"The Dead Valley" by Ralph Adams Cram

Published 1895

 

Plot Synopsis:

Two Swedish youths make an unchaperoned, overnight trip to a nearby village.  On the return journey they lose their way and find themselves wandering through a terrifying realm.

Review:

Nightmarish.  That word best sums up this chilling tale.  Its feeling of fear and despair at being lost in a frightening setting has really stuck with me since reading it, I am ashamed to say, for the first time just recently.

A respected and famous architect of the early 20^th century, Ralph Adams Cram’s designs were primarily in the European Gothic tradition and he became sought after for cathedral style churches as well as for many buildings at prestigious universities.   Early in his career, though, he found time to dabble in short fiction and published the small anthology Black Spirits and White:  A Book of Ghost Stories.    Containing only six stories, “The Dead Valley” is the last one in the collection and it is a virtuoso fear.

The tale is told second hand as a remembered conversation with a Swedish immigrant.  The opening narrator remarks that the Swede would, while playing chess on winter evenings, often recount stories of his homeland and how these tales would “grow very strange and incredible” as the night deepened but how, nevertheless, he still believed him.  The narrator’s characterization of the Swede is brief and done in the casual tone of one describing a close friend.   The offhand manner in which it is handled lends a curious verisimilitude to the Swede’s boyhood tale that reinforces the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief and, indeed, become lost in the feeling that the story is an actual memory, that it really happened, and as such is all the more horrifying.

As a Horror tale, the effectiveness of “The Dead Valley” is heightened by the ninety degree dark turn it takes about one-third of the way along.  Although it begins as a recounting of an episode during the Swede’s bucolic youth when he and his best friend travel to a nearby village to buy a puppy, it transforms into a harrowing tale of two boys lost in a dreadful land devoid of life and hope.  They find themselves beset on all sides with frightening, unfamiliar scenery and a feeling of dread and despair hanging thick within a pervasive silence.  If the idea of two 12 year olds and a puppy lost in a wilderness version of Silent Hill (“The Dead Valley” predates that game and later film by more than a century and is every bit as creepy) is not disturbing enough, Cram treats the reader to the idea that the boys have to try and keep their minds from cracking when a keening, tortured wail shatters the oppressive quiet.   Cram describes the sound as “a low, sorrowful moan, rising to a tremulous shriek, culminating in a yell that seemed to tear the night in sunder and rend the world as by a cataclysm.” 

Without spoiling the plot (I disdain reviews that basically retell an entire story in a watered down, deconstructed fashion), this sound marks a shift in the story's flow of action and the characters' mental states.   Their crushing fear, which has been kept at bay and in check through an incredibly display of forced maturity and reason, overwhelms them and instinct drives them to react the way we all would when confronted with mind-altering terror.

 

“The Dead Valley” is a beautiful, chilling story and is so much the better in the way it presents itself as an event, as a happening in the boyhood of a Swede a lifetime ago and far away.  It asks few questions and offers even fewer answers as to his experiences and it leaves the reader with the ominous sense that the world is frighteningly unknowable.  Robert Frost notwithstanding, the road less traveled can lead to terrible, strange realms where one may not only lose his way, but his sanity or life as well.

Seek out Cram’s excellent tale, fellow worms, its exquisite dread will stay with you long after you have made your way home.