My husband is reading Three Men in the Dark: Tales of Terror by Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain & Robert Barr. I love the cover. I decided this would be a good time to try some more horror stories or ghost stories, an area I am not experienced in.
The title and the emphasis on Jerome K. Jerome's name on the cover led me to assume the books was only stories by that author. In fact, the editor, Hugh Lamb, has created a collection of tales of terror by Jerome and two of his contemporaries and friends, Barry Pain and Robert Barr.
I read four stories and I had mixed reactions. Of the four I read, I preferred Barry Pain's stories. Unfortunately I did not try any stories by Robert Barr.
"The Skeleton" by Jerome K. Jerome
The story starts with a discussion of spiritualism. One of the men tells a story about a man who purchases a skeleton and then thinks that the skeleton is coming alive. The story was more complicated than that, but that was the part that made an impression on me. 7 pages.
I enjoyed this exchange in the discussion of spiritualism:
"For my part," remarked MacShaughnassy, "I can believe in the ability of our spirit friends to give the quaint entertainments credited to them much easier than I can in their desire to do so."
"You mean," added Jephson, "that you cannot understand why a spirit, not compelled as we are by the exigencies of society, should care to spend its evenings carrying on a laboured and childish conversation with a room full of abnormally uninteresting people."
"Silhouettes" by Jerome K. Jerome
I read this twice, and in truth I did not understand it. It was very atmospheric, and there were a couple of paragraphs that were very nice, that I kept going back to. 8 pages.
"The Case of Vincent Pyrwhit" by Barry Pain
This one seemed like a ghost story to me.
Very short, only 4 pages. The story is told by Vincent Pyrwhit's oldest friend. Vincent Pyrwhit died in strange circumstances after his wife died from a long illness. Before his death, Pyrwhit invites the narrator to visit, and they get a strange telephone call. The story did not scare me but I found it very effective.
I found this story online at Wikisource.
"Linda" by Barry Pain
This one was also told in first person and was my favorite. I liked the writing and the narrative. The narrator's brother marries a woman named Linda. After Linda's death, the brother invites the narrator to visit him; he now has Linda's younger sister living with him. The situation is very tense. It was also not very scary but I liked it. 14 pages.
