The Later Tales of H.G. Wells

The latest contribution to the year's reading is a slim volume by H.G. Wells, The Croquet Player (Bison Frontiers of Imagination Series from the University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Weighing in at 109 pages (if you include the "scholarly" afterword by John Huntington), it can barely be called a novel.

The story seems pretty simple at first. A somewhat vacant middle to upper class Englishman, the Croquet Player of the title, is spending some time at a resort. He strikes up a conversation with another guest and learns something that changes his life. The other guest, a doctor, claims to be from a English village called Cainsmarsh. He bought a practice there hoping to get away from the stress of life in London. However, he notices a number of strange things. There seems to be a abnormally high use of various drugs there. There are a number of suicides. There have been a few murders. People do odd things like abuse animals and children.

What is going on? Various people advance theories. One local priest feels that its due to the archaeologists digging up the remains and stirring up ghosts. A local curator of the museum feels that people have been burst from the frame of time and are horrified by the realization of a immensely long history and a equally long future. The doctor starts to feel the pressure of the place and is haunted by the image of a prehistoric skull he saw at the local museum.

Later, the Croquet Player encounters a therapist that is treating the doctor. The therapist tells him that there's no such place as Cainsmarsh. True, there have been incidents of abuse and death, but all over England, not just one area. The therapist seems to feel that these are problems affecting the whole world.

The book ends with the Croquet Player taking an interest in world events as he never did before...having trouble sleeping...being haunted by images...

It is a slim book. The writing is somewhat sparse. But Wells manages to convey a lot of atmosphere in this slim book. There are echoes of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft here, as well as British author William Hope Hodgson. (And oddly enough, I foresee the spare but effective writing of a later British author of speculative fiction, one Arthur C. Clarke.)

So what is going on in Cainsmarsh? Is it the spirit of Cain as one person asserts? The ghosts of our prehistoric past? I was struck by the concept of being burst from the frame of time and wonder if Wells was feeling "future shock" long before Alvin Toeffler coined the phrase.