Episode 24: 'The House on the Marsh' by Frederick Cowles
Frederick Cowles remains a somewhat overlooked figure in the realm of supernatural fiction. A writer on folklore and history, as well as a writer of children's stories, Cowles nevertheless produced an impressive number of horror and ghost stories that were widely collected in 1930s anthologies of such, and would periodically surface in 1970s anthologies of the same.
As an author, Cowles appears to have taken a good deal of inspiration from M.R. James both in subject matter (ecclesiastical hauntings, cursed objects, black magic dabblers) and title formulation (The Horror of Abbot's Grange can't fail to bring to mind James' Treasure of Abbot Thomas; like James he has a story called, simply, Rats). In plot The House on the Marsh umistakably harkens back to James' Lost Hearts.
This is merely to make an observation (of course, nearly all writers of supernatural short stories of his era were paying a debt to M.R. James!), not to disparage Cowles. Indeed, the later author has, on his side, an efficiency and directness not commonly found in the James canon. Shorn of the tendency to assert scholarly leanings (what Aickman, in the foreword to his fourth Fontana collection calls the element of "patronage" in James' stories; "one becomes aware as one reads of the really great man, the Provost of Eton") and possessing the leaner prose style (not to mention the more explicit grue) of the '30s writers, Cowles could never be accused of not getting to the point!
As such, the bulk of his short stories are brisk, highly entertaining variations on what, by his time, had become genre staples, and are none the poorer for it. This story, The House on the Marsh is a fine example from 1936, telling the story of a man who inherits the titular house from his sinister, disreputable uncle, and soon uncovers its appalling secrets.
There's a nice little piece about the story, drawing parallels with M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft here (on the Dark Worlds Quarterly site).
Unfortunately, online information about the author, himself, is scant. I know very little about him, save that he died very young. He was forty-eight.
Must fly,
Jasper
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About the episode:
"The House on the Marsh" by Frederick Cowles. First published in The Horror of Abbot's Grange, and Other Stories by Frederick Cowles, 1936.
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