This particular collection of nine stories by E.F. Benson (1867-1940) was published in 2016, but the individual components date back to the early 1900s.

For the record, here's a list of the stories in order, with the date of their first publication (E&OE):

-- Spinach 1924
-- In the Tube 1922
-- The Man Who Went Too Far 1912
-- Mrs Amworth 1922
-- The Room in the Tower 1912
-- The Bus-Conductor 1906
-- Negotium Perambulans 1922
-- 'And No Bird Sings' 1926
-- Caterpillars 1912

The selection was made by British actor Mark Gatiss, who also supplied an Introduction, and narrated my audio-version (superbly, it must be said, with an impressive range of accents and voices).

The Intro begins like this: "Even in a land of eccentrics, the Benson family were PARTICULAR. Paterfamilias Edward proposed marriage to Minnie when she was only twelve. He went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, she a startlingly visible gay woman who liked to be known as 'Ben' and was referred to by Gladstone as 'the cleverest woman in Europe'."

(It's also interesting to note that the Archbishop, who was the founding member of what was informally known as the Cambridge Ghost Society, was the Archbishop whom Henry James credits with providing the original inspiration for The Turn of the Screw.)

Edward Frederick (known as Fred) was the fifth of their six children (only four of whom survived into adulthood). Benson Senior and all the children, according to Matthew Dennison, struggled with mental health issues. Nor was family life straightforward, as their father's strictness left the three brothers in particular isolated and fearful. It is likely that all the children were gay; they had a variety of talents; and they couldn't stop writing (racking up 200 books between them...)


E.F. Benson

These days we generally know Benson for his social comedies. In the early 1990s, I read/listened to four of the half-dozen novels that make up the Mapp and Lucia series: Queen Lucia (No. 1); Miss Mapp (No. 2); Lucia in London (No. 3); and Lucia's Progress (No. 5). They're hugely entertaining (just looking back at the quotes I'd noted in my diary made me laugh). And back in pandemic-time, I read the rather curious Robin Linnet as part of my Norfolk reading.

In his own life-time, however, Benson was just as well known for what he called his "spook stories". He attended one of the first of M.R. James's Christmas ghost readings at King's College Cambridge, Gatiss tells us, and both Negotium Perambulans and the one called 'And No Bird Sings' are a "nod to the slithering monstrosities of M.R. James".

H.P. Lovecraft admired Benson, attributing "singular power" to some of his stories, and describing one (The Face) as "lethally potent in its relentless aura of doom". Both James and Lovecraft have been on my never-diminishing TBR list for a while now...

Benson, says Stephen Carver, was "refreshingly broadminded about mediums and seances, neither swallowing the whole thing as had Conan Doyle, or discounting it completely as a fraud. Sometimes he sent up Spiritualists, sometimes he proved them right."

Nicholas Lezard speculates about the roots of that era's love of the uncanny (represented not only by James and Lovecraft, but also by Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells). Of course, the pain of WWI promoted a longing for the comfort of spiritualism. But many of the stories in this collection predate that cataclysm. Lezard suggests: "One could propose a kind of morphic resonance, whereby Freud’s research into dreams a decade earlier had filtered through into an otherwise placid world; or you could suggest that it was the bad conscience of empire at work, undermining the pinnacles of its achievements as they were experienced at home: the church, the academy, the country house. James and Benson themselves remained, as they used to say coyly in the obituaries, unmarried, and maybe the sense of existing to some extent at a marginal level of society helped them conjure up tales of visitors from unseen worlds. I see Benson as trying to work something out from the unconscious: it’s not unusual for his stories to break the membrane between the waking and dreaming world, as in Caterpillars, or the recurring nightmare in The Room in the Tower."



***

The stories are rivetingly creepy, and Benson has a brilliantly atmospheric way of evoking the darkness that dwells just behind every aspect of our everyday life. He does a beautiful job of both winter cosiness (crackling fires) and summer sunniness (tea on the lawn). His is the world "of the inter-war gentleman of means and confirmed bachelor...; with manservants, motorcars, summer leases, property envy, bridge, golf, brisk walks, and plenty of huntin', shootin', and fishin'... Benson’s jaunty narrators, who are often writers clearly based on himself, combine, as did he, the easy confidence and breezy enthusiasm of his class, an open mind, and a fierce intelligence. They are invariably rich single men drifting from one let, holiday home, or long visit to the next, who, mostly in company with another male friend, meet an elemental monster in the woods or find themselves in a haunted house. Imagine a Bertie Wooster figure, only with the intellect of Jeeves. And then shove him towards something terrible."

I was very impressed by the variety on offer in this book:

-- Benson confidently brings us a whole range of scary things: The classic ghost; astral projections in the shape of presences that predict the future; vampires; "elementals"; cancer-causing caterpillars...
-- Spinach was really funny as well as scary. The slightly phony medium brother and sister (they call themselves Ludovic and Sylvia Byron, rather than their real names, which are Thomas and Caroline Carrot) are scared witless when a real ghost drops by with some information about a recent death...
-- The Man Who Went Too Far, which is about a visitation from Pan, was terrifying. It's another that was admired by Lovecraft, and it's very thought-provoking. We can let ourselves be absorbed by nature, which superficially calms and rejuvenates us, but at the end of the day there's nothing gentle about the natural world...
-- The Room in the Tower is "properly creepy", as Gatiss says: "Jack will show you to your room... I have given you the room in the tower."

In short, a nicely chilling experience, the perfect accompaniment to Christmas preparations, and an inspiration to dig up a bit more Benson.