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The Pale Ape and Other Pulses
by MP Shiel
(Tartarus Press, 2006; 211 pages; $55.00; 1-872621-98-8.)
Review by William P Simmons
Attaining an ethereal wedding of cosmic awe and emotional unease beyond
the grasp of his peers, M.P. Shiel (1865-1947)  was
an author whose lyrical, emotionally-charged style proved the perfect
aesthetic vehicle with which to express the grandiose and macabre. A
true eccentric, his mystically charged narrative style and technique
enraptures. Poetry of the truest sort, the crystalline complexity of
his images -- mirrored by his sentence structure -- is heightened further
by a less apparent but crucial underlying resonance of the outré.
Admired by both Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft, the latter discovering
the stylist's supernatural work in 1923, Shiel was the author of around
25 novels and dozens of short stories, including grotesque detective
pieces, ornamental mysteries, exotic adventures, scientific romances,
and supernatural horror, the last few of which make up the bulk of the
fiction reprinted in The Pale Ape And Other Pulses, a collection
of Shiel's hard-to-find yet easy to appreciate neglected weird fiction.
The first major collection of this author's in three decades,
this collection is part of Tartarus Presses ever-expanding efforts to
salvage worthy neglected masterworks of the macabre. This collection
is rather like a burnt offering to some dark god -- a dark treasure
of supernatural, psychological, and early surrealistic fiction, each
of which are lent philosophical richness by Shiel's ornate style. These
stories are worthy of their bad-boy reputations, literary vivisections
of morality and expectation In a genre too often known for bland obedience
to conservative moral posturing than quests for truth, these pieces
subvert not only the commonplace themes, subjects, and moral/ aesthetic
attitudes of Shiel's day. In addition, their method of narrative delivery
was (and remains) revolutionary. An explosive refutation of the banality
of minimalism -- a narrative approach long utilized by modern ghost
story authors -- these Pulses are precisely that, life-lines
pumping new blood through literary convention.
Originally collected in 1911, the ten stories comprising The Pale
Ape and Other Pulses date from the mid 1890s into the first decade
of the twentieth century, providing a fascinating cross-section of Shiel's
evolving interests in a rapidly changing cultural climate. As noted
for technique and structure as for his delirious style, Shiel was just
as often noted for an implicit wit which is duly noted in "Huguenin's
Wife," a conte cruel easily comparable with (if not superior) to
the efforts of Charles Birkin. Destiny occupies just as prominent a
place in these tales of spectral revelation and human baseness as do
occult manifestations, the former celebrated to high effect in "The
Spectre-Ship," a chillingly effective re-shaping of folklore sensibilities
that benefits from Shiel's stylistic witchery and cynicism, treating
an unavoidable doom with all the pathos and fervor of a Decadent whose
bread and butter was the beautifully corrupt, meaningless void. "The
House of Sounds" (a revision of "Vaila," first published
in the landmark collection Shapes in the Fire), toted by none
other than H. P. Lovecraft as "the most haunting thing I have read
in a decade," is a delicious, undeniably poetic rape of convention,
attacking our frail dependence on perception; this piece arouses not
only fear but panic, evoking a sense of awe most often reached only
by such authors as Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen.
Showing a devotion to Poe as well as the artists of his own age, "The
Great King" is a study in moral deterioration, while the less successful
"Cummings King Monk," "'A Bundle of Letters," and
"The Bride" are more concerned with human mysteries of identity
and deduction than the spectral or unknown that lend Sheil's other stories
such effect. Despite the more mundane topics of these later stories,
their treatment lends them an undeniable sense of strangeness, surrounding
what in other hands would be mundane 'who-done-its?' with a cosmic sense
of unease also exhibited in Shiel's Prince Zaleski stories. Sharing
much with the atmospheric terror of the traditional ghost story, wherein
established reality is invaded by outside forces -- albeit with a vastly
different style and approach -- "The Pale Ape" is a minor
supernatural masterwork, mirroring in its tragic plot and emotional
authenticity a sense of helplessness reached only in LeFanu's own story
of abnormal psychology, guilt, and supernatural menace, "Green
Tea."
Rather than possessing the self-hating, melodramatic angst of the traditional
doomed gothic anti-hero/villain of the Romantic period (or the uncontrollable
greed for experience exhibited in both Goethe and Marlow's Faustus interpretations),
Sheil's characters are contradictions of conservative principles, desires
and motivations. Neither a ghost story writer proper nor a fantasist
strictly in the Lewis or Morris mold, Shiel's ideas joined the adventurous
with the uncanny, both reflecting and subverting the natural world.
Likewise, his style, no less important to the fiction's success as his
themes, invited suspension of disbelief. Not for Shiel, the domestic
terrors of the hearth-ghost or the simplistic condemnation of abnormality.
When Shiel does unveil the spectral both its appearance and its
subsequent effect on people are more ambiguous in tone than what is
expected in traditional supernaturalism. Exploring the philosophical
resonance of the unknown, Shiel created in emotionally mysterious, sensitively
heightened characters exotic flesh-and-blood representations of cosmic
independence and cold intellectual power.
Moments of terror-laden friction -- emotionally charged moments of
explosion -- abound in this collection. Introduced by Brian Stableford,
this volume instills a sense of both mysticism and earthly relevance
to fantasies which celebrate the outré in the truest sense of
the term, allowing imagination to run unfettered. The result? Stories
without genres, nightmares without boundaries.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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