Creeps by Night
Introduction, Copyright, 1931, by Dashiell Hammett.
A Rose For Emily, Copyright, 1930, by The Forum.
Green Thoughts, Copyright, 1931, by Harper & Brothers.
The Ghost of Alexander Perks, A.B., Copyright, 1931, by The Atlantic Monthly Co.
The House, Copyright, 1931, by Harper & Brothers.
The Kill, Copyright, 1931, by Peter Fleming.
Ten O’Clock, Copyright, 1931, by Philip MacDonald.
The Spider, Copyright, 1931, by The John Day Co.
Breakdown, Copyright, 1929, by The Forum.
The Witch’s Vengeance, Copyright, 1930, by the International Magazine Co.
The Rat, Copyright, 1929, by the Popular Fiction Co.
Faith, Hope and Charity, Copyright, 1930, by the International Magazine Co.
Mr. Arcularis, Copyright, 1931, by Harper & Brothers.
The Music of Erich Zann, Copyright, 1925, by the Popular Fiction Co.
The Strange Case of Mrs. Arkwright, Copyright, 1928, by the International Magazine Co.
The King of the Cats, Copyright, 1929, by Stephen Vincent Benet.
The Red Brain, Copyright, 1927, by the Popular Fiction Co.
The Phantom Bus, Copyright, 1930, by the Popular Fiction Co.
Beyond the Door, Copyright, 1930, by the Popular Fiction Co.
Perchance to Dream, Copyright, 1931, by Michael Joyce.
A Visitor from Egypt, Copyright, 1930, by the Popular Fiction Co.
Introduction
To taste the full flavor of these stories you must bring an orderly mind to them, you must have a reasonable amount of confidence, if not in what used to be called the laws of nature, at least in the currently suspected habits of nature. If you believe in the ability and willingness of surgeons to transplant brains from skull to skull with shocking results, these stories may frighten you, but merely in the same way — though hardly to the same extent — that having to take ether in a strange hospital would frighten you. If you believe in ghosts, you can hope to derive from these stories at the very most a weak semblance of the sensation you would experience on being told there was a bogey-man in the closet, or on having the village cut-up wrapped in a sheet jump out of hiding at you. If you believe in werewolves, then it can make little difference to you, except perhaps academically, whether your heroine is eaten by one of them or shot down by a Cicero muscle-man. To the truly superstitious the “weird” has only its Scotch meaning: “Something which actually takes place.”
The effectiveness of the sort of stories that we are here concerned with depends on the reader’s believing that certain things cannot happen and on the writer’s making him feel — if not actually believe — that they can but should not happen. If the reader does not feel that these things have happened, or does not care whether they have happened, then the author has been, in the first case, unconvincing and, in the second, uninteresting, literary faults by no means confined to our present field, and so of no especial interest to us here. If the reader feels that it is nice for these things to have happened, or has no positive feeling that they should not have happened, then the story is, for that particular reader at least, fantasy and lies outside our field.
This business of making the reader feel that what cannot happen can and should not is a tremendously difficult one for the author. Addressing himself, as we have assumed he must, to the orderly minded reader, he cannot count on any native credulity or superstition to be taken advantage of.
Atmosphere may be used to set the stage, but is seldom a great help thereafter and in fact more often an encumbrance than not.
Brutality, often an excellent accompaniment and a means to an end, is never properly more than that in this field, and some of the finest effects have been secured with the daintiest touches. The most authentic single touch in “The Turn of the Screw” — too well known as well as a bit too long for inclusion here — is not when the child sees the ghost across the lake, but when she turns her back to it, pretending interest in some rubbish at her feet, to keep her governess from knowing she has seen it. One of my own favorites is that attributed, I believe, to Thomas Bailey Aldrich:
A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the whole world: every other living thing is dead. The doorbell rings.
That has, particularly, the restraint that is almost invariably the mark of the effective weird tale. Usually all the most skilled author can hope for are some shivers of apprehension as his reader feels himself led towards the thing that cannot happen and the culminant shudder as he feels that the cannot has become the should-not. This shudder is almost always momentary, almost never duplicated. Few weird stories have run successfully to any great length. The familiar exceptions are those in which considerable space was devoted to groundwork. The high spot is when the cannot becomes the should-not, and whether this transition is accepted or rejected by the reader, the peak has been passed and the wise author rests.
Dashiell Hammett
A Rose for Emily
by William Faulkner
I
When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeraclass="underline" the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old negro manservant — a combined gardener and cook — had seen in at least ten years.
It was a big, squarish, frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps — an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.
Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor — he who fathered the edict that no negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron — remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.
When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff’s office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.
They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse — a close, dank smell. The negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father.