and often disturbing. There’s a shocking act of violence in Esme that made my jaw literally drop and a scene in The Peace of Mowsle Barton that is really disturbing. And if you don’t find the young child’s prayers to Sredni-Vashtar in that story creepy, you’re better than I am. The Chronicles of Clovis is definitely Saki’s best collection of short stories and one I highly recommend.

But again, all of those stories are in Saki’s previous book, not in Beasts & Super-Beasts, the book chosen for my project. It’s true that The Elk has an absolutely brutal, and perversely hilarious, twist, and a couple of other stories have brief fantastical elements. But I’m pretty sure it was a story called The Open Window that got this book on my list. Because The Open Window is easily the best short story Saki ever wrote. In The Open Window, a young man visits at a country home but he’s puzzled by the fact that the French windows in the drawing room are left open at all times; when the story is unveiled, well . . . The Open Window is brilliant, subversive, funny and genuinely scary – and all this in only four pages. It’s, no question at all, the best ghost story under five pages in length. You really MUST, in fact, read The Open Window. It’s one of the greatest short stories ever written. Please go read it; it’ll take five minutes and you’ll love it.

Anyway, I liked this book. Saki’s wit remains sharp and his writing is as great as always. The stories are funny and clever. It’s a book I can recommend, albeit not as much as The Chronicles of Clovis.

Horror? Well, no. There’s some light supernatural activity in some stories and a few moments of Saki being particularly cruel in his mockery. And The Open Window of course. But, taken as a whole, no. But there’s a nice plug-in: The Chronicles of Clovis – it’s a great short story from Saki that, in my opinion, really does fall under horror.

All in all, quite good, if not as good as Saki’s best. 3 stars.

Well, there’s 1914 in horror. Next time, we’ll head back to 1913 before we move on into 1915. There are three books in 1913 and we’ll get to the first one, next time, with the novel that inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller. Join me then for The Lodger by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes. It’s our first book by a woman and our first book in one of my favorite horror sub-genres: the serial killer story.

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Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913) – Earl Derr Biggers



We find ourselves in a peculiar position . . . Knowing nothing of one another, we have sought the solitude of Baldpate Inn at almost the same moment. Why?

A writer seeks solitude in a deserted mountaintop hotel in the winter months in order to find inspiration for his greatest novel yet. But soon enough more and more people begin to arrive, each with a story more bizarre and unbelievable than the last: a tailor seeking solace for a broken heart, an actress seeking to disappear for a few days in order to get her name into the papers, a university professor seeking to flee negative press over misogynistic remarks and more. And then there’s that mysterious other person, glimpsed only occasionally in the shadows or heard walking about on the upper floors. The author believed himself to be the only person with access to Baldpate Inn; but it turns out there are seven keys to Baldpate.

Earl Derr Biggers is a forgotten author to the degree that even this work is mostly remembered, to the degree that it is remembered at all, as a play that another author wrote based on this novel. If Derr Biggers has a claim to “fame” it’s the creation of Charlie Chan and that character has fallen out of favor, to say the least, in recent years, for the obvious reasons.

This book isn’t a horror novel at all. It’s a kind of mystery/adventure, of the kind where shadowy figures leap out of the darkness and struggle mightily with the hero, gunshots ring out in the night, no one seems to know what exactly is in the hotel safe and people are forever spying on other people. So why is it here? Well, it’s kind of obvious. I mean, it’s about a writer seeking inspiration, a deserted hotel, an isolated location, the winter months . . . it’s the damned Shining is what it is. And with its tale of a motley cast of characters, all hiding something, while trapped in this location, it kind of prefigures Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, as well as, by extension, most slasher movies. So, I suppose it’s here because it’s seen as having a significant influence on the horror genre.

And, anyway, I really didn’t like this book at all. It’s very repetitive and the style is very amateurish. There’s really no tension; all anyone ever seems to do is talk and the book goes on almost four-hundred pages, far too long for the ridiculously thin plot. And once all the mystery is revealed, it’s just incredibly cheesy, all under-cover agents and mobsters and such. And, of course, there’s an unbearably corny romance subplot between our hero, the writer, and the “actress.” And it doesn’t even have the visceral thrills of a slasher film; despite all the strange people and secrets packing Baldpate, not a single person ever dies. I mean, Good God. What is the point? Anyway, I give this one a recommended against. It’s not at all worth your time.

Horror? Not at all, really. Footsteps heard upstairs and a shadowy figure just aren’t enough to even give this book of doldrums a modicum of suspense, much less horror. Not even a single death. I don’t think anyone’s ever even scared.

2 stars.

Okay, next time, we’re going to do the book I said I was going to do this time. Got my wires crossed a bit. Next time, it’s The Lodger by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes.

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But at least it has a fantastic cover. I mean, a swarm of giant keys attacking a tiny castle, the ridiculous word "Baldpate," and the name Earl Derr Biggers, which sounds like something out of a German boner pill spam e-mail. You've got it all right there.

 

The Lodger (1913) – Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes



A strange woman is a narrow gate. She also lieth in wait as for a prey . . . Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.

A mysterious killer stalks the fog-shrouded streets of London, brutally murdering woman and signing himself The Avenger. And then a stranger shows up at the door of the Buntings, a couple with a room to rent. At first, this stranger seems a bit odd, but then tension mounts as suspicion builds. Why does the lodger turn pictures of women to face the wall? Why does he obsessively read the passages of the Bible that discuss the dangers of loose women? And . . . is that a red stain at the bottom of his cabinet . . .? In short, could the strange Mr. Sleuth and the brutal serial killer The Avenger be one and the same?

This novel has been put to film numerous times. The 1944 version is considered a classic, but the version most people are familiar with is the silent film from 1927, directed by a young, up-and-coming director by the name of Alfred Hitchcock. It wasn’t his first film, but it’s still something of a watershed; it was his first thriller.

This book is very clearly inspired by Jack the Ripper and Lowndes is excellent at conjuring atmosphere. The bulk of the book takes place inside the Buntings’ home, but there are sequences where we venture outside the home into the streets that seem perpetually shrouded in dense fog, even during the day. At night, when darkness descends and mixes with the fog, the streets feel decidedly dangerous, even terrifying.

Lowndes is also very good at conjuring interior lives for her characters. The main character of the book is Mrs. Bunting and for that alone, the book feels of interest. I can’t really recall another horror novel with a decidedly middle aged woman as a protagonist. There’s no shortage of female protagonists in the genre, but they’re always decidedly young. The book really gets inside Mrs. Bunting’s head, up to a certain point; it eventually starts to strain credulity that Mrs. Bunting is keeping her suspicions a secret, even from her husband, though there are the compelling interest of a steady financial income (the lodger arrives just as the Buntings are on the brink of absolute poverty) and also the fear that she’ll be thought insane.

Anyway, I’m definitely getting into spoilers here and I should say that the film and the novel diverge in some significant ways, so if you’ve seen the film, these will still be spoilers for the book. And also for the film if you haven’t seen it.

Spoiler

Regardless, the book has its thrills and its scenes of real tension. There’s a gripping dramatic passage where Mrs. Bunting goes to an inquest for one of the Avenger’s victims. And late in the book, Mr. Bunting, his suspicions finally beginning to mount, finds himself following his lodger through the empty, deathly quiet, fog-shrouded streets of early-morning London. That sequence in particular is almost unbearably suspenseful and, at moments, genuinely frightening as you expect, at any second, the lodger to loom out of the fog, bloody knife in hand.

The film version has a very intriguing twist in which the lodger turns out to be a man seeking revenge on the Avenger for the murder of his sister, which neatly explains all of the strange behavior. I expected the same here; the lodger even gives his name as Mr. Sleuth. But no, given that I was expecting a twist, the novel surprised me by not giving me one: the lodger is indeed the Avenger. The climactic scene where the Avenger and Mrs. Bunting come face to face, all pretense gone, the Avenger’s identity revealed beyond a shadow of a doubt, is genuinely breath-taking. It’s a moment of pure terror, the unveiling of the serial killer and his realization that his landlady knows his secret. The book gives us a brief glimpse into the psyche of the Avenger that’s fascinating and intriguing and then, in what must have seemed a very shocking twist at the time of the book’s publication, the novel ends with the Avenger escaping, thinking to himself as he goes that he has “so much avenging still to do.” The idea that the serial killer has moved out of London, but is doubtless headed for some other busy metropolis (we find out that London is the fourth city he’s terrorized) is quite disturbing and it actually sheds a much more grim light on the rest of the book. The way the Buntings keep their suspicions secret is all well and good if it turns out that the lodger isn’t the Avenger, but if it turns out that he IS, then one is lead to the unpleasant and inescapable conclusion that the Buntings are, in fact, responsible for quite a few murders, simply because they refused to report their suspicions to the police. Ultimately, the book ends up being extremely dark, not at all a pulpy thriller of the kind that were popular at the time.

The book certainly has flaws, particularly in the first half in which the book has a very repitious structure with Mrs. Bunting suspecting the lodger then deciding against it and then the lodger doing something creepy and Mrs. Bunting suspecting him again and then deciding against it and then etc. But the last third of the book or so is really quite brilliant.

3 stars.

Horror? Most assuredly. It’s our first serial killer novel, inspired by no less terrifying a figure than Jack the Ripper himself. The chills are mostly second-hand for a while, as grisly murders are carried out off screen. But I mentioned a few scenes in the spoiler section of the review that are quite visceral. A scene of Mr. Bunting taking a late stroll in the fog-shrouded streets is incredibly suspenseful and genuinely frightening. And that climactic scene? In that shocking moment alone, not to even say of the surprisingly dark things that follow, the book sends a shock of real fear into the heart.

Next time . . . well, did you know there used to be an entire genre of fiction dedicated solely to the proposition that Asian people were scary? It was called the Yellow Peril and next time we’ll get into the most famous and foundational book of that genre as we take a look at The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer. And it’s our first cross genre book; it appears on my horror list and also on my espionage list. We’ll see which one it fits in better next time.

Genre Project!

 

Really, really long review this time, but it's just a really fascinating and interesting book with a lot of different interesting elements. Take your time. Luckily, this thread goes slow so you have plenty of time to read it all.

The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu (1913) – Sax Rohmer



At last they were truly face to face – the head of the great Yellow movement, and the man who fought on behalf of the entire white race.

In this book, Nayland Smith, agent for the British government, along with his trusty sidekick, Dr. Petrie, attempt to foil Dr. Fu Manchu, sinister figure of the Chinese underground, in his efforts to take over England and, possibly, the whole of Europe. The battle with the evil Fu Manchu will take Smith and Petrie across England, from quiet country estates where murder lurks in the shadows to the smoky depths of opium dens where every step may lead to a deathtrap to the very dungeons of Manchu’s evil organization. Will Smith and Petrie be able to overcome the Yellow Peril?

Rohmer was an author of pulp novels of varying stripes; he wrote supernatural horror, spy novels and various other kinds of books, but it was with the invention of Fu Manchu that he had his greatest success. Between 1911 & 1913, a series of short stories about Dr. Fu Manchu were released; in 1913, the stories were collected into this book, which was a huge hit. Rohmer wrote two more books in the series and then walked away from the character, stating that he, rather like Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, had begun to feel trapped by his most popular character. But, as with Doyle & Holmes, the character won and Rohmer returned to the character some fourteen years later with a fourth book. When the series wrapped in 1959, there were thirteen novels total. The character of Fu-Manchu has appeared in a variety of films: a series of serials in the 1920s, an iconic Boris Karloff film in the 1930s, a series of Christopher Lee films in the sixties and a parody film starring Peter Sellers, in his last film appearance, as both Manchu and Smith.

Okay, so, in case it isn’t already entirely clear, this is one of the most racist books I’ve ever read. And I’ve read The Lair of the White Worm. It’s a book that’s very much about the fear of the white upper class of Europe and their fear of immigration. I mean, that’s really what it’s about. Fu Manchu and his band of murderers represent a threat to everything held dear by the main character, Nayland Smith. The physical descriptions of the Chinese characters in this book are everything you fear they’re going to be. They draw a physically grotesque picture: sallow skin, slanted eyes, protruding foreheads, claw-like hands . . . there’s even a hunchback. And there’s an amoral quality that’s terrifying as well. Manchu and his henchmen draw the line at nothing. They murder with impunity, torture without compunction, drive people to insanity with drugs and torture. There’s a gripping and disturbing scene where Manchu leads a group of police officers into a trap and then releases poison gas into the hall where they’re trapped. He literally laughs and screams with delight as the men die; Rohmer goes into great detail as to the horrible convulsions of the body, the frothing mouths, etc. Even the one sympathetic “foreign” character is treated in a really stereotyped and clichéd fashion. She’s a slave to Fu Manchu who falls madly in love with Dr. Petrie after a single meeting. Smith tells Petrie that this kind of insane infatuation is “typically Oriental.” Regardless, she then attempts to help Smith and Petrie in their efforts while acting as a sort of double agent inside Manchu’s organization. But her beauty is described in terms of the harem; it’s her intoxicating foreignness that Petrie is attracted to. And her conversations with Petrie reveal that she wants him to possess her in, shall we say, colonial ways: she’s forever asking him to control her, to imprison her, etc. etc. And this is the way the novel treats its most sympathetic foreign character.

But I think the most troubling thing about this book is really . . . just how good it is in almost every other way. I mean to say that it’s pulp at its most visceral and thrilling. It’s easy to see where the short story breaks were originally; every three or four chapters, there’s a bit of a break in the action and a new story begins. But Rohmer’s prose is muscular and vibrant. He puts you in the action in a genuinely thrilling way. A story in which police officers are being murdered and found with their right hands mutilated builds to a really gripping climax in which Petrie is thrown into a water trap; as he flounders amidst the rising waters in pitch black, I think it’s impossible not to get both a thrill and a chill. A section in which Smith and Petrie, both unarmed, are pursued across a deserted beach by three killers with machetes is just unbelievably intense; the climax of the scene, a desperate fight for life in a darkened, deserted cabin on the beach is brilliantly written. There’s a scene in which a drugged Petrie has a strange hallucination of Fu-Manchu’s lair and it’s as vividly written and memorable as any drug trip scene I’ve ever read, full of strange surreal detail and an odd feeling of shifting reality.

Rohmer does a really canny thing in keeping Fu Manchu off screen for long sections of the book. We catch our first glimpse of him over fifty pages in and it is literally that, a glimpse of a figure through the smoke and chaos of a burning building. It isn’t until the end of the book that we spend significant time with him and for all the racism built into the character Rohmer did indeed create a really compelling, terrifying character. There are even a few surprises. Late in the book, a likable supporting character is accidentally poisoned by Manchu; Manchu then risks capture in order to bring him an antidote, stating that, as he was not the intended target of the poisoning and Manchu has no need for him to die, he feels honor bound to cure him since he has the power to do so. Moments like that hint at something beyond the one-dimensional villain of the rest of the book. But there’s another smart thing that Rohmer does. He makes Fu Manchu ultimately far more intelligent and cunning than Smith & Petrie. Our heroes are constantly on the back foot; many of the people they attempt to protect are murdered under their very noses and when captured by Fu Manchu they escape, both times, via the intervention of an outside force, not through any intelligence or strength of their own. At one point, Smith muses that Fu Manchu’s defeat in one particular instance is down purely to luck, not any skill or intelligence on his part. It’s odd for heroes in a pulp novel to be this ineffectual, but it gives the reader a sense that Smith & Petrie are desperately overmatched and that Manchu is exactly the kind of character Rohmer wants him to be, a shadowy, canny puppet master, present even in the moments you feel safest, unstoppable, smarter, faster, more dangerous than you can imagine. It all builds to make Manchu nothing short of a genuinely great villain.

Ultimately, I . . . well, I really loved the experience of reading this book. It’s short, atmospheric and moves like a house on fire. It has the feel of heroes battling long odds and its villain is memorable, frightening and compelling. It’s a book that swept me up in a non-stop adventure; the book rarely pauses for a breath – it’s a rush of a book, always in a dash toward or away from some danger. So what do I do with this, a virulently, unpleasantly racist book that is also incredibly entertaining and wonderfully executed? Well, I guess I say that about it. It is what it is. The racism was so unpleasant that it did pull me out of the book at times. I suppose you might say it exasperated me when it would come up in a particularly awful way because of the way it was breaking into my pleasant experience of the book with unpleasant sentiments that upset me. Still, it is of its time and these kinds of things crop up in a lot of art, though, as I said above, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a work of art this entirely founded on and shot through with racism. Your mileage will vary, decidedly. I kind of have to recommend it though; it’s a thrilling book no question and, if you can divorce yourself emotionally from it enough, a fascinating look at institutionalized racism from not even a hundred years ago.

3 ½ stars.

So, this book appears on two of my genre lists, so I’ll briefly discuss both of them.

Horror? Espionage? Most definitely horror, despite the fact that there’s nothing supernatural here. The book attempts to make you suspect that Manchu has supernatural powers at various moments. There’s a great section where Smith has been cursed in the same way a series of other murder victims were and the section of Smith and Petrie sitting alone in their darkened room, awaiting the curse is really taut and suspenseful and the ultimate deliverer of the curse is quite creepy and disturbing. And there’s plenty of talk about torture, though we never actually see any. The scene of Manchu excitedly murdering a bunch of policemen is disturbing and scary. It’s definitely a creepy book, very atmospheric; you know, mysterious sounds are heard in the darkness around the English estate kind of thing. As to espionage, I’d give it a nod. Smith is a government agent and it’s got a lot of intrigue and double-agent stuff going on. Manchu isn’t, I don’t think, affiliated with the Chinese government, but that’s a small quibble. It’s definitely a rollicking adventure with plenty of action.

Okay, next time, we’ll jump up to 1915 to read the one and only book from that year to make my horror list. And it’s the first book on this list that I’m betting a lot of people reading this have read, probably in school; even if you haven’t read it, I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Join me next time for The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

Genre Project!