Who Goes There?

Robert Graves was, like Ernest Hemingway and J. R. R. Tolkien, is a writer whose subject matter of choice is inexptricably linked with having survived the horrors of World War I. His wartime experiences would more or less shape his career as a writer, resulting most tangibly in his first commercial success, his memoir Good-Bye to All That. Also like Hemingway, Graves was a hot mess: his first marriage was a disaster, and he had an intense homosexual relationship (he was a messy bisexual like yours truly) in his youth that did not end well. Then there was the PTSD from his time in the war, which no doubt strained things. He was involved in a sort of love triangle, between his first wife and fellow writer Laura Riding, in the ’20s when he and Riding were still early in their careers. Incidentally (or maybe not), Graves would write “The Shout” during a rather fraught period in his relationsip with Riding. Be sure to put a pin in that one.

Graves considered himself an Artist™, someone who was genuinely interested in the classics, and unlike the vast majority of writers he achieved real commercial success. Good-Bye to All That was popular, but I, Claudius and its sequel Claudius the God became major bestsellers that are still talked about and considered some of the best fiction of the 20th century. Undertandable! These two novels are great, and they are what convinced me to read “The Shout,” which is easily the most famous out of Graves’s relatively small body of short fiction. It even got adapted into a film of the same name, which is decent but which I think loses much of the story’s psychological density; or rather much got lost in translation.

Placing Coordinates

“The Shout” was first published in 1929 as a chapbook. It was reprinted in the April 1952 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It has the unusual honor of appearing in F&SF twice, the second time being in the May 1959 issue, which you can find here. Prior to its first F&SF appearance it saw book publication in the Graves collection Occupation: Writer. It’s been anthologized quite a few times over the years, but seems to have gone scarce recently.

Enhancing Image

An unnamed narrator visits an asylum and has a chat with Charles Crossley, who we’re told is highly intelligent but has one or two delusions. Immediately we know something is up because Crossley thinks he was arrested for the murders of three people, and as we find much later on he recounts these happening; but apparently they didn’t. Or did they? The other delusion, “which is more humorous,” is that he thinks his soul has been broken into four pieces. How did this happen? How did he get thrown into a mental hospital? Crossley is all too happy to tell us, and about a certain couple who, not coincidentally, the narrator is friends with. In fact all three partiers know each other. Most of the story is Crossley’s monologuing to the narrator, and this is important to remember because Graves is gonna play some tricks on us. Unreliable narrators get brought up constantly in literature classes, and Crossley is a good example.

Through Crossley’s narration we’re introduced to Richard and Rachel, and right away I was weirded out a bit because Rachel is my therapist’s name. Anyway, they’re pretty comfortable with each other, married in sort of the European sense (they admit having crushes on other people, but never actually commit adultery), to the point where they discuss their dreams with each other regularly. The latest one is a doozy, not least because somehow they both the same dream at the same time. “We not only live together and talk together and sleep together, but it seems we now even dream together,” Richard says wistfully, although the dream will turn out to be foreboding. A man with a black handkerchief wanders the sand dunes on the outskirts of town, and this man turns out to be Crossley in the waking world. Richard and Crossley meet after church one day and, after tormenting some kids, Crossley wedges his way into the couple’s lives. He’s charming, and yet also uncanny. He claims to have spent eighteen years in the Australian outback, hanging out with the indigenous population, and in that time learning a few tricks—the biggest of these being a “terror shout.” One degree of it will drive you mad, another will kill you.

Crossley claims to have used the shout before, but Richard is skeptical. Rachel, not so much. In a sense you’ve seen this plot before: strange outsider reeks havoc on the lives of an unassming middle-upper class family, no doubt the author saying something about class or sexuality or whatever. If you’ve seen Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem, or more recently Saltburn, you can guess the trajectory of the plot—only you would still be wrong to a degree. I think the love triangle aspect, in which Crossley inevitably cucks Richard and keeps Rachel to himself (though she later claims she was just joshing), is the least interesting part of it, it does make sense when you consider Graves’s chaotic love life at the time. He admitted to seeing himself as Richard in the triangle, with Laura Riding presumably being the inspiration for Crossley. Curious that the woman in the real-world equation is replaced with a man. The tension between Richard and Crossley is certainly not what you would think of as between two straight men, although maybe I’m projecting Graves’s queerness here. Richard’s interest in getting a demonstration of Crossley’s shout could be thought of as like a man propositioning another man for a sexual act. Richard surviving the shout (he puts wax in his ears ahead of time, unbeknownst to Crossley) marks the turning point of the story, but it also serves as a point of no return—as if Richard and Crossley have had sex by some strange proxy, and indeed it’s here that the story becomes hard to decipher.

So about the stones. There are stones scattered across the sand dunes, which Richard finds may not just be ordinary stones. Following the shout, he picks up a stone and it’s like his mind is suddenly filled with information he couldn’t possibly have known before. “He began to think about shoemaking, a trade of which he had known nothing, but now every trick was familiar to him.” He tosses the stone out of fright and just like that, his knowledge of shoemaking leaves him. Things get even weirder when he later talks with the town shoemaker and the other man recalls the sensation of having been thrown suddenly by some unseen force. If what Richard suspect is right then every person in town is connected with a stone in the sand dunes, as if each person’s soul were not in their own body but kept away in these inanimate objects. This means Richard and Rachel have their own stones that their souls are linked to, and maybe the same can be said of Crossley. This reads as insane, if taken literally, but remember that Crossley is now telling us this as someone whose stone has been broken into pieces. The stone breaking could be a metaphor for severe mental trauma, which Graves would know a thing or two about. I know a few people whose personalities have fractured from PTSD, and when understood that way Crossley’s case does not seem as outlandish. But still, it’s surreal.

There Be Spoilers Here

Cucking Richard is good a good idea, especially if he finds the stone your soul is connected to. Crossley loses his mind and is promptly arrested for having killed three people in Australia—only we know he wasn’t arrested. At the asylum, Crossley suddenly loses it again and threatens to use the shout when a doctor detains him—and then something very weird happens. A storm kicks up and the narrator narrowly survives what seems to be a burst of lightning that touches down, killing both Crossley and the doctor. It’s unclear if the shout is what killed the doctor or the lightning bolt, since he’s found with his fingers in his ears. Did Crossley somehow conjure lightning or was it a hell of a coincidence? But then we get to the weirdest part. The narrator meets up with Richard and Rachel (the real couple, divorced from Crossley’s perspective), and they react with horror to the doctor dying (they knew him) but barely react to Crossley dying. They claim to have met him only once, casually, as he was putting on a magic show. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Crossley did not have intimate knowledge of the couple like he claimed to have.

Normally this would be where such a story would end, but Graves gives us one last little mindfuck of a line that I’ve been thinking about since then. Rachel says that Richard didn’t like Crossley’s magic show, and Richard (again, the real Richard) says, “‘No, I couldn’t stand the way he looked at you all the time.” Last line of the story and we’re left with a lingering quetion or two. How much was Crossley making up? Did more happen between the three of them than the couple at the end are letting on? Is Richard more prone to jealousy than Crossley made him out to be? Certainly it would be insecure of him to be hung up on how a stage magician looked at his wife. It’s impossible to say because we don’t meet the real Richard and Rachel until the very end and they only have a couple lines; at the same time those lines are telling. Crossley claimed Rachel visited him at the asylum but at the end the two don’t seem to have ever met him past the one time, unless we take Richard’s “all the time” remark to imply it wasn’t just the one time—that they really were intimate with each other. It’s intentionally confusing, and obviously that won’t sit well with all readers, but I’m a sucker for this kind of literary mind game.

A Step Farther Out

On the one hand I’m not sure how effective this story is as horror. The shout itself is not exactly scary (it’s even less scary in the movie, but that might a problem of trying to do it justice visually), and the supernatural element is more confusing than frightening. On the other hand, I’ve thought a lot about this story over the past few days. From a literary perspective, when trying to take in all the ambiguities (not to mention observations on mental illness) Graves packed into such a small space, it’s almost a masterpiece. I think it’s fascinating. It’s a good example of F&SF reprinting material by mainstream authors that fit in with the magazine’s MO.

See you next time.