Book Review(s): The Dunwich Horror, Tales of Terror and Mystery & Three Ghost Stories

Dunwich Horror

Revisiting the classics is always a pleasure! Not only are they timeless, but also a great way to admire the beautiful language that's English. So this holiday season, I decided to pick up a few of them to relive my memories of those bygone days...

The Dunwich Horror - H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe are inarguably the best horror fiction writers to have grazed our times, and their works are a must read for anyone who is fascinated with the macabre, morbid and the limitless imagination they offer! One such is The Dunwich Horror, a superlative work of horror that retells the mysterious happenings in the town of Dunwich.

Born out of an inter-racial relationship, Wilbur Whately is an unusual child whose arrival unleashes the true monstrosity towards the townsfolk. Following his grandfather's footsteps, the precocious boy takes into dark arts and his subsequent attempts at getting Necronomicon, a book that deals with spells to invoke the Old Ones - the otherworldly beings of R'lyeh, to wipe off humans from the surface of the earth forms the rest of the novella.

Entirely vivid in its descriptions, TDH is highly evocative and the eerily dark atmosphere adds a fantastic touch to the proceedings. Mind-blowingly creative, this is Lovecraft at his best. If you are looking for a initiation to his body of work, look no further!

Tales of Terror and Mystery - Arthur Conan Doyle

Terror and Mystery

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is perhaps well-known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes and his trusted aide Watson. But Doyle was more than Holmes, Baker Street and the canon. His stories featuring Professor Challenger (The Lost World, The Poison Belt among others) are equally good, if not better, and his short story collection Tales of Terror and Mystery is ample proof of his genius!

Totaling twelve stories (six each for Terror and Mystery), The Horror of the Heights is a sci-fi story that talks about a pilot's encounter with jellyfish like aliens in the sky. The Leather Funnel is a case of a chilling nightware. The genuinely creepy The New Catacomb is a moralistic tale of friendship and betrayal, while The Case of Lady Sannox is a secret love affair gone wrong. The Terror of Blue John Gap is a scary tale of the narrator's fight with an underworld monster. The Brazilian Cat throws in backstabbing relatives to the mix and makes for a thrilling read.

The Lost Special opens the Tales of Mystery segment and recounts the specifics of a train hijack incident that captures the wild imagination of the media. Doyle also possibly alludes to Sherlock Holmes in an indirect way when an 'amateur reasoner' writes thus in The Times to explain the disappearance: "It is one of the elementary principles of practical reasoning," he remarked, "that when the impossible has been eliminated the residuum, HOWEVER IMPROBABLE, must contain the truth."

The next two are perhaps the weakest stories of the lot owing to the main themes losing its 'mystery' value over time: The Beetle-Hunter following a destitute doctor's adventure after he answers a newspaper ad and The Japanned Box involving a widower's yearning for his dead wife. The Man with the Watches is about a ticketless passenger found dead on a train as a case of a missing town doctor is discussed in The Black Doctor. The Jew's Breastplate is a singular occurrence during the tenure of a newly appointed museum curator.

Three Ghost Stories - Charles Dickens

Ghost Stories

A collection of three short stories as the title suggests, the first one, The Signal-Man, talks about a narrator meeting a signal-man who is haunted by a ghost and is overall very engaging despite a lack of clarity about who or what the specter was and what was it trying to do as such by warning the protagonist.

The Haunted House, in two parts, is a bizarre story. The narrator after seeing an abandoned house as part of one of his journeys, is instantly attracted and takes up residence at the place despite local gossip that the house is haunted. Their servants, naturally, are distraught and finally determined to get to the bottom of it all, the narrator and his sister send them away and invite their friends over to stay with them on the condition that they must keep their out-of-the-world experiences to themselves.

The beginning (The Mortals in the House) couldn't be more perfect and shows Dickens flair for storytelling. However, the tale takes a inexplicable twist in the latter half (The Ghost in Master B's Room) that's somewhat outlandish. I later came to know that this was a portmanteau story written by Dickens in collaboration with Hesba Stretton, George Augustus Sala, Adelaide Anne Procter, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell, with each author taking turns to explain the ghosts lurking in each of the guest's bedroom.

Judging the story just based on Dickens's contribution will be a gross injustice and hence it shall be updated once I have read rest of the six parts. The last story, The Trial for Murder, deals with the supernatural aspects concerning a death at Piccadilly. Dickens treats the subject with aplomb, and the climax is a perfect clincher.