BWBC 33: Definitive Article Adjective Noun

This week’s story was the first that made me explicitly look up whether the author was known as an anti-Semite or not. A quick peek at Wikipedia and I discovered it wasn’t Jews the author hated but the Irish. So that’s fun. 

“The Grey Ones” by JB Priestley

Our narrator is seeing a psychiatrist because he worries he might be cracking up. You see he’s figured out that there’s some active force of Evil at work in the world and it seeks to destroy all humankind. But first it must crush all our joys and emotions and make insects of us, so that’s what has happened. These Grey Ones have moved into key places of local government and are making things awful for the rest of us, and it’s all part of their awful plan. 

Interesting that in the first paragraphs our narrator chooses Smith over Meyenstein, because he doesn’t think he could possibly speak freely to one of “those people”. Whether we are to read this as Priestly raising the anti-Semitic specter to poke fun at it, or to reinforce it by linking the story to it I don’t know. I read the narrator as a crank and think the presentation of the Grey Ones themselves is a bit trash. They’re basically seven-eyed frog-demons, at least if they actually “exist” and aren’t a hallucination of the narrator. And this story comes down on the side of “Ha. Ha. What if this inhuman conspiracy was true and only you knew it?” That said there are some funny bits dealing with how the Grey Ones cloak themselves in dullness to hide and protect themselves. It reminded me of the convention of witches in Roald Dahl’s The Witches. Would you actually attend a conference of the New Era Community Planning Association?

But, honestly? The story’s trash, and unless you accept the narrator’s delusions as real, then any way you cut them his scary THEM that controls everything are either Jews, Socialists, or Neurological Atypical People. 

The best read you can make is that they’re vampires of the Colin Robinson type. 

The Feather Pillow by Horatio Quiroga   

This one’s more old-fashioned, but it’s still in revolting bug territory. What’s best about it is that it’s short and relies on a single gross image to supply its chills. A young bride slowly succumbs to anemia, but before she dies she sees a horrible anthropoid monster moving unseen throughout her house. She also becomes obsessed with no one coming near to her bed. Eventually she dies, and after she does her husband and servants go to straighten her bed. It’s here that a servant discovers the feather pillow’s heavier than usual. Opening it up, the husband and servant find a hideous monster creature, a bloated specimen of a common parasite that lives on feathers. Unbeknownst to anyone it had been feeding on the wife, using its needle-like proboscis to pierce the skin of her temples while she slept.

The End. 

Next Week, a chonky one from Walter De La Mare. 

Don’t forget to wash your pillow cases!