A:B:O by Walter de la Mare

“Rats crowd in the walls, I often hear their tumult. Come, sup with me.”

A narration by a man affectionately nicknamed Rattie by his complicit friend. This is horror and a half. And half again, half again, a growing horror forever. This narration’s title (and the whole word these letters are short of) must be seen, at least partly, in the abject ‘light’ of the veiled Anti-Natalism perceived earlier by this review above and beyond… “And sin is in the air – child of disease and death and springing-up and hatred of life.”

But it is even worse than that! This narration strives from outset to subvert the horror in its inevitable path, by doubling the half, as if a whole of something would be a final exorcism of that something. This being in tune with the boy at the beginning, a whistler or ‘siffleur’ (he whistles the Marseillaise here in the WDLM), a boy who, I recently noted in the famous OH WHISTLE story (reviewed here), had his sixpence gratuitously doubled to a shilling — in this WDLM “He doubled his fist on the sixpence.” [Someone called Theresa Whistler is mentioned in a footnote to this story in this book.] And we also have this so-called proverb: “Well, what is a five pound note in one’s pocket to a sixpence discovered in a gutter?” And later Rattie twice explicitly doubled a five pound note tip to someone to ‘come sit and sup’ with him and thus, by company, try to safeguard his soul from the horror.

“(I slowly counted each sounding ‘cluck’ of my clock)”

I could try to itemise this horror for you, the nature of how and what was dug up from his complicit friend’s garden, something attached by a metal pipe to a yew tree, why a rectangular shape floated on his retina, the Welsh lamb bone being gnawed, the nature of the invasive entity, and much more. But nothing would serve to convey the sheer horror and foulness of this story, not even by quoting: “This was a dim skulking horror of soul and an inhuman depravity. It is impossible for me to tell of my horrid strivings of brain.” That is mere wordage. The horror of this story is beyond its words. No exaggeration. I will, though, additionally mention, merely as an aside, the significant explicit ‘elbow’-trigger (“my elbow was pressed against his arm”) that sort of announces the first appearance of the aforementioned entity. ABO, Elbow, too, as assonant?

I shall just join in saying, along with this narration: “And if this be not our lot we must exist but to hide our discovery from the eyes of the sane.” That should include the discovery of this narration itself, too. Don’t dig it up. But, on the other hand, literature needs reading, needs being doubled-down upon.

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Full context of this review here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/walter-de-la-mare/