Classic Ghost Story Writers: Edward Lucas White

Edward Lucas White: Lukundoo (1927)

I think that the first time I encountered one of Edward Lucas White's stories was in Bryan Netherwood's aptly named collection Terror! An Anthology of Blood-curdling Stories. The story in question was 'Amina,' and there was a matter-of-fact simplicity about it which made a deep impression on me.

To be sure, it concerns a ghoul, but she is certainly the most realistic - and, indeed, most sympathetic - bloodsucker I'd ever met. Her simple remark, 'We shall have to drink shortly, but it will be warm,' still haunts me to this day.

Bryan Netherwood, ed.: Terror! An Anthology of Blood-curdling Stories (1970)

Next came the title story in Kathleen Lines' The House of the Nightmare and Other Eerie Tales. I spent a good deal of my time as a kid reading such anthologies, most of the time coming across the same old chestnuts: H. G. Wells' 'The Red Room,' Rudyard Kipling's ' The Mark of the Beast,' Arthur Conan Doyle's 'Lot no. 249' ...

Every now and then, though, I'd find something new and exciting. There was something quite strange and original about this E. L. White's fiction - something that made it stand out from the otherwise fairly predictable ruck of Edwardian spine-chillers.

It was an experience of the same order - though certainly not of the same kind - as my first reading of H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Dunwich Horror.' I'd already read 'The Colour out of Space' (Lovecraft's personal favourite among all of his stories). That was still roughly assimilable to my own general sense of the outlines of the 'weird story, though - 'The Dunwich Horror,' and the various vicissitudes of Wilbur Whateley and his sinister kinfolk, came from another universe entirely.

Kathleen Lines, ed. The House of the Nightmare and Other Eerie Tales (1967)

Last (but not least) I read 'Lukundoo' itself in one of the greatest of all short story anthologies, Dorothy L. Sayers' 3-part Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928-34 / reprinted in 6 volumes in 1950-51).

Dorothy L. Sayers, ed. Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928 / 1951)

'Lukundoo' was a trip, all right. I still have nightmares about that razor. But, of course, that was really the point. I'd gathered from carefully poring over the bio-notes in each of the collections above that White's fiction was - or at least purported to be - a simple transcript of his dreams.

Edward Lucas White (1866-1934)

He'd apparently had an illness during which his nightmares became particularly vivid and unpleasant, and had tried to exorcise the effect of these haunting images by writing them down as 'short stories.'

Looking at the blurb to the first edition, below, one gets the impression that this must have come as a bit of a nasty shock to his regular publishers, as well as what they refer to optimistically as 'his army of readers,' who were presumably expecting another historical novel in his more customary style:

Lukundoo: blurb (1927)

Mr. White, best known as the author of the memorable EL SUPREMO, here shows himself master of quite another style.
Tales of mystery and horror compose the greater part of the present volume - tales that prickle the skin and curdle the blood - tales that are told with that fine art of the thriller which, opening on a subtle note of suspense, develops surely and fearfully until the heart is brought pounding to the throat and the dénouement is reached with a sense of pure relief.
Whatever the personal preferences of Mr. White's army of readers, they will find him as expert a story-teller in the realm of the weird and the fantastic as ever they found him in that of the historical novel wherein his reputation has been so firmly established.

Certainly the 'personal preferences' of the blurb writer do not seem to extend as far as the actual enjoyment of these heart-pounding dénouements, reached in each case (it would appear) 'with a sense of pure relief.'

In any case, he did not offend in the same way again. His only subsequent publications were a history book, Why Rome Fell (1927), and a memoir attesting to the happiness of his marriage, Matrimony (1932):

On March 30, 1934, seven years to the day after the death of his wife Agnes Gerry, he committed suicide by gas inhalation in the bathroom of his Baltimore home.

- Wikipedia

It's hard to convey to young readers today the sheer difference between exploring such byways of weird fiction in the 1970s and the comparative ease of doing so now, more than forty years later. The book Lukundoo was unobtainable to me. It wasn't in any of the libraries I frequented, or even had access to via interloan. In fact, it wasn't until I went to the UK to study in the mid-1980s that I began to be able to read such things.

Edinburgh, where I was studying, was the proud possessor of a copyright library. There are six of these in Britain:

In the United Kingdom, the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 restates the Copyright Act 1911, that one copy of every book published there must be sent to the national library (the British Library); five other libraries (the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Trinity College Library, Dublin, and the National Library of Wales) are entitled to request a free copy within one year of publication.

- Wikipedia

This did not mean that the National Library of Scotland had everything contained in the British Library, but it did mean that there was a reasonably good chance of having access to most things you could think of through its stacks.

And, yes, it did have a copy of Lukundoo. Which I duly read, perched uncomfortably in the reading room there, possibly the least congenial place imaginable to pore over so strange and atmospheric a work.

Lukundoo (1927)

Lukundoo and Other Stories (1927):
contents:

1. Lukundoo
2. Floki's Blade
3. The Picture Puzzle
4. The Snout
5. Alfandega 49a
6. The Message on the Slate
7. Amina
8. The Pig-Skin Belt
9. The House of the Nightmare
10. Sorcery Island

Possibly for that reason, it came as a sore disappointment to me. None of the other stories, 'weird' though they undoubtedly were, seemed to come up to the standard of the three I'd read already. They seemed too arbitrarily 'dream-like', lacking the circumstantial solidity of (especially) 'Amina' and 'Lukundoo.'

S. T. Joshi, ed.: The Stuff of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White (2016)

The other day, whilst pursuing my strange quest to acquire everything substantive by (or about) H. P. Lovecraft - for more on this, see my posts here and here - I stumbled across the volume above.

So great had been my disappointment on finally getting to read White's book, that it had never really occurred to me to research him since. Now, though, for a very reasonable cost, it seemed possible to obtain most of the stories in Lukundoo together with some of the posthumous material published since.

S. T. Joshi, ed.: The Stuff of Dreams: contents (2016)

Mind you, if I'd waited a bit longer, I might have been tempted to go as far as the book below, described on its cover as containing 'Four Novelettes: "The Snout," "The Message on the Slate," "The Song of the Sirens," & "The Fasces," Nineteen Short Stories & Two Poems of the Strange and Unusual':

The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Edward Lucas White (2017)

That might, however, have been a step too far. In any case, I note from the Wikipedia article on him that:

During 1885 White began a utopian science fiction novel, Plus Ultra. He destroyed the first draft and started over in 1901, then worked on it for most of the rest of his life. The resulting monumental work — estimated by one critic [S. T. Joshi] at 500,000 words — remains unpublished, although a portion of it was released separately in 1920 as the novella From Behind the Stars.

This fascinating sounding work must therefore have been begun by White before the appearance of Edward Bellamy's classic Looking Backward (1888), and written over roughly the same period as Austin Tappan Wright's similarly immense Islandia (1941), which I've previously written about here.

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That was the before. Here is the after. I've now received (and read) Joshi's selection of Edward Lucas White's 'weird stories', and I'm sorry to report that most of the 'extra' stories in it suffer from the excessive padding so typical of the period, and yet so conspicuously lacking in the three described above. It's almost, in fact, as if they were written by another author altogether ...

There remains, in any case, 'Lukundoo' itself. According to the blurb of the horribly garish version below:

One of Alfred Hitchcock's favorite tales, he lamented that it was a story "they wouldn't let him do on TV."

In case even that isn't alluring enough, they add helpfully: 'This is a book that goes to the heart of darkness - and beyond.'

Edward Lucas White: Lukundoo (1927)

'You headed for Hicksville?'

'You headed for Hicksville?'

In my earlier post on Dylan Horrocks graphic novel Hicksville (1998), I mentioned that this page of his comic reenacts a classic scene from John O'Shea's 1964 film Runaway.

John O'Shea, dir.: Runaway (1964)

The scene with the car in O'Shea's film is (you'll no doubt recall) set up north, on the Hokianga harbour, whereas Horrocks' imaginary "Hicksville" is located in Hicks Bay, near the tip of East Cape.

John O'Shea, dir.: Runaway (1964)

More than fifty years on, East Cape really is one of the last parts of New Zealand where you can recover that sense of emptiness and distance which were once an essential part of the local experience. As the poster says: 'Set in the New Zealand you know' - or, rather, that you once knew.

Te Araroa and East Cape

So, on our latest drive back home from Wellington, we decided to go the long way round. Headed for Hicksville? You betcha!

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How do you get there?

Reading the Maps (2007)

Well, obviously the first thing to is to check it out on the map. I knew that the road would be pretty rough from Gisborne, but I have to say that I hadn't remembered that the route from Napier to Gisborne was so long and demanding. East Cape, with its wide open spaces and gentle curves, was quite a rest-cure by comparison!

Bronwyn Lloyd [BL]: Tolaga Bay (18/1/20)

Tolaga Bay was the scene of a particularly traumatic childhood holiday for Bronwyn, so we were duty-bound to stop and take a look at the place. It gives you some sense of the territory, I think - a few sandy footprints, a driftwood-strewn beach, a half-empty campground ...

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Where should you stay?

BL: Hicks Bay Motel Lodge (18/1/20)

There's really only one answer. If Hicks Bay is your destination, then the Hicks Bay Motel Lodge is the obvious place to hang your hat.

Situated on the hill above the township, there's certainly no shortage of magnificent views. The buildings themselves seem to date from another era. They've been modernised a bit inside, but from the outside they look like nothing so much as the Christian Youth Camps we used to get sent to periodically when my parents wanted a bit of peace and quiet.

There's even a restaurant - with a bar and off-licence attached. There's not a lot of choice, really, but we did enjoy our meal there, nestled romantically in the far corner of the dining room.

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Why Hicks Bay?

Dylan Horrocks: Hicksville (1998)

I've already mentioned the Dylan Horrocks connection: Hicks Bay is the approximate setting for his imaginary hamlet of Hicksville, "a quiet seaside town where the beach is sunny, the tea is hot, the locals are friendly, and everyone loves comics", as the blurb to the slightly expanded 2010 version has it:

Dylan Horrocks: Hicksville (2010)

Every detail of this town is etched in the memory of his fans: The Rarebit Fiend tearooms; Mrs. Hicks' Hicksville Book Shop and Lending Library; Kupe's lighthouse, home of the secret comics library ...

Xavier Guilbert: Interview with Dylan Horrocks (2016)

And, for a moment at least, one can almost persuade oneself that it's really (almost) all there:

JR: Hicks Bay (19/1/20)

Rarebit Fiend, anyone?

There is, of course, a lot more to the place than that. Thirty years before Hicksville, New Zealand novelist David Ballantyne wrote a dark, strange, moody thriller, set in the imaginary beach settlement of "Calliope Bay," which just happens to bear an uncanny resemblance to Hicks Bay.

David Ballantyne: Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968)

There was an old man who lived on the edge of the world, and he had a horse called Sydney Bridge Upside Down. He was a scar-faced old man and his horse was a slow-moving bag of bones, and I start with this man and his horse because they were there for all the terrible happenings up the coast that summer, always somewhere around.

- David Ballantyne. Sydney Bridge Upside Down. 1968 (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1981): 5.

How's that for an arresting opening? It's almost as if he'd set out to beat the celebrated first sentence of The Scarecrow, published just five years before:

The same week our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut.

- Ronald Hugh Morrieson. The Scarecrow. 1963 (Auckland: Penguin, 1981): 1.

If you're curious to know more, there's an excellent discussion of Ballantyne's novel and its background on pp. 162-67 of Bryan Reid's After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004).

Nor do the literary antecedents end there. Four decades later, Steve Braunias decided to play the place a visit, and this is how he begins his account:

Steve Braunias: Civilisation: Twenty Places on the Edge of the World (2012)

There was an old man who lived at the edge of the world. 'When I look back on my life,' Lance Roberts said, 'I've done a lot of killing.
I met him at his monstrous house. Someone had once written that they heard screams and bleats there on still nights. Outside, the long horizontal line of the blue Pacific looked sharp as a knife. The blade flashed in the bright sun. It cut the sky in half.

- Steve Braunias. 'Hicks Bay: A History of Meat.' In Civilisation: Twenty Places on the Edge of the World. 2012 (Wellington: Awa Press, 2013): 1.

Here's Lance Roberts' "monstrous house", the old Hicks Bay freezing works, seen from the road, half-hidden by trees - then closer up:

BL: Hicks Bay (19/1/20)

And here's "the long horizontal line of the blue Pacific":

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Hicks Bay or Hicksville?

BL: Hicks Bay (19/1/20)

Just a few atmosphere shots to remind us what it's like if we ever feel tempted to go back there.

JR: Hicks Bay (19/1/20)

Though, to be honest, I'd really have preferred to have stayed a bit longer. It sure is peaceful there. Edgy, yes - Braunias is right about that, but there's no point in pretending that we were even able to start on the long task of unravelling its mana and mystique.

I don't know if this trip means that I'll be able to appreciate Hicksville - or, for that matter, Sydney Bridge Upside Down - any better from now on, but there's no denying that Hicks Bay certainly is unique.

And those of you who've never explored the East Cape of New Zealand are definitely missing something: a tiny window on what the country used to be, how it felt to drive around it in my father's station waggon some fifty years ago.

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BL: Hicks Bay (19/1/20)