Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post.
“The Beckoning Fair One” (1911) marks an interesting point in our discussion of The Dark Descent. For the past two stories, we’ve seen the results of the alienation and disconnection from humanity that intense psychological stress can cause. Going further back, we’ve seen the way a mind can twist itself into so many knots that it snaps from external horror through both a masculine and feminine lens. Oliver Onions combines these elements into a dark and gothic story fraught with modern themes of alienation, exploring the idea of living space as inner landscape in a much darker way than James’ “The Jolly Corner,” which was published three years earlier. This synthesis, and the twisted way it inverts James’ brighter and somewhat less strange story, drags its tale of haunted houses, alienation, paranoia, and eventual loss of humanity into a more modern space, exploring in devastating detail the self-inflicted feedback loop of trauma on Paul Oleron, the damage to those around him, and his toxic relationship with “The Beckoning Fair One” in his house.
Paul Oleron is a writer, fifteen chapters into his magnum opus, a novel called Romilly Bishop. One day, while passing an abandoned house he sees on regular walks, he notices that it’s available to rent and immediately falls in love with the place. While he can’t afford the whole house, he rents a single floor as an apartment and moves in, hoping to enjoy a change of scenery, a bigger space, and a place to write Romilly undisturbed. As he settles in, strange incidents begin to occur, friends distance themselves, and the house itself seems to want Oleron entirely at its mercy. It’s the start of a long spiral for Paul Oleron that in the end might cost him his sanity, his humanity, and even possibly his life itself.
As there’s no real way to tell where Oleron’s madness ends and any “actual” haunting in “The Beckoning Fair One” begins, much of the horror comes not from the fantastical circumstances but from our experience of watching uncomfortably from a front-row seat as someone loses all sense of self and connection with the outside world. There are a few moments that remain inexplicable, especially in the way the house seems to react to Oleron’s friend Elsie Bengough, slashing her hand with a nail (a clear sign that Clive Barker’s read this novella) and shredding her foot when she falls through a seemingly solid porch step. There are also unusual moments like when Oleron starts whistling an old folk tune he’s never heard before, or his obsession with the house’s previous tenant, who died under mysterious circumstances.
Make no mistake—most of Oleron’s misery is self-inflicted—but the idea that there are supernatural elements in play further twists the story into knots, ratcheting up the sinister atmosphere of the single-floor apartment that soon becomes Oleron’s prison as well as his home. Knowing there are things that, at even his most lucid, cannot be explained adds a feeling of doom as he slowly alienates himself from everyone—a tightening of the noose around him on a larger existential scale. As he withdraws into himself, his delusions grow more manifest until he develops a toxic codependency with the presence—real or imagined—in his house. Bit by bit, friends start to leave, people avoid him on the street, and as things seem to grow ever more sinister, there’s a nonspecific “evil” that drives his housekeeper away. It’s an ominous sequence, and piles on paranoia with each bizarre negative interaction, each time someone acts slightly off-kilter. Once it seems like the environment itself is against him, the contrast between the outside world and Oleron’s internal landscape becomes more stark.
The twisting of that internal landscape is the centerpiece of “The Beckoning Fair One.” It starts small and in ways few would notice, with Oleron developing writer’s block on Romilly and deciding to abandon all fifteen chapters to work on an entirely new version of the story. Elsie responds by questioning him and asserting that he needs to get out more, even offering to help him find some way to get out of the house. He turns her down, of course—he has a perfectly good job writing and needs to finish Romilly—but underlying this exchange is the grim reality that Oleron rejects the outside world for more time spent cooped up in his house. It’s a harrowing and realistic portrait of a downward spiral, with the narration around Oleron giving no hint of danger while the subtext and incidents that remain unseen start to pile up.
“The Beckoning Fair One” is ruthless in its execution, as Oleron’s escape routes from his own troubled psyche and the presence in his house dwindle away, often in small ways or in ways the limited viewpoint on Oleron offers no explanation or answer for. Onions actually references agoraphobia as Oleron further sequesters himself inside his apartment, buying flowers to counteract the stale air from not opening any windows or doing any of his own cleaning, until eventually he can’t even stand going to the store, getting everything delivered so he doesn’t have to go outside. His thoughts turn internal, obsessive, manic, and depressed, though he’s confused as to why that’s the case since nothing should depress him.
It’s horrifyingly accurate enough that anyone who’s been in such a situation knows exactly what this feels like. The confused thoughts, the way social interactions feel abrasive, the outright helplessness as you do less and less for yourself and therefore can do less and less, are all hallmarks of deep depression and alienation. It’s clear there’s something seriously wrong with Oleron that he can’t fix on his own, but with him rejecting all help and everyone else willing to just chalk it up to “he’s crazy” and turn away, eventually it all collapses. In a sardonic passage about abandoning the mentally unwell to their demons, the narration notes with considerable venom that “[t]he lost must remain lost,” as his protagonist rambles through incoherent and blurred thoughts.
While Onions allows Oleron a final moment of clarity, even this is just to twist the knife, letting his protagonist see that he’s wrecked his life beyond all repair by cutting everyone and everything off. Between the realistic portrait of a man’s breakdown and the final knowledge that there is no escape, the horror of what the audience just witnessed slams home. Worse still, Oleron was rational before the house drove him insane. Under the right circumstances, the story suggests, this could happen to anyone.
“The Beckoning Fair One” is both indictment and warning, one that human beings need connection to the world to function. Oliver Onions draws the reader in with the gothic framework, only to give them front-row seats to his protagonist’s mental breakdown, both from an inability to understand his own mind and from the toxic feedback loop of his own solitude. It brings together the haunted house narrative, the wrenching mental breakdowns of overt psychological horror like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and the obsessive monsters of the id found in stories like “Clara Militch” in a twisted synthesis more unnerving than most “extreme” horror works. It’s a horrifying cautionary tale admonishing the reader never to get “lost.”
After all, sometimes we don’t come back.
And now to turn it over to you. Was there anything anyone could have done to help Paul Oleron before he hit that final stage of complete isolation? Did the house really play a role in driving him insane?
Please join us in two weeks for Civil War-era science fiction writer Fitz-James O’Brien and his tale “What Was It?”