Ghosts, murderers, doppelgangers, and cave bears! What more could you want in a collection of weird fiction? From the Abyss: Weird Fiction, 1907–1945, edited by Melissa Edmundson, has all these things and more! This collection of strange and supernatural stories by early twentieth-century writer D. K. Broster came out earlier this month from Handheld Press. It follows after The Outcast and The Rite in being yet another illuminating spotlight on an overlooked author of weird fiction.
Before reading this collection, I was familiar with D. K. Broster only from her short story “Couching at the Door,” which was my favorite of the tales collected in Volume 1 of Women’s Weird, also edited by Melissa Edmundson. In the introduction to From the Abyss, Edmundson explains that Broster was fairly well known—especially in Scotland—for her historical novels, but that her short stories have not received nearly the attention they deserve. Broster’s work with thoroughly researched historical fiction informs her approach to supernatural stories. Indeed, Edmundson highlights the idea of the past haunting the present—which I consider the core tenet of the Gothic—as one of the main themes pervading Broster’s works. Other common themes include blurred boundaries and identities, possession, and obsession. Following the introduction are eleven tales spanning Broster’s half-century writing career, presented in chronological order.
Broster’s writing makes particularly good use of haunted spaces. “The Pestering” is her most typical haunted house story—though there several elements of this story that aren’t typical at all. For one thing, the apparition that haunts the Tudor-era cottage in this story seems to follow vampire rules, despite being more akin to a ghost: he can’t enter the home or even specific rooms without being invited to do so. He can also take multiple forms, appearing at times as an old man and at other times appearing young, perfectly indistinguishable from the living. “The Window,” is one of the most unusual haunted house stories I’ve ever read, and I found it deeply moving despite a premise that borders on the absurd. It’s hard not to laugh at the young English soldier who gets his arms trapped in a window while trespassing in an empty house, and yet the chilling visions he sees of French Revolution victims murdered on that very spot quickly shift the tone of the story. Broster takes the idea of locations that can slip out of time even further in “The Taste of Pomegranates.” One of her later tales, this one explores the burgeoning field of archeology and our developing understanding of evolution as two curious sisters visit prehistoric cave paintings and get transported back to a time when monstrous mammals roamed the earth and everyday life was filled with terrors our modern society could never comprehend.
But haunted houses (or caves) aren’t the only Gothic trope we see twisted into a new shape in this collection. “The Promised Land” is an interesting example of an unreliable narrator. Though the story is told in the third person, the reader is frequently allowed into the internal monologue of the little old spinster Ellen Wright. Though Ellen is meek and unassuming, the reader slowly gets the sense that she is mentally unhinged. Ellen is strangely detached from the act of violence that she commits and afterward lies to herself so thoroughly that she begins to fervently believe her own lies. Another Gothic character archetype in this collection is the doppelganger, which appears in the titular story “From the Abyss.” The tale opens with a frame story in which a group of young men discuss the phenomenon of dual personalities. This prompts one man to tell of his own experience with someone who split physically into two different bodies, rather than two personalities, after a traumatic event. The two forms are identical, though they grow to look a bit different over time, and they have the same mannerisms. The seemingly newer form has noticeably different desires, interests, and personality traits than the woman she was before the traumatic event, but she also seems to have a sense of her other self and sees her in dreams. Most interesting of all, though, is the deep hatred and revulsion that the two forms seem to feel for each other upon reuniting. And as usually seems to be the case in Gothic literature, nothing good comes from the two doppelgangers meeting.
If you love clever but unsettling stories that will leave you thinking about them long after you’ve closed the book, you need to check out the works of D. K. Broster. The stories in From the Abyss perfectly encapsulate the subtler side of weird fiction that doesn’t need tentacled aliens with god-like powers to make you feel like the world we live in is stranger than you could ever know. You can order a copy directly from the UK-based publisher Handheld press or order it from this Bookshop.org affiliate link and support The Gothic Library in the process. Once you’ve read it, let me know your favorite stories from the collection in the comments below!