E F Benson (1867-1940) was a prolific writer from an extraordinary family. His three brothers were writers, his sister a significant Egyptologist, their father became Archbishop Of Canterbury and their mother pretty much crumbled under the pressure from her husband and offspring. Her life is recorded in "The Impossible Life Of Mary Benson" by Rodney Bolt (2012), which I do have a copy of but haven't got round to reading.
I feel like I've experienced a fair bit of Benson, he is in my Top 10 most read authors but I haven't barely scratched the surface. The Delta Classics e-book edition has 49 novels and many short stories as well as non-fiction publications. Nowadays, he is most celebrated for his sparkling "Mapp and Lucia" novels which I've read and re-read and will hopefully read again but I discovered from the short Introduction to this Wordsworth edition that during his lifetime it was his ghost stories which brought him the most recognition.
Here, in "Night Terrors" we have 54 of them over 705 pages. They tend to be of similar length broadly averaging out around 15 pages. The Wordsworth Editions are cheap and cheerful, you don't get much in the way of additional information. I don't know where these stories were collected from or when or over what period they were written. I would imagine they been pulled together to make this collection as some feel too samey to have been published together originally. Having said that, and actually getting down to what I felt initially to be a daunting task of 705 pages of chills, I did really enjoy this book and it got me remembering what it is I like about Benson.
Quite a number of the tales do follow a loose formula. We start with a description of a location, and there's a single man who is either going or who has just arrived there- it's often a large house in a rural setting and the man is either visiting friends who live there or is escaping for his own health. Sometimes there is an expert in medicine or psychic research who attempt so explain. There has often been some event in the past and manifestations build to some kind of a head. Benson is good at introducing tension in a range of ways in these tales. He can actually get quite grisly and the mood can vary from doom-laden horror to the more jokey, gossipy writing he excels in with "Mapp and Lucia", especially when there are mediums who need debunking involved.
My personal favourites include "The Confessions Of Charles Linkworth" where a condemned man uses the technology of the telephone in a tale I found really quite creepy. "How Fear Departed From The Long Gallery" was according to Davies in his Introduction E F Benson's favourite short-story and it has a very grisly seventeenth century murder as a backdrop to a country house chiller which has an unusually hopeful ending. Tonally, this is a strong work which packs a lot of variety into the short-story format, so no doubt that why it was an author favourite. "At The Farmhouse" depicts a man going great lengths to hide a crime which backfires and "Mr Tilly's Séance" is certainly the work of the writer of the Mapp & Lucia novels. "The Step" gives us an Egyptian setting, an odious main character and a come-uppance both deserving and one of the most chilling and "The Wishing Well" sees the daughter of a folk-lore expert following the old ways herself to get what she wants.
It's been a while since I've read ghost stories and as I get older I feel less enamoured with this genre than I did when one's own mortality felt less of an issue and I devoured horror fiction but E F Benson's writing has provided genuine chills and even though 700+ pages reflects a lot of writing along similar lines I did get some real satisfaction from this book.
Night Terrors was published in 2012 by Wordsworth Editions.
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