THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #28: A review of "The Red Lodge" by H. Russell Wakefield

This place could very well have been taken up by Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu,” but Pelan sensibly made his HPL choice “The Outsider” a few years ago. In its place is an odd little haunted house story. We are still not away from the polite trend in horror, but here we have a singular example of the form. Not only is it polite, it also has a heart.



Perhaps this is because it is told in first person, where the narrator doesn’t have to refer to his own wife as “Mrs.” Or his son as “master.” But it goes deeper than such superficial examples. The unnamed narrator (we haven’t strayed that far, folks) shows a genuine affection for his son in a very human way, rather than the usual stodgy, stiff-upper-lip way. More on that in a moment.


The narrator and his family are on holiday, and they’re renting a place called the Red Lodge from a scoundrel named Wilkes. Their neighbor, Sir William, seems to feel the need to apologize for their landlord, and he insists that if the narrator has any difficulty, he is to see Sir William at once on the matter.


The Red Lodge seems idyllic enough, and it has a nice river by which young master Tim can play . . . but oddly enough, he doesn’t want to. In fact, greasy smears of green slime, the same color as the river, have been appearing out of nowhere throughout the house.


That’s not the only anomaly. At first, the narrator does the sensible thing and ignores the strange sounds as mere fantasy, but one night, while reading alone, he experiences something he simply can’t discount. He actually sees the green slime materialize, and he hears someone breathing in his room.


But then he does something that makes sense only in polite horror: he decides that since he has a bit of Highlander in him, seeing strange things must be a race ability. These things don’t seem to be bothering anyone else, and he doesn’t want to be the squeaky wheel, so he keeps it all to himself.


In the meantime, Tim has become deathly afraid of the river, and the narrator can’t figure out why, since he’s never had a fear of the sea before. And here’s where that genuine love comes from: the narrator understands that a man shouldn’t go with a lot of fear throughout his life, and such things are more easily ironed out in childhood. Not wanting his son to live miserably in adulthood, he takes the tyke down to the river in an attempt to allay any fears.


Soon, the narrator discovers that Tim’s fears aren’t that crazy, as his son has seen something he calls the Green Monkey lurking by the water. Not only that, but Mary, the narrator’s wife, is also seeing and hearing things.


That sorts it out. They decide to get out the next day, even if it’s at a great cost to their finances. However, that final night is a doozy . . . . SPOILER ALERT: The ghosts go full force at them as they cower in their beds. The narrator is plagued by one in particular who demands that he crawl to the window and look out into the yard below. However, he manages to resist, and the dawn comes.


All right, that seems kind of weak. There doesn’t seem to be a lot at stake here. All they do is put up with a bunch of strange incidents in which no one gets hurt, correct? Wrong. The next day, the narrator goes straight to Sir William and explains the whole thing. Sir William then tells him that early in the house’s history, one of the previous owners paid his men to scare his wife to death. They kind of did; she ran screaming from the house and drowned herself in the river. Since then, people have had a habit of doing that very same thing . . . with one slight oddity. Every once in a while, a child will drown as well, shortly after mentioning a green monster . . . . END OF SPOILERS.


While it’s still too entrenched in the past, this tale is still pretty effective and definitely worth your time. Another classic every horror fan should read.

[This story first appeared in THEY RETURN AT EVENING (check out that awesome cover above!), and it cannot be read online at this time.  However, you can listen to it here.]