The Outcast and The Rite – H. de Guerry Simpson; #uncannytales #HandheldPress

JDC

Sep 22

*'In the Salt Marshes of N.J.' by James Hamilton; oil*

"…she had one of the finest minds I know and an extraordinarily vivid personality."

The name of the author rang a bell in my mind when coming across this book, but it took a while to remember why it had stuck with me. Dorothy L. Sayers dedicated Busman's Honeymoon to three friends, one of them Helen Simpson who she met through the Detection Club and became close friends with. Another close friend was Clemence Dane who Simpson collaborated with on a series of detective novels. In Melissa Edmundson's introduction she goes into some detail about the Australian author's work and eventful life, which was cut far too short by cancer.

The thirteen stories in this collection of the uncanny don't jump into a reader's lap shouting about how spooky they are; these are stories that give a feeling of unease, a subtle sense of the disturbing that isn't necessarily obvious to pin down and all the more effective for it. There are thematic threads running among the tales, often more than one. My descriptions of the stories are going to be very cursory so I don't inadvertently spoil them for anyone else.

Landscape and its effect on people plays a major part in several stories including the first, Grey Sand and White Sand, in which a painter living in the marshlands tries to capture its mysterious essence on canvas.

It would explain, he thought, a great many things; and though the actual happening might be too swift or too subtle for a brush to define it, something might remain, a kind of light showing the reason why the land looked as it did, why it took on these aspects and rejected those. For, he thought, what is the use of going on painting surfaces for ever?

(Grey Sand and White Sand)

Like other stories in the collection it features an artist, as does A Curious Story and The Man Who Had Great Possessions. The second one includes two, an actor and a poet. The actor turns to a poet friend for help in communicating with someone else, and in the third a writer also turns to a friend in a cry for help to rid himself of something he's also desperately hanging on to.

In The Rite, a local wood avoided by villagers is another landscape affecting a person's mind, while in Young Magic, part of a house's garden is an imagination's playground for a child, and in Good Company various landscapes in Italy affect a young woman who is traveling there. A street in The Pledge draws and repels outsiders to it, while it could be said that The Outcast features a landscape that refuses someone.

She looked up as he had done, and saw that a light was beginning to glow and tremble against the white walls of the farthest houses. It increased until they were altogether reddened, save for the black slots of shadow marking windows and doors, so gradually, so calmly, that when the first of the torches came in sight she felt as though the little naked lights had pricked her eyes.

(Good Company)

Another sort of landscape encountered by characters in the tales are dwellings that seem to be imbued with their own power. In As Much More Land it's a room in a house where a young man is a guest. A room in Young Magic is as important as the garden, and in Disturbing Experiences of an Elderly Lady and Teigne, the places exerting a strange power are much grander.

Teigne broke the masters, their fortunes, their spirits, their health, their hearts. The village looked on, changeless, and thanked God on Sundays for a lowly station in life.

(Teigne)

Various manifestations of obsessions haunt a few stories; an older woman is obsessed with the sea in The Pledge, the lonely young child in Young Magic imagines a playmate, the writer in The Man Who Had Great Possessions seems to want to leave his obsession behind, and in The Pythoness a client is obsessed with a medium. Good Company might have a presence that's obsessed with finishing their own story.

There she came every evening, to the same angle of the churchyard fence; and every evening, watching the marsh darken, she would forget its lush earthy green, seeing instead the green of shoal water breaking to white against the cliff.

(The Pledge)

The last two stories in the book, The Pythoness and An Experiment of the Dead are more straightforwardly supernatural tales, though Simpson plays around with the typical storylines. The collection is a combination of the eleven tales that were originally published during Simpson's lifetime as The Baseless Fabric, which fell out of print and public consciousness after her death, plus an additional two placed at the end of this book, written for magazines years after the story collection came out.

All of the stories explore one of my favorite subjects-borderlands. At the heart of most of the tales is that shifting borderland of the mind, the elusive grey area of consciousness, and the landscapes provide their own borderlands for minds to probe, the characters's and ours. The writing is gorgeous and the stories are made for mulling over during long autumn evenings.

(Introduction and notes by Melissa Edmundson; published by independent press Handheld Press. The quote heading the post is from a letter Dorothy L. Sayers wrote to Sir Walter Wilson Greg shortly after Simpson's early death in 1940.)