H.G. Wells The Valley of Spiders (1905)
I didn't do very well with my last collection of Herbie's short stories, finding them generally patchy and of uneven quality amounting to things which might seem nice ideas as the mind wanders while doing the dishes, but which don't quite add up to a tale. It's hard to miss that a couple of these follow certain narrative conventions favoured by my fifteen-year old stepson, specifically that by which he came up with the saga of the raccoons with rainsticks.
He was back from a weekend at the ranch, and there had been rattlesnakes under the house. 'I called them raccoons with rainsticks,' he informed me, barely able to contain the pleasure taken in his own wit.
'Tell him how you came up with that,' my wife prompted.
'Well,' he began, figuratively taking a thoughtful puff on an imaginary cigar, 'we were in the bedroom and we could hear rattlesnakes under the house, and Courtlandt asked what it was, and I said it was raccoons with rainsticks!'
'What a great story,' I dutifully exclaimed.
Anyway, Wells employs more or less the same composition technique with tales centred upon the appearance of a weird and unusual thing, entailing the discovery of a thing which seems both weird and unusual, with the weird and unusual thing additionally named in the title of the story - The Moth or The Inexperienced Ghost being two examples. Despite being the father - or perhaps uncle - of modern science-fiction, there's not actually a whole lot of science here; although significantly, there's nothing traditionally supernatural, and that which falls outside the realm of anything sciencey should probably be termed either unexplained or just plain weird. These tales have the rhythm and mood of Poe - or what I vaguely remember of Poe - without quite invoking dark forces as anything much beyond a product of human imagination. I suppose therefore that this was supernatural horror catching up with the enlightenment, the death of God, and the industrial revolution.
Yet for whatever reason, I enjoyed this a whole lot more than the collection based around The Time Machine - or Poe for that matter. The stories were written between 1894 and 1905, roughly the decade from which Wells' better novels came, and so most of these are reasonably tight without too much of the whimsy or jabbering which characterised his less successful efforts. The Red Room succeeds as a ghost story in a universe which doesn't really allow for the existence of ghosts; Pollock and the Porroh Man achieves the same but with a more visceral mood which almost foreshadows Lovecraft; and The Crystal Egg serves as an intriguing pendant to War of the Worlds. As seems to be generally true of Wells' short stories, there's nothing here to match the likes of the hits, but it's nevertheless a decent collection in its own right.
I didn't do very well with my last collection of Herbie's short stories, finding them generally patchy and of uneven quality amounting to things which might seem nice ideas as the mind wanders while doing the dishes, but which don't quite add up to a tale. It's hard to miss that a couple of these follow certain narrative conventions favoured by my fifteen-year old stepson, specifically that by which he came up with the saga of the raccoons with rainsticks.
He was back from a weekend at the ranch, and there had been rattlesnakes under the house. 'I called them raccoons with rainsticks,' he informed me, barely able to contain the pleasure taken in his own wit.
'Tell him how you came up with that,' my wife prompted.
'Well,' he began, figuratively taking a thoughtful puff on an imaginary cigar, 'we were in the bedroom and we could hear rattlesnakes under the house, and Courtlandt asked what it was, and I said it was raccoons with rainsticks!'
'What a great story,' I dutifully exclaimed.
Anyway, Wells employs more or less the same composition technique with tales centred upon the appearance of a weird and unusual thing, entailing the discovery of a thing which seems both weird and unusual, with the weird and unusual thing additionally named in the title of the story - The Moth or The Inexperienced Ghost being two examples. Despite being the father - or perhaps uncle - of modern science-fiction, there's not actually a whole lot of science here; although significantly, there's nothing traditionally supernatural, and that which falls outside the realm of anything sciencey should probably be termed either unexplained or just plain weird. These tales have the rhythm and mood of Poe - or what I vaguely remember of Poe - without quite invoking dark forces as anything much beyond a product of human imagination. I suppose therefore that this was supernatural horror catching up with the enlightenment, the death of God, and the industrial revolution.
Yet for whatever reason, I enjoyed this a whole lot more than the collection based around The Time Machine - or Poe for that matter. The stories were written between 1894 and 1905, roughly the decade from which Wells' better novels came, and so most of these are reasonably tight without too much of the whimsy or jabbering which characterised his less successful efforts. The Red Room succeeds as a ghost story in a universe which doesn't really allow for the existence of ghosts; Pollock and the Porroh Man achieves the same but with a more visceral mood which almost foreshadows Lovecraft; and The Crystal Egg serves as an intriguing pendant to War of the Worlds. As seems to be generally true of Wells' short stories, there's nothing here to match the likes of the hits, but it's nevertheless a decent collection in its own right.
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