The final volume of Collected Speculative Works from Swan River Press covers the period 1858 to 1864. It was in the opening stages of the American Civil War that O'Brien joined that small but august company of authors who died in war or revolution. Some had already demonstrated their potential, others had yet reach it in full. O'Brien falls into the latter category, judging by the stories gathered here.
As always, the book begins with a masterly essay by John. P. Irish. 'Premonitions of Death' makes clear that O'Brien was strongly committed to the Northern cause early on, unlike many in his Bohemian circle. Combined with this, he was pugnacious and a bit of a scrapper. So it's not surprising that, not long after enlisting, he was shot in a skirmish with a rebel patrol and died of his wounds.
We can only speculate what works O'Brien would have bequeathed us if he'd lived. We do have some notion of how he might have handled an actual novel, though. The first story in this book is the bizarre serial 'From Hand to Mouth', which combines comedy and some social realism with a surreal story. A man is locked out of his New York apartment on a snowy night after having imbibed too heartily. He is offered a bed for the night by a mysterious aristocrat, who runs a hotel. This takes our protagonist on a weird adventure in a kind of living building, where disembodied eyes, ears, and hands keep tabs on guests who are really inmates to be exploited. The tone is jaunty and the ending is a cop-out, but the inventiveness is impressive.
'The Golden Ingot', a more conventional story, takes as its premise a modern alchemist who has convinced himself his process works. The truth is that his loving daughter, fearful that he might go insane through failure, has been 'planting' the eponymous ingot in his crucible over and over again for years. This is wildly improbable, but O'Brien makes it work with his usual panache. If only his approach to romance had been as radical as some of his other notions. But no, here we have the morally flawless, long-suffering 'child woman' so familiar from Dickens and others. O'Brien was very typical of his time in his desire to either put a woman on a pedestal or bury her under it.
'The Lost Room' is a near-perfect tale of dislocation. The narrator lodges in a strange house with odd, taciturn servants and a maze of dark corridors. One night, he returns to find the room transformed and inhabited by strange people who seem the epitome of Bohemian sophistication - and who may not in fact be human at all. He demands his old room back but loses on the roll of two dice and is exiled, seemingly forever. I wonder if this one is about the perennial writer's fear of one day discovering that he can no longer write? That creativity itself is a quasi-magical process, easily lost?
'Mother of Pearl' is perhaps the strangest of the tales in this volume. It begins with a romance between two young Americans in India. They marry and have a daughter they name Pearl. The baby is narrowly saved from being eaten by a shark at one point. Then the action moves back to the USA, and Pearl's mother starts acting oddly. I was genuinely startled by the direction the story took.
'The Wondersmith', as Irish notes, may have inspired Abraham Merritt to write his novel Burn, Witch, Burn! The central idea is the same. The magician of the title is part of an evil quartet plotting a form of supernatural terrorism.. The method is to instill evil souls in killer marionettes and unleash them on the unsuspecting world. I wish I liked this story more, as it is exuberant and inventive. However, the casual racism is hard to take. The villains are 'gypsies' who wish to destroy Christians out of spite. O'Brien also takes a couple of gratuitous sideswipes against Jews and Italians. Oh well.
The star of the show, of course, is 'What Was It?', a tale I first encountered many years ago in an excellent anthology entitled A Century of Science Fiction. The story - if you don't know it - concerns a supposedly haunted house in which a man with an opium habit encounters a bizarre and dangerous entity. O'Brien crafted a near-perfect story here. It would be interesting to know if Maupassant had read 'What Was It?' before creating a similar entity in 'Le Horla'. Certainly, there is a thread of inspiration here that leads us to many classics of both science fiction and horror.
And that ends my review of O'Brien's collected speculative works. As a body of work it is impressive, with much to please the aficionado of Victorian fiction in general, and the Gothic horror genre in particular. O'Brien's early death deprived us of a true artist of the short story who might well have grown to become a titan of American letters. We will, sadly, never know.
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