America was an infant in comparison to Europe's long, dark history that gave rich background to its supernatural and gothic tales. Not to be outdone Washington Irving would become one of America's first great writers and write some of our first supernatural tales of note. Everyone knows Irving for two specific stories
Rip Van Winkle and
The Legend of Sleepy Hallow (1820). Unfortunately, these stories have been anthologized to death which realizing this, Penguin's
American Supernatural Tales wisely chose his
The Adventure of the German Student (1824) instead. The story of a German exchange student in Paris during the height of the French Revolution who has an encounter with a beautiful woman on a dark and stormy night is a bite sized bit of spookiness. Told by a narrator who seems to know just enough about the young man to pull us into his frame of mind, this is a brief but decently effective spooky story. Any modern reader will probably pick up where the story is going fairly early on because of consistent use of certain motifs that have in some ways become trope in current fiction but at the time were probably very fresh. This by no means hampers the story. It's still a fun diversion.
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| Penguin's 2013 edition |
The second story in the collection comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne, well known author of
The Scarlet Letter. Told as a fireside story about a portrait that used to hang in the very building the story is being told in
Edward Randolph's Portrait (1838) is not my favorite of these first two stories. It has an interesting concept with its black framed portrait with an unviewable subject who somehow becomes visible to possibly warn against an action but its old fashioned language makes it laborious to read. What I found interesting is that Irving's story is older but has more clarity of prose than Hawthorne. It could just be their individual styles but I found myself distracted from the supernatural elements of Hawthorne's story every time I had to pause to understand the language I was reading. If you're a completionist and you're reading this collection go ahead and read it at least once but for the general reader I would read the biographical page on Hawthorne and move forward to story three instead. Well those are my thoughts on the first two entries in
Supernatural Tales. All through October I will be reviewing the stories in this anthology in sets of two as well as doing regular novel reviews and commentary. As always the comments are open, thanks for stopping by.
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