Month: May 2023

I opted for the cover art for the original Arkham House printing; the Valancourt reprint is good but slightly on the cheesy side.

Anyway, book #6 for 2023, Horror May-hem continues with The Third Grave by David Case… I gather the latter’s normal forte was werewolves, and this book does have a perhaps slightly pointless red herring in that line, but otherwise it’s actually a sort of mad science-ish tale with an Egyptological twist. In classic “Return of the Sorcerer” style, our narrator, Thomas Ashley, is hired by a most peculiar man, Lucian Mallory, to translate some hieroglyphics for him; Mallory’s real interest, though, is immortality, and he thinks he’s found part of the secret and wants Ashley to work out the rest of it. Neither, however, realises just what the immortality of the ancient Egyptians actually involves…

This is an awfully slow-burning book; it’s only about 200 pages long but the build-up feels paced for a much longer book, and the real business only really happens in the last third or so… mind you, when it does, damn. Mallory’s work, based on incomplete and misunderstood knowledge, has already had awful results; the murder-mystery stuff in the first two thirds of the book is resolved in a not exactly surprising manner, but conceptually speaking the nature of the killer turns out to be… yikes. The book has a weird sense of… well, time, I don’t know how to describe it really; I got this from Mallory’s ruminations about his own sense of the passage of time and the book kind of embodied something like that… the Egyptological setting of the book’s opening already felt decades old for a book published in 1981 and, evidently, set around that time as well, and the setting of the rest of the book—the crusty old rural village and the even crustier old house where Ashley and Mallory do their stuff—gave a similar sense of not quite the modern world. I don’t know, maybe I just felt that because it’s 2023 now and the book itself is as removed from my own time as the story feels. Wonder what its original readers thought.

One thing about the book that, unfortunately, was of another time but still is of ours is the racism of the village characters, who have thoughts and feelings about immigrants even though they’ve almost certainly never met any (the local “vagabonds” are bad enough for them. Cf. also the vicar who laments how much of the Bible was written by Jews). It’s probably more of a general small old village distrust of outsiders and newcomers than anything, but still… and I don’t suppose David Case actually shared in that sort of thinking, having been an import to the UK himself, but Ashley as narrator never exactly does much if anything to contradict these people’s Middle Englandness… That aside, though, I wound up liking this a lot; should read more Case.