Finding Hugh Walpole

I had been thinking about going swimming. It would have been the first time in Lord knows how long since I'd been, but the weather wasn't having it. Initially, the weather report had read full sun and eighty-some degrees. Well, in northern Minnesota, the weather seems to be a different animal than is found anywhere else. So there I was, sitting cross-legged on the end of a dock, bracing myself and my inflatable Justice League pool raft against a persistent wind that whipped the slate-colored waves into angry peaks, looking like a little kid who'd just witnessed his scoop of melting ice cream do the slow-then-speedy slide off the mouth of his waffle cone, before making a messy, Jackson Pollock impact with the concrete.

It was cloudy, it was windy, it was maybe sixty-five degrees, tops, for those brief pockets of mere seconds when the shifting cloud cover permitted some direct sun exposure. Some bleeping vacation, huh? 

No, the round, red apple of summer was starting to show the brown rot of autumn at that point. Which, naturally, put me in the mood for ghost stories. Fall always does that to me.

I had been wanting to wade into a good collection of ghost stories for a while. My foundation in the genre of supernatural/horror fiction is firmly built in the Ray Bradbury/Robert Bloch/Richard Matheson/Charles Beaumont/Marjorie Bowen/Seabury Quinn tradition; i.e. I really like late 19th century and early-to-mid 20th century material. I wanted something in that vein, so I turned to that local light in the dark, Dreamhaven Books. 

When I stumbled across the reprinted All Souls' Night by Hugh Walpole, I knew absolutely nothing about the author. I'm not sure I'd ever even seen or heard his name mentioned before, but the book sold itself as a book of chilling horror tales:

"But it was in the field of the macabre and supernatural that Walpole was at his best, and this collection of sixteen tales contains many of his finest, including the classic werewolf story 'Tarnhelm'; the oft-anthologized 'The Little Ghost'..." (from the back cover).

It was originally published in 1933, so it was right up my alley.

I gave it a shot. 

All Souls' Night does in fact contain ghost stories. And it does contain the shapeshifter tale "Tarnhelm; or, The Death Of My Uncle Robert". But the ghosts in tales like "The Little Ghost" are almost incidental to the tales they haunt, and very rarely do they do much ghosting. There are genuinely dark moments in the stories included in the collection, ranging from a house that decides to look after the best interests of its owner, in "The Staircase;" the aforementioned "Tarnhelm;" and the darkly surreal "The Silver Mask", which, I have to believe Thomas Ligotti read at some point. But by and large, the book is full of character studies and explorations of the human condition that are much more W. Somerset Maugham than H.P. Lovecraft, and frankly I found it amazing.

There are at least two stories about dogs, and what they mean to the people who take care of them, such as "The Whistle" and "Sentimental But True". Dogs are only the impetus, of course, for the dissection of human pride and a look at human relationships, as well as setting up a dare I say modern analysis of the expectations of women dealing with wounded egos in a patriarchal society, as well as a melancholy meditation on how humanity can be lost in translation when people are viewed through the stratified layers of the social classes. 

Another thing that struck me about Walpole's fiction is how little he relies on subtext. It was clear to me  by the time I was a couple of stories in to the collection, that Hugh Walpole had been a gay man in a time when it was illegal to be a homosexual in the United Kingdom, but seemed to write like it didn't matter!   

For example, this blurb from the male protagonists's point of view in the tale "Portrait In Shadow": I liked him at once. Standing there in the new morning sun, the water dropping from him in crystal drops, he was as handsome a man as I've ever seen – more handsome, I sometimes think, than anyone else in the world. 

Again, the male narrator's words about his recently deceased male friend Bond, in "The Littlest Ghost": I believe that he knew me, with all my faults and vanities and absurdities, far better than anyone else, even my wife, did.... I missed him, of course; was vaguely unhappy and discontented; railed against life, wondering why it was always the best people who were taken and the others left;....I had a flashing, almost blinding need of Bond that was like a revelation. From that moment I knew no peace. Everyone seemed to me dull, profitless and empty. Even my wife was a long way away from me, and my children, whom I dearly loved, counted nothing to me at all.

I haven't done a deep dive on Hugh Walpole, I don't know much about his personal life and struggles as a gay man during a time when simply being one meant punishment by law and social persecution, but damn if it didn't seem ballsy as all hell to put such blatant prose into his work. It's the literary equivalent of beating the reader over the head with a cast iron skillet, and you'd have to be as obtuse as hell or have the mental acumen of a rutabaga to not pick up what he's laying down.

Hats off the Hugh Walpole! For the horror reader, there are some genuinely good chillers in the collection, including "The Silver Mask", "The Staircase", "Tarnhelm", "Seashore Macabre. A Moment's Experience", and "Mrs. Lunt." The remaining eleven stories in the collection of sixteen, are incredibly cognizant distillations of human folly and frailty, hubris and ignorance, in the guise of short stories about seaside vacations, marriage proposals, dogs and more. Recommended if you're a fan of Maugham or the short fiction of Roald Dahl, minus the humorous twist endings or shock value accoutrements. 

I was tricked, when I bought into the ad text on the back of Valancourt Books' 2016 edition of Hugh Walpole's All Souls' Night. It isn't a book of macabre ghost stories. It isn't anything like what I had initially wanted it to be when I purchased it; and I was treated in the best possible way.