Donald Douglas reviews The Dark Chamber in 1927

A rather breathless and overwrought book review, from the 4 September 1927 issue of The New York Herald Tribune. The last paragraph is the best. Donald Douglas (1893-1966) was a journalist, teacher and author. His novels include The Grand Inquisitor (1925), a metaphysical and psychological thriller, and The Black Douglas (1927), a historical novel. 

Moon Magic

by Donald Douglas

There would be only wrong and error in calling Leonard Cline’s The Dark Chamber another one of those tales where men go down on all fours to howl like wolves or take white powders and change themselves into golliwogs. There would be as little use in comparing it to Algernon Blackwood’s best stories or, indeed, in comparing it to anything, for in both the loose and exact sense of the world it is incomparable. Don’t go in fear of the shuddery were-wolves of Dracula, of the spurious booby-traps of the “Gothic Romance” or even the supernatural visitations conjured up in Blackwood’s alarums ringing from the vengeful gods. Nothing of that sort appears in Mr. Cline’s exquisite prose poem, even if he does give you gooseflesh with a black hound named Tod, and even one of his women talks about astrology and turns the bright stars into green mold. One even suspects that Mr. Cline uses his device of vampirism and curious suggestion only as a frame on which to hang the shimmering cloak of his prose that shines like a web from the sun or sings in the ordered cadences of immaculate tonality.

You will find a tale as good as Dracula and as mind-curdling as “The Mark of the Beast” without the added nuisance of Bram Stoker’s unexciting prose, or Rudyard Kipling’s habit of stopping his plot to make nasty remarks about men who get married. Even Mr. Cline’s discourses on lycanthropy and music are mated to the central plot and his most rhapsodic painting of autumnal field and deep woods and dreary main holds in its form and color, all the intention of his art.

None the less why should we call The Dark Chamber by the dull name of a book? It is no book, but rather a sweep of clouds over the blue gulf of the sky and a nest of ferns hidden in the oozy marsh of a haunted wood and an arctic moon riding over the haunted gables of a house gullied with shadowy mysteries and the march and splendor of chords resolved into a diapason. It gets into your blood and rings in your heart and foams like a curl of waves on dark speeding oceans, or freezes the brain like a solitary walk over a road winding down toward the stricken silence of a space empty save for the dead ghosts of things. Try to tell its plot in a cold and sober prose and the whole being and essence of the book is gone like breath spent on air. Describe the family where the musician, Oscar Fitzalan, ran the gamut of fear and horror and the red clutch of vampirism and you make a tone poem sound like a calliope vibrating in a sick screech of tinny harmonies. In any genuine work of art you can not separate the atmosphere from the substance or divorce the plot from its lovely mesh of prose. That kind of thing can only be with justice in retelling the machinations of the indisious Dr. Fu Manchu.

You must imagine the composer, Fitzalan, going to the manor of Richard Pryde [sic, for Pride] because he has been offered a job at some kind of collaboration and wants some time to write his own music. He enters a mansion built near the upper reaches of the Hudson and falling, for all its magnificence, toward slow desolation. He meets Miriam, the wife with her blood-red lips, and the daughter, Janet, with her wayward impulse towards passion, and the secretary, Hough, with his death-mask of a face, and the dog, Tod, with his sinister name and black bristles and small yellow eyes staring into the horror of an indefinable dream. In time he meets his employer, Pryde, towering  like rocky cliffs over the river and with his face like the slate of grimness of a ledge plucked with two eyes peering like the lightless eyes of the blind. Believing that memory is indissoluble and that every image of one’s own life is recorded on the plate of the brain, Pryde uses Fitzalan as his aid in tracking down every event of the past. He broods in a study built into the heart of a hill with the door lifted like a snout. He has volumes and volumes packed into shelves’ and every volume is a record of a past experience evoked by a perfume, a chance song in the street, the least stir in the tight layers of the mind. At last his researches go back to events in the lives of his ancestors and by a non-Freudian analysis of dreams even into the dim lairs and green lagoons of the prehistoric past. By the aid of drugs and the force of his own will and other incantations Pryde achieves the end of his search; but that end must be left for Mr. Cline to tell in his own words.

Even from this first hour in a house cloaked in shadows thrown by the sputter of dim candles Fitzalan himself takes part in the drama of the wife and the mother and the secretary and the dog ringed around the inner drama played in the dark chamber of the master of the house. Miriam and Janet and Hough and the sinister Tod are drained of life by the tyrannous presence of Pryde and by his weird power to draw the energies and the very life of others into the net of his own purpose. Everything plotted by Miriam, at the expense of Hough and Fitzalan, has its origin in her hope to be freed of the stone monster who has lain like a sphinx on her breast. Janet’s unrest is not the unrest of youth. It is the protest and defiance of ordinary life against the unimaginable exactions of the man with a fixed idea. Shadows thicken over the hills and fear steals like snow into the hearts and pawns who exist only for the protection and life of the king. What if the queen rebels to seduce a knight and drive one of the bishops to despair and death? Behind the torn anguish of his pieces sits the implacable king like a fixed image wrought from stone and with a stone circling like  graven heart in the hollows of his breast.

It is most notable that Mr. Cline has wrought the miracle of combining a tale of terror with the sheer loveliness of golden song. That is why he makes Fitzalan a musician and why through the closing shadows shines the bright radiance of a beauty visible even in the murkiest gloom of the dark chamber. Even the excess of the plot and situation are made plausible with sound psychology and lustering, with hill and dale and human hearts caught in a garment of tenderness and pity and the power of love over the clutch of the obscene, Not the reality of life, perhaps; but the intense ache and the moon-haunted reality of a dream experiences in phantasmal meadows edged with the deepening gold of the ascending sun.