My ‘horror moments’ examine horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. They are published weekly on Thursdays and come out in series of ten articles focussing on a particular source e.g. ‘Wallace & Gromit,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ or ‘Kate Bush Songs’. Catch up with the last series on The Sopranos here and browse the full back catalogue of horror moments here.
Last week we began our journey through horror moments in the work of illustrator Edward Gorey and met the Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet of children who were dispatched in various hilarious ways.
Gorey’s work revels in a particular kind of abruptness akin to the literary technique of ‘bathos’ where humour is created by a sudden let-down or anti-climax, a drop from the supermundane to the mundane, or the profound to the puerile. Gorey’s bathos usually comes in the form of a character you’ve grown a little fond of being suddenly snatched away without warning or ceremony. The punchline to many of his weird short picture books is something like: “And then she died. The End.”
A typical example of this is The Disrespectful Summons which is not one of Gorey’s most famous books but is one of my favourites. It was published as part of a collection, Fantod IV: Three Books from Fantod Press (1973) and before that was published in the National Lampoon (1972). It’s only 14 panels long, enough time for Gorey to introduce you to ‘Miss Squill’ who meets the devil, is gifted a familiar spirit, wreaks revenge on he enemies, uses her magic to collect exotic plants and cook unusual recipes, then ‘much too soon’ is tossed into hell by the returning devil.
The whole thing happens at breakneck pace, emphasised by the way the devil leaps into the story in panel 1, knocking her to the ground, and in the way the stone urn reading ‘finis’ is itself tipped over at the end. In fact, you can more or less get the gist of the narrative from those two images alone:
As always with Gorey, there are plenty of fun details to spot and each re-read raises slightly new questions despite the simplicity of the narrative. Why, for example, do three of the panels contain windows to what appear to be scenes of mourners in different graveyards? Is her house surrounded by tombs? Is there a second tragedy happening in miniature just beyond the main story?
But my favourite detail is the design of the familiar spirit Beëlphazoar who arrives, with a little label round his neck, the day after Miss Squill’s rough encounter with the devil.
He’s been rendered somewhat cuter than the original, with Gorey’s tell-tale style, but he is copied from a woodcut design of a devil from the 1720 woodcut illustrating The History of Witches and Wizards, an account of the sixteenth century trial of Agnes Sampson. The original picture shows our little devil alongside two of his siblings as they flock around the devil himself. The congregating wiches are offering him waxen images just as Beëlphazoar teaches Miss Squill to do:
Although the nineteenth century setting makes some of the witchy business of the story seem quaintly anachronistic, almost everything that happens in The Disrespectful Summons is entirely in line with what people believed about witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Little choices about the story reflect these beliefs, like the fact that the woman targeted by the devil is unmarried and lives alone. She cooks horrible recipes with Beëlphazoar and can upset livestock, exactly the kind of domestic disruption you can trace back to Shakespeare’s witches and earlier.
Of course, Miss Squill cannot enjoy her powers for long. She looks comically resigned as she is hauled away to hell. As she falls passively down into the flames, her seemingly faithful companion Beëlphazoar hovers close by. Is he reaching out in a gesture of sorrow and affection for his former mistress, or is he pointing and jeering at her literal downfall? I am put in mind here of the familiar spirits of the early modern stage, like Mephistopheles, who shake their heads as their foolish masters at last pay the price for their occult power. Having slunk around her house like a cat (Gorey’s favourite animal) for most of the story, Beëlphazoar now raises the question every cat owner must ask themselves: am I okay with the fact that this animal would do nothing to prevent my demise?
A fun postscript to the demon design is that last year when I was asked to review a new edition of Malleus Maleficarum, I was pleased to see the little devil I now think of as Beëlphazoar on the front cover, looking for his next unlucky mistress, no doubt.
You can read the whole of The Disrespectful Summons here. Next week, we turn to the horror of liminality in a Gorey picture book which has no words, and is all the more frightening because of it. Until then, happy nightmares everyone!
Horror moments are published on Thursdays and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Mondays.
If you’ve enjoyed Horror Moments and want to help me keep going, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll be able to read my archive so you won’t have to worry about losing access to the back catalogue, and every month I publish one thing for paid subscribers only. If you can’t stretch to that, please like, share, comment, subscribe or recommend and thank you so so much for your support!
Just wanted to say that I’m not familiar with Gorey at all but I’m absolutely loving this series. Thanks for the introduction.
Such a delight. Demonic pets are the worst! This is a warning to us all.