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Barbara Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>
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Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sun, 15 Sep 2024 20:59:12 -0500
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The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Alan
Gribben.
~~~~~

BOOK REVIEW

_Mark Twain's Tales of the Macabre & Mysterious_. Rasmussen, R. Kent (ed.).
Essex, Connecticut: Lyons Press/Globe Pequot Publishing Group, 2024. Pp.
265. Paper, 6" x 9". $24.95. ISBN 978-1-4930-8613-9.

Many books reviewed on the Forum are available at discounted prices from
the TwainWeb Bookstore, and purchases from this site generate commissions
that benefit the Mark Twain Project. Please visit: http://www.twainweb.net

Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Alan Gribben
Auburn University at Montgomery

Copyright © 2024 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.


R. Kent Rasmussen seems to have made it his mission in life to help every
reader become a Mark Twain expert. His _Mark Twain A to Z_
(1995)--eventually expanded as the 2-volume _Critical Companion to Mark
Twain_ (2007)--has become as indispensable for the literary scholar
specializing in Mark Twain's works as for the casual inquirer looking for
background information about a Twain novel, an incident in Twain's life, an
explanation of an essay by Twain, or the publishing background of one of
Twain's short stories. Rasmussen's _The Quotable Mark Twain_ (1997)
likewise saves everyone much effort in locating a favorite quip or
searching for what Twain said or wrote regarding a certain topic.

The name "Mark Twain" still sells books. Those who edit his writings, write
biographies about him and his circle, or analyze and comment on his novels,
stories, essays, newspaper columns, travel books, poems, and plays benefit
from the author's enduring fame. Too often, though, a percentage of writers
and editors seem drawn to Twain largely because of his popularity and the
probability that their book or article will find ready acceptance by a
press or journal owing to the celebrity of its subject. By contrast,
Rasmussen brings to this collection more than his decades of research; it
is clear that he genuinely enjoys and admires the writer about whose works
he has written or edited more than a dozen books. A reader unconsciously
absorbs this beguiling enthusiasm. Rasmussen's affection for Mark Twain
causes pages to turn pleasantly. We are sharing a solid and delicious
experience with this knowledgeable scholar.

Mark Twain, however, is not among the authors who first come to mind when
the subject of Gothic horror fiction arises in conversation. Horace
Walpole, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley envisioned the prospects for this
genre in British literature, of course. On the United States side of the
Atlantic, one thinks of nineteenth-century writers like Charles Brockden
Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and Charlotte
Perkins Gilman. Later on, H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James carried on, and
enlarged the boundaries for, forms of literature involving the horrific and
macabre.

Yet when, upon reflection, a reader recalls the number of Mark Twain's
literary characters who are buried (sometimes alive), resurrected from
their burials, burned alive, struck by lightning, drowned, left adrift in
floating vessels, or suffer other forms of excruciating torture or
premature death, the creator of these fates seems to have earned a right to
be included in any list of literary producers of the horrific. It's just
that we don't associate Twain with the writers who conjured up these
effects exclusively because Twain typically incorporated his accounts of
gruesome ordeals into narratives in which they are subsumed into larger
story lines.

In fact, Rasmussen is quick to acknowledge that he is often extracting his
selections from unlikely places. Possibly to surprise and intrigue readers,
he has chosen _not_ to use any material from Twain's two best-known
works--_The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_ and _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_,
but rather has chosen "underappreciated" short pieces as well as passages
from Mark Twain's travel books that possess "a powerful Gothic feel."

Twain experts may find themselves a bit disconcerted upon not recognizing
any titles in this collection. That is because the contents bear invented,
updated titles. For instance, Twain's hilarious reminiscence about groping
about in an unlit German hotel room as related in _A Tramp Abroad_ is here
called "Forty-Seven Miles in the Dark."  In many cases the pieces have been
renamed to endow them with twenty-first-century relevance. "Cannibalism in
the Cars" now becomes "Politically Correct Cannibals." The dilemma in
Twain's "A Medieval Romance" appears as "A Mysterious Gender-Bending
Impasse." Always meticulous and accurate, Rasmussen thoughtfully adds the
actual titles and sources, along with their dates, at the end of each story.

Six categories in _Mark Twain's Tales of the Macabre & Mysterious_--all of
them containing between four to six narratives--capture different effects.
Part I offers "Tales Spooky & Grisly," Part II consists of "Unpleasant
Places," Part III brings together "Remarkable Characters," Part IV collects
"Curious Talk & Strange Obsessions," Part V introduces "Worlds Remote in
Time & Space," and Part VI concludes with "Ironic Twists & Clever
Deceptions."

An excerpt in "Remarkable Characters" titled "The Mysterious New Boy" turns
out to be Chapter 1 from the "Schoolhouse Hill" version of Twain's the
_Mysterious Stranger_ manuscripts, in which the youth who calls himself
"Forty-four" flabbergasts his classmates by demonstrating his incredible
skills at vocabulary memorization, foreign language acquisition,
mathematical calculation, mimicry, and various other feats. From Chapter 28
of _The Innocents Abroad_ Rasmussen gives us the elderly friar's animated
descriptions of the four thousand monks of the Capuchine order whose skulls
and bones lie heaped in different rooms. "See what one can accustom himself
to.--The reflection that he must some day be taken apart like an engine or
a clock, or like a house whose owner is gone, and worked up into arches and
pyramids and hideous frescoes, did not distress this monk in the least,"
Twain observes. Corpses abound in Twain's writings, and several of them are
on exhibit in this book, including "The Undertaker's Chat," renamed for
this collection "A Corpse Not Particular about Style." Limburger cheese, a
coffin, and a box of rifles make their appearance (or stench) known in "The
Invalid's Story," retitled as "Out of Focus Imagination."

But relatively few selections are morbid to this degree. More typical is
the comic sketch Rasmussen designates as "A Literary Nightmare." There
Twain's narrator runs across a simple rhyme ("Punch, brothers! Punch with
care! Punch in the presence of the passenjare!") in a newspaper and then
realizes that his mind is unable to stop humming its imbecilic lines. The
hilarious "photographs" Rasmussen devised to accompany these "odious" words
that pulse unceasingly in anyone's brain who comes in contact with them are
as empathetic as they are laughable.

A number of subscribers to the Mark Twain Forum may have previously been
aware of Kent Rasmussen's consummate skill at adding color to black and
white photographs with computer software, making GIFs of Twain-related
images, and playfully photoshopping images of himself and friends into a
historic Twain photograph. Now, with the new abilities of AI at his
disposal, Rasmussen has produced--throughout _Mark Twain' Tales of the
Macabre & Mysterious_--representations of Twain and his characters that
alter, evoke, vivify, celebrate, and concoct so convincingly that they seem
like actual snapshots inserted merely to stimulate the reader's
imagination. Not since Walter Blair's hilariously droll sketches of himself
standing and sitting with Twain, William Dean Howells, and other literary
figures has any Twain scholar had so much imaginative fun with the man in
the white suit. (Professor Blair, one of the first scholars to study
American humor, sent his whimsical drawings out as Christmas cards in the
1960s and 1970s.) The publisher of this present book clearly gave its
editor carte blanche to do pretty much whatever he wished to enliven and
supplement the stories by adding what Rasmussen refers to as
"photo-realistic details."

The imaginative results are highly entertaining. Readers view (persuasive)
photographs of Scotty Briggs shaking hands with the hapless parson who
would preside at the funeral of Buck Fanshaw (in _Roughing It_) and the
same Briggs addressing earnest-looking young children in a Sunday school
class. We see an image of young Sam Clemens innocently furnishing the town
drunkard with the matches that will light a fire and engulf the intoxicated
man in flames (also depicted), an incident borrowed from Chapter 56 of
_Life on the Mississippi_. Another neo "photograph" captures the moment of
Captain Stormfield's arrival at the Heavenly gate where, up to his knees in
cloud vapor, he encounters space aliens. Perhaps the prize for optical
impact should go to the fantastic illustration of a bewhiskered Stormfield,
astride a miniature Earth-globe, steering this cosmic vehicle into the
bedroom where Mark Twain is writing his story. The hideous caricatures of
Mark Twain's shriveled conscience, portrayed twice in "Facing One's Most
Pitiless Enemy" ("The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in
Connecticut"), are menacing enough to scare most wavering souls into
reforming their lives.

If these examples seem a bit zany, well, they reflect the offbeat tone that
Rasmussen cultivates in this collection. The originality of Twain's
imagination inspires the illustrations that Rasmussen employs as aids to
help us savor Twain's skill with words and syntax. Before textual purists
clear their throats to object to decorating these excerpts from Twain's
fiction and travel writings with so many invented scenes, they should
recall how committed Twain and his publishers were to adorning Twain's
volumes with those multitudinous illustrations by True Williams, E. W.
Kemble, and other artists with the motives of padding their page length and
delighting the subscription book customers. The uninhibited, innovative
Mark Twain himself would likely feel honored by the ingenuity of
Rasmussen's authentic-looking pictures--and might even agree with this
reviewer that the visual effects in this collection alone are worth its
modest price.

Beyond all this--and one can detect it in the range of Kent Rasmussen's
Twain publications, which extend from Twain's autobiography to Twain's
descriptions of dogs--Rasmussen definitely wants a larger proportion of the
public, and even those of us already and especially interested in the Mark
Twain's life and writings, to grasp the astounding dimensions of this
author's capacities and achievements.
_____

 ABOUT THE REVIEWER: The University of Georgia Press will shortly release a
revised reprint of Alan Gribben's two-volume _Mark Twain's Literary
Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading_ containing
additions and corrections.

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