This collection of "Tales of the Macabre" is very uneven in style, tone, and quality. The introduction tells us that this collection was put together to complement a previous Oxford volume, Tales of Terror from Blackwood's Magazine. Blackwood's, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, was extremely influential and widely read in the 19th century, containing essays on political and social issues, as well as literary offerings. It published works by the likes of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, William Godwin, James Hogg, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, thus contributing to the development of the Romantic movement. The Tale of Terror was in its heyday, and the magazines supplied the reading public with a steady stream of the macabre, horrific, and sensational.
Not content with limiting themselves with tales of terror from Blackwood's magazine, Oxford produced The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre: "The aim of the present collection, however, is to exhibit the variety and vitality of the terror-tales and similarly macabre fiction published in the rival magazines of London and Dublin, in the two decades following the appearance of Polidori's tale; that is, the 1820s and 1830s." These are very narrow parameters, which limit the scope and quality of tales included in this collection.
"Sir Guy Eveling's Dream" by Horace Smith is written in a pseudo-archaic style so bizarre and convoluted, with vocabulary to rival Jabberwocky, that I thought I might have hit my head and not realized it as I struggled to make sense of it all.
The absolute worst tale here has to be "Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman" by William Carleton. It reminded me of the torture that is reading The Valley of Fear, that blight on the Sherlock Holmes canon loosely based on the Molly Maguires and Pinkerton detectives. The Ribbonmen were a secret society of violent Irish radicals. While their midnight meeting in a chapel has imagery suggestive of a Black Mass, this tale quickly descends into gruesome (and disgusting) descriptions of violence. This type of story is not the type of macabre story that I like.
I found "The Red Man" by Catherine Gore lurid and in extremely poor taste. Miss Gore lived up to her name.
Putting these three aside, the rest of the tales were interesting and engaging to varying degrees, and a couple of them were real gems. Madness, fears of being buried alive, the bodysnatching craze of 19th century, castles, secret passages, graveyards, and curses all make an appearance. I loved the fairytale imagery (with a twist) in "The Bride of Lindorf," and the folklore feel of "The Master of Logan." One of the best tales was "Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess" by the Irish Gothic writer Sheridan Le Fanu. This one is part tale of terror, part locked room mystery, and was later developed into Le Fanu's novel Uncle Silas.
Of course the real draw of this collection is "The Vampyre" by John Polidori. I think a discussion of Dr. Polidori's tale merits its own post at some future date. For now, suffice it to say that this is the tale that launched the vampire craze in literature which carries on to this day, and was the product of that infamous ghost story competition which also gave us Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This Oxford edition provides a bit of introductory material and notes on the publishing history. It includes the "Letter from Geneva" that accompanied the anonymous manuscript to the publishing house, as well as a later "Note on 'The Vampyre'" by Polidori and Byron's "Fragment" which influenced Polidori's tale.
This Oxford collection would earn a place on my shelves for Polidori alone, but I very much enjoyed some of these other tales of the macabre.
Chosen for my Tea and Ink Society 2024 Classics Reading Challenge for October: a spooky classic or short story collection.
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