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Fantasy Commentator, v. 1, issue 11, Summer 1946
Page 279
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FANTASY COMMENTATOR 279 victim, who progressively becomes more morose and taciturn, eventually losing himself in a morass of Calvinistic gloom as he sees his fortune slip away and his family disintegrate around him, is excellently portrayed. Of these four stories, "Miss Avenal" is surely the best. It describes the experience of a woman acting as a nurse-companion to a Miss Avenal, who allegedly is recovering from the effects of a nervous breakdown. The two live alone together on the moors, with only small village near by. Gradually the patient becomes less weak, more active, and no longer spends sleepless nights. Conversely, the nurse progressively develops a dreamy lassitude, falling asleep during the day and remaining helplessly awake at night. In queer daydreams she seems to follow Miss Avenal's voice down long corridors of black marble, or along gloomy avenues of clipped yews. Eventually her malaise becomes complete and she loses consciousness, to awaken days later among friends at her native town; her strength and beauty are gone, and she is left haunted by strange visions which she recognizes as the memories of Miss Avenal herself. It would be a mistake to regard this story as one of metempsychosis: it is, of course, a variant on the vampirism theme---and a most noteworthy one indeed. In Dr. Harvey's hands familiar subject-matter is cleverly transmuted so that what traditionally hinged on a physical concept has been made to depend upon a physical one. The atmosphere is maintained with skill from beginning to end, and the characterization is acutely real. Miss Avenal is to this critic a far more frightening entity than the widely-praised creations of Stoker, Polidori and Prest; and stories in a similar vein---such as The Parasite of A. Conan Doyle---are simply not in the same class as Harvey's work. That "Miss Avenal" should be so little known to connoisseurs of supernatural fiction is as puzzling as it is deplorable. There is a strikingly close thematic similarity between the stories in this group and those written by another modern master.... Ghosts, it is advanced, either do not exist at all, or else, like the stars at noonday, they are there all the time and it is we who cannot see them... This [last] is the ghost-belt that never asserts its spectre, but leaves you in no doubt of his presence... Nobody...has not sometimes surmised the existence of a class of beings of a composition so unstable, yet of so plausible an exterior, that they are hardly known to have been ghosts till they have passed. To some of us these are the most disturbing simulacra of all, not because they contradict nature, but because they actually join hands with it. Surely that voice was a real voice, that touch a real touch? That that passed us in the twilight just now, surely that was substance and not shadow? So writes Oliver Onions in his "Credo" (Collected Ghost Stories, page ix et passim). And thus it is with Miss Avenal, the horrible Peter Levinsham and the doll Sambo: only after they have passed from our ken do we realize that we have indeed met with things which are not all that they seem, those who are not the Real People. IV The third group of William Fryer Harvey's tales is fundamentally an extension of the second. Here the supernatural agencies are directly referred to in the fictional structure, but they nevertheless can be characterized only by the effects of their actions; the author is still content to keep his otherworldly creations in the wings of the theater, out of sight of his audience and frequently even those on the stage itself.
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FANTASY COMMENTATOR 279 victim, who progressively becomes more morose and taciturn, eventually losing himself in a morass of Calvinistic gloom as he sees his fortune slip away and his family disintegrate around him, is excellently portrayed. Of these four stories, "Miss Avenal" is surely the best. It describes the experience of a woman acting as a nurse-companion to a Miss Avenal, who allegedly is recovering from the effects of a nervous breakdown. The two live alone together on the moors, with only small village near by. Gradually the patient becomes less weak, more active, and no longer spends sleepless nights. Conversely, the nurse progressively develops a dreamy lassitude, falling asleep during the day and remaining helplessly awake at night. In queer daydreams she seems to follow Miss Avenal's voice down long corridors of black marble, or along gloomy avenues of clipped yews. Eventually her malaise becomes complete and she loses consciousness, to awaken days later among friends at her native town; her strength and beauty are gone, and she is left haunted by strange visions which she recognizes as the memories of Miss Avenal herself. It would be a mistake to regard this story as one of metempsychosis: it is, of course, a variant on the vampirism theme---and a most noteworthy one indeed. In Dr. Harvey's hands familiar subject-matter is cleverly transmuted so that what traditionally hinged on a physical concept has been made to depend upon a physical one. The atmosphere is maintained with skill from beginning to end, and the characterization is acutely real. Miss Avenal is to this critic a far more frightening entity than the widely-praised creations of Stoker, Polidori and Prest; and stories in a similar vein---such as The Parasite of A. Conan Doyle---are simply not in the same class as Harvey's work. That "Miss Avenal" should be so little known to connoisseurs of supernatural fiction is as puzzling as it is deplorable. There is a strikingly close thematic similarity between the stories in this group and those written by another modern master.... Ghosts, it is advanced, either do not exist at all, or else, like the stars at noonday, they are there all the time and it is we who cannot see them... This [last] is the ghost-belt that never asserts its spectre, but leaves you in no doubt of his presence... Nobody...has not sometimes surmised the existence of a class of beings of a composition so unstable, yet of so plausible an exterior, that they are hardly known to have been ghosts till they have passed. To some of us these are the most disturbing simulacra of all, not because they contradict nature, but because they actually join hands with it. Surely that voice was a real voice, that touch a real touch? That that passed us in the twilight just now, surely that was substance and not shadow? So writes Oliver Onions in his "Credo" (Collected Ghost Stories, page ix et passim). And thus it is with Miss Avenal, the horrible Peter Levinsham and the doll Sambo: only after they have passed from our ken do we realize that we have indeed met with things which are not all that they seem, those who are not the Real People. IV The third group of William Fryer Harvey's tales is fundamentally an extension of the second. Here the supernatural agencies are directly referred to in the fictional structure, but they nevertheless can be characterized only by the effects of their actions; the author is still content to keep his otherworldly creations in the wings of the theater, out of sight of his audience and frequently even those on the stage itself.
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