Forgotten Books, $9.50, ISBN 978-0-366-06633-9
Horror, 2020 (Reissue)

Francis Marion Crawford, gone too soon in his early 50s, was a man of important literary works. Just ask your nearest tweed-clad literature professor clutching a sherry and sighing about the good old days.

Yet of all his output, one story refuses to die: The Upper Birth. It has shambled its way into so many horror anthologies that it’s essentially the literary equivalent of that one friend you vaguely remember from high school who now sends you pyramid scheme DMs on Facebook. Everyone’s sure they’ve read it, no one remembers when.

Why? Well — brace yourself — it’s because it’s*public domain. Yep. The scariest thing about The Upper Birth isn’t the ghost. It’s the fact that desperate editors throughout history have been using it as cheap page filler since about five minutes after Mr Crawford died. It’s been anthologized more times than anyone’s grandmother’s fruitcake recipe.

Now, for the plot. In true Victorian ghost story tradition, it’s a story within a story about a man telling a story about a thing that happened to him… allegedly. Because nothing screams *authentic horror* quite like a guy at a gentleman’s club claiming he totally didn’t just make this up for attention over cigars and brandy.

Enter Brisbane. Smug, superior, and utterly devoid of survival instincts, Brisbane boards the steamship Kamtschatka and winds up in a cabin where everyone who sleeps in the upper berth mysteriously flings themselves into the ocean. Naturally, Brisbane refuses to switch cabins because he is — how do I put this diplomatically — an absolute tool.

Now, you might think the crew, who work on this boat for a living, would have put two and two together after, oh I don’t know, the third person yeeted themselves into the sea from that bunk, but no.

It takes Brisbane’s smug, self-satisfied genius to come up with the shocking idea of… investigating. Groundbreaking stuff. The ghost itself, when it finally appears, is more mildly inconvenient than malevolent, like a spectral roommate who leaves wet towels on the floor and hogs the bathroom.

It’s not so much scary as it is… quaint. The horror equivalent of being lightly scolded by your grandmother. Maybe it was a big deal in its day, but reading it now, one suspects Mr Crawford might have bashed this one out on a Sunday afternoon in exchange for a free dinner and a complimentary cigar.

In short: The Upper Birth is a perfectly serviceable ghost story if your expectations are so low they’ve tunneled into the earth’s crust. A classic? Sure. Frightening? Only if you’re terrified of smug men at clubs telling tall tales. A literary masterwork? Let’s just say it’s been public domain, so at least one doesn’t have to pay to read it.