The Miracle Boy (1927) by Louis Golding

I must confess to never having heard of Louis Golding before I chanced to find his 1927 novel, "The Miracle Boy", offered for sale through L.W.Currey. I still don't know if any of his other novels have the same tone, though I have read good things about "Honey for the Ghost". One does hope he didn't leave that dry wit and sardonic tongue confined solely to the pages of "The Miracle Boy".

Now, you could take this novel and C. F. Ramuz's "The Reign of the Evil One" and find that, though they have a similar subject matter, they both do it in different ways. Where Ramuz is more tragically farcical, Golding is condescending, satirical, sardonic. There are fewer instances of what you could call comedic in Golding's novel, but there is just as much awe, and though it isn't a tour de force like Ramuz, it builds differently, trying to give the impression of the place and the people, though the author clearly never wants you to grow to like any of them. The peasentry of Ramuz is pittiable in it's suffering, but the one of Golding is detestable, filthy, more human and less in a way.

Golding does well with the novel, the idea of a peasent lad, with a supranaturally attracted raven sitting on his shoulder, whose hunger in war-torn Munich brings him to perform miracles and then returns to his oafish people, exciting their primitive passions in one way or another is one that demands attention.

The sole negative of the novel is it's pacing. Now normally Golding will linger on, to try and submerge you in the atmosphere, which is fine because he is able to do so quite well, but he seems very impatient in revealing certain key plot points early, so much so it takes dozens of pages until the event thus teased actually transpires. Perhaps one could also say that the way in which the Miracle Boy meets his ends is set up rather abruptly, though Golding will still spoil it halfway through the book. You could even say characters might be negative stereotypes, but then there are no positive stereotypes in the book either.

The narrator, only hearing the story in fragmentary sentences throughout many weeks, also seems to piece together the tale rather perfectly, and takes quite a while to stop babbling and get to the point early on. One wonders why a living narrator is necessary when you could simply relate the matter to an omniscient one, and you would notice no difference, the fictional author of the treatise on Hugo Harpf managing to acquire such choice information as no Earthly methods could provide him with.

Finally, the very beginning of the books speaks of ancient Etruscan mysteries performed in Florian's Valley, which are the very reason the narrator even arrives in the village. But this plot thread is abandoned almost instantly and is sadly never revisited.

But those are minor issues with an otherwise fantastic book.

City of Endless Night - Milo Hastings (1920)

Milo Hastings

Milo Hastings was a man of many talents, most of them involving nutrition, healthcare and the artificial reproduction of chickens. Clearly, it is the mind of such a man as this that would create a novel where the embattled city of Berlin is submerged underground for a hundred and fifty years.

The story is set in the 22nd century, where an Idealistic World State controls most of the planet except for the armourer city of Berlin protected via Science Ray. It's a story that very much turns the concept of a "Lost race" story on it's head, but it doesn't do so in a farcical or humorous way. The society presented in city of endless night is based on that tired old stereotype of German efficiency, expanded into monstrous dimensions via living in a giant metal tube.

It is interesting that Hastings, writing just at the end of World War I not only predicted World War II, but that he also sadly predicted some other things, like scientific breeding, and the desire of certain German authority figures to make the "breeding" of the "lesser races" cease.

Strangely, throughout the novel Hastings portrays the eugenically produced workers classes as being incapable to adapt to any changes in workforce, even with getting slightly less work and yet the ending with it's sudden capitulation of Germany does not really adress the issues. There is the massive coincidence of the main character's resemblance to a dead German scientist he finds in a mine that even allows the plot to get into motion, but there are worse coincidences, and at least people do take note of it. It's also sad how little room is actually given to the Emperor, despite his importance to the story at least on a technical level. Though as a monarchist the bleak, anti Hohenzollern streak the novel has going for it somewhat irritates me, I can see it in the perspective of being serialised just after WW I and I urge others to give it a go regardless of political affiliation.

The Reign of the Evil One - C.F. Ramuz, 1917

Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz

The Reign of the Evil One is a most unusual piece of work, something like a combination of a classic Old testament "God is being a genocidal prick" moment except presented to us in "modern" (1917 edition) times. However, for the most part it's done without being didactic, though some moralising is inevitable, but the bulk of the book focuses on the manyfold sufferings of the people of the village.

The setting is a quiet little village in the Swiss mountains, where a wandering stranger called Branchu suddenly shows up and, using an amount of money totally at odds with his appearance and demanding the summoning of the authorities, buys his way into becoming the new shoemaker of the village.

Almost as soon as he does so, things start to go downhill. Suicides, child murder, the deaths of farm animals, terrible diseases, falling trees that make the village inaccessible and to top it all off, floods wrecking the fields and brings about famine. Oh Branchu is completely charming all the way and at first, and he even cures the stroke-afflicted wife of the villager Lhote, so no one says anything because he works so well and so cheap but things escalate and then after one botched crucifixion Branchu sets himself up in the Inn where he gives food and drink to the arrivals if they make the sign of the cross backwards, while those who don't starve in their beds, terrified.

Only when an innocent returns to the village and stands in front of Branchu does the horror finally come to an end. This book is so unlike most modern books, the only thing I can compare it to is the latter half of Alfred Kubin's "Die Andere Seite"/"The Other Side", which those few who have read it will realise is a very favourable if specific comparison indeed.

Obviously being a cheerful sort, Ramuz's later novel, "The End of All Men" (1922 as "Présence de la mort ", english edition 1944) apparently "describes the imminent end of the earth as it plunges toward the sun “through an accident to the law of gravity.”"

Ramuz himself is probably the most high-profile of the obscure or semi-obscure writers tackled for this blog thus far, his likeness adoring the 200 Swiss Franc note which seems to be the only notable piece of trivia about Ramuz in english, beside his authorship of the libretto to Stravinski's "L'Histoire du soldat".

God's Failures by J. S. Fletcher (1897)

Joseph Smith Fletcher was a very busy man. According to some sources he wrote more then 230 books on a variety of topics during his life. Sadly I have not been able to find a full bibliography, at most a recording of slightly more then half that number, so I can't verify that.

His "God's Failures" is a work that does not seem to fit among his many thrillers and the occasional dash of speculative fiction. It is basically a collection of conte crueles  This nearly forgotten genre, characterised with a level of restrain contemporary "horror" stories dead-set on having the most gruesome death scenes utterly lack, was popularised by Maurice Level in his stories performed on the stage of the Grand Guignol, however the true master of the field was W. C. Morrow, who'se collection of "The Ape, the Idiot and Other People" contains some of the most gruesome stories of their sort.

J.S. Fletcher's book doesn't quite approach the genius of Morrow or Level, however every one of the stories contained in this volume is a tale of loss, despair and hopelessness. The stories are all rather short so summarising them would be a bit pointless. And one does find certain themes and motiffs repeating, for instance one being the decrepit last member of a proud old family, having squandered the family fortunes in one way or another. Many of these stories could be expanded into lengthy, melodramatic, boring novels of their own, however leaving nothing but the bare essentials, each story can get to the meat of the emotional conflict and leave you with that peculiar feeling of expectancy one only experiences when reading a book where every single story is fated to end badly.

Oddly, I can't tell how exactly I came across this book. I cannot find it being refferenced in Bleiler or any other volume dedicated to cataloguing the supernatural and superscientific, nor does it seem to have ever been listed on the L.W.Currey website. Still, I am glad I ran across this as it's a bit of a relic of a by-gone age, and one can easily sink one's teeth into these little vignetes and satisfy one's schadenfreude.