The Complete Supernatural Stories of Fredrick Cowles
commentary by rbadac
Fredrick Cowles & his nicely-crafted ghost stories are among us again, after a long time in limbo. Ash-Tree's biggest book yet at 391 pages, The Night Wind Howls (1999) combines two hopelessly scarce early collections & a convenient (and very welcome) reprint of his barely-rescued third. Cowles' widow revealed to Hugh Lamb the existence of Fear Walks the Night (Ghost Story Press, 1993) when Lamb was in correspondence with her during a search for more Cowles material to feature in his resourceful, high-quality anthologies, a correspondence pleasantly recalled by him in his Introduction to this volume.
Along with an affectionate though muted Foreword provided by Fredrick's son Michael, the picture emerges of a studious, well-traveled & generous man, author of several books on a variety of subjects, a devoted husband & father, a respected & entertaining lecturer. He worked as a librarian, where his editorship of the library system's Bulletin enabled him to provide among its pages the occasional ghost story. Some of these were collected in The Horror of Abbot's Grange (1936), & their origin probably accounts for the vignette quality many of them have; they are, for the most part, short three-pagers, making this first assemblage take on the not unappealing character of a box of chocolates.
The dark Swiss cordials of the group are "The House On The Marsh," a baleful account of a degenerate uncle's suicide, the waterlogged ghosts of his heart-divested victims, & noisome black flies that feast on blood; & 'The Thing From The Sea,' a succinctly grim return of a drowned wife, unpleasant in life & even more so in death:"... he shook the salt water from his eyes, & then he saw, within a few feet of him, a yellow, phosphorescent thing, with a mass of long, black hair. The flesh was eaten away from the face, tiny crabs crawled in the sockets of the eyes, & a hideous sea-snail clung to the place where the mouth had been..."
The petit-fours are the titular story of an evil & treacherous monk who maintains unholy life through his malevolent portrait; "Terrible Mrs Greene," another & more Baroque example of the wife whose living company is a blight, whose company otherwise infinitely worse; "The Bell," Cowles' take on James' "Oh Whistle...," though with a merely respectable demon in place of the reversed bedsheet ghost of James; & "Eyes For The Blind," a nasty bit of possession.
Assorted caramels & cremes are "Guardians Of The Dead," one of the several Gypsy tales Cowles favored due to his Romany ancestry ("The Ring" is another from this collection); "The New Inn," which is haunted by a murderous landlord & his wife; "The Headless Leper," Cowles' first published ghost story (debuting in the library Bulletin in 1931, & selected for a Creeps volume, Nightmares, in 1933); "The Pink Columbine," a pro-royalty piece set during the French Revolution; & "The Limping Ghost" of a murdered painter who reaches out to a brother in the profession.
Quality dips somewhat in stories like "Room For One," far too derivative for its own good; & "Passenger From Crewe," another shaggy-dog ghost insisting upon telling its sad story before fading away in a doubtful climax; but overall The Horror of Abbot's Grange is a fine preparatory collection.
Cowles has indeed been unjustly neglected, mostly because of the rarity of his books; one assumes his absence from the usual periodicals of the time, otherwise Hugh Lamb, Jack Adrian, or Richard Dalby would have found him by now ! Whether or not he actually submitted to them is unclear. It may be that the inclusions in the *Bulletin* & the publishing of his two books, with the hope of a third, were enough for this self-effacing & otherwise adequately occupied man, who seems to have been regarded with affection by everyone he knew. Perhaps he believed that, in the field of the spectral tale, he would always be impelled to think of himself as a well-meaning amateur, not only by his own inclination, but because of his awareness that he shared the period of a Golden Age of the ghost story with contemporaries whose names conjure even in our present time. An ambition such as this would have been in constant eclipse; he may not have dared to stand with the concentration of luminaries on that Olympus.
So he wrote other books instead; on travel, folklore, & literary interest, books for children, books for the general reader; & appears to have done passably well with them, leaving his much-loved hobby in the background-- in one case, literally in a drawer, to be discovered decades later by a new generation of devotees who loved the form as much as he did.
In The Night Wind Howls (1938), Cowles shows himself adept at longer lengths. "The House Of The Dancer" is a fine study of malevolent love enduring beyond death; this & "Wood Magic," with its spicy & perfidious goings-on involving the soul of an evil lord trapped in an oak, are highlights. Length, though well-sustained, does not however aid 'The Vampire Of Kaldenstein,' an ultimately pointless exercise in light of Dracula, coming across more like a humdrum Hammer film plot than a successful story. Certain others, like "The Florentine Mirror," haunted of course, "Retribution," the favor of a fiery death returned by a rival, & 'Rendezvous,' a conversation between the Devil & a notorious bandit on the eve of his execution, would have been at home in televised presentations such as The Twilight Zone or Boris Karloff's old Thriller series.
Other faults that kept Cowles the competent ghost story writer from being a truly great one become evident: the penchant for overexplaining matters which hobbled some of Algernon Blackwood's stories is unfortunately present here; even a run-of-the-mill phantom car fatality like "Out Of The Darkness" could have retained a little more self-respect without the last line stating what should have been considered obvious. He is rather too eager to provide the hurried 'wrap' at the end of some tales; intended to shed light upon the mysteries presented, it all too often leaches the color from them.
There is, too, a sentimentality to some of his ghosts that eschews fear for wistfulness; fine if you like that sort of thing, & effective in its way, but a quality which is usually (and wisely) avoided by most masters, excepting those like Walter de la Mare who have the poetic strengths to bring it off & elevate it from the level of the merely maudlin. "June Morning," "Lavender Love," "King Of Hearts," & "The Lamasery Of Beloved Dreams," as well as "The Castle In The Forest" from Grange, are examples of such, & cannot be recommended to the cynical.
But this does not mean Cowles is incapable of a transcending poetry. In the realm of pure fantasy his creations can still surprise; in "The Lady Of Lyonesse," he mixes the legend of the fabled submerged land with the unlikely ingredient of Horned God worship & witches' Sabbats, & the results, while still somewhat confused, nevertheless manage to generate an unexpected awe.
"Death In The Well," Abbot Thomas with too much plot, "The Cadaver of Bishop Louis," W.F. Harvey by way of James, & "The Little Saint Of Hell," Machen arm-wrestling with W.W. Jacobs, are thematic curiosities, amalgams probably best left unamalgamated; "Voodoo," "The Witch-finder," & "Rats" are decently-handled tales of revenge; "Confession," "The Caretaker," & "The Lover Of The Dead" all familiar formats done better elsewhere; yet all are still far from badly presented, & all are consistently readable. If Cowles cannot claim to being original throughout, he still endeavors to entertain, & only the more well-informed reader of the genre will perceive these lapses.
And he still displays considerable storytelling talent. "Gypsy Violin," probably the most Gypsy of his works in the category, proceeds from beginning to end without faltering, spinning its inevitable web in very satisfying fashion. Another revenge tale, but with an interesting idea: the Gypsy violinist knows the three movements of an arcane musical piece which cause, successively, blindness, madness, & death; without belaboring the premise, Cowles lets the story tell itself, & the result is without blemish.
Notwithstanding his Romany heritage, Cowles the writer is completely English. His purported similarity to M.R. James, not really a precise definition, comes from his favoring Jamesian devices: the disreputable pasts of churches, the fondness for local characters & their colloquy, the unabashedly hideous ghosts/monsters, & of course the traveling antiquarian who is frequently the narrator of events. The Englishness of his style, informed with an obviously vast knowledge of the ghost story tradition, could carry the banners of his literary evaluation even further into these allusion fields; we could just as rightly speak of a Wakefieldic matter-of-factness, a Burragian human interest, a Bensonish delight for appall, in addition to his empathies with James' constructions.
Of course all this inbreeding of the genre is bound to produce some fraternal twins sooner or later. Hugh Lamb points out quite rightly in his Introduction the plot similarities between some of Cowles' tales & those of James & Amelia B. Edwards. Just to be fair though, there is at least one case where Cowles' story ("One Side Only" in Grange) appears to prefigure its lookalike (Wakefield's "The Caretaker" from Strayers from Sheol); both come from the same school of campfire climax that ghost story authors smilingly recall from time to time out of our collective memory.
Fear Walks the Night (1993) is the closed-drawer denizen that rounds out the complete Cowles; though its publication came many years after his death, the letter accompanying it is dated 1947, & is addressed to Naomi Jacob, an author & close friend. In it, Cowles discourses pleasantly on the ghost story, the pleasure it has given him in his life (he died the following year), & his fervent hope that his own efforts would succeed in entertaining others.
What follows is an extraordinary collection, Cowles at his absolute best. His strengths are resplendent, his faults virtually eliminated. To think that it lay hidden all those years, passed on by publishers who considered the ghost story to be a defunct form, resistant to the efforts of Michael Cowles, Richard Dalby, Lamb & others to get it in print -- ! Fear Walks the Night is nothing less than superb.
Fans of the "Blind Dead" films will appreciate the opening story "Fear Walks The Night," about a ghastly Prior blinded by the Saracens, who inhabits an abandoned Templar lodge, where the tapping of his cane is only one harrowing bit of evidence to his presence. "Princess Of Darknes"' is a fine vampiress story that rises above the pedestrian level of his earlier "Kaldenstein;" "Three Shall Meet" & 'The House In The Forest' quiver with grotesquerie. "The Florentine Chest," more than a companion piece to Night Winds' "Mirror," is another memorable belle dame sans merci; but the most resonant villainess of the collection is the unforgettable 'Lisheen,' as comely & soulless a witch as you are likely to encounter this side of Hanns Heinz Ewers' Alraune.
The familiar themes of "Variety Show," a reappearing theatre, "Voodoo Drums," another excursion into the dark secrets of Haiti, "The Strange Affair At Upton Stonewold," of witchcraft & cats, & "The End Of The Lane," where the little girl plays hide & seek, are now made fresh by immersion in Cowles' matured & more confident style. The more carefully realized sentiment of "Christmas Eve," when friends of opposing nationalities are reunited, & "Goosefeather Bed," the story of a dishonored girl which is lyrical & horrifying by turns, shows that Cowles has mastered the elements that bore such promise in his previous work.
Echoes of the Second World War make moving personal dramas of "Gypsy Hands" & "Twilight," though their denouements are almost polar opposites. "Death Of A Rat" is a delightfully vicious account of sympathetic magic reminiscent of Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife & its film Night Of The Eagle (US title: Burn, Witch, Burn).
And hold on to your hats when you read "Punch & Judy"! Most Americans are unfamiliar with the seminal puppet show, & its proliferation of travelling Professors who dragged their booths to any available public venue to stage the recurring string of murders which made up Punch's oeuvre. The majority of this tale is related by Professor Jack Smith himself, & he is damned out of his own mouth utterly & enthrallingly -- but not without help.
A lively essay, "Do You Believe In Ghosts?" & a fond Afterword by Cowles' friend Neil Bell, no stranger himself to readers of supernatural fiction, close the book. Ash-Tree's edition includes a photograph of Cowles & reproductions of the rare dust jackets of his first two collections, the whole bound in attractive wine-colored boards & imprinted red endpapers. Linda Dyde's wonderful dust jacket art depicts a chilling Punch with the booth curtain sweeping in the background, done in finely-rendered black & white -- except for the red of his lips & eyes, & the blood-spattered baton he wields. The bloodied lace upon which the book's title is printed belongs, no doubt, to the unfortunate Judy, whose perspective we share. As thorough a whack on the noggin as this book is, the image is more than apt. Step right up -- Fred wants to have a word with you.
Editions of Cowles' ghost stories:
- Horror of Abbot's Grange (London: Muller, 1936)
- The Night Wind Howls (London: Muller, 1938)
- Fear Walks the Night: The Complete Ghost Stories (London: Ghost Story Press, 1993), limited to 250 copies, introduction by Richard Dalby, afterword by Neil Bell. Including the third, previously unpublished collection of Cowles' tales, this landmark first edition was out of print by its day of release! Over the next very few years realistic value on the book rose to around $250, give or take. But one bookseller been streched that to $700, inducing a sensible Ash-Tree Press to reprint this big omnibus as:
- The Night Wind Howls: Complete Supernatural Stories (Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press, 1999. Introduction by Hugh Lamb, & adding a previously uncollected essay by Cowles on "real" ghosts & a new Forward by Cowles' son, plus the 1946 remembrance by Neil Bell which was first collected in the Ghost Story Press edition. Limited to 600 copies.