The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension (Tales of the Weird, Band 46) - Softcover

Kerruish, Jessie Douglas

 
9780712354936: The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension (Tales of the Weird, Band 46)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 071235493X ISBN 13: 9780712354936
Verlag: British Library Publishing, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

First published in 1922, The Undying Monster secured Jessie Douglas Kerruish's place in the history of British Weird fiction. The novel was adapted for the screen in 1942, and remains one of the definitive twentieth-century tales of lycanthropy and occult detection.

'Where grow pines and firs amain, Under Stars, sans heat or rain, Chief of Hammand, ‘ware thy Bane!'

The Hammand family have been hounded by an ancient curse for generations; now, after the close of the First World War, the only two survivors are Oliver and Swanhild. When Oliver is beset by a creature in the forest surrounding the Hammand estate, the siblings resolve to meet the curse head on before it seals their fate in the form of a violent death. Enlisting the service of the occult detective Luna Bartendale, the investigation begins to unshackle the Hammands from their doom, and the stage is set for battle with an immortal force of savage horror.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jessie Douglas Kerruish (1884–1949) was a British writer of romantic, horror, and historical fiction, descended from an ancient Manx family. She was a regular contributor to The Weekly Tale-Teller, finding success with the publication of Miss Haroun-al-Raschid (1917) and The Girl from Kurdistan (1918), novels set in North Africa and the Middle East, before publishing her best-known work, The Undying Monster, 1922.

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First published in 1922, this cult novel is a heady brew of black magic lore, Norse mythology and weird mysteries spilling out of an eldritch ‘fifth dimension’ – complete with the first female occult detective to appear in an English novel, the ‘White Witch‘ Luna Bartendale.

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INTRODUCTION
The Worlds of Jessie Douglas Kerruish

In 2023, the British Library’s series Tales of the Weird published its first novel in the form of The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson. Hitherto the series has published either anthologies of stories by various writers or single-author collections, but now it expands on to a greater canvas—The Undying Monster is the forty-sixth volume, and the second novel, republished in the series. It has been five years since the series began with my anthology From the Depths followed by Haunted Houses, Andrew Smith’s compilation of two short novels by Charlotte Riddell. The series has brought back into print both classic and little-known works, and revived interest in both well-known and forgotten writers. Its subject matter has ranged from weird weather to botanical horrors to child ghosts to creepy-crawlies and even tattoos. Amongst them has been my anthology of occult detectives, The Ghost Slayers, and with the following volume we encounter one of the earliest female occult detectives, Luna Bartendale—the Supersensitive.
    The writer who created Luna Bartendale is one who had become lost in the shadows of old tomes, so it is good to welcome back Jessie Douglas Kerruish. She must have been something of a super-sensitive herself, because she had been deaf since childhood, and yet you would not know that from her descriptions of the nightmarish and provocative sounds that pervade this novel or the regenerative power of music. Little has been written about her life before, so this is an opportunity to bring her back into the daylight.
   Jessie Douglas Kerruish—I’ll call her Jessie from now on—was born in the village of Seaton Carew, just south of Hartlepool, in County Durham in the spring of 1884. Both her parents were seafarers but may have known each other for years—indeed, their respective families lived next door to each other. Her father, Moses Kerruish, was a merchant sea captain—he became a Master Mariner. He had been born on the Isle of Man and his Manx heritage can be traced back many generations. He had married Margaret Kell in 1876 and the two travelled the world. Their first child, also called Margaret, was born on the captain’s ship, the Black Watch, in October 1877 moored off the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. A second child, John, was also born at sea, in August 1879, while the ship was homeward bound. Unfortunately a third child, Mary, who was born on land, in Seaton Carew, died when only three months old, in 1881, and it may have been felt that the mother should stay at home, to avoid any possible stress through travelling.
   Jessie was their fourth child, and though born in Seaton Carew, it did not remain her home for long. Her mother was increasingly ill and the family moved down to Kent settling first in Charlton, before moving to Dover and eventually along the coast to Hove, next to Brighton, in Sussex. It was there that a final child, Harry, was born in 1895.
   Their father continued to work at sea and died at Antwerp in Belgium in December 1899. Jessie was fifteen. Her mother’s health was failing and to add to the burden, besides her deafness, Jessie found her eyesight was becoming poor. Thankfully she never lost her sight, but it put a stop to her hopes of studying art. Instead she turned to writing and managed to sell the occasional story to magazines from 1907 onward. Her eldest brother, John, had married and settled in Liverpool, so Jessie and her sister Margaret had to look after both their mother and help raise young Harry. Her mother died in August 1914 aged 56, just after the outbreak of the First World War. Harry, now aged 19, volunteered for army service, joining the Royal Sussex Regiment. He served in India where he was killed in March 1917.
   Jessie and her sister Margaret stayed together in Hove for the rest of their lives, caring for each other. Margaret worked as a dressmaker and seamstress whilst Jessie wrote. She had a vivid imagination inspired by the stories told her by her parents about their travels, and the Manx legends. Her childhood memories of Seaton Carew brought with them tales of smuggling and lost treasure, and she became fascinated by the world of make-believe and adventure. Amongst her earliest sales were three booklets for W. T. Stead’s series Books for the Bairns. The Gambler Prince appeared in December 1909 and The Raksha Rajah in December 1912, both showing her fascination for the stories of the Arabian Nights and the world of the Middle East. The third book drew upon her father’s tales and Jessie’s subsequent research, Tales and Legends of the Isle of Man (1913).
   It is not easy tracing her stories because she sold mostly to the smaller weekly magazines and papers which were too ephemeral. It is likely that other stories may yet be discovered. Her main market during the War years was a small magazine, the Weekly Tale Teller, where she first appeared with a tale of accursed treasure, “The Gold of Hermodike” for 7 November 1914. It was followed by her first attempt at a story of an occult detective, “The Swaying Vision” (16 January 1915) which I reprinted in Fighters of Fear (Talos, 2020).
   She found her metier, though, with a series of stories which ran through October 1915 under the general heading “Babylonian Nights’ Entertainment”, though there were only six tales unlike the 1,001 Nights. They were evocative of distant lands and showed her fascination with other cultures of the ancient past. This held her in good stead, because in 1917 she entered her novel, Miss Haroun-al-Raschid for Hodder & Stoughton’s astonishing 1,000 guineas competition, and she won. Her share of the prize money was £750 which is roughly the equivalent today of over £44,000. It provided her and her sister with a significant financial cushion to help them through the years. She continued to write, despite her failing eyesight, and in 1918 Hodder bought her next novel, a romance, The Girl from Kurdistan, which implies they were satisfied with the sales of her earlier book.
   It was now that Jessie turned her imagination closer to home and drafted The Undying Monster set in the South Downs just north of Brighton and Hove. Unaccountably the book failed to sell, despite the post-war interest in spiritualism and occultism. Perhaps Hodder had now type-cast Jessie as an author of oriental adventures or perhaps they felt the book too violent—there is, after all, a reference to the monster “eating babies”. They were not known for publishing tales of the supernatural. Whatever the reason, the book was rejected and slowly made its way round a circle of publishers until being picked up by a relatively small firm, Heath Cranton, who published it in March 1922. It must have sold reasonably well because it was reprinted within a month. It also received good reviews, The Westminster Gazette calling it “… an absolutely first-rate mystery tale, which combines the hold of a good detective story with that of the horrible.” The reviewer also perceptively remarked that he believed the book would have “a tremendous effect as a play”. It would, as you will see, have been a challenge to adapt for the stage and remain effective, but twenty years after its publication it was adapted for the screen by John Brahm for Twentieth-Century Fox. The film, like so many of its fellows from the 1930s, capitalising on the success of The Wolfman and other such movies, does not stand up well today, but its cardinal sin was that it dropped the character of Luna Bartendale and replaced her with a male Scotland Yard detective.
   Leaving the plot...

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Verlag
British Library Publishing
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
071235493X
ISBN 13 
9780712354936
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
300
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Van Ditmar Boeken, VDB Sales
+31881338650
sales@vanditmar.nl

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