Couching at the Door by D. K. Broster

[regshoe]

I read this one months ago but, what with one thing and another, never got round to writing up a review. Now luzula’s recent posts about this book reminded me of it, it's getting near a year since I last posted a D. K. Broster review and I thought I'd better get on with writing up the ongoing read-through; well, better late than never...

Couching at the Door (1942) takes a departure from Broster’s usual material, being a collection of short horror stories. I suspect that at least most of them are considerably older than the date of this book; some had appeared before in magazines, and some in the earlier collection A Fire of Driftwood.

(The title is sometimes misquoted as Crouching at the Door. ‘Couch’ is an archaic word for ‘lie’ or ‘lay’, probably related to the noun ‘couch’ as in the American for sofa, a couch being something you lie down on. Broster is paraphrasing Genesis 4:7, part of which the Revised Version renders as ‘and if thou doest not well, sin coucheth at the door’... While looking up the verse to check which translation it came from, I found that several other more recent translations have ‘crouching’, suggesting that Broster’s book isn’t the only place people have confused these words. So there you go.)

The exact forms of horror vary pretty widely. There are hauntings, time travel, doppelgangers, general unexplained weirdness; some of the stories are not outright supernatural but instead make a more psychological horror just as terrifying; while most of the settings are modern, several of the stories include historical elements, looking rather different here from what they are in Broster’s realistic historical novels. In all this variety I think most of them are pretty good; Broster’s elegant and precise prose, which works so well in rich description of time and place and in illustrating historical mores of honour and duty, also works very well for creating a precisely-drawn sense of spine-chilling horror.

The title story is about a pretentious and unpleasant Oscar Wilde wannabe of a writer who is haunted by the ghost of a past terrible sin in the form of... a fluffy fur boa that keeps turning up and trying to give him a hug, utterly horrifyingly. It's funny and creepy and very good, and I was amused to see a shout-out to, of all things, John Halifax, Gentleman (found alongside the relevantly-quoted Bible on a shelf of books that belonged to the main character’s mother and which form a morally-relevant contrast to his present depraved life). My other favourites included ‘The Pavement’, in which an elderly woman becomes obsessed with the image of a girl in the mosaic floor of a Roman villa on her family’s land (I was delighted to see Broster writing something with real femslash potential for once, and amused by how different it is from her slashy stories; it’s gone on the list for future femslashex nominations). ‘Clairvoyance’ and ‘The Promised Land’, both repeated from A Fire of Driftwood, are both excellently chilling, and I very much enjoyed revisiting them here.

Some of the other stories are just downright weird in ways that, if they don’t perhaps work perfectly, still make for really good reading—I would put ‘From the Abyss’ and ‘The Taste of Pomegranates’ (which is better described as playing with the ideas and aesthetics of the myth of Hades and Persephone than as a take on the story itself) in this category. Before the story swerves into really disturbing murder mystery, ‘Juggernaut’ includes a very funny scene in which a writer character despairs over the printing-error-riddled mess which the publisher has made of the proofs of her story—I’m sure Broster was writing from experience there! ‘The Window’ (another repeat from AFoD) and ‘The Pestering’ both combine horror with historical elements familiar from Broster’s novels.

This collection seems to be one of the most difficult to find of all Broster’s books, which is odd when set against the fact that (at least some of) the individual stories have received much more attention, especially recently, than her historical novels. There was a new edition of some of them published only a couple of years ago! I would love to ebook the original Couching at the Door, especially since most of the stories in it are not otherwise available online, but first editions are not to be got for any remotely reasonable price. Perhaps the wartime publication meant a more limited number of copies? In any case, if you can get your hands on it (I have the 2007 Wordsworth edition, which seems generally more obtainable), this collection is highly recommended. ETA, thanks to luzula: There is also a commercial ebook edition!

I only have one more D. K. Broster book to go :(

Comments

[osprey_archer]

Oh, this sounds fantastic! I've been doing lots of short story collections this year and perhaps this should go on the list... I read "Couching at the Door" in an anthology and the fluffy fur boa that keeps trying to give the protag a hug is indeed horrifying.

[regshoe]

Definitely a good one for the list, in my opinion :D

[sovay]

My other favourites included ‘The Pavement’, in which an elderly woman becomes obsessed with the image of a girl in the mosaic floor of a Roman villa on her family’s land

That sounds like the premise of a Tanith Lee. I'll have to find it.

[regshoe]

It's here, in the original magazine version! I have never read any Tanith Lee, but perhaps I should if her books are like this.

[sovay]

It's here, in the original magazine version! I have never read any Tanith Lee, but perhaps I should if her books are like this.

It would be more obviously supernatural if written by Tanith Lee, but the obsession, the classical allusions, and the queerness are very much in her line. I hope someone does write you fic for it. "It was like striking at her own."

[luzula]

I'm glad you enjoyed these! You only have one Broster book left to go now, right? I also have only one left to go, but mine is Chantemerle.

‘Juggernaut’ includes a very funny scene in which a writer character despairs over the printing-error-riddled mess which the publisher has made of the proofs of her story
Ha, yes, that was funny!

I wouldn't exactly say it's difficult to find, since there's an ebook.

[regshoe]

Just The Captain's Lady! How symmetrical that your last Broster book is her first. :)

(And a few more never-collected short stories; and The Happy Warrior, which I now have after finding it at St Hilda's—it's short-story-length non-fiction; and her book of poetry, if I can find it, or if not I might just read through all the poetry that's available online.)

I had totally missed that there was a commercial ebook! I very rarely buy ebooks and wouldn't for something in the public domain unless I really couldn't get it otherwise, but that is an option—how good.

[luzula]

Oh right, I do have a few short stories left that I haven't read! Including the one that is a proto-FotH, which I have kept saving up.

[regshoe]

Hold on, is that ''Mongst All Foes'? (It's definitely relevant to FotH, but I wouldn't call it a proto-FotH—certainly not in the way that 'Fil d'Émigré' is a proto-Sir Isumbras—but I don't think there's another one I haven't heard of...)

[luzula]

Yes, that's the one I meant!

[regshoe]

Ah, I see! A good one to save up :D