Review: “Outside the House”
Nov. 11th, 2022 01:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losToday I read the short story “Outside the House”, which a friend described thus:
“I’ve been reading a collection called Women’s Weird 2—it’s the second volume of a series of early 20th century weird tales by women authors. I was really struck by the story I read yesterday evening. It was by a writer named Bessie Kyffin-Taylor, who’s fairly obscure and apparently wrote very little, and the title was “Outside the House.” I’ve never come across her other stories and don’t know whether they’re any good, but I’m convinced this one is a lost classic. It’s about a WWI veteran who is visiting his fiancée’s family for the first time and discovers they have very peculiar rules about never leaving the house, or even opening the windows facing the lawn, after 5 PM. From there things get gradually and unexpectedly apocalyptic in a House on the Borderland kind of way. Ultimately it’s about an upper-middle-class family whose fortunes are based on atrocities, and who’ve weaponized polite respectability in order to avoid acknowledging this under any circumstances, even as their ancestor’s victims lay siege to their home.”
For my own part, I want to add that it feels very reminiscent of Arthur Machen. It directly references “Angel of Mons”, but the overall treatment is also of that school. This does more with that set up and those themes, I think. The strongest aspect is probably the characters’ varied ways of handling this, how thoroughly they naturalise violence and even the pride they come to take in their ability to do so. The social mores of their responses and the parallels between this form of illicit acquisition of generational wealth and ‘legitimate’ forms that hinge on classism/colonialism, the unsustainably of the mental structures that enable atrocity and sugar-cost even the memory thereof, are well-observed and poignant.
“I’ve been reading a collection called Women’s Weird 2—it’s the second volume of a series of early 20th century weird tales by women authors. I was really struck by the story I read yesterday evening. It was by a writer named Bessie Kyffin-Taylor, who’s fairly obscure and apparently wrote very little, and the title was “Outside the House.” I’ve never come across her other stories and don’t know whether they’re any good, but I’m convinced this one is a lost classic. It’s about a WWI veteran who is visiting his fiancée’s family for the first time and discovers they have very peculiar rules about never leaving the house, or even opening the windows facing the lawn, after 5 PM. From there things get gradually and unexpectedly apocalyptic in a House on the Borderland kind of way. Ultimately it’s about an upper-middle-class family whose fortunes are based on atrocities, and who’ve weaponized polite respectability in order to avoid acknowledging this under any circumstances, even as their ancestor’s victims lay siege to their home.”
For my own part, I want to add that it feels very reminiscent of Arthur Machen. It directly references “Angel of Mons”, but the overall treatment is also of that school. This does more with that set up and those themes, I think. The strongest aspect is probably the characters’ varied ways of handling this, how thoroughly they naturalise violence and even the pride they come to take in their ability to do so. The social mores of their responses and the parallels between this form of illicit acquisition of generational wealth and ‘legitimate’ forms that hinge on classism/colonialism, the unsustainably of the mental structures that enable atrocity and sugar-cost even the memory thereof, are well-observed and poignant.
