From god-like ferrets, to ghostly doggies, and on (this evening) to a "cursed" & withered simian extremity - our mammalian carnival of horrors just keeps on truckin'.
More than any of the five authors we've discussed thus far, W. W. Jacobs' popular reputation rests heavily (if not exclusively) on but one tale (and what an influential and oft-parodied tale it is) - "The Monkey's Paw" (1902).
The popularity of the story has not only guaranteed it the status of evergreen "horror anthology" staple, but also allowed/encouraged it to cross over into the realms of children's literature.1 Thus it was, in a mediocre children's miscellany, that I first came across a (no doubt abridged) version of it. The mixture of sadness, profound loss and (off-screen) horror stayed with me for years. In this, I very much doubt I'm alone.
So here I am (and we are) many years on - ready, willing and eager to discuss it (while getting mildly pissed, or caffeinated). To keep us company we have the second volume in the "club's" ongoing mixtape/muxtape series - "Dreadful Thoughts Two: Dread by Dawn". Listen to it, wallow in it, and thank our resident DJ Niall Munnelly for putting it all together.
I'm a terrible man for "further ado" - so (without any more of it) let's get comfortable, and begin…
- And wider pop-consciousness. [back]
Evenin’ horror fans. A cheap & cheerful bottle of Ceferino (Reserva) Shiraz is my poison & my companion tonight. Hope this fine stretch of fine weather isn’t putting you off matters spooky. The summer, after all, is but a fleeting thing…best ignored.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:02 pmStag cider, here. I think I can feel its antlers in my kidneys.
Let’s get this party started!
May 6th, 2008 at 9:04 pmImagine how much more unsettling this story is when you actually have a son called Herbert.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:06 pmCider? You mad bastard. That’s only for young ‘uns who have the constitution to handle it.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:06 pmI made a little supplemental muxtape of spooky music for tonight, as well. It will be an ongoing concern.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:07 pmHa! I only thought of this today. In case you don’t know folks, “wunderkammer” is my brother-in-law and he actually does (have a son etc). A pal of mine (a recent daddy) was nearly in tears reading it - and he doesn’t even have the “Herbert” excuse.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:08 pmAren’t you a great man altogether? This (I listened to it earlier) makes a delicious side dish to the “Dread by Dawn” main course. Ta.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:11 pmOk, so the scene is set. A cold & wet night in a house “far out”. A warm and cheery atmosphere within - full of comfortable familial affection & gentle teasing. A visitor arrives…
May 6th, 2008 at 9:16 pmWhat a denouement. One can see it coming for miles, but it’s still an effective end - perhaps even because we know what’s likely to happen. Hitchcock would later claim that he favored suspense over surprise, and it’s easy to see why.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:19 pmI guess “surprises” are fairly easy - in the sense that they can be bolts from the blue. Suspense, on the other hand, has to be built slowly and carefully. There’s a horror in seeing something coming from miles off. That horrible feeling of wishing it were not so (or not coming), but knowing that, inevitably & inexorably, it is…
May 6th, 2008 at 9:22 pmIf we can backtrack from the denouement a bit, I was struck by one thing about the Sgt-Major’s repeated warnings RE: the paw. They seemed to me somewhat resigned and half-hearted. Did anyone else feel this? That, perhaps, he was ridding himself of it and passing on its doom to another - but in a way he could absolve himself of.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:25 pmI used to think The Monkey’s Paw was too workmanlike a tale for my tastes - as if virtuosic writing guaranteed great reading - but it’s got staying power. It’s a light in that house no one will enter that never seems to turn off, while I’ve all but forgotten the fireworks of less restrained, edgier horror writers I’ve encountered since high school.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:25 pmHello dreaders Fústar and Niall,
I’m not able to stay for the chat and banter but I though I’d offer something as I take my first opportunity to contribute to this delightful project. I’m swigging beer from a can and I think I remind myself of ‘Alf’ from Home and Away back when his idea of a challenge was to keep an eye out for Lance and Martin.
This story was by far the most disturbing for me to date. It’s one I have read and re-read over the years but it was no trouble to revisit it again. I loved and love The Willows and Sredni Vashtar, this one really gave me the fear. Perhaps it’s because I have a son and it all seemed like some horrible allegory for imposing one’s wishes on another human being but I reeled for some time after I read it and even as I was reading it. Jacobs did a frighteningly good job of drawing me into the family circle and making me feel how much they loved and relied on each other only to have it all taken away from them by some distant fakir who was trying to teach a lesson that was hardly suitable for these undeserving and hapless victims. For some reason the fakir in my mind’s eye is the guy from Tintin, he’s a nasty piece of work. (In the great ‘be careful what you wish for’ scheme of things, wouldn’t it be fitting if the paw ended up in the fakir’s own possession to teach him a lesson about wanting to teach other people lessons?)
Anyway, as this is my only post (I’ll read it all tomorrow) I’ll finish up. Once I had accepted that Tintin’s fakir had the power to make the paw do what it did, I believed it all… every last word, I was completely taken in. I felt the desperation of the mother her desire to bring her boy back at all costs, the horror of the father , the misery of both as they found themselves torn between grief and the ghoul (not the Limerick pronunciation or meaning). Much more effective than Pet Cemetery!
Cracking read Fústar, enjoy the evening’s reverie,
May 6th, 2008 at 9:27 pmCnuimh
I would have thought the same thing once, but reading it again one has to admire the precision and the economy. The pacing is also terrific - changing from comfort (and “prosaic reality”) to dread, back to daylight normality, and then into total horror etc.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:29 pmO, hell yeah. It seemed that he knew the Paw was bigger and stronger than him or anyone else, and that any earnest attempts at dissuasion would fall on deaf ears. There’s a whiff of the old Stiff Upper Lip as well, of course. I’m reluctant to turn this into an extra-disciplinary chat, but I reckon a critic would have a field day with this, citing the auld Imperialism, Orientalism and the inevitable blowback.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:32 pmAgreed. The affectionate family atmosphere is beautifully constructed & suggested - plonking us (wet night aside) into a situation as far from horror as one might imagine. The turn, when it comes, is all the more hideous for it.
RE: the fakir, I’ve a hunch the real villain of the piece is (as I’ve suggested above) the Sgt-Major. Does he do enough to stop the terrible fate he knows must await (even if he doesn’t know the details)? I think not.
There’s even a suggestion that he has engineered this transfer, as the father hints at early in the tale:
May 6th, 2008 at 9:36 pmNicely spotted, but he is, if not entirely candid, then not exactly disingenuous in warning the family away from the totem.
…and
May 6th, 2008 at 9:40 pmThat’s the resigned part. The sense of fate dealing its hand. But what about the deliberate desire to be rid of it?
Har! There’s a great exchange between Mr. White (Snr) and the Sgt-Major that hints at the terrors of the exotic other (though I’m not sure how Jacobs meant this to be interpreted - it’s by no means clear cut):
May 6th, 2008 at 9:43 pmYer man Jacobs shares MR James’ talent for juggling moods. I always liked this bit:
May 6th, 2008 at 9:44 pmSurely the most poignant moment (knowing what’s to come) is when Mr. White says
May 6th, 2008 at 9:44 pmI was thinking of Pet Cemetery as I read it too - mad how influential the story has been. Also elements in Hellraiser and Ringu; as fustar alludes with the engineering of the passing on of the paw.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:46 pmAye, the poor bastard.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:47 pmNiall, Sure the Sgt-Major is fairly open with the warnings, but there’s a sort of weary sense of acceptance (and inevitability) about his protests.
The lines…
…seem less designed as attempts to stop the “curse” and more motivated by a desire not to be guilty of the results. As you said, he believes it to be bigger than him and that’s what makes his protests weak and sad.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:50 pmAbsolutely. Those lines are pretty heart-wrenching. We’ve seen the love he has for his family and his comfort with his lot. The fact that the 200 pounds wish is suggested, completely casually, by Herbert (the son) adds to the sense of horrible futility.
The wish was for something he didn’t want and it took away one of the things he needed and treasured.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:54 pmAnother eerie moment (of inescapable fate) comes when the father sees a simian face in the fire. He reaches for a glass of water to throw upon the flames and grasps only…the paw. It wants to be used! A moment straight out of much contemporary horror.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:01 pmAs established in the Whistle discussion, the real horror is parenthood, with marriage a close second:
This was tough reading. He knew, but ultimately couldn’t deny his wife the wish’s awful, inexorable outcome.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:04 pmYes. He struggles with his wife - both physically and in terms of the 2nd wish - but his struggles are almost as half-hearted as the Sgt-Major’s. In this case, though, there’s the overwhelming need for the son to be alive - even though he knows how terrible the returning son will be.
He knows it’s wrong but the house “steeped in shadow and silence” is a horror too. He and his wife no longer even talk for “they had nothing to talk about”.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:13 pmOf course, there is the point that the fakir’s intention was to show that fate couldn’t be escaped - in a sense using the paw tempts fate, but is it to do anything it wouldn’t have happened anyway?
Perhaps Herbert was doomed from the start. Using the paw has really only made them complicit, and enlivened their horror.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:16 pmRight, the hopeless resignation of the old, sometimes miscalled, apathy.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:17 pmOr maybe using the paw drew on death by decades.
Hard to say what is the true horror of the paw.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:17 pmcopernicus,
The fakir…
…so it’s the interference that’s the main offense. It seems obvious, if one follows this train of thought, that this interference is punished by Herbert’s death.
But you raise an interesting point. Maybe the interference is punished, but not in the way the parents think. They don’t cause it to happen (it would have happened anyway) but they’re doomed to live with the conviction that they did. That’s almost as bad.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:24 pmAn aside: Judas Priest rock!
May 6th, 2008 at 10:26 pmNot so obvious - fate rules lives and must therefore be inexhorable. Interference with fate, doesn’t make it rule any less; you just suffer for it.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:27 pmOf course, the corpse dragging itself up the garden path doesn’t seem like it would have happened anyway.
On the otherhand, we never know who or what was outside…
May 6th, 2008 at 10:28 pmThat’s pretty much what I was driving at. As in, the parents are not agents of change - as far as fate is concerned - but they will live out their lives believing they were. That’s one nasty punishment.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:30 pmI was just clarifying that even the first reading wasn’t quite so obvious.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:34 pmRighto, it’s been fun chatting, but bed and daytime duties call. Good night.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:34 pmThe fact that we never actually see the mutilated corpse fits in with the following:
That’s a key point. If we’d seen the animated corpse then you could chuck a lot of the discussions of fate’s intricacies out the window. There’d be proof that the paw caused change and that the parents were agents of change.
As it is we can still put the banging on the door down to “coincidence”. As in many horror scenarios, it could just have been the wind. Does that lack of certainty makes the agony all the more acute?
May 6th, 2008 at 10:38 pmMight turn in early for a change myself. It’s impossible to sleep in the morning its so bright.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:38 pmNight, Niall. Small crew on duty tonight (alas), but fun nonetheless.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:39 pmtheir agony is awful - the father is tempted to allow his son to be brought back, but he feels he has dragged his broken child from his grave and across two miles of dark and empty countryside.
And by not waiting to see what was at the door, he’s now cursed with the “knowledge” of what he’s done.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:41 pmWhen the mother says “I forgot it was two miles”, I was thinking, yes, and six feet of grave!
May 6th, 2008 at 10:42 pmIn his mind, then, he’s “killed” his son twice. Fuckin’ ‘ell!
May 6th, 2008 at 10:44 pmI fucking fixed that “tow” to “two”. God I hate my laptop’s mousepad. If the heel of my palm is on the surface of computer within an inch of the pad, the cursor jumps around and changes get made to text!
O death where is thy sting??
May 6th, 2008 at 10:44 pmIndeed. As if being horribly mangled and killed isn’t bad enough, you have to wake up (still mangled) under six feet of earth, crawl and wriggle your way out, and then walk two miles along a desolate windy road to bang at a door that doesn’t open in time.
Dude, that sucks.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:53 pmI suppose a good modern take would be to have the wish take place and then finish with Herbert’s perspective in the grave - opening his eyes, lighting a match and screaming. Then credits.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:54 pm…and his screaming would be gurgly and strangled - due to his torn and smashed larynx.
The horror of reanimation has (of course) been taken up numerous times, but one of my favorites is the EC Comics story (I think it’s EC) where a wife wishes for her husband back alive and that he may never die again.
He comes back to life screaming in agony from his wounds (and, possibly, embalming) and she decides to end his suffering. No matter how much her axe chops and dissects him, however, his bits still live - writhing in mute agony!
Must find the source of this.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:59 pmAnd with that charming image, exeunt copperknickers.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:02 pm‘Night, Mr. Knickers. May your dreams be full of dread knockings at your door.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:04 pmI only got back very late from a long weekend away and completely forgot about DT. Am so sorry. Will amend this and post some thoughts when I get some work finished.
Sorry F.
May 7th, 2008 at 10:54 amNo problem at all, S.
You weren’t the only no-show! It was a pretty quiet evening all round.
May 7th, 2008 at 11:11 amHe dropped the book on the coffee table with an exaggerated diffidence and, looking pointedly out the window, replied, “I don’t know where it came from originally, but the last man to read that copy of Galaxy 666 wished for death ere he had finished.”
May 8th, 2008 at 10:41 pmniall, It’s sitting in the middle of a pile of books I’m working my way through. Once I reach it I’ll take a deep breath, a stiff drink and plunge in. God help me.
May 9th, 2008 at 1:07 pm