This is the story of a strange and terrible judgment of the Lord in the deeps; and it has seemed good to me, and to the one other who knows, to set down in order that which happened, for the instruction and warning of our children, to show them the certain end of evil-doing. For there is need of much exhortation to keep the young from the taint of that recklessness of unclean living that has of late years corrupted our people, in spite of the plain signification of God's wrath by plague and fire, and by discomfiture before our enemies....
Deferred encounters: a brief autobiographical sidetrack best skipped
Starting a novel is for me an almost unbearable wager. My readerly "imp of the perverse '' insists on deferring: reading and minutely studying the paraliterary attributes of a volume: artwork, blurbs, synopsis, bibliographic and copyright matter; performing a mental x-ray of the author photo.
And then more often than not, setting the novel aside. After a week or two the guilt of not starting is scabbed-over, regret and shame thin-away.
The Hole of the Pit is a specially tough sell. I threw out my Oleander Press edition two years ago because margins and font size were impossible. A couple of months ago I bought the new Kindle version, but this increased ease of accessibility demanded more delay.
Still, I refused to read reviews or articles about the novel. This was easy, as there is so little worthwhile beyond a few basics. Reading reviews and listening to podcasts about a novel I might read is a sure way to kill my interest for several years.
When I learned our house would be full of my wife's children and grandchildren for Christmas weekend, though, I decided to invest the time in The Hole of the Pit instead of the usual social media frittering and self-distraction.
I am certainly glad I did.
* * *
Passing strange
This is the story of a strange and terrible judgment of the Lord in the deeps; and it has seemed good to me, and to the one other who knows, to set down in order that which happened, for the instruction and warning of our children, to show them the certain end of evil-doing. For there is need of much exhortation to keep the young from the taint of that recklessness of unclean living that has of late years corrupted our people, in spite of the plain signification of God's wrath by plague and fire, and by discomfiture before our enemies....
The Hole of the Pit (1914) by Adrian Ross is fabled among horror readers for several reasons. First, it is hard to find, even with the plentiful supply of out-of-copyright material online.
Second, it is infrequently in print. To my knowledge, there was no ebook edition prior to 2021. As noted above, the Oleander Press edition is - to be kind - unfriendly . The Hole of the Pit was collected in Ramsey Campbell's Uncanny Banquet (1992), of which - if Amazon is to be believed - there are copies of the first edition available at reasonable prices.
Third, Adrian Ross dedicated the book to his friend M. R. James. A horror novel by even a secondary member of James's circle of friends and acquaintances, and dedicated to James, is treasure indeed.
Fourth, The Hole of the Pit is about a bastion or redoubt under siege by strange forces. This type of story resonates for many readers of horror fiction and viewers of horror movies. We know how modern writers like Richard Mattheson and modern filmmakers like George Romero handled the under-siege idea, but a 1914 novelist? A snippet of information about the plot plus the book's scarcity let the story grow in my own imagination to 55 Days at Peking-proportions.
Such, as it turns out, is not the case. The Hole of the Pit is a modest sui generis novella-length work of first-person horror. Whether the pit menace is supernatural, Biblical, cosmic, or simply weird biology, there is also an element of the spectral in Ross' story. A strong chord of historical hubris-nemesis clustered round the political opportunist Earl of Deeping, Royalist lord of Deeping Hold castle, also runs through the story. Narrator Hubert Leyton paints him and his troop as an unprincipled multinational agglomeration of mercenary free-booters collected during the earl's campaigns in Britain and the German states.
As the novel begins, the year is 1645. The power of Royalist hold-outs is dwindling, militarily reduced mostly to bitter-enders who know their choices are either Charles I or the rope.
Hubert Leyton is in his own library chewing-over and rationalizing his precarious neutrality.
In sitting Dr Owen again on the shelf, I pushed back a volume of some commentary, and seeking to draw this out, I thrust in two more. So, with the sudden anger that makes children beat the footstools and chairs for tripping them, I flung on the floor first the other volumes of the commentary, and then those that I had thrust to the back. There was much dust on them, and looking into the shadow of the shelf before I set the books in their place again, I saw a little leather book, flat and thin, and stamped on the cover with the arms of our house. Taking it up, I opened on a genealogy of the family of the Earls of Deeping and other their kinsmen, written in a fair hand with the shields very well blazoned in colours and gold; the whole, as I judged by the last names, some eighty years old, for my great-grandfather ended his branch of the tree. All these names I knew, or nearly all, but as I cast my eye over the pages, it lighted on a string of rhymes in the middle of a leaf:
"When the Lord of Deeping Hold
To the Fiend his soul hath sold,
And hath awaken'd what doth sit
In the darkness of the Pit,
Then what doth sit beneath the Hole Shall come and take him body and soul."
I had not before time come upon this rhyme of the Earls of Deeping, but it called up remembrances of stories and songs that I had heard and half forgotten on my nurse's knee.
Never had I seen Deeping Hold, in the sea-marshes at the mouth of the river Bere, nor the village of Marsham, on the hill-sides above the creeks. But I had heard legends of a curse hanging over the Lords of Deeping, which had fallen once, if the story might be believed, and was to fall again and no more. And on the one day when I, a mere boy, had seen my cousin the Earl as a tall young man, with fair hair and a small pointed beard, riding with my father, I had wondered at the wildness of his blue eyes, and had thought of the stories my nurse told me. Then I read the rude verse again, and even as I lifted my eyes from the page, my serving-man knocked at the door....
The knock is the serving-man announcing the visitor whose message will send Hubert Leyton on his adventure to Deeping Hold and its nearby "hole of the pit."
* * *
The best commentaries I found on the web about The Hole of the Pit are here and here.
Jay
29 December 2021
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