The Thing from the Lake, the final novel of Eleanor M. Ingram, was published by J. B. Lippincott Company in 1921. Its protagonist, Roger Locke, is a fairly well-known composer from New York. In need of a summer house that he can retreat to when New York becomes too hot to work in, he buys the old Michell place in Connecticut, which comes with land and a lake. But, as Roger soon finds out, his new house is haunted. During his first night in the place, he is visited twice in the dark: first, by a mysterious woman—whether living or ghost he does not know—who whispers of witchcraft, and then by a terrifying ‘presence’ that is accompanied by the foul stench of damp and mould.
I love a good haunted house story, and this is definitely one of those. It’s not often that a book gives me the heebie-jeebies so much that I read it over and over and get more uncomfortable as I do so. I really don't understand why this book isn't more well-known.
For me—perhaps for most people who read haunted house stories—it isn’t the idea of confrontation with a physical being that causes fear but the thought of being unable to fend of an ‘entity’ that isn’t physical. How do you fight off a malignant puff of smoke? The thing about ghosts, though, is that they are generally dead humans, and to a certain extent that sets boundaries around what we expect them to be capable of. But what if a haunting is caused by something that was never human? What if the ‘Thing’ that haunts us is beyond our comprehension, more powerful than we can imagine, and is kept at bay by the resistance of the human mind that, with each encounter, has the potential to weaken and fail?
The ‘presence’ that haunts the haunted house in this novel is just such an entity: malignant, non-human, immense, incomprehensible, relentless, telepathic (in part at least), timeless, and not in any way of our world… all the things that make battle against it seem futile.
'As I sat there, facing the door of the room, I became aware of Something at the window behind my back. Something that pressed against the open window and stared at me with a hideous covetousness beside which the greed of a beast for its prey is a natural, innocent appetite. I felt that Thing’s hungry malignance like a soft, dreadful mouth sucking toward me, yet held away from me by some force vaguely based on my own resistance. And I understood how a man may die of horror.'
I should point out that it is a romance too. Not a conventional one, but a romance all the same. Not that the romance makes it any less atmospheric or frightening. In fact, the opposite applies, as the romance binds poor Roger to his house, and in so doing it makes it impossible for him to escape. Eleanor wrote a number of romances, and this is the only one that is supernatural. Sadly, she died while very young, so she didn't get the chance to write more.
