Friday, October 21, 2016

Bookworming - The Victorian Chaise Longue (1953) by Marghanita Laski


It's good to re-recognize every once and awhile horror literature, either in short form or long, as the genre is dominated in the public eye by movies, most of which are of low artistic merit.  While not all literature is good just because it's literature horror fiction writing has the capacity to be just as high quality as any other literary genre, and while some authors are highly well-known, even record-breaking in their success (as with Stephen King, still the best-selling author of all time), lots of great stuff slips through the cracks and there isn't nearly the same public fanbase that supports horror books like horror flicks.  While we've got a week-and-a-bit before Halloween I'd like to spotlight a few of favorite horror novels that haven't gotten nearly the attention they deserve, and first is a perfect little nightmare, Marghanita Laski's The Victorian Chaise-longue.

Marghanita Laski (1915-1988) was a British novelist and record-breaking in her own right, setting the high bar for contributing quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary, about 250,000 of them during a 38 year span.  As a novelist she's best known for Little Boy Lost which was later turned into a movie starring Bing Crosby; the only other book of hers still read today, though never discussed as part of horror history, is The Victorian Chaise-longue.  I snagged it off a dollar book rack at a local Half Price Books and blew through it in about an hour.  After retrieving my socks and pants from the spot they'd been blown to I slid it onto the permanent section of my shelf and today you get to hear why.

Melanie is a sickly, naive young woman, fighting off an encroaching case of tuberculosis with fluff and sweetness.  On a shopping trip she spots a decaying chaise-longue chair on a heap at a junk store and is immediately attracted to it, purchasing it at the weary approval of her husband.  She gets it home and is visited by her doctor, whose assurances of her improving health are poor masks for what is most certainly the opposite.  She decides to take an afternoon nap in her new chair, and upon falling asleep awakes in a different room, a different body and a different time.  In her sleep state she has been transported into the body of Milly, a woman her own age and suffering from the same sickness who owned the chair in the late Victorian era and lived in the house across the river from her own.  Melanie has only her thoughts as herself and is a prisoner in her new body, hardly able to move or comprehend what is happening and subject to grudging care by Milly's harsh sister, one who alludes to past tragedies that Melanie can do nothing about.  As Milly's health continues to degrade Melanie gets closer to the awful truth of their connection and her own fate.

More of a novella than full novel, The Victorian Chaise-longue plays out like the creepiest installment of England's A Ghost Story for Christmas TV movie sequence we never got.  This isn't the kind of horror that has to rely on violence to disturb, but rather crafts a flawless gem of nightmare, where each new detail piles on unease and makes the reader cringe at the plight of one of horror's most vulnerable protagonists.  Part of what's so disturbing is that it's crushingly unfair what's happening to Melanie; while all horror protagonists have to be frightened and threatened in order for the reader to empathize with them, they at least can gather their wits and strength and make a best attempt for their lives - not so with Melanie.  She's not stupid per se but she's not the most clear-minded person, either, and her consumption and out-of-body-in-a-body situation shackles her down.  There's a reason that you can't sentence a criminal to death if they're unable to comprehend what's happening to them or if they did something wrong, and it's that same horror at an unjust universe that creeps under your skin all throughout The Victorian Chaise-longue.  But the real kicker, the part that blew off my aforementioned socks and pants, was the ending, that screaming wallop of an ending that tied my insides into a Gordian knot, one that I won't dare spoil for you.

The Victorian Chaise-longue has actually been filmed twice before, both as long-forgotten teleplays from the golden age of TV, but it's high time someone took a swing at it in a new series, though it's also high time there was a horror anthology series worth a damn.  It's length, simple story and slightly repetitive structure make it an easy adaptation to a 30 minute runtime and a skilled director could wring every drop of tension out of the setup with little more than set design and camera angles.  A number of British literary high-ups quite admired it when it was first published, including Penelope Lively and P.D. James, the latter of whom wrote the preface to Persephone Books's 1999 reprint, currently the only in-print edition of the book I know of.  This praise hasn't earned it a real place in horror history, though, as most lists of great horror novels of the last century skip over it and not many reference guides remember it, either, most likely due to its restraint and lack of traditional supernaturalism (not that these are marks against it, mind you).  If you've got a spare hour or two before Halloween give it a shot - it might not hook you immediately but stick with it and you'll be profoundly floored.  It's one of the best surprises I've had reading books, and that should be saying something.

~PNK

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