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IT IS PERHAPS A NOT VERY SURPRISING TRUTH that the artists who tend to be most critical of television\u2014and of the culture it has shaped and will continue to shape\u2014are those very few truly great artists who have spent the majority of their creative lives working within the medium. Think of Rod Serling or Paddy Chayefsky in America. England seems to have an endless supply of such people, most prominent (and most beloved by me) among them being Dennis Potter. And as little known as Dennis Potter still is in America, even less well-known than him is Nigel Kneale, whose 1968 teleplay The Year of the Sex Olympics<\/a><\/em>, written for the BBC2 anthology show Theatre 625<\/em>, was so remarkably prescient about how grotesque TV would become that we\u2019ll probably hit the exact spot mapped out in his story no later than April 2026.<\/p>\n Like many writers of his generation and nationality, Kneale wrote in many genres: The Year of the Sex Olympics<\/em> is science fiction; The Stone Tape<\/a> <\/em>(1972), another of his classic teleplays, is horror; and the iconic Hammer film for which he wrote the screenplay, Quatermass and the Pit<\/a> <\/em>(1967), is one of the most successful hybrids of those two genres ever filmed (or written, for that matter). Yet for all his success, and for all the skill, innovation, imagination, and sheer talent he put into his scripts, Kneale\u2019s interest in writing prose seemed minimal. Kneale published just two works of prose: Quatermass<\/a> <\/em>(1979), a novelization of the TV serial from the same year (part of a longer series of Quatermass stories, of which Quatermass and the Pit <\/em>was an earlier installment); and, in 1949, two years before his first script was produced for television, his only short story collection, Tomato Cain and Other Stories<\/em>.<\/p>\n And it was through that book\u2014or, really, the title\u2014rather than his famous scripts that I first learned of Kneale. I found the title, Tomato Cain and Other Stories<\/em>, tucked away in the Recommended Reading List in the back of Stephen Jones and Kim Newman\u2019s indispensable reference book Horror: 100 Best Books<\/em>. I was struck by the title, because what kind of horror could Tomato Cain <\/em>possibly pertain to? I\u2019m a sucker for an unusual title. However, for most of my life, used copies of this collection were completely unaffordable. The closest I could get was finding a horror anthology that included another reprint of Kneale\u2019s ghost story \u201cThe Patter of Tiny Feet<\/a>,\u201d with its scalpel-sharp line, \u201cThis was not a house with a woman in it,\u201d which encompasses one character\u2019s grief and loneliness with grim succinctness. This is surely the most famous story from Tomato Cain<\/em>, in part, I imagine, because of the way Kneale has that same lonely character reveal an unpleasant side, to himself and to his marriage, as he speaks of his late wife and how she was \u201cunworldly\u201d and \u201cunnecessarily emotional.\u201d Then later, as this man, Mr. Hutchinson, explains to the journalists questioning him about the paranormal phenomena plaguing his home, he describes his late wife as \u201cin some ways . . . so to speak . . . retarded.\u201d This causes one of the journalists, our narrator, to observe, \u201cHe looked as pleased as if he\u2019d just been heavily tipped. If that was pure intellectual triumph, it was not good to see.\u201d You were lucky to find \u201cThe Patter of Tiny Feet\u201d in an anthology, and even luckier to find \u201cMinuke,\u201d a conceptually unique haunted-house story, which contains the immortal line, hinting at something about Kneale that I\u2019ll get to: \u201cI buried what was left of the dog myself.\u201d<\/p>\n Before you go any further (I know, I know), take a moment to sign up for a free or paid subscription. Your inbox will appreciate it.<\/p>\n Luckily, Tomato Cain and Other Stories <\/em>came back into print three years ago in an expanded edition<\/a> from Comma Press, boasting blurbs from Ramsey Campbell<\/a> and Garth Marenghi himself, Matthew Holness. Across the collection\u2019s 31 stories, Kneale experiments with different forms, approaches, focuses, and genres (ironically, the title story, \u201cTomato Cain,\u201d cannot be described as a horror story, even by the most expansive definition of the term).<\/p>\n Something Kneale does in \u201cMinuke<\/a>,\u201d as in several other stories, is employ a first-person narrator as one side of a conversation. For example, this, from his story \u201cThe Terrible Thing I Have Done\u201d:<\/p>\n I want you to promise me that when I\u2019m dead\u2014oh, never mind reassuring me!\u2014when they take me down river to the embalming place, promise me you\u2019ll see that my copy of the Book of the Dead is a good one, with all the instructions. I know the embalmers often slip a dud scroll into the burial equipment, with mistakes in it, and pieces left out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cThe Terrible Thing I Have Done\u201d is told from the unique point of view of an ancient pharaoh\u2019s food taster. With him being the \u201cI,\u201d who can \u201cyou\u201d be but the reader? Not literally, of course\u2014the \u201cyou\u201d is named, and his name isn\u2019t Bill Ryan\u2014but if one\u2019s inclined to feel this way, one might feel implicated in the terrible thing that\u2019s been done (if one thinks that in this case the thing is all that terrible). Worse, for you, is you can\u2019t quite enjoy the catharsis of brutal revenge delivered to \u201cyou\u201d in \u201cChains,\u201d partly because of who\u2019s \u201cyou,\u201d and partly because the comeuppance is so richly deserved.<\/p>\n Kneale had a gift for disquieting imagery as well. Take this from the book\u2019s eeriest story, \u201cJeremy in the Wind\u201d: \u201cAs we went along, he talked to me\u2014a funny sort of voice he\u2019s got\u2014until a pebble fell out of his mouth.\u201d This story is either about an insane boy, or it\u2019s about an insane boy and his giant, gangly puppet monster friend.<\/p>\n Or this from the quite odd folk horror story \u201cEnderby and the Sleeping Beauty.\u201d Our hero is walking through a dark tunnel when he encounters a row of figures by torchlight:<\/p>\n The figures were of both men and women. Some were painted, in dull colours: blue and green stones sparkled in their dress: more than once Enderby saw gold in the carved folds of a woman\u2019s hair. And every face repelled him. . . .<\/p>\n Each seemed to have a double meaning. A twisting of the brows and a wrinkling round the empty eyes, and madness showed through the face\u2019s laugh. Where they were heavy and stupid, there was vicious cunning also. In eagerness was slavering depravity: in innocence cruelty.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n It may sound strange to say this about a horror writer, but Nigel Kneale had a surprisingly dark streak in him. Remember before, the line about \u201cwhat was left of the dog\u201d? In her introduction to the original 1949 edition of Tomato Cain<\/em>, Elizabeth Bowen wrote: \u201cIt would be fair to say that his children and animal stories, with their focus on suffering . . . most dangerously approach the unbearable.\u201d His story \u201cOh, Mirror Mirror,\u201d which is a sort of inverse version of Richard Matheson\u2019s classic \u201cBorn of Man and Woman,\u201d is not about escaping cruel abuse; it\u2019s not even about abuse beginning. It\u2019s about abuse expanding.<\/em> The obliviously evil narrator (speaking, again, to you) blathers on:<\/p>\n And after that we must simply be patient, and auntie loving, because we haven\u2019t so very long in the world, have we? And if we\u2019re not ordinary . . .<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
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