Dodo Press, $9.99, ISBN 978-1409912194
Horror, 2009 (Reissue)

Edward Lucas White was a poet and writer in the early 20th century, and it shows. In fact, it shows so hard that reading his prose feels like getting directions to the grocery store from a poet laureate who’s been at the absinthe again. He writes like a Victorian taxidermist reciting a séance transcript, and honestly, that’s part of the charm.

This tiny compilation contains two of his ghost stories, The House of the Nightmare and his better-known Lukundoo. Both share the same basic premise: a lone, well-educated man stumbles upon a haunted house through some contrived mishap, has a terrifying nightmare, and walks away rattled but alive, ready to recount his ordeal to a long-suffering friend over brandy.

Now, these aren’t what you’d call thrill-a-minute reads by today’s standards. The tropes have aged like an egg salad left out in the sun — so thoroughly used and reused that modern readers might feel like they’ve been here before. Because they have. In fact, they probably met Luckoondo’s weird cousin in a Goosebumps book in 1996.

But what really gives these stories their peculiar flavor is Mr White’s prose. The man could not describe a cup of tea without making it sound like a metaphor for the transience of man’s mortal coil.

In The House of the Nightmare, the narrator has a car accident — a simple, straightforward thing, right? Not here. Mr White’s description is so florid and oblique you might think the poor narrator either astral projected into the fifth dimension or was abducted by the Victorian equivalent of a UFO. I had to reread it twice just to be sure a car crash had actually happened and I hadn’t hallucinated it. Spoiler: it’s a car crash.

And yet… there’s something irresistible about it. Mr White’s overwrought, decadent style makes even the dullest moments feel like you’re reading the feverish diary of a man who’s seen too much and probably hasn’t had enough fiber in his diet. The stories are haunting and oddly beautiful, like watching a candle gutter out in a long-abandoned asylum.

By the end, you might even feel a pang of sympathy for the ghost in The House of the Nightmare, and possibly for yourself for making it through without reaching for a bottle of laudanum. No one writes like this anymore, unless it’s in one of those literary fiction quarterlies that only ten people on earth subscribe to — all of them English department chairs.

If you can brave Mr White’s verbose phantasmagoria, you’ll emerge like his protagonists: slightly bewildered, vaguely haunted, but weirdly pleased with yourself for surviving the experience. It might not be the scariest thing you’ll ever read, but it’s a heady little trip through the dusty corridors of Gothic horror’s weirder corners.