Mark Twain Forum Reviews: “Mark Twain’s Tales of the Macabre & Mysterious”
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Mark Twain’s Tales of the Macabre & Mysterious. Edited by R. Kent Rasmussen. Essex, Connecticut: Lyons Press/Globe Pequot Publishing Group, 2024. Pp. 265. Paper, 6″ x 9″. $24.95. ISBN 978-1-4930-8613-9.
R. Kent Rasmussen seems to have made it his mission in life to help every reader become a Mark Twain expert. His Mark Twain A to Z (1995)–eventually expanded as the 2-volume Critical Companion to Mark Twain (2007)–has become as indispensable for the literary scholar specializing in Mark Twain’s works as for the casual inquirer looking for background information about a Twain novel, an incident in Twain’s life, an explanation of an essay by Twain, or the publishing background of one of Twain’s short stories. Rasmussen’s The Quotable Mark Twain (1997) likewise saves everyone much effort in locating a favorite quip or searching for what Twain said or wrote regarding a certain topic.
The name “Mark Twain” still sells books. Those who edit his writings, write biographies about him and his circle, or analyze and comment on his novels, stories, essays, newspaper columns, travel books, poems, and plays benefit from the author’s enduring fame. Too often, though, a percentage of writers and editors seem drawn to Twain largely because of his popularity and the probability that their book or article will find ready acceptance by a press or journal owing to the celebrity of its subject. By contrast, Rasmussen brings to this collection more than his decades of research; it is clear that he genuinely enjoys and admires the writer about whose works he has written or edited more than a dozen books. A reader unconsciously absorbs this beguiling enthusiasm. Rasmussen’s affection for Mark Twain causes pages to turn pleasantly. We are sharing a solid and delicious experience with this knowledgeable scholar.
Mark Twain, however, is not among the authors who first come to mind when the subject of Gothic horror fiction arises in conversation. Horace Walpole, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley envisioned the prospects for this genre in British literature, of course. On the United States side of the Atlantic, one thinks of nineteenth-century writers like Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Later on, H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James carried on, and enlarged the boundaries for, forms of literature involving the horrific and macabre.
Yet when, upon reflection, a reader recalls the number of Mark Twain’s literary characters who are buried (sometimes alive), resurrected from their burials, burned alive, struck by lightning, drowned, left adrift in floating vessels, or suffer other forms of excruciating torture or premature death, the creator of these fates seems to have earned a right to be included in any list of literary producers of the horrific. It’s just that we don’t associate Twain with the writers who conjured up these effects exclusively because Twain typically incorporated his accounts of gruesome ordeals into narratives in which they are subsumed into larger story lines.
In fact, Rasmussen is quick to acknowledge that he is often extracting his selections from unlikely places. Possibly to surprise and intrigue readers, he has chosen not to use any material from Twain’s two best-known works–The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but rather has chosen “underappreciated” short pieces as well as passages from Mark Twain’s travel books that possess “a powerful Gothic feel.”
Twain experts may find themselves a bit disconcerted upon not recognizing any titles in this collection. That is because the contents bear invented, updated titles. For instance, Twain’s hilarious reminiscence about groping about in an unlit German hotel room as related in A Tramp Abroad is here called “Forty-Seven Miles in the Dark.” In many cases the pieces have been renamed to endow them with twenty-first-century relevance. “Cannibalism in the Cars” now becomes “Politically Correct Cannibals.” The dilemma in Twain’s “A Medieval Romance” appears as “A Mysterious Gender-Bending Impasse.” Always meticulous and accurate, Rasmussen thoughtfully adds the actual titles and sources, along with their dates, at the end of each story.
Six categories in Mark Twain’s Tales of the Macabre & Mysterious–all of them containing between four to six narratives–capture different effects. Part I offers “Tales Spooky & Grisly,” Part II consists of “Unpleasant Places,” Part III brings together “Remarkable Characters,” Part IV collects “Curious Talk & Strange Obsessions,” Part V introduces “Worlds Remote in Time & Space,” and Part VI concludes with “Ironic Twists & Clever Deceptions.”
An excerpt in “Remarkable Characters” titled “The Mysterious New Boy” turns out to be Chapter 1 from the “Schoolhouse Hill” version of Twain’s the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts, in which the youth who calls himself “Forty-four” flabbergasts his classmates by demonstrating his incredible skills at vocabulary memorization, foreign language acquisition, mathematical calculation, mimicry, and various other feats. From Chapter 28 of The Innocents Abroad Rasmussen gives us the elderly friar’s animated descriptions of the four thousand monks of the Capuchine order whose skulls and bones lie heaped in different rooms. “See what one can accustom himself to.–The reflection that he must some day be taken apart like an engine or a clock, or like a house whose owner is gone, and worked up into arches and pyramids and hideous frescoes, did not distress this monk in the least,” Twain observes. Corpses abound in Twain’s writings, and several of them are on exhibit in this book, including “The Undertaker’s Chat,” renamed for this collection “A Corpse Not Particular about Style.” Limburger cheese, a coffin, and a box of rifles make their appearance (or stench) known in “The Invalid’s Story,” retitled as “Out of Focus Imagination”………
.….Finish reading Alan Gribben’s review at the Mark Twain Forum
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