SAVE OUR BURRAGE
I was, by all accounts, an easily frightened child. Not through any weakness of the heart or timidity though, you see, but because like any inspiring child I did not know my own boundaries. I would look to be scared, and look, and look, and so when it came to something that genuinely terrified this young writer, he was sleepless for much longer than any of his fearless peers would (openly) claim.
So the book of vampire comics was hidden (and what a sadistic present for a nine year olds birthday!), and the X-Files video with Eugene Victor Tooms on it remained unwatched. Hey, I was even scared by an episode of The Adventures of Tintin! (Oh, the shame). The Seven Crystal Balls, for those who must know.
One might surmise that as I grew older my fears slowly gave way. Not so. Now I challenge the reader by manifesting my fears onto the page. "Hmm", say I, "This scenario scares me so. I bet it will terrify an audience!" Many of the flashes of fear described in my ever increasing horror collection come direct from personal experience of fear. But again, nothing had ever unsettled me as much as that I had encountered in my innocent days.
Then I stumbled upon "One Who Saw". You've never read it, have you? But it is easily the best of the many, terrifying tales penned by A.M. Burrage. Who? Alfred M. Burrage is possibly the most underrated writer England has ever produced. Easily in the same bracket of writers as M.R. James, E.F. Benson or even the modern day Neil Gaiman as quite brilliant English dark horror fantasists, yet few beyond the connoisseurs of the horror genre have even heard of the man. He remains unloved, and this is a great shame. Born in Middlesex, the man was also a noted journalist and poet. The Burrage war memoirs can be found online via the most simple of Google searches.
But what of his fiction? I first read Burrage's words, after being recommended to do so in one of the collections by the horror connoisseur, R. Chetwynd Hayes. And so I turned to "One Who Saw", available as it was in so many anthologies as short a time as a decade ago. "Saw" is a first rate tale. It starts as do so many a Burrage (or Ex-Private X, as he often wrote under) tale does: in the jovial confines of a party. The party in "Saw" preside over the oft-mentioned game of reminiscing; complete with the question "Whatever happened to so-and-so?" One name that is brought up leads many guests to remember the good man fondly, and so it comes as some shock to find out the man has had a nervous breakdown and is currently just out of a sanitarium. As it transpires (and I shall not spoil the plot), the unfortunate man on a trip to Paris has become entranced by a girl who sat in a locked garden with her back to him, seemingly crying. And, as in all good cases of curiousity killing the cat, our man longs to find out why.
Another great Burrage tale is "Smee", that being of an innocent variation of hide-and-seek that claimed the life of a girl, and the experience Mr Jackson had when playing the same game in the same house some ten years later. "The Waxwork" is another chiller, and was borrowed for the Twilight Zone. Raymond Hewson is a freelance journalist with a family to think of who is going to spend one entire night alone in the Marinner's Waxworks Murderers Den. I think you can guess how this one turns out, since the plot has been half-copied by less competent writers countless times over the years, but none of the imitations have the advantage of the claustrophobia, fear and sheer twisting of perception that gives Burrage the undisputed victory.
"The Sweeper"? That is almost as scary as "Saw"! And probably a whole lot creepier. Tessa Winyard is the new aide to the old Miss Ludgate at the Billingdon Abbots country mansion. A mostly unkind woman, Miss Ludgate is however overly kind to beggars. And then, come autumn as the trees dispense of their leaves, a ghostly figure can be seen to be sweeping the leaves. A figure with a "white cadaverous face and eyes that bulged like huge rising bubbles as they regarded her. It was a foul suffering face that he showed Tessa, a face whose misery could - and did - inspire loathing and a hitherto unimagined horror, but never pity." And what did this visitant want? Nothing peaceful you can be assured.
"Playmates" is surprisingly mellow, and comes recommended by no less than Roald Dahl. And yet the tale of the little girl who finds children to play with in one of the abandoned rooms in the newly acquired mansion, and her uncle who watches and tries to affix scientific means to the goings on in the house, is by slow degrees both chillingly unnerving and sympathetic.
Burrage does not rush his stories. His tales are like Sudoku puzzles, so to speak. All the clues in the cases are gleefully scattered through his pages. You could see them coming if you thought openly about each word written, but of course the mind does not process the story in this way (The same principle of writing is what makes Agatha Christie so spectacularly successful).
So we have Burrage. What a writer. And yet, if we are not careful the mans work will fall into disrepute and be lost. This would be an unbridled tragedy. Spread the word! Tell all your friends about this most brilliant of writers before we forget! You lovers of horror, look up the mans work. Oh ye who claim that visual media is no longer scary enough, give this master a try and see what you are missing. Google searches can only help so much. Surely if we start up enough momentum, frenzy and interest in the writer some intelligent publisher can re-release his collections. It is nothing more than deserved. Surely the copyright owner - J.S.F. Burrage if still alive - would not stand against that? Forget James, Gaiman, Blackwood, Dickens, Byron, Dahl, Timperely, Gatiss, Benson, Le Fanu, Stoker, Wells and all the rest. In terms of the most brilliant dark, and criminally underrated, British writer, look no further than A.M. Burrage. Though hopefully, underrated for not too much longer.
Are you a "horror connoisseur"? Do you just like reading, or even being scared? Or do my views need answering? Contact me at
michaelthepoet@hotmail.com, and let’s see if the "Publish Burrage" bandwagon can gain any proper momentum.
