THE CLOSED WINDOW by A.C. Benson 

Spoilers!

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The legend was  that the window at the top of the tower was most strictly kept closed because of young Sir Mark de Nort’s late grandfather had made it so. And it seems this is because of some curse connected with the latter’s behaviour or wishes. Sir Mark lives with a cousin, his heir, Roland, two years older than him, and  their hobbies and other manners of life are amenable together, and it is touching when one of them holds the other’s hand at a time of distress. Until manly pride makes Mark open that window, opens that casement to what evil is now uncloseted as a foreign rocky terrain outside with an imputed temptation of riches, but only if one can but reach for them out there (an effective damnable vista that will likely haunt me). Effectively, Mark later seems tantamount to abandon the emerging wreck of his amenable cousin companion  who has been infiltrated with false optimism by what lay beyond the window, with Mark indeed seemingly further abandoning him by acquiring a wife after Roland’s foolhardy escapade out there via a rope, as well as after Mark’s beloved dog had been slaughtered  as part of the same dire process. Roland soon becomes mentally and physically hollowed out after climbing down there and today he is just a sad appendage in the house, although dutifully cared for by Mark. This affected me a lot. This and the ‘Tower of Fear’.

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My other reviews of unconnected horror stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/


A book by Arthur C. Benson below that I may review later in the comment stream below…

4 thoughts on “THE CLOSED WINDOW by A.C. Benson 

  1. There seems to be something transcending about the above A.C. Benson work, a story unread by me till today. Something I was not expecting.

    Perhaps I was somehow led to it by its mention of the word ‘elbow’ at the start….!

  2. SLYPE HOUSE by A.C. Benson

    “…the silence of emptiness, but such silence as may be heard when unseen things are crowding quietly to a closed door, expecting it to be opened, and as it were holding each other back.”

    …and that in the context evoked a huge frisson, if a frisson can indeed be huge. We learn of Anthony’s dark backstory, his reputation in the community, his making of mechanical toys, including ‘a puppet that moved its arms and laughed’, his oriel casement in Slype House overlooking the local church with a vantage point upon what the priest handles on the altar, and of Anthony’s own secret locked room with a different altar, where, one night, in a dark mood, using instruments of ritual, he tries to summon his beloved mother, with descriptions implying perhaps he was a bit of what some people may call a mummy’s boy, I guess, but instead he is sent on a narrow journey where two forces fight over him. He recovers back in his bed in Slype with what the doctor deems to have been a stroke, but whether a stroke of luck or otherwise, I felt as uncertain as Anthony also seems to feel by a sense of whatever did still “dwell by him” at the end, as he “awaited his end.” That casement conveying two words of something that felt like a hopeless spyhole, each of these words being separately within ‘Slype House’, I spy.

  3. Pingback: SLYPE HOUSE by A.C. Benson | The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books

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