From Out of the Silence ~ Bessie Kyffin-Taylor

From Out of the Silence: Seven Strange Stories was first published by Books Limited in 1920, and the first edition is an incredibly difficult book to get hold of. It's not surprising, the physical book itself is so fragile, the paper so thin, that it's a wonder copies are still about at all.

One of the many things I particularly like about this collection is the fact that several of the stories have the weird happenings take place in daylight in the middle of summer. There are ghosts in gardens, woods, on countryside roads... they're not a bunch of spooks that can only come out indoors in the dark.

In ‘Room Number Ten’, it is a hot day in August when Peter Maxton, who's pretty fed up with his environment and the small-minded people who live in it, accepts an invitation to join a house party at ‘High Crags’ in Scotland, the home of his friends Mr and Mrs Stuart. Come along, Norman Stuart writes encouragingly, ‘if you don’t mind where you sleep!’ Perhaps Stuart should have added ‘and with whom you sleep”! Poor old Peter soon discovers that he is far from alone in his bedroom and the bed he occupies within it.

‘Two Little Red Shoes’ is a sad tale of child abuse. According to her own description, the narrator of the story is the usual ‘everyday woman’. However, she gets her kicks from breaking into empty properties, to get away from the noise and routine of her daily life. She likes the peace and quiet of an entirely empty house, where she can make herself at home and daydream about being the house’s owner. Having a few days off, she breaks into a house she's been looking forward to having a mooch around. She is ‘not greatly alarmed by the supernatural’, and when she encounters it in her 'House of Mystery', as she calls it, she is not put off returning; but ‘Little did I guess what was in store for me, or even I, good as my nerves were, would have gone gladly a hundred miles in another direction.’

I think ‘Outside the House’ is the most atmospheric and unsettling story in the collection. Major John Longworth has returned from the French front during the First World War, having been sent home with a gammy leg, and he's fallen in love with Elsie Falconer, the nurse who looked after him when he was being treated in hospital. He goes off to convalesce at her family home following his discharge, but Elsie’s relatives are an odd lot. They don't really pay him that much attention, considering he's their future son-in-law, but they do ask one thing of him—the same thing they ask of everyone in the house—he shouldn't go into the garden or open a window after five o’clock in the afternoon. But John isn’t the type to accept being made a prisoner in Elsie's parents' house. No... he’s going to break the rules, stay out late... and regret it!

In ‘The Wind in the Woods’, Wilfred, an artist, is tired of people, noise, and the annoyances of his everyday life. He wants some peace and quite. So, he takes a month’s holiday in Wales and visits a place he calls 'Silent Wood’, a shaded pine tree wood that doesn't seem to have any animal life in it. It also doesn't seem to have any wind. During all of his previous visits, there has never been any... but then, he’s never visited the wood in July before, and he'll end his holiday wishing he never had!

‘In some quiet hour in my studio, maybe during some winter night of wind and storm, I shall hear again the hideous laughter, shall dream of the scent of pines—nay, perhaps I shall even try to forget the horror of all I went through, and may memory, sometimes kind, only recall the peace, the scent, the perfect still quietness of the woods I loved best, when I knew them only as “Silent Wood.” ’

Now, I like outdoor ghost stories. Being a rambler, I can relate to characters who wander about in silent woods, with no humanity near, surrounded by all the possible dangers of being remote, away from help if it is needed. A familiar landscape can turn hostile pretty quickly under the right conditions. I say that as someone who once found herself trapped (along with a muddy husband) in woods after a tree fall, unable to return to a familiar path, forced to go deeper into unknown territory, and stuck repeatedly in bogs as the light failed. Add the supernatural on top of all that, and what started out as a normal, sunny day could quickly turn into a rather nasty nightmare. So, 'The Wind in the Woods' is my second favourite story in this collection.

‘The Twins’ are Dallas and Basil York, and the fact that they are twins is the bane of Dallas’s life. Nobody can tell them apart, not even their own mother, so every one of Basil’s misdeeds has been laid at Dallas’s door since childhood. When Basil went out of bounds to buy sweets, Dallas was punished for it. When Basil went drinking beer in the village pub, Dallas found himself confined to his room as a consequence. Now, in adulthood, when Basil sends love letters to Esmé Simpson, using his brother’s paper and forging his handwriting, Dallas is the poor sod who is forced to become engaged to her. They do say that there is a special bond that exists between twins—and, much to Dallas’s chagrin, it turns out to be one that can extend beyond the grave.

‘Sylvia’ is set during the First World War. The narrator, on holiday in Wales, witnesses a ghostly apparition while out walking late in the day. When she returns to the village where she is staying, her friend, the village doctor, recounts the story of Sylvia, a young girl who, though she had lived many years with a band of gipsies, had a forgotten past. This is my least favourite story in the collection, though I do like Bessie's description of the environment her characters are in; that's the case for me with all of her tales.

In ‘The Star Inn’, Dick and Pat, who are brother and sister, decide to take a holiday together. Wanting to go somewhere without telephones, where people can’t reach them, that is not more than an hour away by train, they browse through a railway timetable and choose a place they've never heard of: Pine Side. Then, without doing any research about the place—without even finding out if there's an inn they can stay in—they set off, along with Timothy, Dick's very sensible dog. It turns out that there is indeed an inn, situated on Pine Side’s only road, and it is one they are unlikely to forget.

The Liverpool Daily Post felt that ‘those who enjoy having their hair raised by tales of restless spirits’ should ‘find fare to their taste’ in Bessie’s collection. And they weren't wrong.

As I said, this is a rare book. If you do find one, it's most likely going to cost several hundred pounds without the dust jacket. If you find one with the jacket, well, you're talking thousands rather than hundreds.

UPDATE:

A new edition is being published on 31 March 2025 (see cover image on the right), and you can find out all about it by clicking here.

The Thing from the Lake ~ Eleanor M. Ingram

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; this is the only one that is supernatural. Sadly, she died while very young, so she didn't get the chance to write more.

The first edition very seldom comes up for sale, and it would cost hundreds of pounds if it did.

UPDATE:

Nezu Press will publish a lovely new edition of The Thing from the Lake on 25 February 2025 (see cover image on the left). You can find more information about it on this blog by clicking here, and order it from the Nezu Press site by clicking here.