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Is Doyle’s Terror Terrifying?

by Kim Newman

It used to be much argued whether belief, in ghosts or even religion, was an aid or a hindrance to the writing of supernatural stories – with clergyman M.R. James and atheist H.P. Lovecraft united in thinking that belief in ghosts was beside the point when it came to writing scary ghost stories … while Algernon Blackwood spoke up for those with occultist leanings. Doyle wrote a lot of strange stories – not many proper ghosts, but plenty of curses, Egyptian mummies, cryptids, monsters and psychic vampires. He often aims for awe rather than shivers – the dinosaurs of Maple White Land are big animals, not monsters – but he could turn a creepy phrase when he wanted. And he knew what was really scary – in “Lot No. 249,” the killer mummy is a murder weapon but the terror comes from the malice of the man who revives it and sets it on victims, the way other murderers use a snake or a phosphor-daubed dog in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” and The Hound of the Baskervilles. What resonates is the cruelty, though it might be concealed within rotting Egyptian bandages.

“The Terror of Blue John Gap” is a sketch of a kind of fiction that would become much more familiar a century on – in many tales of Bigfoot or related creatures. Like The Blair Witch Project, it’s presented as evidence of an encounter left behind by someone who did not survive – with comments and footnotes designed to confirm the authenticity of the made-up story. An invalid’s diary describes an encounter in an out-of-the-way place with a cryptid we’re encouraged to imagine as an unusual, natural creature (a giant blind albino cave bear – you know, like those alligators in the New York sewers). The door is left open to a weirder, more frightening interpretation that it’s a walking wrongness whose mere presence hastens the narrator’s death and stirs the wiser-than-city-folk-with-qualifications locals to pile up boulders to keep it buried. It’s a kind of horror story you sense Doyle himself was wary of – he could accept, even if as a fictional thought experiment, that the world was big enough to accommodate dinosaurs and fairies … that beyond the veil were dead relatives eager to inform those still living that they were happy and useful and unburdened by earthly cares. But that there might be a cosmic void, inhabited by beings whose mere existence violates rationality and negates all hope, terrified him.

Honestly, put like that – it terrifies me too.

WHO IS KIM?

Kim Newman is a British critic, author and broadcaster. His books about film include Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman’s Video Dungeon and BFI Classics booklets on Cat People, Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit. His fiction includes the Anno Dracula series, the Drearcliff Grange School novels, The Night Mayor, The Quorum, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the d’Urbervilles, Angels of Music, A Christmas Ghost Story, Something More Than Night and Model Actress Whatever. He has written for television (Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema), radio (Afternoon Theatre: Cry-Babies) and the theatre (The Hallowe’en Sessions), contributed many commentary tracks and extra features to DVD and BluRay releases, and directed a tiny film (Missing Girl). His website is at www.johnnyalucard.com.