The Dead Valley

Photo by Marceau, 1911.

"The Dead Valley," by Ralph Adams Cram, in BLACK SPIRITS & WHITE. Stone & Kimball, Chicago, 1895.

One of my favourite horror stories, and, in my view, easily the best of Cram's fiction, "The Dead Valley" is unremarkable in its technique. Simply and rapidly, it tells a tale without excursions into side matters, but it also props up its narrative with good physical details and well-visualized scenes. Unlike too many stories that try to convey a mood of strangeness with assertions, Cram shows the reader the sounds, actions, and images that make his tale bizarre.

I put one foot into the ghostly fog. A chill as of death struck through me, stopping my heart, and I threw myself backward on the slope. At that instant came again the shriek, close, close, right in our ears, in ourselves, and far out across that damnable sea I saw the cold fog lift like a water-spout and toss itself high in writhing convolutions towards the sky. The stars began to grow dim as thick vapor swept across them, and in the growing dark I saw a great, watery moon lift itself slowly above the palpitating sea, vast and vague in the gathering mist.

Cram also skirts the trap of explanation, which adds to the force and mystery of his events. There is no reason for any of these things to happen, but they do, and the simple vividness of their presentation is enough to make the story seem real.

To these good qualities, Cram brings a further touch. At the end, he pulls back to show that the terrible night of his narrative is merely one speck on a vast continuum. This unexplained haunting has occurred over and over in the past, and will go on, perhaps forever. Because Cram has given this deadliness no reason to begin, it has no reason to stop; and this, too, adds to the story's power.