The Second Macabre MEGAPACK®. Эдит Несбит

The Second Macabre MEGAPACK®

NOTE

Language has not been updated for “political correctness” and some stories may contain language which some may find offensive. Please note that languages change and evolve, and what was acceptable in the time of original publication may prove offensive to some today.

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

The late Mark Owings, through his research into 19th century literary journals, uncovered quite a few rare and unknown fantasy works. In the 1990s he planned to release two volumes of short stories and poetry from the Southern Literary Messenger. Alas, those volumes never materialized. Fortunately, he gave the publisher of Wildside Press a selection of stories from that journal for his use, and we draw upon Mark’s scholarship for about half of The Second Macabre Megapack.

The following is drawn from Mark’s original notes:

The Southern Literary Messenger was founded in 1834 and lasted until the War for Southern Independence killed it in 1864, on its seventh editor and fourth publisher. (It was revived many years later, only to die at the end of the Second World War, but that second incarnation is not dealt with in this book.)

If there is anything about it that is remembered by someone in these times, it is that Edgar Allan Poe was the editor for a period, and indeed Robert Bloch’s story “The Man Who Collected Poe” mentions that the title character has a bound set of the magazine for the period of Poe’s editorship. This would in truth be an odd volume, since it would bind 14 issues, from December 1835 to January 1837, which is to say a year with an extra month at each end. And there was no particular increase in fantastic or macabre material during that time, except by Poe. As a matter of fact, he seems to have hogged all the space for such things himself.

The publisher and first editor, Thomas H. White, declared in one of the first issues that he had no interest in “stories of fairyland” or “tales of the last heir of an ancient house and the fate awaiting him,” but only material dealing with, well, the material. However, the readers or available authors did have such interest, one supposes, since the fifth issue of the magazine, that for January 1835, contained “The Doom” by Benedict—whoever Benedict was. This story of a man ruining his life and that of a young woman, on orders from a demon or spirit or something, is denounced in that same issue by the editor for its immorality. [Those comments follow the story. —The Editors.]

Much of the short fiction that the magazine ran was translations, historical mostly from the French and melodramatic or supernatural from the German. On the material from the German, the name of Mary E. Lee shows up a lot. While it might be tempting to connect her to the FFV Lees, it’s probably not true. (FFV means First Families of Virginia, the old Southron aristocrats like Lighthorse Harry and Robert E. Lee.)

Mary E. Lee hailed from North Carolina and wrote poetry for the magazine as well as doing German authors into English. And in the case of “The Gray Lady,” (July 1848) I suspect her of committing fiction herself. There is no author given for this one, or any supplied in a note in a later issue, at least one close to the date. It seems unlikely that a German author would set part of a story in England, part in Wales, and the rest in the American colonies, when nothing in the story seemed to require it. A war or revolution in Italy would do as well, and the ghost being released through the destruction of the building seems English. [We have credited her as the author. —The Editors.]

David Dawson Mitchell is noted in the April 1835 issue as a man from Virginia who had then spent a number of years at the falls of the Missouri River where he was now running a trading post with the Blackfeet Indians. He appeared in three issues of the magazine and is represented here by half of the third one, in August 1835. Both the anecdotes there are presented as fact; the second one is a story of fulfilled prophecy, and I could easily see it happening. But the first is Another Matter, and I hope he made it up. I find no book credits for him.

With all these anonymous or obscure authors, we can now change to an anonymous translator (“a lady from Pennsylvania”) and a reasonably known author. Heinrich Zschokke [Billed as “Tschokke” in the magazine. —The Editors.] Zschokke (1789-1844) wrote a lot of short fiction; less than half of what has been translated into English is supernatural, though I’m told it’s all interesting in its way. This particular piece, “The Transfigured,” from the April 1839 issue, must be among the first fictional treatments of multiple personality disorder, though that does not seem the term for what we have here.

This volume does contain two stories that have appeared in book form before, both by the same author—Baron Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777-1843), who is perhaps ultimately responsible for the flood of sword-and-sorcery novels we had in the 1960s and 1970s. At any rate, he is a link between the medieval verse epics and the ahistorical fantasies that William Morris did in the 1890s, and what followed. His The Magic Ring (1813, in English 1825) is said to be a possible source for Tolkien’s work, though if it is as rare in Britain as here (two copies in the National Union Catalog) one wonders. The translation is said to be poor, if someone feels ambitious.

The first story we have here “Rosaura and Her Relations,” was collected in 1844 in Wild Love and Other Tales and probably has not been seen by many readers. It is from the July 1854 issue of the magazine.

I guess that the one safe thing to say about W. Gardner Blackwood is that he’s probably not related to Algernon, or to the people at Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, being from Charleston, South Carolina, and all, and they all being on the other side of the Atlantic. (Well, Algie got over here, but that was fifty years later.) W. Gardner Blackwood did a few other poems for the Messenger, but nothing else as long or impressive as “The Dead Man’s Race,” from the May 1844 issue.

“The Vision of Agib,” from the December 1837 issue, is one of the two examples of the oriental or pseudo-Arabian tale in the volume. The magazine like most of the era, ran a lot of these, mostly not good to modern eyes. It is anonymous.

The second story by Baron de la Motte Fouqué is “The Gallows-Man” from the October 1850 issue. Everett Bleiler’s The Guide to Supernatural Fiction says that this story was in book form seven times in English in the 19th century, and once in the twentieth – under several titles, usually “The Bottle-Imp,” and never under this one which is the literal translation (“Das Galgenmaennlein”). The 20th century appearance is what seems to be an abridged translation, in the Peter Haining Great Tales of Terror, (1972) where it is attributed to Johann Karl Musaeus..

“The Rock of Hans Heiling,” from the March 1846 issue, is credited to Th. Koerner. The first name is evidently Theodor, but all that I can say about him otherwise is that his collected works are common in bookstores in Germany, and the itinerant fanatics at the alt.book.ghost-fiction newsgroups (who have seen most of these) could add nothing more. [We have here credited the story as by “Theodor Koerner.” —The Editors.]

“The Enchanted Gifts,” by Jane L. Swift, from the February 1844 issue, is by a woman who otherwise contributed poetry and inspirational essays. This is our second piece of orientalia.

The issue for March 1850 contains an infuriating story. “Mr. Lindsay’s Manuscript” by T.H.E. Nothing else in the magazine is under those initials. The story really cries out for editorial intervention to allow ambiguity. It builds nicely to a story of occult retribution or wild madness, and could so easily have had it both ways...but instead the author piles on at the end a mess of denial that there could be any truth to the madman’s tale. Pity.

In May 1851 the magazine published a piece called “Revelation of the Spirits,” concerning a man who visits the Virginia state capitol at midnight and finds the ghosts of departed legislators debating current events and condemning the actions of their successors. The references are hopelessly obscure, and I would think it would have been pretty poor stuff even then. However, it seems to have spurred an anonymous contributor to an imitation of sorts and produced for September 1851: “Winderhans and the

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