Stories of Darkness and Dread [Hardcover]

Joseph P. Brennan (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Arkham House Pub (June 1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870540645
• ISBN-13: 978-0870540646
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,505,063 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Quiet Master of the Weird Tale, January 18, 2010

By 

W. H. Pugmire "I never can be tied to raw, ne... (Sesqua Valley) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stories of Darkness and Dread (Hardcover)

The stories included in this slim yet handsome hardcover from Arkham House are:
"City of the Seven Winds"
"The Keeper of the Dust"
"Zombique"
"The Seventh Incantation"
"Delivery of Erdmore Street"
"The Way to the Attic"
"Mr. Octbur"
"Episode of Cain Street"
"Killer Cat"
"In the Very Stones"
"The House at 1248"
"Black Thing at Midnight"
"Monton"
"Apprehension"
"The House on Hazel Street"
"The Man in Grey Tweeds"
"The Ninth Knoll"
"The Dump"
(The dust jacket is a wonderful illustration and lettering by the fabulous artist Denis Tiani.)

I corresponded with Joe near the end of his life and found him, in person, as quiet and unpretentious as is his wonderful weird fiction. These stories had an enormous effect on my own earlier fiction in that they taught me the art of the very short tale, stories under two-thousand words. Brennan's very short tales are so compact and compelling that they seem like tales of longer length. They always satisfy. He was as gifted at conjuring a strange sense of place as was H. P. Lovecraft, as we see in this paragraph from "City of the Seven Winds":

"I've never seen such a place, before or since--crooked stone houses with sloping tile roofs leaning crazily over the narrow streets about half of which consisted of steps, outlandishly carved gables, queer little lattice windows set with sparkling discs of colored glass, and squat, square-cut chimney pots which looked like obsidian. It all reminded me of the cover illustration on a book of fairy tales which I had treasured at the age of five or there abouts."

Brennan's conjuration of horrors in the same story is equally effective:

"Seemingly suspended in the outside air, floating, writhing and squirming, was a vast host. There are no words in the limited language in which I write to encompass them. I think of human abortions which have somehow been imbued with hideous half-liquid life, monstrous elementals from some infinitely distant end of the universe, of the half-conceived hallucinations of some unspeakable god of savagery and chaos..."

Again, Lovecraft's influence may be detected. (Brennan was the author of a bibliography of Lovecraft and a study, "H. P. Lovecraft: An Evaluation.") Brennan writes fluently of horror experienced and horror remembered. He shares with August Derleth the ability to write the simple ghost story, tales of quiet haunting. He sometimes falls a little short in his elicitation of terror -- "Black Thing at Midnight" doesn't quite live up to its charming title; but in most cases his wee tales leave you with a wonderful chill of horror, and that is what a horror story should do first and foremost. This collection includes one tale of the Cthulhu Mythos, "The Keeper of the Dust," and one wonders why there was no Brennan Mythos tale included in Derleth's TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS.

Brennan is now largely forgotten and neglected, which is a crime. He was as effective a poet as he was a weird fantasist, and Arkham House published one slim volume of his verses, NIGHTMARE NEED, in 1964. I liked Joe because he was an old soul, as is described on this book's back jacket: "He admits to a nostalgic fondness for antiquarian sections of old Connecticut towns and cities. Like a growing number of his contemporaries he objects to the replacement of beautiful landmarks and historical sites by wastelands of concrete and egg-crate cubicles of apartment living. His writing often mirrors his acute time-sense."

Stephen King explained how great Brennan's fiction is in an excellent introduction to the wonderful pb collection, THE SHAPES OF MIDNIGHT; "Brennan writes in what E. B. White called 'the plain style,' a style which is as modest and as self-effacing as Joe Brennan is himself . . . but for all of that, it is a sturdy style, capable of wielding enormous power when it is used well. As it is here. In fact, THE SHAPES OF MIDNIGHT could serve as an exercise-book for the young writer who aspires to pen and publish his or her own weird tales."

In his simple and unassuming way, Joseph Payne Brennan is one of the masters of the weird tale. May his kind soul rest in peace.