The Master of Silence by Irving Bacheller, 1892

Irving Bacheller appears to be one of that type of novelist that is somewhat popular in his day and then fades from public memory. While not a complete enigma like some of the authors presented on here prior, Bacheller's life seems oddly lacking in interesting episodes. A WWI war corespondent and founder of the first modern Newspaper Syndicate who brought Kipling, Doyle and Conrad to the US reading public, his one major goof seems to have been sending writer Stephen Crane as a war correspondent to Cuba where the poor bloke got himself stranded on a dinghy for two days when his ship went under.

The Master of Silence appears to be Bacheller's first novel. It deals with a young man named Kendric who is visited one night by a strange mute person handing him a card from his mysterious, long unseen uncle Revis Lane (this family has a bit of an aversion to common names it would seem), urging the recipient (the boy's father, unknowingly to the writer long since departed) to come, citing "Consequences of vast importance to me and to mandkind" as incentive. Before the boy can get an answer to his questions, the mute servant suddenly up and dies, leaving the thing a mystery.

A few years later Mr. Earl, a man whose connection to the Lane family is never properly dwelled upon, ships off Kendric to look for his uncle in America. Then we skip two years and Kendric's already at his witts end. He finally discovers his uncle in a weird lake-side house shut up from all sides, only discovered via the medium of convenient newspaper article and here he comes to meet his cousin Rayel, who was intentionally raised by Revis Lane in complete isolation without ever having been taught how to speak because of Revis' idea that speech clouds the minds and distances us from the truth of things. Of course you have to have only a cursory understanding of feral children to know this is anything but the truth.

Of course the novel doesn't dwell on the sadism of the man deciding that since his wife died in childbirth he might literally make his own son into a living science experiment, dammaging him beyond repair in god knows how many ways but it's okay because he brings up God a few times.

Once Revis Lane dies Rayel is taken to the outside world and you'd think this would now be a novel about him trying to fit in with humanity after having spent his entire life with his father and two mutes inside of one house. But not really. Well it sort of is like that for a few pages, but it's mostly about Rayel's ability to somehow see through people's lies and the subsequent societal embarassment caused thereby. And then he and Kendric run into Kendric's old sweetheart, by complete accident again, who is now a famous actress. Now you'd think this would lead to some romantic entanglement involving both the cousins and the lady in question and it does for about two pages but then Rayel basically says he'll walk it off and you're left wondering what the point even was.

Around this same time Kendric gets beaten up by the accomplices of a sinister count whom Rayel accused of bank robbery while at a dinner table, and then after they move back to England there's some refference to a plot by Kendric's foster mother and her new husband to try and kill him except it's not really dwelt on at all, and then there's a confused scene of Kendric starting a fire and Rayel being horribly burned carying him out.....and if you're wondering if that's the end then pretty much yeah.

Despite the fact that barely anything happened.

This is a strange book. The first chapter draws you in with the sudden appearance of a mute bearing a cryptic note and even the search for Revis Lane leaves you with some hope but then it switches between taking potshots at high society, romance and adventure all within the span of a few pages and it barely dwells on any of it long enough to leave an impression.

The Sign of the Spider by Bertram Mitford (1896)

Courtesy of southafricabooks.com

Bertram Mitford (1855-1914) is a tought nut to crack. There isn't much information on him to be had online accept for the fact that he was born in the UK and visited South Africa several times, which is also where he got the inspiration for the setting of most of his novels. The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction claims he was a member of the Royal Geographical Society. His father Edward Ledwich Osbaldeston Mitford (1811-1912) lived to be 100 years old, for which he received a congratulation by the King, and according to The Times from London served for 25 years in the Ceylon Civil Service and in fact his first three children were born on Ceylon/Sri Lanka but Bertram was born back in England.

The Sign of the Spider is a book which I've looked forward to for many years on the title alone, before I found out Mitford was compared to H.Rider Haggard.

The problem is the tone of the book is all over the place. On the one hand you have a main character, Laurence Stanninghame, who is very pessimistic in all he does, to a lovable decree. But on the other, you have him participate in human slave trade in Africa and he goes through all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify how it's actually good that's he's enslaving these people. Mitford has all the people he enslaves be "savages", bloodthirsty cannibals, and so he tries very very hard to not have the issue seem at all moraly dubious. That is still very hard to accomplish, especially when the main character actually compares his own perpetual and hereditary enslavement of whole generations of people to his own future of, gasp, having to do odd jobs for not that much money ! Because willing paid employment and forced unpaid lifelong servitude and objectification are basically the same.

The main character doesn't set out to South Africa to deal in slaves, but circumstances force him into it. Only later on in the book when he gets captured by the People of the Spider, descended from the Zulus, the reader is hard pressed to feel genuine sympathy for him because he always has to remember this man was making money out of enslaving people. One of his companions actually continually protests the bloody business at first, and I could not shake the feeling it would not have been better for the book if that was the main character who had these objections. And not because I favour clearly defined black and white morality in characters, but more because the entire rest of the novel is set up like a traditional adventure novel where the story is designed to have you sympathise with the main characters and his plight and that always comes up as a sore spot.

The title of the book is derived from a box given the main character by a potential love interest before he sets off for his expedition and just so happens to resemble the national symbol of the spider worshipping Ba-gcatya and thus saves his skin. He gets carted off to their land, but his stay there doesn't take up much of the book and isn't as in depth as one would like.

Then finally, the moment we've all been waiting for. He gets himself thrown down into a pit with a huge man eating spider and it's.....not that great. It only lasts a few pages and then he runs off thanks to his Ba-gcatya sweetheart Lindela. On the way back to Cape Town Mitford, in order to avoid having to deal with race issues, does a copout by having Lindela die of a snake bite along the way. Laurence finds his other sweetheart in Cape Town, the owner of the titular Sign of the Spider, her monogram on the box which saved Laurence's life before, is now married to her rude, obsessive cousin, because he'd probably off himself otherwise.

Laurence then goes back to England with a few diamonds he found in the spider cave and apparently his slaving companions are still in the business and getting rich off of it by the end of the novel.

While the Ba-gcatya are portrayed with dignity, one does have to wonder about Mitford's morality when dealing with some of these issues.

Overall, the horror element in this book is far too minimal to really warrant it being a classic of the Weird and the adventure element isn't as extensive as one would hope. I hope Mitford's Induna's Wife and The Weird of Deadly Hollow will fare better.

THE GOLDEN DWARF: A SENSATIONAL ROMANCE OF TO-DAY by R. Norman Silver (1903)

Courtesy of L.W.Currey

There is nothing at all I could find about the author of this book, apart from his real name apparently being "George Knight", Given no other information including date of birth or death, it seems rather difficult to find anything with certainty on such a common name.

The book itself is really a melodrama, taking place in Wyresdale, England. It originally appeared serialised in Weekly Mail in 1902 before it was published as # 105 of M.A.Donohue's Flashlight Detective Series. An odd choice to be sure, as overall the detective elements of the novel are somewhat incidental.

It is the story of a pair of lovers whom circumstances contrive to tear apart, but unlike most stories this one has two different sets of antagonists opposing the main characters, who intertwine and subsequently frustrate each other's attempts at revenge. There are about fifteen characters one has to take note of and memorise their particular mutual sympathies and antipathies, including two romantic couples at once, because the more the merrier I assume. Of course there is a fantastically rich, villainous dwarf who wishes to obtain the hand of the female lead, by any means necessary, as well as vile german scientists at his beck and call. The main character's uncle gets murdered and the village inspector constantly makes wrong assumptions and never even comes close to identifying the killer himself, though that may be because he has the hots for the local Chemist's pretty daughter, so much so he reveals classified information to her, pretty much without provocation. His romantic rival, the chemist's assistant, becomes more usefull then the policeman or the main character, by revealing the sinister plottings of the Golden Dwarf, the fantastically rich diminutive person already mentioned.

This discovery, coming in a little too late in the novel, is also the most intriguing part of the whole book. The Golden Dwarf is apparently conducting inhuman experiments to turn children into giants and dwarfs...and yet this utterly horifying aspect of the story gets ignored for three quarters of it's running time in favour of conspiracies relating to paid false testimony and secret messages engraved on riding whips, and even then it takes up only a few pages at most until we're forced into a dramatic climax involving landmines. It's a pity because that was why I read it in the first place.

The main characters are also not much horrified by the inhuman abominations they find, and even the inspector himself has, apparently, no idea with what to charge those responsible. Now, I know Britain in 1902 wasn't paradise on Earth but even I think child abduction and inhuman experimentation on children would probably have landed you in the brig even back then.

Of course the inspector would also probably land behind bars as he let the disfigured children stay locked in their cells and him never thinking to move them results in all of them dying when the laboratory blows up.

The only interesting part of the novel, aside from the aforementioned ungodly experimentation, is that not only do two people who abducted the main character's cousin get away scott free, but so does one of the Germans who was directly involved with the child experiments, as well as being an accessory to the murder of poor Sir Christopher Derring, who never even shows up in the book alive, and whose murder the inspector pinned on half the people in the village.

Overall, not even close to what I was hoping it to be.

Born of Flame: A Rosicrucian Story by Margaret Bloodgood Peeke (1892)

The legacy of Margaret Bloodgood Peeke (1838-1908), if it survives at all, is through her contribution to Hermetic philosophy. She appears to have been quite active in the field, and even taught courses with titles like "Breath-Prana and Kingdoms of Consciousness" and "Eight lectures on the Yod, He Vau He, the Secret of the Kabalah". There is precious little I could find regarding her personal life, apart from being married to Rev. George Hewson Peeke and that she left all her real estate property not to her husband, but to her son E Cornelius Peeke, while her husband only received 100 $ to, quoting her will "to show my good intention toward him".

Of her sons the only one on whom some information exists is Hewson L. Peek, a lawyer in Sandusky, Ohio, who wrote two historical accounts of Erie County and also penned the 1917 history of American drunkenness in "Americana Ebrietatis: The Favorite Tipple of Our Forefathers and the Laws and Customs Relating Thereto".

As to the fiction work of Miss Peeke, she appears to have penned two fiction titles, today's subject and her Zenia the Vestal. The novel, Born of Flame, first came to my attention in the early months of 2014 when I found it listed on L.W.Currey's website. The description intrigued me and I went to seek it out but alas it was not yet digitised. It was one of the works which drove me to create this project in the first place, in fact to start compiling my list long before I decided to set it up as a blog. Now recently I have found that Born of Flame had been made available online and so with amazing eagerness I raced to acquire it and start reading it as soon as possible.

Unfortunately I was found rather disappointed. In fact this case shows many similarities with that of Charles W. Leadbeater's Perfume of Egypt, the first proper review on this website in that people of spiritualist leanings will often produce the most inefective works of supernatural fiction, a statement I have heard before from another author whom I cannot identify at present but I assume it may have been Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

The sadder part is while Leadbeater's work was flawed it was at least presented as a series of stories, with varying degrees of competence and racism. But Mrs. Peeke's book is barely a novel at all. There is some plot but a majority of the book is taken up with characters having lengthy discussions on spiritualism, hermeticism, and trying to link these together with Biblical dogma and geological evidence. And then the author will practically drop all pretenses at narrative fiction and sometimes will fill up three quarters of a page with extensive notes and quotations from spiritualist texts, sometimes seemingly with little or no segue between what is being (volumniously) explained on the page and the word or phrase of the novel which lead to said diatribe via an asterisk. In an amusing gaf, the author forgets the novel is supposed to take place in 1857 and has characters quote Hargrave Jennings's "The Rosicrucians" which was first published in 1870, and even have it reffered to as an old book ! Incidentally, those who unjustly rag on Bulwer-Lytton for supposedly writing incredibly bad prose (see "It was a dark and stormy night" etc.) never read Jenning's line "Note the goings of the Fire, as he creepeth, serpentineth, riseth, slinketh, broadeneth.", a line which Peeke actually quotes in the novel !

If it seems like I'm stalling that's because I am. There is almost nothing here. A doctor by the name of Grotius at an asylum falls in love with one of his patients who becomes violent whenever he's not near her. She dies and leaves him a bundle of papers inscribed by her father. Now after reading this Dr. Grotius becomes melancholy and gives it to his friend, the skeptic mineralogist Dana to read over.

The inscribed tree bark details the life story of the father of Dr. Grotius's great love, a certain Van Guilder. He relates how he met a woman from far India during a shipwreck and how they married and then travelled to a rough, untamed part of America to build a house in the hills. But Van Guilder's house becomes a store house for smugglers who bribe him with precious minerals. Then after some time his wife, who constantly talks about some grand mystical enterprise she's been chosen to conduct, passes away and he is stricken with grief but is consoled by her spirit. Dr, Grotius decides to find the House, along with Dana, to take a load off his mind and there runs into a group of people lead, as it turns out, by Elfreeda, the cousin of Grotius' Clothilde, who is a great female mystic and constantly talks about concluding her aunt's work. Dana falls for her and nearly gets himself killed because Mrs. Van Guilder's ghost takes umbridge at people touching the books in her old room, even if it's just regular volumes of verse, to the point of routinely killing people who do so.

The rest of the novel describes how Elfreeda, her brother, friend (the latter two of whom pair off in a sort of blink-and-you-miss-it way which never really comes much into play) and Dana travel to a town of Black people where Peeke can wax lyrical about Southern hospitality, have a white lawyer be sort of racist towards black people by implying slavery made them lazy, and falling for Elfreeda as well....and this also literally leads to nothing except him and his senator friend going on about what an absolutely flawless Goddess she is. I would almost think this was a self-insert of the writer, given her deep and lengthy musings on Rosicrucianism and Hermeticism. While in the town they find bones of pygmy people who are said to be the first human species to have possessed a spirit, as opposed to the so called Mound Builders who didn't because something about them being brainless, and who chased and hunted the pygmies violently.

Then after they find a tomb with a bunch of pygmies and a sacred inscribed moon rock to match one they found at the house and one Elfreeda saw in India, they return back to the Van Guilder house where, out of nowhere, Grotius decides to take some of the preserved Pygmy brains and have it inserted into the neck of an infant so that....it will regress in evolution and or develop regressive degenerations or defects to.....prove something about evolution.....I guess ? This is such an out-of-nowhere moment and it's over in a sentence or two so you have no idea what just happened.

The Novel ends with a fire Tree planted by a mystic in the back of the house exploding, Dr. Grotius willingly dying to join his beloved Clothilde and the entire house sinking into a sink hole in the ground. Mixed between all of this are statements about how humanity was basically designed to evolve into modern man by some type of Moon spirits called Pitris, how Darwin is a stupid-face because he believes we evolved from Apes as opposed from Pygmies, or how the Seven Planets of our solar system and seven sections of a human heart are all connected to the mystical number seven because mystical mysticism. Well Mrs. Peeke that last point was much more hilarious until 2005 but may yet prove to be just as hilarious in time. Oh and there's a psychic Black girl who can summon birds but she's in the story for like three pages and ends up as the house maid in Elfreeda and Dana's house.

And if it seems like that was actually a decent length of plot, boiled down it's a bunch of people going to a house, finding a ghost and scroll there, going to a place to dig up bones and then coming back, all while never shutting up about moon spirits and soul transference and the sanctity of fire. Which is really a shame.

Zanoza, a Borzoi Story by Ralph G. Kirk (1920)

If only a little while ago I complained about Philip Verrill Mighels being hard to find information on, Ralph G. Kirk is a near complete enigma.

There is no information on the man whatsoever apart from his date of birth and death (1881 & 1960) and a listing of stories he published in various magazines over thirty years. Two of these stories, Malloy Campeador and United States Flavor were made into films, though they appear to be melodramas, while the title of another, A Poem as Lovely as a Blast Furnace, at least has an amusing title. Kirk also seems to have had a thing for dogs, as he published at least 5 stories dealing with dogs, two of them as novels before they were collected together in his 1923 "Six Breeds" collection.

This was also the last time the chief item of interest today, Zanoza, saw a reprint, being originally published three years prior.

The book is odd to say the least. The first part deals, in very great detail, with a legendary hunting-dog-aided wolf hunt taking place in 19th-Early 20th century Russia. It's chief point of interest for the story as a whole is that, right at the conclusion of the hunt, a bitch named Zanoza gives birth to a pup who inherits the same name.

Then all of a sudden the book switches time period, location and the person in which the story is told, so suddenly in fact it's bound to give you whiplash. The setting itself is infinitely less interesting then the snowy expanses of Russia that Kirk managed to evoke very well without very many words, and the now first-person narrator never really bothers to introduce himself. In fact the whole thing is written as if we're supposed to know many of these things already, as if this was a sequel to something. Zanoza, for instance, is reffered to at almost the very end of the novel as the granddaughter of another bitch bearing the name Zanoza, and the narrator reffers to her cunning, but it's the first time the author even mentions the existence of this particular dog, as I don't believe she ever comes up in the first part, in fact within the first section of the book Zanoza II doesn't really have that much to do with the plot either.

The reader is unsettled by the sudden lack of interesting things happening, as well as the author's excessively keen interest in the poetic beauty of dogs, which Kirk writes about in such detail in this story that I was a little worried.  Only a sudden mention of the narrator's obsession with werewolf mythology even hints at anything fantastical maybe happening, and distracts us from questioning the inner workings of Kirk's mind.

To sum up the plot of Part II: The narrator, who has just had a baby child, and is the owner of Zanoza III, is visited by a strangely smelling man called Doctor Lupus. He shows up for no other reason then a social visit, arranged by a mutual friend, but mid-coversation a messenger boy comes about and hands the narrator, who has yet to change out of his bathrobe, a note from said friend who apparently assumes this may be a wereworlf and so he assumes the narrator can deal with him, somehow.

Then Doctor Lupus, for no real reason, turns into a wolf, steals the narrator's infant child and leads him and Zanoza on a mad car chase, (wherein the werewolf is driving a car) that ends with him splattered on the ground and strangled by the narrator. After a distressing discovery, he returns home with heavy heart, but finds out that everything he experienced was just a dream. And while this is a cliché, it certainly explains the weird logic which characters follow in the story, as in the content of the note, or why Doctor Lupus even showed up, or in fact the very being of a Doctor Lupus who is also a werewolf. It's a sort of strange non-logic one oftentimes finds in dreams, and one I've experienced myself.

I believe the most fitting way to summarise the story is to note that it is, in fact, not Lupus.

No I could not resist.

The Crystal Scepter (1901) by Philip Verrill Mighels

The person of Philip Verrill Mighels is a bit of a mystery to me at present. I didn't find a single photo of the man for starters. I found pictures of his parents, his wife, even his wife's second husband but none of the man himself.

Mighel's family grave

His personal details are limited to the year of his birth (1869), the year and place of his death (1911 in Carson city) and the fact that he married Ella Sterling Mighels, a pioneer and historian. And a handful of choice anecdotes: the fact of his being raised in Nevada, the second son of Nellie Verrill Davis and Henry R. Mighels, who both worked as editors on Carson city's "Morning Appeal"/"Carson Daily Appeal", his being a lawyer and journalist, a snippet from the publically available section of the New York Times concerning his wife's divorce from Mighels, which states that Mighels had deserted his wife in Nevada under some circumstances and another NYT article which lists him as one of the people present for the funeral of Mark Twain. According to "No Rooms of Their Own: Women Writers of Early California" by Ida Rae Egli he died at the age of 42 in a hunting accident a year after their divorce.

Philip's parents Henry and Nellie Mighels

Of his novels, most seem to deal with the old west and the frontier, and seeing the place he died at, the fact that he wrote some novels about prospectors doesn't come as much of a surprise. The only other work of his that seems to have some immediate interest beyond the fields of period adventure and gold digger fiction seems to be"When a Witch Is Young", his 1901 historical novel taking place around the time of death of Metacomet, the so called "King Philip".

The only piece of his fiction that is known to me to deal definitely with anything fantastic, beyond the elusive 1896 story "The Polar Magnet" from the Black Cat magazine mentioned on the SF encyclopedia page for Mighels, is his 1901 tale "The Crystal Scepter".

In it Mighels describes the journey of the narrator, who remains nameless for more then half the book, where thanks to a ballooning mishap hefinds himself in the middle of somewhere, on a tropical island, face to face with primitive early humans which he dubs "Missing Links". The novel focuses on him forcing improvements onto the poor savages, including better cooking, housing and defense mechanisms. The narrator never actually explains his own backstory in any way, but seems strangely knowledgable about archery, mixing explosives and boat building.

The tribe of Missing Links good old John Nevers finds himself sharing his lot with are white, and constantly besieged by a horde of other Missing Links who are black. Now there seems to be some racial bias in the way these latter ones are treated, beyond the one good natured black Link who was raised by the white Links and who, for his athletic figure, is dubbed "Fatty" by the narrator. However at least Mighels clears them of the charge of having murdered a traveller whose skeleton the narrator finds in their camp, as it turns out to have been an accident.

The novel, while it could have opened up to far more fantastic things, is a solid read regardless, though the Crystal Sceptre of the title, being the chiefly insignia of the head of the tribe the narrator joins forces with, is a rather miniscule part of the novel, though it's a good title I suppose. Oh and there's a woman who ended up crashing on the same island and was the unwilling guest of the black Links. I can't really say anything about her as she comes into the story in Chapter 36 (out of 45) and there's not much space actually given her.

The book is written in an amusing way, and Mighels is good with an occasional quip or two. Still there's a certain thing that happens at the end which I hope he wouldn't have done because it was a bit sad and it was also kind of a clichéd thing to do, and seems rather tacked on to the ending.

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.