At the Change of the Moon by Bernard C. Blake

Johnny Mains has passed on news of a reissue of his discovery of the 1902 collection of nine tales At the Change of the Moon, by Bernard C[ecil] Blake (1882-1918). 

The nine stories tell of a competition between two men during a lengthy storm as they relate stories of madness and horror, each in an attempt to top one another. This reprint from Mislaid Books is considerably expanded, not only by Johnny's lengthy and well-illustrated Introduction and additional matter, but also with other items the author wrote around the same period, including five tales, two poems and one piece of non-fiction from issues of Vectis from 1903.  

It is available in hardcover from Amazon.co.uk at this link for £19.00; and at Amazon.com in the US at this link for $25.38. 

Johnny writes in his introduction that:

In 1901, aged nineteen, he wrote his only collection of weird stories, At the Change of the Moon—an example of horror portmanteau, and possibly inspired by the Dickens-curated ‘The Haunted House’, published in All the Year Round in 1859—about two men who swap strange tales while stuck in an inn during a storm. It was published the following year. 

Here are some extracts from original reviews that are quoted in an appendix:

“This book, itself not long, strings upon a narrative of strangers entertaining one another by story-telling at a mysterious village inn, eight short tales of ingeniously imagined horror. There is madness—fancied madness—in them all to make the background appropriately lurid. The particular motives are like those of Poe, and the smaller shudder-bringers who have followed him. In one tale a man tells how he took delight in poisoning his friends and watching the symptoms of their agony. Another is philosophically fantastic, and tells of murder as a homeopathic remedy for lunacy. Then there is one of an ominous bird, the sight of which brings the coldness of death to him who sees it; another of horrific mesmerism, and another in which the teller asseverates that the sun is hell, for he has been there, and he knows. All are short and he writes with a rapid lightness which gives them as much verisimilitude as this sort of story need carry to be convincing to a complacent reader. They make a suitable book for holiday reading.” —The Scotsman, June 23, 1902 

“At the Change of the Moon by Bernard C. Blake (2s. 6d.). We have not had the pleasure of meeting with any of Mr. Blake’s work before the present volume. If it be his first effort, we can only say it is a very fine one, proving him to be a writer of rare imaginative power. The stories in the volume are nine in number, and are supposed to be told to the author by a strange old being named Pharaoh and a doctor who has made lunacy his special study. The tales are weird and uncanny, and here and there somewhat morbid. The latter feeling, however, by no means predominates, and the reader, while now and again getting a creepy feeling, finds his sympathy with the personages brought before him thoroughly enlisted. Mr. Blake has the touch of a fine artist, and knows the value of a suggested horror as against a plainly elaborated one. All who like weird literature and are fond of thrills.” —Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, June 29, 1902

“This is a weird book, as might be expected from the fact of its material having been gathered in a hitherto untilled, but certainly fruitful, field—the lunatic asylum. The writer has evidently made a study of the morbid as seen in such places, and has out of his knowledge put together some curious and startling stories. Not the least of these is the man who killed his father, and in so doing considered that he had performed a service to humanity, because his father was in the habit of wearing a collar without a necktie!” —Weekly Dispatch (London), August 3, 1902

 

His Beautiful Hands

I first encountered the work of Oscar Cook (1888-1952) not by his prose but by a television adaptation of one of his stories. It remains the only Cook story to have been filmed. It was one of a handful of episodes of Rod Serling's Night Gallery series, which I watched avidly upon its first broadcasting, that really stayed with me. The show ran three seasons, from November 1969 through October 1972. I was nine years old when Night Gallery debuted, but I was already completely familiar with Serling's early series, The Twilight Zone, which ran from 1959 through 1964--though I certainly watched it in re-runs. Oscar Cook's story was "Boomerang," first published in Switch on the Light (1931), edited by Christine Campbell Thomson (then married to Cook). Serling himself wrote the teleplay, re-titling it "The Caterpillar."  It was broadcast on 12 March 1972, when I was twelve years old.  More than fifty years later I still recall its impact.

Many years passed before I paid attention to the authors whose works had been adapted into films or television shows, and I was glad finally to read "Boomerang." It was not frequently reprinted, and I suppose I must have read it in A Century of Creepy Stories (1934). About twenty years ago, John Pelan of Midnight House was contemplating  doing a volume of Cook's stories, and one of Thomson's stories--or a best of both in one volume. I put together bibliographies of both, and did some research on their lives, but the plans came to nought. More recently I learned Johnny Mains was planning a Cook omnibus, so I sent him the bibliography I had compiled years earlier. Johnny added to it considerably, and it is now published in his omnibus (where Johnny generously kept my name as part of the byline). 

His Beautiful Hands: The Short Fiction of Oscar Cook has now been published by Ramble House, and it is a thick compilation, containing around forty stories (plus some nonfiction, etc.), and the results of Johnny's researches appear in various introductions and appendices. There is even a short Foreword by Cook's grandson. 

Our knowledge of Cook has thus been considerably advanced, and anyone interested in British horror fiction from between the First and Second World Wars will find this volume essential.

Celtic Weird and author Eochann MacPhaidein

Celtic Weird: Tales of Wicked Folklore and Dark Mythology, is a newly published anthology edited by Johnny Mains. It contains some twenty-one stories, divided into seven sections: Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, Isle of Mann, Wales, Cornwall, and Gaelic. Some of the authors are well-known, like Robert Aickman, Count Stenbock, Edith Wharton, Nigel Kneale, Arthur Machen, and Frank Baker, etc. Of course I immediately gravitated towards the authors unknown to me, and I'd like to discuss one of them here. The story is called "The Butterfly's Marriage" and it is by Eochann MacPhaidein.

Mains introduces the story as follows:  

I cannot find anything about Eachann (Hector) MacPhaidein apart from the fact that he wrote Pòsadh An Dealan-dè ("The Butterfly's Wedding") for Uirsgenlan Gaidhealach / Highland Tales (1905). The following story is, in my opinion, astonishing, I don't think I've ever read anything so out there and he distills the very essence of Gaelic folklore and outré imagination into every single word. This is one weird tale. 

I think the editor oversells the story a bit, but it is an odd one, and I certainly wish we had more stories from this author. Uirsgenlan Gaidhealach is a small all-Gaelic anthology of four stories, of which MacPhaidein's is the last one. The book (published in 1905 in wrappers at 6d, and cloth at 1s) is only 64 pages, and MacPhaidein's story is found on pages 58-64; it is the shortest in the book. The names of the four authors are given only in the table of contents, with the names Gaelicised. However, an early review in the October 1905 issue of An Deo-Ghréine, gives MacPhaidein's everyday name as Hector MacFadyen, and notes "The author is a master of the folk style, and his tale does not lapse once into modernity. We should like to see larger output from the same source" (p. 16). The book was reprinted in both formats in 1912. 

Mains does not say where the English translation comes from, but it appeared soon after the book's publication in the 16 October 1905 issue of  The Celtic Review, with no author's name given, and no translator's name either. The translator was clearly someone closely associated with The Celtic Review, for after the 1912 second edition of Uirsgenlan Gaidhealach had been published, an unsigned review appeared in the January 1914 issue, where the reviewer admitted that "Pòsadh An Dealan-dè (the Butterfly's Wedding), a delightful fairy fantasy by Hector MacFadyen, . . . so charmed the present writer that he translated it for the Celtic Review" (p. 252). 

The editor of Uirsgenlan Gaidhealach was (per the title page) Chaluim Mhic Phàrlain, or Malcolm MacFarlane (1853-1931), a Gaelic scholar, very active in the An Comunn Gàidhealach (the "Gaelic Association"), an organization, founded in 1891 to promote Gaelic language and culture, which continues to the present day. The Association sponsored an annual Mod, a convention at which many prizes were given for composition in Gaelic. All four stories in Uirsgenlan Gaidhealach were winners of prizes. 

What of Hector MacFadyen? The Caledonian (NY) for November 1902 notes that at the 11th annual Mod, held in Dundee the last week of September, Hector MacFadyen, of Glasgow, won a prize for the "best original Gaelic tale"-- presumably Pòsadh An Dealan-dè. MacFadyen also won other compositional prizes at other Mods in the first decade of the twentieth century, including a £5 prize in September 1907 for a "Gaelic Short Story, extending to 1500 words or more, of Olden Times in the Highlands, with historical setting" (An Deo-Ghréine, October 1907, p.2).  Nothing further is known of this second tale. 

Genealogical resources haven't helped me to pin down anything more about Hector MacFadyen, as multiple Hector MacFadyen's turn up. The name of John MacFadyen, also common, is perhaps a relative, for it appears in the lists of prize-winners at the annual Mods at the same time as Hector's name does. John MacFadyen also lived in Glasgow. Unlike Hector, John MacFadyen published some books, including An t-Eileanach [The Islander] (1890; second edition 1921), containing original Gaelic songs, and Sgeulaiche nan Caol (1902), containing original Gaelic readings, sketches, poems and songs.  

Perhaps someone with access to better resources than I have in the US can find out more about these MacFadyens. Meanwhile, I share below scans of "The Butterfly's Marriage" as it appeared in The Celtic Review in 1905.  (If I've done this right, clicking on the image will make the page bigger.)