Round the Herne

 Another story to mark Halloween 2021. This is my reading of E F Benson's short story, "The Temple" in which holidaymakers end up regretting their choice of accommodation. It reminds me a little of a holiday cottage I once stayed in. The obsession of earlier centuries with shattering standing stones in order to use them for building projects - much like the soulless Puritans who destroyed large swathes of the Avebury circle - has resulted in quite a few buildings have chunks of defiled temples worked into them. I've not heard off any of the inhabitants of such places having the experiences of Benson's characters, but who knows?

 With Halloween around the corner, this is my reading of Robert Bloch's atmospheric story about 'The Skull of the Marquis de Sade' in which the earthly remains of the infamous libertine exert a corrupting influence on all around. Whether the real de Sade was guilty of half the things he was condemned for is a matter of debate, with some conjecturing that he was mostly just sweaty-minded but spent so much time in prison he probably had few opportunities to indulge his fantasies (which is probably just as well). Bloch is best known for writing the story which became Hitchcock's 'Psycho' film about Norman Bates and his ghastly mother. This short story was made into a film in 1965, starring the wonderful Peter Cushing as Maitland the collector and Christopher Lee as his rival collector of ghoulish curiosa. The film sticks closely to the original story, though Lee's character is renamed. I hope to record a few more stories and perhaps poems between now and Hallow...

  My reading of the final story from Ruth Manning-Sander's book "A Book of Magic Animals" (1974). The last tale is a German one, 'Elsa and the Bear'. It is a variation on Beauty and the Beast, a trope that riles and inspires people in equal numbers. Those who get irked by it often do so because they interpret it as a moralistic story that encourages young girls to marry abusive monsters (of the more human sort) in the naive hope that they can transform them into handsome princes through patience and compassion. Those with a more upbeat view are sometimes just romantics who believe in the power of redemption (as do billions of Christians, of course, though I think it would be stretch plausibility a bit to see Elsa as emblematic of the Holy Spirit or the Shekinah bringing a lost soul back from its bestial state). Others take a more Jungian view that Beauty and the Beast are two sides of the same person - Higher and Lower Selves and that the one can eventually transf...