Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen

Dinesen’s second work on the bookshelf, Seven Gothic Tales, is a wonderful treat of carefully told stories with ‘gothic’ twists. The tales generally are of everyday bourgeoisie people (steeped in the class consciousness of the 19th century), people that are easy to relate to and emphasize with and people to whom significant, though dark and disturbing, things happen. The stories are not the least bit contrived; all the occurrences appear real and necessary to the plot; but, the atmosphere is slightly twisted and Dinesen reveals disturbing aspects of people’s lives for the reader.

In one story, a gentleman goes home with a woman he meets on the street and has sex with her. In this unseeming, darkened setting where a man brings a strange woman home for sex (in a story set in Victorian times even!), Dinesen incorporates an additional twist: she is a prostitute and he is her first client.

In another story, a deceased brother of two old women sits down to dinner with them. The expectation builds in this story for something dark to happen: the harrowing trip across a dangerous sea road by carriage; the older woman living alone, haunted by visions of her dead brother; the brother’s refusal of marriage and subsequent wild sea voyages. Dinesen sets the atmosphere expertly, and very subtly, so that when the three of them sit down to dinner, it seems quite unreasonably natural and a creepy feeling rises from inside the reader, based entirely on the untenable situation.

In other stories, the gothic element is downplayed throughout the story, but the ending has quite a twist. In one of these, a woman, attempting to set up two people for marriage, switches places with her favorite pet monkey and, at the end of the story, is left clawing and scraping at the molding around a parlor door. Because of the woman’s meddling in their affairs, two people, who do not love each other must get married, trapped in a horror of a marriage they seem perfectly made for.

As expected, Dinesen displays excellence in narrating these tales of twisted relationships, dark settings, and preternatural happenings. While keeping the stories believable, and using characters whom we care about, and to whom significant things happen, she weaves in a gothic element that surprises and disturbs the reader. In all, she offers examples of narrative fiction at its best.