FRIGHT FEST #4: The Shadow Guest - Hillary Waugh

In the 1970s there was an explosion of Gothic suspense novels mostly appearing in mass market paperbacks. You didn't have to go to a bookstore to find any of them, you could buy these book in Woolworth's, local drug stores, newsstands and train station book stalls. There were ubiquitous. To some extent they still are as I find them by the dozens at library fundraising sales, used bookstores and estate sales.  The stories were even more formulaic than traditional detective novels with the exception of the addition of supernatural or quasi supernatural incidents. In the better neo-Gothics the supernatural events are genuine but in the majority of them they are always rationalized.  The formula can be summed up in a quip that is attributed to Donald E. Westlake (or was it Elmore Leonard? or Mike Avallone? or who?) that goes like this: "A gothic is a book where the girl gets the house."

In The Shadow Guest (1971) Hillary Waugh inverts the entire formula by first making the lead character and narrator a man. Howard Whelan, a successful architect, finds himself in charge of a large building project in England. He takes his new bride Angela with him to London. He hopes her odd depressive persona will come to life in a new setting. Back in New York she was under the care of a psychiatrist who approves of a new setting as part of her recuperation. Angela is the woman in peril of the novel, but as she is not the narrator the story is enlivened and rises above the usual formula of the neo-Gothic.

Waugh even starts his book with an homage to a HIBK narrator. Nearly every sentence in the opening paragraph starts "If only I had..." the usual signal that terrible things we are about to read about might never have occurred if Howard had seen everything the way it really was. I smiled at this opening paragraph and dismissed it as a semi-parody of the entire genre. Big mistake. Howard was telling the truth and the reader really should be paying attention to how the story unfold.

Cliffside home reminiscent 
of the Whelan's house
(© William Dax/SWNS)

Shortly after they arrive in England Howard has a heart attack. His doctor tells him he has been working too hard and stress lead to his attack. He loses leadership over his project is told to take a hiatus from work. It is even suggested that he leave London and find a home far away from hectic urban life. Angela is excited to look for a new home and she finds one in the lonely house built by a forlorn seacoast. With much cajoling and prodding Howard gives in to her desire to move in to Heather Cottage. The girl gets the house, just as we expect, and very early on. But not without a load of trouble.

Because -- of course -- Heather Cottage is a house with a past. Soon Angela is seeing visions, hearing horrible sounds, and is drawn to ghostly apparition that appears in the yard outside. But Howard also sees the apparition and hears the terrible sounds. He does his best to assuage her fears.  But if he is also seeing and hearing these supposed hallucinations is there a real ghost at work? One night they hear what sounds like a car crash but when they go out to explore they find no sign of a car wreck.  All the more disturbing because they know that a few years ago a car came careening down the hill above their house and smashed through a guardrail plummeting over the cliff and ending in a fiery crash on the rocky shore below. Are the Whelans being haunted by that crash and is the apparition a ghost of one of the crash victims?

Waugh tells a creepily effective and engaging story loaded with suspense.  Nearly everyone they meet has some inside dope on Heather Cottage's previous occupants or something about the horrible car crash. Slowly but surely we are provided with just enough information to keep reading in order to find out what actually happened. Questions were flooding my mind as I tore through this book. Did someone survive that crash? Is there a bizarre vendetta taking place? And why?

Added to the weird haunting and the riddle of the car crash is Beverly Gaines, the Whelan's young housekeeper, who may have a psychic power. The first day at Heather Cottage she is frightened by a vision in the sitting room and flees in terror. It takes some time to calm her down and when she re-enters the house it's as if nothing ever happened. She has no memory of being frightened or seeing anything strange. When Howard questions some of the locals about Beverly he discovers she is shunned because of  her deadly premonitions. She had a similar vision on the road where the car crash happened. Howard is warned that if Beverly saw something in their house they should be careful because it is a sure sign that someone will die there soon.

Then there is the mysterious painter who lives in a house on the hill above the Whelans new home.  He is a reclusive, distrustful of almost everyone, and won't allow anyone in his home. Howard meets him in a very strange scene that leaves the reader thinking something very strange is up with the hermit-like artist.

The rear cover of my paperback edition of The Shadow Guest  quotes a newspaper review that states "...At no point does the enthralled reader have the slightest suspicion about the horrendous climax." For once, that's no exaggeration. When the utterly unexpected twist occurred I shouted aloud, "WHAT?!" It is a near brilliant achievement.  Although the ending seems rushed and overloaded with twists and double twists, all is explained cleverly and succinctly. It was all there if we -- like Howard -- had only been paying attention to what was actually happening.

As the only example I know of a neo-Gothic told from a male viewpoint that simultaneously subverts and pays homage to all the conventions and motifs of this genre The Shadow Guest succeeds magnificently. I was truly impressed with this book. Waugh was so successful with this book he went on to write a small batch of true Gothic novels that were published under his female pseudonym "Elissa Grandower."  I also read The Secret Room of Morgate House (1977) to see if he was as innovative with the genre. Sadly, it's too much of a clone of the hundreds of books that cling to the Gothic suspense formula. The Shadow Guest because it basically is an inversion of a neo-Gothic is far more original, innovative and --dare I say it?-- ingenious in its conception.

FRIGHT FEST #3: House Party Murders - Edgar Allan Poe, Jr.

THE STORY:  Wayne Schofield is planning a house party for his friends at his estate in Wilmington, Delaware. But business takes precedence and he heads to Philadephia leaving his friends to set up and instruct the servants on what to do. Little does Wayne know that two of the servants hired are imposters, thieves looking to rob the guests when time is appropriate. Also, among his closest friends two marriages are on the rocks and philandering lovers are in attendance providing ample opportunity for jealous rages to be unleashed.  When Jack Skinner, Wayne's business partner, gets the feeling that the butler who speaks like an extra from a gangster movie is not the real McCoy he confronts the imposter and violence erupts.  Soon the house party guests are not only dealing with flowing champagne and high spirits but exploding bullets and flying knives.

THE CHARACTERS:  The first few chapters are overloaded with detailed exposition about the bed hopping quintet of main suspects. Hope and Jack Skinner are having marital difficulties. Hope is spending a lot of time with handsome, much younger, Ed Fitzhugh who is dreaming that Hope will divorce her husband and marry him.  Hope previously was with Sam Davis, Ed's best friend, who quickly tired of her and passed her off to Ed. Jack in the meantime has taken up with Rose Whitcombe who previously was with Sam.  Rose bizarrely is jealous of Hope who is now with Ed. Oh! and Ed and Jack look amazingly alike. They could be twin brothers. This of course will come into to play later on.

It was dizzying trying to keep all of this straight in my head. And while all this was being related Poe Junior decided to add another level of libido gone wild in the person of Carmen Yakatchie, a barmaid at The Black Cat Tavern. Carmen is described as the daughter of Romanian immigrants with gypsy blood. This un-PC term should signal to the reader Carmen is saddled with fraught emotions like easily triggered anger and jealousy. She vows to kill Ed and even fires a rifle at his car as he leaves the Black Cat after formally ending his affair with Carmen. If this sounds like a ridiculous soap opera that's because it is!  But have no fear the mystery elements are cleverly inserted into the storyline in several unexpected inverted detective novel styled narrative sections.

For the bulk of the novel the reader is in on lots of shifty goings-on, Poe Junior's way of creating suspense while also adding layers of deception and guilt to the busy storyline. We know about the two thieves who abduct the servants, tie them up, and assume their identities in order to rob the Schofiled home.  We know about Rose breaking into Wayne's study looking for an incriminating and embarrassing letter that she fears he will use to blackmail her. We know about Jack confronting the phony butler called "Bull" Bogart.  And we watch as Jack fires a gun at Bogart who was attacking him while at the same time another gun goes off followed shortly by a knife whizzing through an open second story window barely missing Jack's neck and sticking into the wall behind him.  [Knife throwing! Three characters are found to have this carnival skill.  For more about my favorite crime novel plot motif see this post.]

But wait -- there's more! Bogart is shot dead and Jack hides the body and dreams up an excuse for the missing servant. We watch him do all of this too. But his plan never really is carried out as he imagined. Someone interrupts him and later another character literally stumbles onto Jack's body outside in a remote part of the estate. He's been stabbed with a knife that Rose found in the study but which we know she put back into the top drawer of the desk. And right next to Jack is Bogart's body. What? Inspector Grimes must discover how Bogart was shot then dumped beside Jack. We know (and eventually Grimes will figure it out) that Jack hid Bogart's body in a clothes closet in Wayne's study where he shot the fake butler.  This is also the same study where Rose was looking for the letter and found the weird knife with a handle shaped like a woman's leg that is found in Jack's back. Who got into the study, took the knife and stabbed Jack? And how did Bogart's body get from the closet inside to outside the house next to Jack?

Whew! All this in only 63 pages. It's up to Inspector Grimes and his small cadre of diligrnt policemen to make sense of all the chaos.

INNOVATIONS: What I found most intriguing is how Poe Junior blended together the techniques of an author omniscient, inverted crime novel with the traditional narrative elements of a whodunit.  The first half is teeming with criminal behavior -- characters covering up crime scenes, moving corpses and what have you -- and as soon as Grimes appears on the scene the entire book shifts into a traditional detective novel. It's been several years since I've read such a clever tightly plotted book which at first seems chaotic and convoluted but turns out to be rather straightforward.  Close reading will allow the prominent clues to rise to the surface while the red herrings sink down into the murk. There is a lot of deception as you might imagine and the reader needs to watch for who is lying about their actions and whereabouts.

Artwork by Dean Spencer ©2022

As the author is supposedly related to the Master of the Macabre I expected this story to have some kind of homage to The Real E.A.P.  I guess including a bar called The Black Cat Tavern was a wink-wink kind of allusion.  I was ready to give up hoping for something more suited for a Poe story when around the halfway mark there is indeed a weird vignette. Turns out Wayne has devised a Halloween-like prank and hidden it in an abandoned well.  This is near a gazebo where he plans to escort all the guests for a late night meal and drinks.  I won't go into detail about this as it comes as a real surprise, but rest assured it is utterly bizarre and gruesome. Ultimately it is also utterly superfluous as it has nothing to do with the main story! When the machinery of the prank is engaged the bodies of the murdered characters are discovered and the prank is practically forgotten about. Prior to this happening the party approaches something like the hedonistic revelry in "Hop-Frog" and "The Masque of the Red Death.” But perhaps I was reaching for as many Poe allusions as I could.  Still, the requisite grotesquerie does appear. Poe would, I think, approve.

The House Party Murders (1940) is very much informed of action thrillers and at times has some ingeniously devised cinematic scenes.  I particularly liked a Hitchcockian bit. When Rose is finishing up her rifling of the desk she is interrupted by a knock at the door. She ducks down under the desk. The door we know from a few paragraphs previous has a lock that jams and the person who knocked tries to enter but can't get in due to the door knob malfunctioning. Then Rose look up and sees a face reflected in the glass of a framed photograph. There is someone outside looking into the study. She thinks she recognizes the face, but it quickly fades from view. It was like a screenplay moment.  Brilliant touch! Poe Junior has several other similarly concocted scenes that are almost like tightly framed and edited movie shots.

THE DJ: Took me a while to realize that the details in the DJ illustration are 100% accurate to a scene in the book where one of the woman characters also finds Jack's body. I added a close-up photo to show that the artist actually made the knife have a leg shaped handle.  A shoe is superfluously added, I think, to underscore the leg shape idea. But it is a naked woman's leg as described in the text, with no shoe. Also I'm sure the leg should be the other way around -- with the foot facing outward not meeting the blade.

EASY TO FIND?  A handful of copies turn up for sale on various bookselling sites, many with the intriguing dust jacket. My copy was for sale…sold within a single day after this post appeared. Happy hunting!