The Villa Désirée and Other Uncanny Stories

[Nemonymous]

The Villa Désirée and Other Uncanny Stories
by May Sinclair
Ash Tree Press (2008)



Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched
For me, definitely always one of the five great ghost stories of all time.
A real sense of terrifying religious angst - and a negative symbiosis between dead people who knew each other when alive ....now in a vicious circle of erstwhile life's places as a sort of eternal Hell.
My questions are: Would the protagonist have escaped this eventuality had she confessed to the priest her sins about Owen Wade? Or would she have ended up in the same predicament simply as a punishment? Why should a simple confession be able to absolve the (perceived) unforgiveable? Why did she find it difficult to confess - 'knowing', as she did as part of her own beliefs, that a confession may allow her to escape eternal punishment?

The Token
"I can't even sit on his manuscripts and keep them down. He cares more for that damned paperweight than he does for me."
"Well - George Meredith gave it me."
"And nobody gave you me. I gave myself."
And the wife who feels uncared-for dies and becomes a 'light-switch' ghost to discover if he really cared for her. I won't divulge the outcome but the ghost was one who could open and shut real drawers in his desk as he works at it. So even a ghost could be a paperweight judging by its powers?
Enjoyed this ghost story divertimento and it cleansed the palate after the spiritually gut-wrenching "Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched".
An interesting contrast between a voluntary ghost and an involuntary one.

The Flaw in the Crystal
A story of near novella length. It is the Horror of the "Unuttered". In spite of its melodramatic trappings, its DH Lawrence-isms, John Cowper Powysian theosophies, its Algernon Blackwoodian Centaur-isms (or because of them?), this is a tale of terror regarding a gift or power that leaks between selves proving that filters can work both ways. Inter-marital and interpersonal nightmares of disloyalty that ride with an essence of darkness that nobody not even the perceived controller of the gift or power can restrain - because she has a flaw, a chink that makes it thrive uglily... The character who first supposedly carried the 'madness' - a 'madness' that the 'gift or power' was set to dissipate - was a stockbroker seeking sanctuary from his job by moving to the countryside ... no doubt allowing this story to be read as a treatment of the credit crunch and the insanities that dog it.
This is not a perfect story by any shape or means. But like Lovecraft, it seeps a Thing that the author cannot control and the reader is infected by. In many ways, this story is indeed Lovecraftian. It made me understand the quote below properly for the very first time in my life and, if only for that reason, I'm glad I've read it:
"The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it." -- John Fowles 1964 (from 'The Necessity of Nemo' in 'The Aristos')


To be continued