THE DEEP ONES: "The Dead Valley" by Ralph Adams Cram

"The Dead Valley" by Ralph Adams Cram

Discussion begins January 13.

First published in Black Spirits and White: a Book of Ghost Stories (1895)



ONLINE VERSIONS

https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Cram_Dead_Valley.pdf
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26687/26687-h/26687-h.htm#Page_133

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?84622

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

H. P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
Great Weird Tales
Horror Times Ten

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Adams_Cram
http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/flashback-photo-ralph-adams-cram-high...
http://tinyurl.com/h2s8n2l
http://tinyurl.com/gkr7ozl
http://tinyurl.com/zfcyr8k

The free eBook version of Black Spirits and White I got from Amazon (http://amzn.com/B004TIKL6C) for me, I think.

American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the Poe to the Pulps for me.

Seems Cram was mentioned by HPL in our recent selection, "The Thing On The Doorstep", at least according to Dark Arcadia:

In "The Thing On The Doorstep," for example, portions of Cram's biography, such as his "Boston architect's office," are intermixed with that of Cram's close friend Henry S. Whitehead in Lovecraft's description of Edward Derby's best friend, Dan.

Thanks to >1 semdetenebre: for the original MISCELLANY link.

>2 artturnerjr: Thanks for the link, Art. I'll be reading it out of the free Kindle edition.

Ditto for me, as this way I'll have a few other Cram tales available.

I'm fairly certain this was my first Cram tale, and it very much pushes many of the right buttons for me. The prose stylings (I think he does a fabulous job of capturing the flavour of a Swede speaking flawless English, the turns of phrase and ways of using Old World placenames despite little chance the listener would be familiar with the locale), the emphasis on a rural location, natural beauty mixing with the sinister.

I get the sense the visual of the valley and the mist is a key part of the story for Cram. The image didn't really hit me, except at the end with the Dead Tree. But I was left thinking of it this morning, so maybe more of an impression than at first I thought.

There was some lack of closure here. One might think that Olof, emboldened by empirical verification of the Dead Valley (and puppy corpse), would have insisted again to the adults that this place was real and a menace, and that more events would have ensued. Or maybe he feared to tell them. Or they still didn't believe him.

The completely inhuman nature of the menace reminded me of Blackwood's "The Willows," or (to a lesser extent) "The Colour Out of Space" by HPL.

>8 paradoxosalpha: Yes, an inhuman menace like "The Willows". It also reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith's "Genius Loci", another story about a baleful place.

I thought that Cram could have shortened up the opening frame, but otherwise I liked the tale. The imagery of the mist covered valley with its bone covered floor, a falcon falling from the sky, was quite effective.

The added weirdness of Nils' amnesia and the scream's source being unexplained was effective.

I also thought there were some unexpected plot twists: the narrator does find the valley again, the danger of the mist is confirmed, and the dog does die.

I hope to get to this story over the weekend!

>9 RandyStafford:

Good points about the plot twists. It wasn't clear to me whether they were deliberate choices on Cram's part, or reflective of different storytelling tropes at the time he was writing.

It gets to the origins of the Weird Tradition, really. I know from our readings in this group that there were, in fact, Weird tales predating this one that could influence a reader's expectations. And of course the tradition borrows from campfire ghost stories and the appeal of mystery and fear as part of any listener / reader. Perhaps contemporary readers would not have seen these plot developments as unexpected.

All that said, I had much the same reactions while reading that RandyStafford points out: wondering if the valley will disappear, if the dog will survive. Other developments I anticipated while reading, but which did not materialise: that the story would end shortly after escaping the valley the first time; that Olof's cousin would turn out to have been possessed and represent the primary threat to Olof from that point on.

Finally got to this one last night. I switched books shortly after starting, going from the Black Spirits and White eBook to a print version of The World's Greatest Horror Stories (aka H.P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror - a handy collection to have around for this group, let me tell ya). I don't know why - I just felt the need to read it in a "real" book.

I thought this was a strong, genuinely creepy tale. It doesn't seem to be any longer than it needs to be, the prose is expertly controlled, and the imagery is as haunting as it's supposed to be. I agree with >8 paradoxosalpha: that it seems to be a sort of precursor to "The Colour Out of Space".

This was my favorite passage:

Still the same silence, the same dead, motionless air—air that was at once sultry and chilling: a heavy heat struck through with an icy chill that felt almost like the burning of frozen steel.

That really seemed to capture the sense of preternatural menace that the author is striving for here.

***

"In 'The Dead Valley' the eminent architect and mediaevalist Ralph Adams Cram achieves a memorably potent degree of vague regional horror through subtleties of atmosphere and description."

- HPL, Supernatural Horror in Literature

>8 paradoxosalpha:
I agree about the lack of closure. Perhaps it's down to Cram being a "gentleman amateur" when it came to fiction - I assume the stories in Black Spirits and White weren't subjected to any great degree of professional editing.

The suggestion of a malevolent consciousness or will in the valley was well handled, where it seems to draw the narrator to the dead tree at its centre (is there an untold story/explanation involving that tree, I wonder?) and then tries to trap him there as the mist seeps up out of the ground.