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koilungfishEditor - Robert Muller
ISBN - Not Given
Contents:
- Dorabella or In Love With Death by Robert Muller, adapted by Rosemary Timperley
- Lady Sybil or The Phantom of Black Gables by Robert Muller, adapted by Mary Danby
- Heirs or The Workshop of Filthy Creation by Robert Muller, adapted by Brian Leonard Hayles
- Countess Ilona or The Werewolf Reunion by Robert Muller, adapted by Roger Malisson
- Viktoria or The Hungarian Doll by Sue Lake, adapted by Sue Lake
- Mr Nightingale or Burning Masts by Robert Muller, adapted by Robert Muller
- Gall or Ghost of Venice by Robert Muller, adapted by Rosemary Timperley
The stories are linked by the framing device of a gathering called the Club of the Damned, with characters from the stories narrating their adventure before some dire, tired twist is sprung upon the reader at the end. The twist is the same every time: the narrator is - GARSP! GAWRSH! - the main character of the story. Big bloody surprise that is after the second time.
The stories are all written in much the same tone - utter hysteria. The characters all act like they're wound up to the point of nervous explosion, and that does not do much for the reader's sympathies. Poe could get away with it; Muller can't.
Dorabella is a definite idiot plot. It is all very well to assert that the two main characters are so in love with the title character that they have taken leave of their senses, but the story makes it pretty clear that the narrator didn't go dippy until quite some time after his friend. Dorabella contains some of the worst excesses of horror fiction; impactful objects for the sake of impact, clearly supernatural actions used as set-dressing, cheap shortcuts for the sake of impact which don't work precisely because they're cheap shortcuts.
An example of the foremost of these is the title character's pet caged bird. What manner of bird is it? A raven. Ravens have a wingspan of about four feet. This is a rather large, grouchy and intelligent bird to be kept in a cage for several weeks on end - I cannot help but note no mention is made of the bird ever being fed. Although it is inferred the bird is Dorabella's supernatural father in disguise one cannot help but wonder why neither of the main characters ever considered feeding a bird that must have been in a cage too small for it to spread its wings. As for the set-dressing supernatural, Dorabella disappears Frodo-style in the middle a crowded inn. The cheap shortcuts come in the form of Dorabella and her father having Ye Olde Spookie Majick Eyes, in this particular instance without pupils. There is much of this going on, such as the author attempting to avoid the obviousness of Dorabella travelling in coffin by having her travel in what sounds like a red leather steamer trunk, which when one stops to picture it is actually quite comical. In later years, did she travel in a wheeled suitcase?
Lady Sybil is an incoherent collapse of text. It appears to involved two brothers, one a doctor, the other a composer, subject to the tyrannical rule of their crippled mother, who believes her dead husband is coming back from the dead to murder her. Mr Muller points the reader in the direction of suspecting the composer, yet anyone with half a brain can see that the signposts are so big and bold that the author is clearly trying to misdirect the reader. This might have worked if the reader had any reason to believe that the doctor was sane or reasonable, or that the composer wasn't being terribly put upon. All in all the characters are an unlovable mess and the story is best not read.
Heirs is probably the best story in the book by default. It concerns a man following the European travels of Percy & Mary Shelley, and running into - by chance - an inn that the Shelleys stayed at wherein they encountered a family of mad puppeteers who make living puppets from corpses. Why they do this is completely obscure. If one sits down and thinks about what's going on in the story the whole things unravels - why are these people doing this? What do they gain from it? How are they doing it? Why bother reading this story at all?
Countess Ilona is where the misogyny really takes root. It concerns four unpleasant men visiting a woman whom they, one way or the other, wronged and abandoned to marriage to a werewolf. She gets revenge by siccing her husband on them. There is some business about her son in there; she claims he was fathered by one of the visitors, but is actually the son of the werewolf. The title character's lover is in there somewhere too, being snooty at people.
The Countess herself and one of her maids show off Mr Muller's general opinion of women: whores, open to the sexual advances of any man. Female sexuality up to this point of the book has been Dorabella's enchanted allure and some faintly incestuous vibes between the narrator of Heirs and his enthusiastic, bookish daughter. In Countess Ilona Mr Muller opens up on the subject, showing us that he apparently thinks of women as beings whose existences revolve around providing sex to men.
The framing section at the end of Countess Ilona is probably the best instance of a bad reuse of a minor detail I've ever seen. During the story the Countess' soon-to-be-a-werewolf son eats a couple of pieces of candied fruit. The framing segment then establishes the identity of the narrator as being the Countess' older-and-now-a-werewolf son by having him ask for a piece of candied fruit as if this were the determining obsession of his character. I can only assume that, as poor a writer as Mr Muller is, his adapters were much, much worse.
Viktoria is the only story in the book written by someone other than Mr Muller, and a woman to boot. Ms Lake manages to undercut Mr Muller's fear of female sexuality by writing a story in which the listening Club of the Damned are less disturbed by the title character's vengeful possessed doll than they are by the existence of a lesbian couple.
The prose style of Viktoria is particularly bad. Writers tend to go above their standard style for the opening of the book, being a bit more bombastic, a bit more impactful, to get the readers' attention. Ms Lake does this with the opening of every scene. This proves to be uncomfortable to read, since the hard impact of the opening of each scene breaks up the flow, and gives one the feeling of reading a series of unrelated scenes. That each scene involves a different character, the relationships between whom are not clearly defined - the title character's governess, for example, is never mentioned as being such, so that I assumed her to be the title character's father's mistress until several pages after the sce was over - and the whole thing comes across as a mess of shards.
Mr Nightingale is about the worst story in the book, on account of the whole thing being based on the title character having some sort of colossal nervous breakdown and acting like a total bastard to the family he's staying with. It seems that the reader is supposed to believe the title character's assertions that he is being visited by his strange demon double who gives him the ability to tell when people are going to die, yet there is nothing offered in the story to convince the reader that Mr Nightingale is not in fact barking mad, and a total cad to boot.
The theme of distrust of women continues; Mr Nightgale's nervous lunacy runs on a twinned fear of death and sex, to the point of being so highly strung that one wishes the head of the guest house would just take Mr Nightingale down to the red light district and buy him a hooker. Instead, Mr Nightingale has some strange sexual encounter with a widow of the household - he seems to think it consensual, yet the way events are described suggests rape - which apparently drives him bats. This is followed by a strange bit in which the nubile daughter of the household, whom Mr Nightgale has been dribbling over, apparently gets off watching ships burn. The whole thing is a mess of hysteria and really should be taken out and shot.
Gall one can only approach in exhaustion, fed up with Mr Muller's histrionic characters, cheap effects and nonsensical plots. The title character of this one is possibly worse than Mr Nightingale, since he's clearly gone raving mad in the first couple of pages and is wandering around what may or may not be Venice in a deluded, hallucinating state. How the reader is supposed to sympathise and connect with a character who flies into insensible rages at the slightest contradiction, I cannot understand, save perhaps violent editing by a much better writer.
Gall takes the fear of women to yet deeper lows. Every single female character is a repulsive whore, excepting the title character's wife who is only mentioned in association with her fellow actresses who are now, for some reason, all prostitutes. How, when the title character is constantly referring to how events happened long ago, and all the women in question were actresses then, these women are supposed to be in any way attractive enough to earn a living as prostitutes, is not explained to the reader, except possibly that Mr Gall is hallucinating under his hallucinations.
In any case, the whole book is a mess, a slurry of plot fragments in which neurotic madmen squirm and cry. Do not read this book.
This book is:
* - histrionic
* - terrible
* - afraid of women
This book is not:
* - worth reading
* - in print
* - contained of any sympathetic characters at all
