The Travelling Grave

I love a certain kind of classic short story that combines wit and the macabre. Ambrose Bierce does this especially well in his horror tales, but I find that the British top everyone in this area. Nobody does it better than Saki whose stories like "The Open Window" and "Sredni Vashtar" are perfect gems of concision, malice, horror, and satire. A master of the twist ending, Saki was a big (and acknowledged) influence on Roald Dahl. And of course Dahl, in his adult stories, mixed wit and the macabre about as well as anyone. For this Halloween season, I was looking for something in a similar vein to read, and after browsing around online a bit, I decided to read a mid-20th century collection of horror tales, L.P. Hartley's The Travelling Grave and Other Stories.

Hartley is best known for his novel, The Go-Between, a great novel about childhood, memory and class written in 1953. He had a long writing career, with his first stories coming out in 1924 and his last work, a novel, published in 1973 (one year after he died). The Travelling Grave and Other Stories was released in 1948 and was his first American collection of fantastic stories, containing the best stories from two earlier collections he'd done called Night Fears and The Killing Bottle and Other Stories. The American publisher was none other than Arkham House, the now famous publishing house founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei in 1939. They'd founded it originally to publish hardcover collections of their mentor and idol, H.P. Lovecraft, but by 1948, they were publishing lots of fiction by other people. At first these were primarily American writers, but by the late 40s, their releases included fantastic fiction from a number of British authors. The edition I read is from 2017, a reprint of the collection put out by Valancourt Books. Valancourt has been doing some great reissues of fantastic fiction for years now, and The Travelling Grave and Other Stories is one. I'd read about the collection years ago but never came across it till Valancourt put it out again.

As John Howard says in an introduction to the book, "The stories in The Travelling Grave are frequently set in the context of a visit to a country house in England or a holiday destination abroad -- Venice, the setting for so many fine uncanny stories being a favorite. Hartley visited the city on numerous occasions, renting an apartment for extended periods while exploring the canals and islands with the help of a succession of specially chosen gondoliers." The story "Podolo" is one of the Venetian stories here, a quite creepy depiction of a day trip to a small uninhabited island in the lagoon. Though perhaps I should state a warning: if you have a problem with stories where violence is done to cats, this one may not be for you.

Hartley is a quintessential English writer in how he evokes horror. He uses elegant prose and a good deal of restraint, but he's completely committed to suggesting malginancy in many forms. And humor is abundant, of a dark and understated sort. As I said, I love this sort of writing, and though by today's standards, the stories aren't all that terrifying, they do still pack a punch. They are all exquistely constructed and build and build in their tension, leading to a release of that tension in the stories' final sentences. "A Visitor from Down Under" has a title that tells a lot but still doesn't reveal its full meaning until the reader has finished the story, and (again in the words of Howard) "Not for nothing is 'The Travelling Grave' one of Hartley's most memorable stories, with its slowly unfolding deadpan revelation of a host's collecting interests, and a particularly fiendish (and certainly ingenious) item that the collection contains."

I found no clunkers in The Travelling Grave and got just the reading I was looking for during this late October. Wit and the macabre well done is a dish I never tire of.