Horror! Horror! Horror! by Edith Olivier – #ABookADayInMay – Day 13

Under normal circumstances, I would run in the other direction from a book with ‘horror’ in the title, let alone three times. But I also love Edith Olivier, and was interested when Snuggly Books (!) brought out a slim volume of three of Olivier’s short stories in the horror genre. Interested enough to buy it and, as is so often the way of things, read it two years later (and it took about half an hour to read).

Olivier is best-known for The Love-Child, a novella that I wrote a substantial about of my doctoral thesis on, and which I was delighted to bring back into print through the British Library Women Writers series. But I had either forgotten, or never knew, that she also wrote horror stories – and this book collects three of them, written in 1934-5: ‘The Caretaker’s Story’, ‘Dead Men’s Bones’, and ‘The Night Nurse’s Story’.

They’re so short that it’s hard to give an account of them without giving everything away. In brief, the first one concerns someone returning to his house that a caretaker has supposedly been looking after, but finds it abandoned – and gets attacked by a seagull, which is not as incidental as it seems. The second (and least successful, to my mind) is about the deceased being unhappy with how the bones of the dead have been combined – it is one of those stories related entirely by someone who wasn’t involved, which makes it lose any immediacy.

The third was definitely my favourite of the three. Nurse Webber is off on a dark and stormy winter night to be the nurse for an ill woman in the middle of nowhere.

The dark wet November night had evidently had no effect on the spirits of the stout little chauffeur; and he gaily drove Nurse Webber away to her first private case.

They were certainly going to an ‘out-of-the-way’ place, for they quickly left the main road and began climbing about the Moor, taking farm roads which zigzagged over steep hills, and turning ever into narrower lanes where no signposts marked the way. And Matron had been right. They met no one to ask.

When the chauffeur pulls over at the next house to ask, it turns out to be the one Nurse Webber is expected at. But the name doesn’t quite match, and there are other inconsistencies that trouble her…

I shan’t say more, but it was definitely the one of the three that most successfully used atmosphere to give a creeping sense of… well, if not terror, then intriguing unease. There’s nothing like a remote country house on a dark evening, is there?

They were fun stories, but it is interesting how unscary almost all ‘horror’ stories of this period are to me. I know there are some exceptions – I’ve never read M.R. James, but I understand he still has the capacity to chill – but ghost stories by the likes of E. Nesbit, Richmal Crompton, and E.F. Benson have broadly left me unafraid. And I am afraid of everything. What is it that makes these period pieces less chilling? Is it because they tend towards the discursive, rather than the sudden jolts of modern horror?

I hate being scared, so I am quite happy not to be – though it can feel anticlimactic when the author clearly thinks he/she has done enough to leave the reader quivering. As it is, I could enjoy Olivier’s stories in a different way – I was not terrified, but I was entertained, and I’m glad to have expanded my Olivier knowledge.