H. Russell Wakefield (1889–1964)

'The Red Lodge' is a horror story classic about a pretty house by a river that the owner rents out. The owner knows the place is haunted and that there is a good chance that one or more of his renters will die each time. He doesn't care. This summer the Red Lodge is being rented by a couple, their little boy, and a few servants.

Sometimes patches of green slime show up in the house. The little boy is afraid of 'the green monkey'. He's also afraid of the river, although he has enjoyed water before. The wife, who fell for the Red Lodge's attractiveness, has not been sleeping well. As the odd happenings mount up, the man consults a neighbor and learns about the house's unsavory history.

Will they leave in time, or will the Red Lodge claim another victim?… (more)

Taken on loan from my local for a DEEP ONES reading of one story ("Professor Pownall's Oversight"), that effort was strong enough I renewed the book several times in order to read through the rest. "Pownall" features an unusual occurrence, the haunting of chess matches, and the end hints at a wholly unexpected spectral transference.

Other stories seem built around a pun or phrase ("Day-Dream in Macedon", "Blind Man's Buff", "Damp Sheets") but are not novelty stories for that, providing some of Wakefield's most memorable hauntings. At other times, HRW appears to go for pathos over horror: "The Gorge of the Churels" most emphatically, but also "Triumph of Death". Typically there is a coda or epilogue after the narrator dies, several times a written document.

Worth picking up any hardbound edition, Wakefield writes well and his tales reflect a distinct take on the ghost story. Alongside that chess story, for example, mathematicians feature in two stories here ("Kink in Space-Time" and "Immortal Bird"), surely atypical of the genre. That epistemological slant on horror is an attribute I particularly appreciate in such fiction.… (more)

A friend recommended Wakefield as being in the same class as M.R. James. My own feeling is that his stories are competently done but they lack the antiquarian touches I enjoy in James, and they are rarely as terrifying. They generally involve ordinary middle class English people of the 1920s (when they were probably written), usually living in ordinary homes, apartment, and offices (in one case an artist's studio) where something unpleasant(murder, suicide) has happened in the fairly recent past, living immaterial traces behind --not necessarily supernatural in the strict sense --some of his characters advocate Doyle's theory that events leave a kind of "recording" in the atmosphere where they occur, which plays out over and over without have a conscious spirit behind it. On the other hand, there s one story of two mountain (or at least hill) climbers who encounter a creature that only manifests when there is snow on the ground around a certain cairn. That one remains unexplained.Another involves a car in which an American gangster coupe were bumped off. I believe I have read a more recent story which handles the same idea more smoothly, with only one victim. I don;t know if the other writer (whose name I don't remember) was influenced by Wakefield or it was an independent invention. In a fair number of cases, the people who have these encounters are frightened but survive, which I prefer to the others in which they die horribly. Sometimes there is a victim of vengeance from beyond the grave who deserves the punishment, but the reader is not usually in that person;s mind, which makes it more bearable.… (more)