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Fantasy Commentator, v. 1, issue 6, Spring 1945
Page 126
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126 FANTASY COMMENTATOR Forgotten Creators of Ghosts by A. Langley Searles II - Ralph Adams Cram While Ralph Adams Cram is today remembered as an architect of no small eminence, he may be recalled by a few as an author---and by an even smaller group as having written supernatural fiction. His output in the latter field is small: six stories, these having been collected under the title Black Spirits and White: a Book of Ghost Stories (1895). This slim volume contains also a postscript by the author, which, being brief, quoted here in its entirety: There seem to be certain well-defined roots existing in all countries, from which spring the current legends of the supernatural; and therefore for the germs of the stories in this book the Author claims no originality. These legends differ from one another only in local color and in individual treatment. If the Author has succeeded in clothing one or two of these norms in some slightly new vesture, he is more than content. However much Cram may be indebted to his Gothic predecessors for the plots of his tales, no one could ever accuse him of emulating their style. Careful and unhurried though it is, his writing is forceful and realistic; and although his treatment may be sympathetic, it is never unnecessarily sentimental. Cram's stories are far more reminiscent of those in the next century than those of the author's own. Like most Americans in his time he looked forward, and the style of fiction he wrote shows this both by its versimilitude and its abundant use of forthright materialistic detail. Best known of the tales in Black Spirits and White is "The Dead Valley," one of the two stories of the book to appear in later anthologies of supernatural fiction. It tells of the adventures of two Swedish boys on a cross-country walking-trip. The youths encounter on the homeward lap of their journey a strange valley, utterly silent and devoid of life, its very air stagnant with death. It is dusk as they are about to cross it, and with the disappearance of the sun an ashy-white, faintly phosphorescent sea of velvet fog fills the hollow like motionless water, so thickly that it seems almost capable of sustaining weight. And as the darkness walls them in they hear from the depths of the silence "....a cry, beginning as a low, sorrowful moan, rising to a tremulous shriek, culminating in a yell that seemed to tear the night in sunder and rend the world as by a cataclysm." They are all but petrified with fear; yet to escape the place the two---the narrator and Nils, his companion---must pass through the dread ocean of milky-whiteness just below... "I put one foot into the ghostly fog. A chill as of death struck through me, stopping my heart, and I threw myself backward on the slope. At that instant came again the shriek, close, close, right in our ears, in ourselves, and far out across that damnable sea I saw the cold fog lift like a water-spout and toss itself high in writhing convulsions towards the sky. The stars began to grow dim as thick vapor swept across them, and in the growing dark I saw a
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126 FANTASY COMMENTATOR Forgotten Creators of Ghosts by A. Langley Searles II - Ralph Adams Cram While Ralph Adams Cram is today remembered as an architect of no small eminence, he may be recalled by a few as an author---and by an even smaller group as having written supernatural fiction. His output in the latter field is small: six stories, these having been collected under the title Black Spirits and White: a Book of Ghost Stories (1895). This slim volume contains also a postscript by the author, which, being brief, quoted here in its entirety: There seem to be certain well-defined roots existing in all countries, from which spring the current legends of the supernatural; and therefore for the germs of the stories in this book the Author claims no originality. These legends differ from one another only in local color and in individual treatment. If the Author has succeeded in clothing one or two of these norms in some slightly new vesture, he is more than content. However much Cram may be indebted to his Gothic predecessors for the plots of his tales, no one could ever accuse him of emulating their style. Careful and unhurried though it is, his writing is forceful and realistic; and although his treatment may be sympathetic, it is never unnecessarily sentimental. Cram's stories are far more reminiscent of those in the next century than those of the author's own. Like most Americans in his time he looked forward, and the style of fiction he wrote shows this both by its versimilitude and its abundant use of forthright materialistic detail. Best known of the tales in Black Spirits and White is "The Dead Valley," one of the two stories of the book to appear in later anthologies of supernatural fiction. It tells of the adventures of two Swedish boys on a cross-country walking-trip. The youths encounter on the homeward lap of their journey a strange valley, utterly silent and devoid of life, its very air stagnant with death. It is dusk as they are about to cross it, and with the disappearance of the sun an ashy-white, faintly phosphorescent sea of velvet fog fills the hollow like motionless water, so thickly that it seems almost capable of sustaining weight. And as the darkness walls them in they hear from the depths of the silence "....a cry, beginning as a low, sorrowful moan, rising to a tremulous shriek, culminating in a yell that seemed to tear the night in sunder and rend the world as by a cataclysm." They are all but petrified with fear; yet to escape the place the two---the narrator and Nils, his companion---must pass through the dread ocean of milky-whiteness just below... "I put one foot into the ghostly fog. A chill as of death struck through me, stopping my heart, and I threw myself backward on the slope. At that instant came again the shriek, close, close, right in our ears, in ourselves, and far out across that damnable sea I saw the cold fog lift like a water-spout and toss itself high in writhing convulsions towards the sky. The stars began to grow dim as thick vapor swept across them, and in the growing dark I saw a
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