Episode 20: 'Pargiton and Harby' by Desmond MacCarthy
One of the delights in curating a podcast like EnCrypted is that, from time to time, you get to shine a light on a forgotten gem. I mined this one from a battered paperback copy of the Fourth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, although it actually dates back to the Lady Cynthia Asquith-edited Ghost Book of 1926.
That means that not one, but two of horror's pre-eminent anthologists (the Fontana collection was edited by Robert Aickman) thought this story worthy of inclusion, and it's not hard to see why. In 1926 the premise and action of Pargiton and Harby might have been quite radical (this is a psychological story as much as it is a ghost story). It may have seemed less so by 1972 (when the fourth Fontana collection was issued) but one can see why it might have appealed to Aickman; there is a strangeness in the telling, even if the nature of Pargiton's "haunting" is readily apparent from early on. That strangeness, and the suggestion of a kind of cosmic link between the title characters, gives the story an edge of supreme unease.
I'm waxing lyrical partly because I want you to listen to the episode, and partly because I would usually use this space to say something about the author and, in the case of Pargiton and Harby, I don't really have a great deal to say.
So, from Wikipedia, I can tell you that Sir Charles Otto Desmond MacCarthy (1877-1952) was a British writer and the foremost literary and dramatic critic of his day. He was also a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the intellectual secret society. Even with some further Googling I have been unable to glean whether MacCarthy published any more ghost stories of note or whether this was his only foray into supernatural fiction.
It's an accomplished tale, at any rate, and I enjoyed reading it for the podcast. If any readers have any further biographical information about Desmond MacCarthy please feel free to share in the comments.
And, for listeners who enjoy these less well-worn tales, the next episode (I'm in the process of editing) also qualifies as something of a "deep cut".
Until we meet again...
Jasper
********
Comments
Post a Comment