I’ve reached the first clunker in this collection. And it surprises me, because I have liked everything else I’ve read from M. R. James. But something about this story just didn’t click with me, and I’m not sure why.
Have you ever been so mad about your manuscript being rejected you put a curse on a guy? Because that is the central conceit of this story. An evil wizard type named Karswell sent an alchemy paper to a scientific journal, and it was rejected. The man who rejected it, Dunning, almost a parody of a Victorian scientist, becomes slowly convinced Karswell has ‘cast a rune’ on him and given him three months to live.
It’s not that the scary imagery doesn’t work. The bit where a concerned mother complains about the scary fairytale slideshow that caused a stampede and gave kids nightmares has some genuinely cool ideas, along with the scene were Dunning finds a mouth underneath his pillow.
The intro to this story states that it is ‘genuinely unsettling, even today.’ But I really didn’t get that. What I did get, with the Secretary’s wife being called Mrs. Secretary, the bumbling tram workers, the food poisoning near miss, and Karswell’s final demise, was that this was trying to parody something that I do not have a background it. There seemed to be a joke here, and not one I was getting.
And that’s the way with anthologies. They’re not all gonna hit for you. This one did not. To be fair, ‘Sredni Vashtar’ is a hard act to follow, and everything will be compared to that for a while. This one I just didn’t fall in love with. And so we soldier on.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 