Who Goes There?

Sorry that this is a day late. I hope this sort of thing doesn’t become regular, but for what it’s worth my review was not delayed because of bad news; on the contrary, things are looking up for me personally, even if it looks like we’re all going to Hell in a handbasket.

Ramsey Campbell was only 23 when “The Scar” was published, but he had already been a published writer for five years at that point. He had been discovered by August Derleth, in what was probably Derleth’s biggest discovery in his later years, and his debut would be a collection released through Arkham House, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants. That Campbell was barely even old enough to vote did little to stop him from entering the fast track to becoming one of horror literature’s more respected authors. Campbell would eventually turn to novels, in prolific fashion, but for the first decade of his career he stuck exclusively to short stories, which especially in the ’60s (there were few markets for horror literature at the time) was not exactly a recipe for mainstream success. As early as his first collection Campbell showed himself to be a devotee of weird fiction and cosmic horror, and he would even an original story published in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I was surprised, then, to find that while “The Scar” very much deals with the uncanny, it’s much more about psychology than cosmic expanse—about inner space as opposed to outer.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the Summer 1969 issue of Startling Mystery Stories. It has actually been reprinted a decent number of times, including The Year’s Best Horror Stories, No. 1 (ed. Richard Davis), Lost Souls: A Collection of English Ghost Stories (ed. Jack Sullivan), and the Campbell collections Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsey Campbell and Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961-1991.

Enhancing Image

Fair warning that this story, while good, is very British.

Things should be going smoothly at the Rossiter house, and yet there’s some tension behind closed doors. Lindsay Rice and his brother-in-law Jack Rossiter are very different men with different temperaments, and who evidently deal with different financial circumstances. Lindsay (from what I can tell) is an office drone while Jack runs a jewelry store, which he takes a lot of pride in. Lindsay isn’t exactly poor, but he clearly is envious of his sister Harriet having married someone petit bourgeois like Jack, that the two own a house with two fine kids while Lindsay hovers around them like a fly on shit, quietly ashamed of his own meager living situation. “But he never had the courage to invite them to his flat; […] he knew it wasn’t good enough for them.” One night Lindsay tries striking up conversation with Jack, and it goes pretty much disastrously, with Lindsay mentioning, among other thingss, that he had recently encountered a dead ringer for Jack while on the bus, the only big difference being that this doppelganger had a scar running from his left temple to his jaw. Of course the thing with doppelgangers is that if you see your own then you will die soon, but as Jack points out, since Lindsay had sseen Jack’s doppelganger then he should be fine. If it’s an attempt at a joke it doesn’t go over well. Lindsay also brings up the jewelry store possibly getting robbed, this being another attempt at humor, and Jack takes it even worse. The two are not getting along, sadly.

(One quibble I have with this story that bothers me and probably no one else is that the characters all call each other by their first names, naturally, but the third-person narrator consistently calls Lindsay by his last name. He’s the only character who gets this treatment, I have to assume because Harriet and Jack have the same last name. I understand English naming conventions can be weird and I’ve been guilty of being inconsistent with calling characters by their first or last name during a review.)

“The Scar” is, among other things, about self-fulfilling prophecies and time folding in on itself. Things that are talked about happen at a later time. The real world seems to be out for lunch as time goes out of order. I said before that this is a story about inner space, in that while the narrator is third-person it’s also anchored to Lindsay’s POV, with us being given a line to his thoughts. To paraphrase and heavily summarize Lovecraft’s take on what makes weird fiction the thing that it is, as opposed to just general horror or dark fantasy, is that weird fiction should involve the otherworldly creeping into normal human existence. This would be a grounded domestic drama if not for the fact that Jack, on route to the pub he and Lindsay frequent, gets assaulted by a man whose face resembles a “black egg” and who cuts up Jack’s face with the edge of a tin can—from his left temple to his jaw. Of course the faceless attacker is Jack’s double, although he doesn’t conider this, and Lindsay doesn’t say anything about having seen this man before—the fact that this man has the same scar he would give Jack. The snake is eating its own tail, somehow. The why of the attack is never given. Jack starts off as a bitter and rather conceited man, whose new injury only makes him more hostile to everyone. Harriet is worried, but doesn’t know what to do. This is a John Cheever-style family-threatening-to-implode narrative, except that the catalyst is someone who should not reasonably exist. If this is a ghost story then the ghost in question merely gives the human characters a little push, on their way to some kind of oblivion.

The thing about horror stories is that there tends to be a dissonance between what the reader/viewer expects and what the characters expect. This is more apparent in bad works of horror, or horror where the characters seem to have taken several hit points to their intelligence. But then if you’re a normal person then you probably don’t believe in, say, ghosts, or doppelgangers who signal one’s impending doom. Most characters in horror stories aren’t aware that they’re in a horror story, although Lindsay borders on such a realization, the tragic part being that he is unable to express this. He doesn’t have the words for what he and Jack are experiencing. “Something was going to happen; he sensed it looming. If he could only warn them, prevent it—but prevent what?” We’re told early on that one of Lindsay’s character flaws is his struggle to communicate with others, despite being a grown-ass man; given also his tendency to go non-verbal it’s not unreasonable to assume he’s what we’d now call autistic. “The Scar” is horror, being an entry in a long history of stories about doppelgangers; but it can also be understood as domestic tragedy. Lindsay and Jack are both undone by their personal shortcomings, combined with an unspoken but clearly thought-about class conflict, between Lindsay’s timidness and Jack’s bourgeois vanity. The result is an eerie but also class-conscious ghost story.

There Be Spoilers Here

If there’s any part of this that feels like it was written by a very young writer (albeit someone who was on his way up), it’s the climax. Not that it’s bad, just that it’s predictable and it sort of takes the easy way out, which is a quibble I often have when reading horror: the author doesn’t quite stick the landing for my taste. In kind of a side note, Lindsay seeing a naked man painted entirely in red reminded me of the climax to Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death, which Campbell probably had seen at this point, although it’s probably also a coincidence.

A Step Farther Out

It’s been a few days since I read this one, and I have to admit the more I’ve thought about it the more I like it. It’s a textbook example of a weird tale in which the mundane urban way of life meets the uncanny, and is then totally turned inside out by this sudden lack of normalcy. It may have found a better market had it been written a decade earlier, or even a few years later, but the ’60s was sadly the nadir for modern horror publishing. In fairness, while he did run cheap magazines, Robert W. Lowndes (the editor of Startling Mystery Stories, and also Magazine of Horror) did have an eye for talent; there’s a reason Stephen King thanks him in his introduction to Night Shift, Lowndes having bought King’s first two stories. Campbell would go on to bigger and better things, but while he had made his debut five years earlier, “The Scar” feels like a big bang moment for his career.

See you next time.