I read Morbid Tales last week. Funnily enough, it does not seem that morbid: Crisp's brand of introspective horror—introspection tinged with wonder tinged with loss—is almost the antithesis of morbidity. There is an elegiac tone to Crisp's stories that I have not encountered elsewhere in the genre, mediated by his very lucid prose style.
"Far-Off Things" and "Cousin X" are my favourites. The fairytale feel and mournful innocence of the former reminds me of the Norwegian arch-sentimentalist Sigbjørn Obstfelder, whom I revere, and also of John Bauer, the Swedish illustrator, whose style would have fit this story perfectly. Naivety should never be underestimated. The ending of "Cousin X" could be considered overly romantic—in all three senses of the word—but it works for me, even if the adult Cousin X is almost too eloquent.
"A Lake" is a bit problematic, I think, because it occupies a grey area between Crisp's approach to horror and a more traditional style: a curious outsider chances upon a location associated with a strange cult, decides to investigate and gets drawn in, literally—very Lovecraft or "The Last Feast of the Harlequin", a story that can only go one way. "A Lake" ends on the same note as "Autumn Colours", viz. with the possibility of one suicide claiming the next, but I think the more ambiguous ending of the latter story is preferable. Crisp is much better when unravelling obscure strands of tangled relationships, like Andy and Adrienne's in "Autumn Colours", than when pursuing some ordinary horror set-up. Still, "A Lake" is by no means a bad story, and the climax is an exemplary instance of cosmic horror.
Finally, much as I like "The Tattooist", gothyness in horror fiction is really starting to grate on me. Maybe I just overdosed on this when reading certain other authors, but why can fey characters not simply be fey without all these trappings of subculture?
