The Outcast and The Rite by Helen de Guerry Simpson

(Handheld Press, 2022)

Reviewed by Andy Sawyer

Helen Simpson, who died in 1940, was one of a number of extraordinary women in the interwar literary scene. She collaborated with Clemence Dane (later to be editor of the post-war science fiction line from Michael Joseph) on a number of detective novels. She was a member of the Detection Club, a group of fellow writers which also included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and her friend Gladys Mitchell with whom she shared her lifelong interest in witchcraft and demonology.

The Outcast and the Rite, subtitled ‘Stories of Landscape and Fear’, brings together her outstanding supernatural stories mostly published in the 1925 collection The Baseless Fabric. Expertly curated with an informative introduction by Melissa Edmundson, it highlights Simpson as a remarkable writer who approached the task of writing supernatural fiction with a fresh eye and an unsettling imagination.

The only possible criticism I can give to this book is its title. ‘The Outcast’ and ‘The Rite’ are the third and second stories respectively: the title seems to either link them in a way that seems forced or to suggest something else entirely. The subtitle seems much more appropriate, because landscape and place, whether it be the wood of ‘The Rite’ in which grow plants ‘not shaped much like flowers…more like animals; and there were ugly purple spots on the grey surface’, or the houses of ‘As Much More Land’, ‘Disturbing Experiences of an Elderly Lady’, or ‘Teigne’, seem at the heart of these uncanny stories. ‘The Outcast’ links the inability to thrive of a tree planted to commemorate wartime fallen in a small village with the hatred the villagers felt for the soldier, left unburied in the field and remembered as ‘scum’. ‘Young Magic’ is, like ‘The Rite’, a story as much about interior as exterior landscapes: an imaginary friend who has become too real for comfort suddenly departs. In ‘Good Company’ a woman travelling alone in Italy becomes possessed by the mind of a Catholic saint. After being robbed, she is stranded penniless in a village. The power of Simpson’s writing is that she makes Elizabeth’s physical uncertainty (her landlady’s husband edges closer and closer to taking brutal advantage of her situation) as vivid as her psychic experience without allowing it to become entirely the point of the story.

In ‘Grey Sand and White Sand’, a painter becomes obsessed with the coastal landscape. In ‘A Curious Story’, an actor enlists (unsuccessfully) the help of his friend, a poet, to deal with the apparition of a long-dead actress. Most powerfully, perhaps ‘The Man Who Had Great Possessions’ finds a writer struggling with the presence of one of his imaginary creations.

But it’s the marvellous turn of viewpoint, between the mundane concerns of her characters and the ‘invisible realm’ (as one reviewer put it), which transforms and defines those concerns which makes these stories memorable. In ‘Disturbing Experiences…’ we are always aware of the essential character of Mrs Jones, widow of a war-profiteer who buys the house of an ‘improvident’ aristocratic family. Mocked by acquaintances for her common speech and origins, she finds (temporary) ecstatic release in the grounds of her house, only to lose a battle she never really knows she is engaged in.

The two stories not published in The Baseless Fabric were written later in Simpson’s career for more ‘popular’ markets. They are, perhaps, more generic: but even so, the endings of each seem to show a writer playing with the implications of her stories. ‘An Experiment of the Dead’ has a clergyman-magus visiting a woman sentenced to be hanged to set himself up as a necromancer. The ‘twist’ is amusing, but dark. ‘The Pythoness’ involves a medium who becomes involved with one of her ‘regulars’ after his wife dies. The scepticism in the first paragraphs is perhaps answered after the shocking climax, but there is enough ambiguity to make us wonder. Handheld are among the most interesting and eclectic of presses specialising in reviving supernatural fiction, and this is another triumph.

Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.