[Book Review] ‘Women’s Weird 2’ from Handheld Press

Mar 3

This review originally appeared in Dead Reckonings no. 28 and has been reprinted with the permission of the author.

I very much enjoyed the first Women’s Weird anthology (you can read my review here) so I was excited to see the announcement of a second volume in the series, once again edited by Melissa Edmundson. In the introduction to that initial book, Edmundson said that the stories she included “showcase a wide variety of themes and represent the various ways women interpret the Weird in their writing.” From solidly Weird tales of ghostly hauntings and unseen things to more subtle stories of lost children and malevolent housekeeping, Women’s Weird contained a vast range of subjects reflected through the lens of female experience. In Women’s Weird 2 this concept is maintained but broadened by not only “expanding into new territories” in a geographical sense—this second volume includes work set in Australasia, India and South America as well as the UK and US—but also by seeking to “hopefully challenge the already blurred boundaries between the Weird, the Gothic and the ghostly.” Thankfully that “hopefully” is a touch of modesty and Edmundson has more than achieved her goal by presenting us with another wonderful set of near-forgotten stories.

Yet if these stories are near-forgotten then it might be surprising that a number of the authors are not. One of my favorite pieces in the anthology is “The House Party at Smoky Island” written by none other than Lucy Maud Montgomery, perhaps more famous as the creator of the Anne of Green Gables series. Published in Weird Tales of August 1935—alongside Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Treader of the Dust,” no less—Montgomery introduces us to a cast of characters—Aunt Alma, Judge Warden, Old Nosey, et al.—who wouldn’t seem out of place in an episode from the misadventures of Bertie Wooster. Gathered together for what becomes a “flop” of a party, the group spend the “dank, streaming night” bickering and eventually resorting to that old party favorite; telling ghost stories. And it is here, almost with a single line, that Montgomery masterfully pivots the story from a fairly flimsy vignette to something that quickly becomes genuinely chilling. The sense of vertigo is palpable; as the narrator himself admits, “I felt sick - very, very sick.” Where a less accomplished writer would use this to horrify and repulse the reader, though, Montgomery allows the unearthly energy she summons to bring harmony and resolution. It’s an astonishing piece of writing. In a note written just before her death Montgomery lamented that “I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells.” The ambivalent meaning of “spells” can only make readers of “The House Party at Smoky Island” wonder what else she could have written had she pursued the Weird further.

Another stand-out is Barbara Baynton’s “A Dreamer” which, as Edmundson notes in the introduction, is one of the volume’s stories which “concern themselves with haunting, even if no ghosts are present.” The narrative concerns little more than an unnamed woman hurrying home through the night. She travels from the train station—populated solely by “an ownerless dog, huddled, wet and shivering”—through a building storm until, in the dark, she realizes she has lost her way. Recklessly, she cuts across the Australian bush and, guided towards half-remembered landmarks silhouetted by lightning, she manages to cross the storm-swollen creek between her and her childhood home. The unsettling feel of “A Dreamer” doesn’t come from the narrator’s peril but from the eerie feeling that the natural world is itself turned against her, perhaps due to the guilt she hesitatingly admits to feeling. This animosity is made explicit; “The wind savagely snapped [the willow branches], and they lashed her unprotected face. Round and round her bare neck they coiled their stripped fingers. Her mother had planted these willows, and she herself had watched them grow. How could they be so hostile to her!” This brings to mind the similar, unearthly animosity of similar, unearthly trees in Blackwood’s “The Willows” and, although “A Dreamer” contains no supernatural events it is redolent with the same terror.

For me, however, the anthology’s masterpiece is Katherine Mansfield’s “The House.” Barely ten pages long, this tells the story of a woman, Marion, who seeks shelter from a violent storm—“no amethyst twilight this, no dropping of a chiffon scarf”—in the porch of an empty house. Here, where the wind is “so cold, to eat into your bones” she rests for a moment, curious memories of this house lingering in her mind, and she drifts off to another place entirely. Unexpectedly, this place is a far remove from the “autumn rain and falling leaves in the hollow darkness” of the storm. She explores the house, now warmed by roaring log fires and populated with a maid and husband she only half-recognizes. There is a child, somewhere, but she cannot bring herself to think of it fully; “Each time he mentioned the… each time she felt he was going to speak of the… she had a terrible, suffocating sensation of fear.” The story progresses to an inevitable revelation as Marion is called away by a voice she fears but cannot resist.

“The House” is a slight tale, again more of a vignette in many ways, but it has depth behind the obvious narrative. Mansfield herself was bisexual and part of the bohemian circle of the Bloomsbury Group. Her marriage to George Bowden seems to have been largely for the sake of appearances. It’s hard not to read “The House,” with its ambivalent and cautious attitude to what would’ve been considered domestic bliss at the time, as Mansfield’s own struggle with the inability to live her life as fully as she might want. Crucially, the story ends with an implicit criticism of materiality and the traditional focus on ownership, whether of possessions or more subtly through marriage; two characters who appear at the end of the narrative are less worried about the eponymous house being haunted for the haunting’s own sake but because of the effect it will have on the house’s value and desirability on the market. It is no coincidence that Marx describes capital as “vampire-like” with a “thirst for the living blood of labour” when we think of how consumed we can be with our possessions and the means through which we come to possess them. Whether this is a conjecture too far is arguable but it’s undeniable that Mansfield takes some of the core elements of Weird fiction—abandoned places, dislocated times—and uses them not to conjure horror but a much more deeply affecting sadness and sympathy.

Women’s Weird 2 is rounded out by yet more excellent tales. Mary E Wilkins Freeman shows us the strange realms that lie beyond even the most prosaic volumes of commonplace space in “The Hall Bedroom” and “The Black Stone Statue,” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman, reveals how it is not always the monstrous that are the monsters. In fact, only “The Red Bungalow” fell slightly flat for me, with Bithia Mary Croker’s evocative description of colonial India leading only to a disappointing “and then a scary thing happened” ending. This, though, is a mere matter of taste.

As a showcase of needlessly-neglected stories from women writers, Women’s Weird 2 is as accomplished as its predecessor in both content and design; again, Handheld Press offer a useful biography list and glossary that helps with some of the more anachronistic terminology. Even more than this, as an exercise in describing the breadth of what the Weird can achieve—not simply ghost stories or gothic nightmares but a way to, as Edmundson says, “show us humanity at its best and worst and challenge us with meanings and messages that always fall somewhere between the explained and unexplained”—Women’s Weird 2 is a triumph.

Need a second opinion? Read another review of the book here!

Article written by Dan Pietersen

Daniel Pietersen is the editor of I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales of R. Murray Gilchrist, part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. He is a recurring guest lecturer for “The Last Tuesday Society” and the “Romancing the Gothic” project, where he produces an ongoing series on Haunted Houses and related topics. He has also contributed criticism and reviews to publications like Dead Reckonings, Revenant and Horror Homeroom. Daniel lives in a very old house in a very old town and is slowly becoming very old himself. He occasionally appears on social media as @pietersender.